I'd suggest as general rule for mages to just never use mirror images in raids, malygos or otherwise. Generally the optimal outcome of using mirror images is that nothing bad happens.

More often that not they will, however:
1) confuse people (by making death sounds and otherwise) and confuse Grid in particular (grid still relies on unit names instead of unit IDs)
2) hog up a bunch of "smart" heals (ever see your wild growth just vanish in the void? Mirror images is the answer).
3) draw aggro
4) make threat meter harder to read

1. Confusing people - I guess we could slap the SPs wisp form in the same category or rogues vanishing.. hmm lets not do that. Grid - the fact that an addon is broken should stop people utilising a spell? Ouch - hunters feign death...
2. See #1 regarding Grid.
3. Mages or for that matter any player that doesn't know how their spells work should not use them.
4. See #1 regarding addons, not to mention that Omen was fixed.

Now, it really comes down to if you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Personally I think they don't for "most" situations though there are rare exceptions - that's why what I wrote it as just a suggestion.

However, most of the problems are real. People use Grid because despite it's problems it's pretty much the best there is. Raid leaders and druids (for combat res) do have a valid reason to look around when they hear death sounds the mirror images make (and odds are some others do even if there's nothing they can do about it). Tanks (and sometimes others) tend to try reacting to what they see the raid doing, mirror images have been known to cause some confusion.

So called smart targeting heals aren't very smart. They like to hit targets with low HP - quite frequently mirror images (and ghost wolves, treants and other pets too).

Sadly enough there are very real situations where you don't want to use spells due to reasons that aren't "really" the spells fault. You might want to avoid death knight area of effect attacks because they can easily hide some of other nasty things. You might want to avoid using Blizzard to aoe in fights where the mobs also throw Blizzard attacks. You might even avoid doing some things because of game performance or FPS problems (hurricane in early WoW, for example).

Mirror images pull agro for a reason - and it is entirely preventable if the mage knows how the spell currently works. The only time you would want to worry about images eating up 'smart heals' on Malygos is if images were alive during vortex, which they aren't (and wouldnt be used then anyway, dying in 1 tick even if they were).

To go by this logic, some people also find it distracting when players have trinkets that proc the red 'negative charge' animation when they are positively charged on Thaddius. Ask them to not equip said trinket for the fight?

Mirror image agro quirks in fact have some extremely good uses. One is it will let us situationally ignore agro (and go far above MT threat): An example of this is on Sartharian with drakes, you can MI when Tenebron is ~50% hp and ignore agro for good on him - as he will be dead by the time MI would've worn off anyway. Yes, the images will likely die in the meantime to raid damage and make a death sound - but I just find it silly to rule doing very viable things like this out, on the grounds its 'distracting'.

Mirror image is way too useful as an aggro tool to give up when raiding. If you don't play a mage it might be hard to see the advantages.

The right way to use it is proactively..(even bugged, they don't build up much threat beyond what they start with) and THEN go to town with whatever would have pulled aggro. They're also exceedingly useful to pop during aggro dumps, like when KTz mind controls people. They don't pull aggro because 130% of zero is zero, but they insulate the mage from aggro he would have pulled just from things like dots ticking before the tank got his threat back.

As with invisibility of the non-instant variety, you have to think ahead when using this tool. It is, however, a good enough tool that not using it will interfere in a significant way with optimal mage performance in a lot of fights.

Compared to its use as a threat tool, the minimal distractions it causes are trivial. The tank would MUCH rather put up with four death cries from gnomes than to have to chase a mob that I pulled aggro on for real, or alternately have me unable to clean up a massive AOE problem because I can't risk pulling aggro from the adds. I've never seen any real chain heal action on them either...they're either at full health or dead in one swat/raid damage most of the time.

If I was to suggest as a general rule not to use Mirror Images "as a DPS timer" that would perhaps provoke a bit less of a reaction. I'd argue MI in the current implementation is best reserved for use in specific situations. This said, my opinion is arguably motivated by my experience which says that people trying to squeeze the last few % more often than not results in a bunch of unnecessary wipes in situations which call for a more solid approach.

I'll just put it the other way around: I think there are tools you should always be using (your standard DPS/Healing/Tanking rotation). Sometimes you want to make specific arguments to not use certain abilities which are part of the "core package". Other times you want to make use of specific abilities outside of the core package. I'd argue that presently MI is closer to the latter than the former.

The threat dump of mirror image is independant of the images survival and last 30 seconds.

Indeed, it's often better if the images do die quickly so they don't sheep something we're trying to kill or zap something that was safely uninvolved up to that point. They provide a teensy DPS increase countered with a small chance of being irritating.

The threat dump though works just like priest fade.

I hate to interrupt all this MI talk, but I was wondering if anyone else is running into the same issues we are on Maly 25. We have no problems with 10 man, however the last 3 weeks of 25 man attempts we seem to be running into buggy behavior, and Im having trouble finding a way to prevent it.

The two most severe issues -

People in the rear getting hit with breath while Maly is faced away. Combat log says breath comes from "Unknown"

Last night, 3 pulls in a row, the MT got hit with breath for 20k, twice, back to back, in a span of .02 seconds. Impossible to heal. Again, combat log says breath came from unknown.

