Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Tanking Malygos/10

So, Malygos, the final boss in 3.0 Wrath of the Lich King. It's a good challenge. My guild has mostly breezed through Naxx and the raid bosses; I think the hardest thing for us so far has been Grobbulus and that got a lot easier once our raid leader found a better positioning. Malygos is a bit more of a challenge, with all three phases posing different problems and a tight enrage timer requiring precise execution. We still haven't killed him, but now that we've gotten him down to 4% in normal mode I think I understand the 10 man tanking problem pretty well.

In phase 1 the main tank has a lot of jobs to do. You need to grab the boss quick. You need to stay alive, he hits hard. You need to generate a lot of threat: your DPS is going to have 100% damage buffs and you won't, so threat capping becomes a significant problem. And finally, most importantly, you have to position the boss right.

Positioning is hard. He has to face away from the raid at all times, of course, for the breath. But you also need to move him so that the sparks that spawn pass through the middle of the room on the way to the boss. You want to be sure a spark never reaches the boss. Not so much for the damage increase (it doesn't hurt too bad in 10 man) but because your DPS needs to kill those sparks themselves and stack them to get 2x damage buffs at all times. If you don't stack the spark buffs you'll never have enough DPS to get through the fight before the enrage timer. So you're constantly watching for sparks, dragging the boss around (facing away!) to make sure the sparks have to go through the middle of the room on their way to you.

Threat is hard too. In my attempts today I had our frost mage and shadow priest both right on my heels, or above me. Simple things help. Use Berserk early and often. Get misdirects / tricks of the trade. DPS all the time: you can melee the boss a lot longer than you'd think, including during the Vortex if you're lucky. Even with all that it wasn't always enough; my mage and I worked out a thing where I'd let him pull aggro during the takeoff and vortex phase, then I'd taunt off when he landed and the mage would go invisible to drop aggro. Risky, but it worked.

The whole challenge of phase 1 is getting through it fast; you really don't want it to take more than 4 minutes. Phase 2 is a lot easier to tank. You have to pick up two adds at the start, beyond that it's just running around and keeping yourself alive by getting under shields. If your party is melee-heavy you may find yourself on the ground with nothing to attack and no discs to go flying on. If so, make yourself useful and start healing. Grab a disc when you can and go flying-kitty, it's a lot of fun.

Phase 3, oh, phase 3 is heartbreak. It's one of those damn "you're not a druid anymore" fights where you have to master some random set of new mount abilities. Fortunately you can practice the dragon ahead of time in the daily quest. I suggest raid leaders take their raid groups to the daily quest area before the first couple of attempts just to try it out in a group. If you're in a DPS role in phase 3 it's easy. Press 1 two or three times to get some combo points, then press 2 to stack your DoT. Repeat. Every time Malygos starts charging up Surge of Power don't press 2; instead build up a couple of combo points and make sure you have 25 energy. If the Surge is on you then watch him cast it, then time it so you activate your shield (5) right before his cast goes off. If it's not on you, go back to DPS. Not too difficult once you get the rhythm of it, but there's a lot going on and its disorientating so it takes some practice.

All three phases have to be executed well in order to win. Phase 1 and 2 get easier, after a few hours our 10 man was able to get through them reliably. But you have to do it quickly, you want at least three minutes for phase 3. And then you have to do your dragon thing well, which takes more practice. I'm sure he's going to fall for us soon.

Malygos practice

A couple of groups in my guild took a crack at Malygos/10 yesterday. She's hard! Fun fight, a good challenge, nice to see a boss we can't kill the first time we see her. Every phase has its challenge: healing and spark placement in phase 1, disc flying in phase 2. And dragon control in phase 3.

Phase 3 of Malygos is one of those obnoxious fights where you possess another creature and use its abilities; like Teron Gorefiend constructs or the last boss in Occulus. The abilities are totally different to what you're used to and it's hard to learn it on the fly in the middle of a raid with an enrage timer ticking. Fortunately, Blizzard thoughtfully built a Malygos simulator right in the game for you to practice on. Even better it's a daily quest that gives you Wyrmrest reputation! Here's how to do it:

At level 80 go to Coldarra, in Borean Tundra, and speak to Librarian Serrah in the shield at 33.5, 34.4. She has a quest for you to speak with Corastrasza. No prerequisites, but you do have to do this trivial quest.

Go to Corastrasza. She's up high on a platform a bit to the northwest at 29.5, 24.8. Turn in the quest and accept the new quest Ace's High. Once on the quest, talk to her to mount a dragon.

