MMO-Champion is reporting Malygos as being made "more difficult" to compensate for the extra minute on the achievement, but there is no source cited. Any word yet if anything was added/changed in the fight besides him not being targetable in the P2 > P3 transition? Can he still be damaged as he flies up at the end of P1, and can you still root/stack sparks as you could before the patch? If Blizzard intended to remove some gimmicks from the encounter, I imagine these would be the first things they'd mess with.

From WoR

Depending on how long the sparks last now, I would guess that you are somehow supposed to do it with double spark stacks. We need a test of the spark duration to modify (or replace) the current strat.

I heard from another source that you can no longer stack several sparks. They despawn after a certain time period so you can't root them and save 5-6. From what I was told you can stack 2, maybe 3 if you get lucky - but can not confirm this myself.

I can confirm this. Stacks despawn after 90 sec it would seem. We were able to stack 3 last night, but it was only for a very short time before they became 2. Like seconds.

So sparks have a 90 sec timer till they (and/or the stack they produce) despawn? Or are the stacks themselves still on a separate timer?

Can you clarify that?

The sparks entire lifespan is 90 including travel time and the residue after dying lasts for 90 seconds, total?

As Deadjon was saying, it appears that a spark and its accompanying area of effect buff are the same entity. That entity lasts for 90 seconds. So if you root one for the entire duration it will despawn on its own at 90 seconds and if you kill it 45 seconds into its travel time, then you will have a buff on the ground for 45 seconds as well. However, if you wait and kill it 60 seconds into its travel time, then you only have a buff for 30 seconds.

For this reason, we had our DKs deathgripping the sparks that were coming in from behind us so that we had longer with that duration. In this iteration of Malygos, it seems having 3 DKs can be very beneficial so that you can always double grip a bad spark spawn and still have a single grip available. Totally not necessary, but beneficial overall.

Also of note for melee classes--the "arcane explosion" that comes seconds after the tank is breathed on has had its radius nearly quadrupled. You have to be at max hitbox range as to not be hit. This is especially important if your guild runs with fewer DKs and you rely on the tank repositioning Malygos to enable a deathgrip that would otherwise be through the dragon.

Since Phase Three is now critical for the achievement, any benchmark advice for when phase three needs to start and what Malygos' health percentage needs to be? Because of the DoT mechanic, I would hate to fail on the achievement for the week by hitting 6:01.

And I might as well ask what the max-DPS strategy is for phase three - currently we do a mixture of healers spamming a 5-stack AoE heal and DPS spamming 112. But because a time-limit was never critical, we played it safe and had a ton of healers. The start of the thread had people doing the 25-man with four healers - was that with the DPS doing any shielding or was it entirely 112 spam? And in a 10-man group, would it be possible for a single healing dragon to cover the group, or would there need to be more than one?

Did anyone have a problem with casting Wild Growth during vortex? A friend reported getting invalid errors, but I'm not sure if it was UI or new mechanics.

We started playing around with this strategy for our Heroic: Poke in the Eye achievement. 4 healers covered the raid more than enough with minor shielding (1-2 pts to curb some damage). I found I didn't actually have to shield once we figured out the most efficient way for our designated healers to operate.

Basically, you don't want them just spamming the crap out of Life Burst, but making sure they're using it at proper critical times. If you just spam life burst, there's a good shot a lot of your energy spent using the ability is 100% overheal. It also increases the chance that your Surge targets aren't receiving enough healing because A) someone cast life burst for 100% overheal just before a Surge, and subsequently needs to build combo points/regen energy before bursting again, and this can lead to B) the Surge targets that didn't receive enough healing through the Surge are low, and RNG decides they're to be targeted back to back, in which case you're already behind on the heals and Surge is likely to be deadly.

Obviously these problems/situations can be taken care of by shields, but when you're running against a timer, this can mean stacks dropping. Also, I'd like to add that in our 25 mans we had strictly done a "fend for yourself" strategy. Using minor shielding and properly utilizing 4 life bursts, our P3 when running with 20 people was faster and more efficient than any we have done to date with 25.

I came as an extra druid on my somewhat undergeared alt last night, as we played with the 10 man achievement. I was not able to cast Wild Growth during vortexes. We ended up with 2 druid healers and just tried to get a rejuv on each person prior to the vortex (and then I would lifebloom people that were in range of me during the uptime). Wild growth was giving strange invalid errors and didn't seem to be casting while in the air.