No logs handy, but I will be supplying them if the problem appears in our next attempts. I cant find anyone on my server having these issues. Thoughts?

I believe that the breath also leaves a debuff on the players it hits that explodes after some time, maybe other people in the raid are getting hit with a breath and surviving, then blowing the tank up?

I may be incorrect, but this is what it sounds like.

From wowwiki, the exact description of his breath is: Arcane Breath: Deals 28275 to 31725 Arcane damage in a 40 yard cone in front of Malygos. Leaves a debuff which, after 5 seconds, causes the person to explode and deal 18850 to 21150 Arcane damage to nearby friends.

I mentioned this earlier in the thread: Have your pet classes micromanage their pets right after the vortex (put it on follow). Most of the pets will survive the breath because of AoE damage reduction, but the explosion will be full strength on whoever they're near. They get a little confused while Malygos is on his way down from the vortex and can get caught in the frontal blast, leading to some massive friendly fire burst shortly thereafter.

Just hypothesizing, but this appears that it COULD work with DKs and Survival Hunters speccing for traps, and just chain freezing trap on every power spark. But AFAIK, survival DPS is lower than Marks or BM, so you've got another issue there.

Well, come 3.0.8 SV will probably be the highest DPS spec, but there are several problems using hunters. First, traps last a maximum of 26 seconds with a 24 seconds CD, and that requires talents you usually don't take. Second, unlike Entangling Roots traps will break on any damage.
That doesn't mean it's impossible, we actually trapped the last spark on our first successful 5min attempt because we were short one druid, but it required two hunters for one spark and probably won't work for more than 1 vortex phase.

DKs aren't necessary, they just make things easier. Druids however, are pretty useful, doing it without druids requires more players doing it, which is more wasted DPS, and it's worse overall in terms of efficiency(as said above, traps aren't as optimal as root for various reasons). If by B team you mean not very well geared, it's fine really, just get them all to spec moonkin even with crappy gear they'll add decent DPS, and it's perfectly doable as long as your other DPS is good. If by B team you mean they're a bit on the idiotic retard side, yeah well then you might have a bit more work to do, but while DKs might require a bit of thinking, druid stuff is actually really simple.

The way to avoid having to use DK is simply to have your tank move malygos around so the sparks always pass through the first spot. DPS has to be aware of that so they don't run in stupid places(in front of maly), and you might lose a bit of DPS, but hopefully you make it back from having higher DPS classes than DK, aka mages/locks/hunters. Not that DK are bad DPS, but this fight isn't very gargoyle/ghoul friendly, so well it doesn't help. The druids only have to root the sparks when they're close to the previous one, and most of the strat relies on the tank spatial awareness, and a bit on luck(successive opposite spawns are gonna be annoying, spawns from the same general side are easier). So even if your druids aren't too smart, it should be doable with a bit of training.

Saw something extremely strange last night on the 10 man version. Everything was going fine, got to Phase 2 with no issues at all and start going after the Scions. Suddenly, Malygos decided to drop down from the sky and start attacking the tank. This would happen for a bit and then he would fly back up to deep breath, and then swoop back down an resume going after the tank. Never seen that happen before in Phase 2.

We did manage to cover it and get through it and then push on to kill him, even got a Blue Drake in the loot. Still it was extremely bizarre. Anyone else encounter this?

Yes, we had this happen multiple times, even in 25man. It can be healed through without much problems, so... well. Live with it until it's fixed, I guess.

That was our major fear actually, that the healing threat would eventually pass the tank since he was not able to generate any new threat. DPS pretty much risked it and went all out to push into phase 3 to try to stop Malygos from doing it.

I can say for sure that combat ressing in Phase 2 does not activate it. I was the only Druid there and did not even have a chance to use it.

Just did Malygos tonight and noticed that he is no longer targetable in between phases 2 and 3. In fact, he isn't targetable until 5-10 seconds after the raid lands on their dragons.

A Ghoul / Tiger kept getting the AoE debuff last night and bombed the raid several times. At first we thought someone was just noobing it up but after the 5th time in a row it happened I noticed the pets getting really close to Maly's front right after vortex. As soon as we had all the Hunters / DK's dismiss their pets we had no deaths at all.

So just a heads up, if melee keeps getting bombed in phase 1 take a close look at the pets before you start pointing fingers at all the potential noobs.

EDIT: Oh yah and then the entire raid disconnected at the same time and wasn't able to log back in for 15 minutes.

We always had people detarget Malygos when going from P2 to P3, because if they didn't their shield would be bugged and not work in P3. Guess the fix to that was to detarget it automatically by making him untargetable.
However I guess this means you can't apply CoE on him anymore, which is a pity as I always thought about that as clever use of game mechanics.

We have not done the boss this week to verify, but 5 min Malygos is now a 6 min Malygos per the achievement tooltip.

Question to Hunters or anyone else with threat wipes, has anyone else noticed them not working on Malygos since 3.0.8? (or possibly before that)

Couldn't get it to work on Malygos at all last night, which I admit is a small sample size of a dozen or so feigns. No resist messages, and never dropped threat on Omen or the Blizzard Mouse over percentage.