The dragon abilities in this quest are identical to the Malygos raid dragon you ride. It's a weird mix of rogue-like energy and combo points, stacking DoTs like a Warlock, stacking HoTs like a Druid, and a damage shield that saves your life against the giant Arcane Surge. I've done the quest twice now and have a pretty good feel for how the DoTs stack, but still need to get more comfortable with managing energy and making sure I'm always ready to put up my shield.

Malygos dragons causes all sorts of UI issues with addons. When you're mounted on the drake you should see your own frame turn into a vehicle / pet. That vehicle has combo points; either against itself when healing or against the enemy when DPSing. It also has an energy bar. XPerl was giving us a lot of trouble last night but claims to be fixed now. XPerl 3.0.2 which I just installed does work on the Aces High daily. The Malygos Helper addon also works on the Aces High daily, although it's not very interesting when you're alone.

Kalecgos, Brutallus

My interest in raiding has gone down significantly since the big lolpatch. The newly buffed DPS and nerfed bosses mean the fights are hollow parodies of themselves. Particularly the big coordination fights like Kael'thas or Illidan; now you can just power through them without spending weeks learning them first. But like everyone else I do appreciate being able to see new content, in my case Sunwell. Before the nerf we didn't expect to ever go in there. And Sunwell is still a pretty good challenge for us.

Kalecgos is a fascinating fight. The gimmick is there's two realms you phase between; in one realm you fight a dragon, in one you fight a demon. And you have to kill them both at the same time. But individuals in your raid can only move between realms every minute or so in a chaotic process all the strategies try to codify as a "portal dance". It's a real challenge to have the right people on each side of the fight at the right time, particularly since chaos always disrupts your coordination. Last night I finally figured it out and did a good job thinking on my feet. In our kill two of our three tanks got ported to the demon realm at the same time, totally screwing up rotations. But we adjusted and I figured out how to split myself off from my fellow tank so we weren't always in the same place. Towards the end we were short DPS on the demon so even though it was my turn to tank him I didn't, staying in cat form and DPSing until the last possible second. I think that was the right call, and I liked having to figure that out on my own.

Brutallus, by contrast, is pretty simple. There's some trick about positioning and switching between two tanks, but the real challenge of this fight was DPS. It's a big DPS race and before the nerf a lot of raids had a hard time beating the enrage timer. Now post nerf it's not nearly so hard, we've killed him several times with minutes to spare. What I like about this fight now is it's the only DPS fight that lasts long enough that I can really test out my cat DPS rotation. I've got my sustained DPS up to about 1900 now, compared to 1400 when 3.0 started. That makes me about 5th on the DPS charts on Brutallus if Recount is right, which is just fine by me. Most of my improvement comes from learning how to use Tiger's Fury and keeping Rake up. I still get behind on the rotation sometimes, still room to optimize, but I'm not going to stress about it too much until level 80. Here's the damage breakdown:

Nerfwell Plateau

If I needed any more confirmation that all of the level 70 game had been heavily nerfed, I got it in last night's raid in Sunwell Plateau. Where we took down the first two bosses despite it being our first time in there. This week in 9 hours of raiding we completed SSC, TK (first time as a guild killing Kael), Hyjal, BT, and the first third of Sunwell. Um, awesome? Disappointing. It was like going to play basketball at the middle school gym and slam dunking the 8 foot rims. Kinda cool the first time, but you feel pretty silly after a bit.

There's two explanations for why raiding is so heavily nerfed now. Part of it is that Blizzard just didn't bother with game balance, has tuned all the specs and raid buffs to level 80 and is just letting the game go. You see that with Retribution Paladins turning in 1.5-2x the DPS of any other class. Good for them, but it's clearly not a finished game design.

The other explanation is Blizzard deliberately nerfed the endgame content to let more people have some fun and see it before the expansion. Not only do all the raid bosses have 30% less health, they all hit significantly less hard now. I have very mixed feelings about this. It doesn't bother me so much that other guilds are suddenly able to see Black Temple, I think it's great for folks to see more of the game. We've taken advantage of it ourselves in Sunwell. I do wish the game explicitly recognized that killing Illidan now is a different thing from killing him a month ago though.

What really bugs me is the nerfing has ruined a lot of the more subtle encounters. Kael'thas was one of the hardest fights in the game requiring a careful dance and management of his posse for many minutes while you healed and DPSed your way through a long fight. Now you barely need to even tank anything, it dies so fast, and a third of your raid can be doing the wrong thing and you still win. Teron Gorefiend used to be a terror of five raid members managing constructs correctly; now only one person has to get it right before the inflated DPS kills the boss. And I can only imagine how hard Kalecgos used to be in Sunwell, careful coordination of DPS and tanking across the two realms. We blasted through it on our third or fourth attempt well before we really mastered the portal rotation.