Has anyone notice in general more damage being applied to the raid (some say because of buggy breath mechanics in phase one and others are saying it's because of scion attacks not being mitigated by the shields in phase 2)? I had read that some people for the 10 man achievement used 1 healer (a druid presumably), but I cannot see this being possible in 10 man. I mean, we struggled at times with one main druid healer and me on my alt last night (my alt did have 1845 plus heal in tree with a flask, but still my regen, reflexes and gear are not up to 25 man raid standards). As we try to plot how to accomplish the new "brute force" 6 minute achieves, i am trying to figure out the bare minimum number of healers for 10 and 25.

Feign death never worked in Phase 1 on Malygos. Or at least it hasn't since my guild has been doing it, which is somewhat close to the beginning.

We didn't really make it tonight, but weren't too far. The result was 7% with 10 seconds left where we decided to suicide, since we failed badly in phase 3.

We got the achievement pre-patch as well, but that's a different story.

Basically, we managed to get him down below 50% before the 2nd Vortex (in our case, like 1-2 seconds before he would go up), had a flawless phase 2 and entered phase 3 with basically 2 minutes (I think even after RP speech) left to kill him and he was on around 30%. We then failed, since a lot of our guys still don't quite grasp phase 3 mechanics and stuff like a double gaze gives most trouble (even single gaze). But we never did organize phase 3 yet, besides having a warlock suicide for CoE after he becomes target able.

Setup was relaxed, no ranged stacking, 1 prot warrior tank, 5 healers, rest DPS. (2 DKs). Even had 3 rogues, 1 dps warrior and a retri paladin.

What we did in phase 1 was:
You basically want him below 17m HP before first Vortex hits, we have him around 16.5m if not less. As soon as we got out of the 1st Vortex, we ran towards the spawned spark location and used heroism (before the spark was even killed) and proceeded to nuke him. 1st spark needs to be killed so that both melee and hunters can DPS properly. 2nd spark gets pulled in by DKs and killed. This lead to enough DPS to get him down below 50% before second Vortex in like 8 out of 10 attempts.

Phase 2 we treated like pre-patch. Start DPSing the scions on the left, then go counter clockwise for ranged. Melee kills Nexus Lords. Try not to risk too much with staying outside of shields, but do stay until one of the two sparks fades.

We did the 10 man version yesterday after patch. We didn't have a DK, but were lucky and had all the sparks spawn from the same place. Popped Bloodlust right after first vortex and got him down to 33% before phase 2. ( 1 tank, 2 healers, 2 melee, 5 ranged )

Did that phase like described above. The transition between phase 2 and 3 is different now. There's a rather long talk sequence where you can't target or attack Malygos. When he became attackable again we killed him with 15-20 sec left on the clock.

Unfortunately the wws report for the kill completely bugged out and is only showing 4 people.

I was unable to cast CoH while in the Vortex as well (25 man). Kept receiving 'Invalid target' errors. We had to bring in an extra healer than normal (7 instead of 6) in order to get people topped up fast enough after the vortex.

We also had a few other oddities, including Malygos meleeing in phase 2 (mentioned earlier in the thread) and being unable to target Malygos at the end of phase 2/beginning of phase 3.

Euh, if I'm getting this correctly, you're having a lock suicide IN p3? You can just reapply CoE between p2 and p3, before you get on your drakes. Just make sure everyone clears target and retarget malygos once they are their dragons.

He said:

We were able to keep all raid up in 2 healers at p3 of 25 people instance (we've lost 4 of 6 healers at p2) . All people were correctly shielding on gettting beam and flying from sparcs.
PS
We failed to kill Malygos because of p2 lagging and ended raid after 2 tries. p2 was lagging like hell, taking 6-7 minutes of event time, leaving around 1 minute for p3.

I stand corrected, sorry for the confusion. (didn't raid yesterday, my error)

In the matter of sacrificing a lock, what actually happends if you soulstone up in p3?

Invisibility works fine. Used it several times in one encounter even.

Did the achievement last night. We had consistantly been getting Maly to ~10% with 10-15seconds left, with average drake dps at 2200dps each. This was with a 2nd vortex going off. The critical point for us was getting Maly to not go into the 2nd vortex, as it saved us about 15-20 seconds of stagnant time which ultimately translated to higher drake stacks in p3 (average drake dps was ~2800dps on the kill). We had 1 second to spare on our kill, with 1-2 people dead for pretty much the full duration of p3.

We also killed the sparks as they came. Only 2 DK's in the raid so one grip per spark.

Most of our phase 3 dps have switched from using "1,1,2 + shield as needed" to "1,1,2,3", as we found that with 4 good healers no one in the raid needs to shield if they have a 5 stack of HoTs running at all times.

It at least makes it so that someone targeted twice in a row won't lose their damage stack due to spending all of their time getting two shields up in a row, though I suspect we may occasionally lose someone that gets targeted more than twice in a row (not verified yet).

Anyone doing the 6m kill have experience comparing the two phase 3 DPS strategies for efficiency?