I've always known that all these months of hard work learning the Burning Crusade endgame encounters and gearing up was artificial, meaningless time spent. I mean, we're just killing virtual monsters in an online game. But it's a bit deflating to see all that hard work and game balance go out the door this last month. Then again it is just a game, and it's meant to be fun, and it's still fun to go slam dunk the virtual bad guys. Even if they're only 8 feet tall now.

Update for an alternate take on the raid evening, see Karthis' post.

First day's raiding in 3.0

We had our first raid today post-3.0 patch. 4/5 Hyjal, 2/9 Black Temple, fast and quick. Everyone had a good time with all their massive new DPS. Hyjal in particular was ridiculous with all the new AoE class abilities. On the other hand the game is now completely unbalanced, at least at the Tier 6 level. Way too easy. We made all sorts of dumb mistakes and got away with it and things died ridiculously quickly. I think Blizzard has thrown Burning Crusade under the bus to get this patch out. I'm really glad we got Illidan down once before 3.0.

My new DPS oriented spec seems to work pretty well... for tanking. With my spec and in my DPS gear I have about 18k armor, 39.5% dodge, 16k health in bear form. And only 1/3 Protector of the Pack. Even so I was able to tank all the Hyjal trash I felt like. I also ended up main tanking Kaz'rogal after a healing accident in full cat gear. No problem at all, our healers had no trouble keeping me alive. Thanks to our defense talents the difference between cat gear and bear gear is much smaller than it used to be: I'm always crit immune.

DPS-wise, my cat DPS is not so impressive. I'm managing about 1400-1600 on single target boss fights as measured by Recount. That's about 10% more than I used to have. I haven't optimized my gear yet and I'm having a hard time with the new DPS rotation, so I'm sure I can improve. Still, our hunters and rogues were looking at 30-40% increases, so I'm a bit concerned. On the other hand we're now playing a game intended for level 80s, so /shrug.

The new Feral Charge - Cat is super-fun. It doesn't break stealth and the animation is hysterical. Swipe hitting unlimited targets is ridiculous, too. In Hyjal I went bear form on trash just to Swipe-spam 10 mobs at a time for about 2500 DPS. The Glyph of Maul is nice for multitargeting, too. Cat DPS cycling is definitely more challenging; keeping Mangle, Rake, and Rip all active while using Tiger's Fury every 30 seconds is a lot of juggling. OTOH Ferocious Bite is quite nice now: 6000+ crits.

In other news, it turns out Inscription pays for itself if you're lucky enough to be the only one on the server with Glyph of Feign Death. Hunters will pay at least 100g for one of those today, just my luck!

Hero bear

WoW is kinda fun when everything goes smoothly but my favourite moments in the game are when something goes wrong and you have to get creative. Druids excel at being creative: we can tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, or heal. I love it when I'm called upon to heal or tank unexpectedly and save a fight.

Like tonight in Hyjal, on Azgalor. Warrior main tank, my fellow druid Karthis and a prot pally Doomguard tanking. Me, uncharacteristally, DPSing in full cat gear. And just at the start of our pull our main tank died; bad luck.

I was already feeling cranky from wiping once before on Azgalor. No way I was gonna clear that trash a third time. So I shifted to bear in my cat gear, smacked Azgalor a couple of times and called out on Vent "Karthis, come pick this up." I couldn't tank Azgalor in my cat gear but I managed to dodge enough attacks to live for a bit. And Karthis was right there taking over for me, picked it up when I died. Raid saved!

The best thing was another druid was able to battle rez me so I could go back in the fight and help pick up Doomguards. Again, not in tank gear, but I was able to help pick them up when they spawned until our properly geared prot pally could taunt them off me. Then switch to healing or DPS on the adds as needed, rez the dead. About the only thing I didn't do that boss fight was Moonfire spam.

Rawr!

Tanking a Flame of Azzinoth

Hooray, we just killed Illidan! We've been working hard to knock down the T6 raids before the expansion comes out (or for me at least, before the 3.0 patch). And on our third night of serious attempts we got him. We win BC! (Well, pre-Sunwell at least).

Illidan takes four tanks: a Warrior or Paladin for the emo elf, two fire resist tanks for the spawned Flames of Azzinoth, and a Warlock tank for the demon phase. My role was tanking kill target #1 for the Flame; a good choice for bear threat. Tanking it requires two things: the right gear and the right kite path.

Gear is straightforward. You need to be at full 365 fire resist with buffs, which assuming a Flask and a Paladin aura requires 260 in your gear. You get 200 of that from the Inferno Hardened Badge of Justice gear (100 badges total). Lots of ways to get the other 60: I use the Amulet of the Torn-Heart and the Phoenix-Fire Band along with +15 FR to cloak enchant. The Wyrmcultist's Cloak is another choice. Once you've reached 260 FR you also need to get to the full level 73 defense/resilience cap to be crit immune. For me that means lots of PvP gear. Beyond that, the rest of your gear should be avoidance. Armor is useless for the flames so you want stamina and dodge/miss, the more the better. So bring your Staff of the Forest Lord (or Wildfury Greatstaff if you can't), your Pocketwatch, Pepe's Shroud if you have it. I was at around 32% dodge and 17k health unbuffed on our kill. Sadly in all this FR gear your cat DPS will be poor (about 600 for me), but you're doing the hardest job in the fight so you need it.

The reason flame tanking is so hard is you're kiting through two kinds of fire while avoiding eye beams. The main thing is to keep the elemental faced away and do your best to stay out of green and blue fire. And if an eye beam comes lancing down, get the hell out of the way. Beyond that, in addition there's an invisible leashing mechanic where you and your fellow tank both need to be in 40 or so yards of the other elemental or it charges and wipes the raid. This part is invisible and confusing, so read the strats for positioning and be sure to move in tandem with your other tank. For me, this leashing was the hardest thing to learn.

On our successful kill I had terrible luck, got three eye beams on my side. The first actually hit me but I was one Crawdad away from dying so survived it thanks to my amazing healers. The third one also hit me just as my elemental was dying, that one did me in. Disappointing, but I'd done my job.

Just as I died our raid leader said "Flyv is dead; that's OK, he's not important for the rest of the fight". Which made me wince ruefully but he was totally right. If your an FR tank your gear makes you pretty weak. And positioning is really tight in this fight, so often it's better for you to stay out of the way than to try to add another half a person's DPS. In general fighting Illidan I find I'm most useful hanging out in the back and healing or else contributing some DPS to get down the demons in phase 4.

The whole Illidan fight is quite epic, a fitting challenge to cap a long and well designed raid instance. I'm very proud of our guild for stepping up to this challenge and getting him down.

Tanking Veras Darkshadow

My guild is now 8/9 in Black Temple: we took out the Illidari Council after our third week of serious attempts. It's an obnoxious fight, once you get the basic setup correct it's just a matter of repeatedly avoiding AoE for nine minutes until you win. Honestly, the encounter would be just as fun a challenge if it were only six minutes, but there it is.

In the past I'd DPSed this fight or off-tanked Malande with some unconventional off-tanking. This week I took the more traditional druid role of tanking Veras Darkshadow, the vanishing rogue. Once you learn the tricks he's easy, although I have Karthis to thank for figuring out most of the tricks and explaining them to me. Here's how it works.

Veras doesn't hit hard; the tanking challenge is entirely in picking him up after he vanishes. On the initial pull you need to get aggro quickly; hopefully a Hunter will help you out with a misdirect. Then hit Veras to get some aggro and drag him away, far away from the rest of the raid. After 15 seconds or so he will Vanish, much like Moroes. He's vanished for 30 seconds (and poisoning people, nothing you can do about that). When he respawns he immediately runs for someone on the global threat list, usually a healer. You have to hit him once to get his attention again, but once you hit him he seems to remember his old aggro. So that's all there is to it: smack Veras around, wait for the Vanish, then quickly find him when he respawns and hit him again.

Of course it's more subtle than that. You have to find him when he reappears. He respawns somewhere near where he disappeared, so be sure to always drag him far away from the raid so you have time to catch him on respawn. There's also a few second delay between when he's visible (at the end of the 30 second timer) and when he starts moving, giving you plenty of time to get to him. He's vulnerable in this half-spawned state, too. You can Faerie Fire him, hit him, apply a Hunter's Mark, feral charge him, etc. Also if you have a raid mark on him it will be quite visible. Basically you take advantage of the respawn delay to get on top of him, it makes life quite easy.

The one trick is that sometimes he'll be melee immune when he respawns thanks to a Blessing of Protection. If that happens your usual bear attacks won't work. In theory a Faerie Fire should be enough to get him to remember he hates you most, but I don't quite trust that. Your next option is Moonfire. Again, in theory a single Moonfire should be enough to bring him to you, although Karthis reported last week it took more like four. Be careful with the Moonfire; if he catches you in caster form he hits for about 8000 an attack and you'll be dead soon. That's what happened to me the one time I had to grab him while he was BoPed (we wiped). So I need to practice this a bit more, I think the trick is to stay at long range while Moonfiring.

To make the pickup on respawn easier, I use the following spammable macro:

/cleartarget
/target Veras Darkshadow
/cast Faerie Fire (Feral)
/cast Maul

I start spamming that macro about 1 second before Veras respawns. The Faerie Fire may or may not help, but the target puts a big easy to see circle under him and the queued up Maul means as soon as I get in melee range I get an attack in. Once I had him targeted I'd usually do a Feral Charge to get in melee range; just be sure to do it early enough (while he's still spawning) so you're not stuck motionless after the charge while he's running off.

Veras is tauntable and stunnable. Given the 30 second vanish time you can Bash him once every other cycle. I recommend keeping the Bash in reserve for when you're at low health; on our kill I had a Hero Bear moment where my healer was down and I survived an entire round of Veras attacks with no healing thanks to trinkets and stuns and frenzied regeneration.

The fun thing about off-tanking Veras is when he's vanished you have 30 seconds to do other things. I mostly focussed on wandering over to Malande to help interrupt her with a Feral Charge, you can easily do one interrupt per cycle. You can also help heal, or DPS, or Innervate or Battle Rez. Just give yourself a few seconds to get back into position to pick up Veras and make sure you have plenty of rage when he respawns.

PS: if you use Deadly Boss Mods be warned that there's a lot of spam during the IC fight. It's a big help to manually configure it to only show you the warnings you care about: vanish timers and melee shield. The vanish timer makes the pickup really simple.

Tanking Lady Malande

We're up to the Illidari Council in Black Temple now, the High-King Maulgar equivalent fight in Black Temple. There's four mobs to tank. The paladin needs to be tanked by a spell reflecting warrior and the mage has to be tanked by a spellstealing mage. The rogue is well tanked by a druid; he vanishes and when he comes back you need to quickly hit him again to regain aggro. But sometimes he's melee immune, so a Moonfire or Faerie Fire can be a big help.

Finally there's Lady Malande, the priest. She doesn't really hit hard; her main thing is that she casts all these nasty spells you need to interrupt. The usual advice is to have a warrior tank so he can Pummel / Shield Bash and interrupt. But druids can interrupt too, with Feral Charge!

Circle of Healing is the big thing you want to interrupt; it's a long fight and you can't afford her to heal the bad guys. Best to put a rogue on Kick duty for that. But she also has a nasty Divine Wrath that can kill folks pretty quick. And for that, why, a feral druid can interrupt that and help out the healers.

The trick is staying at range to use Feral Charge. Normally we don't have that luxury when tanking. But Lalande almost never melees; she's content to stand at range and cast. And no one's DPSing her too hard in the usual setup, so you don't need to generate much threat. So hit her a few times at the start of the pull to get aggro, then hang back at 10 yards and just hover over your feral charge key waiting to interrupt. Voila, you're like a rogue who can tank!

The other fun thing about tanking Malande is that since she doesn't really melee, you don't need to be in bear form when tanking her other than for the extra HP. So you have time to innervate, battle rez, etc. Beyond that, when tanking Malande just be sure to watch out for all the other silly tricks. If she's melee immune you can't do a damn thing, so don't bother. If she has her reflective shield up don't hit her. But mostly you're tanking a target that no one is hitting, so you've got time to play all sorts of tricks.

Reliquary of Souls video

I'm not usually a fan of raid videos, but my guildmate Helias put together a nice video of QSS taking out Reliquary of Souls. Instead of the usual tedious techno crap soundtrack we've got our Ventrilo stream during the fight, so you can listen to how our fantastic raid leader coordinates things.

I do a few unusual druidy things in the fight that you can see in the video. At the end of Phase 1 you see a whisper "phew!" pop up from me to Helias; that's because he spent most of Phase 1 with 157 hit points and as soon as healing became possible again I was spamming Rejuvenation and Lifebloom on him. Yeah, I'm not a healer, but mobs spawn quickly between phases and I didn't want him to die. At the start of phase 3 I ask on Vent as to whether the main tank wanted me to "taunt for him". Confusing terminology; really I was getting initial aggro in phase 3 so he could taunt off me to enjoy the 2x threat buff that comes from aggro switches. Finally, watch towards the end of phase 3 for all the Tranquility sparklies; we had a druid in every group that night and the massive group heal helps a lot as the DoTs build up.

Other than that I don't do much but the usual boring cat DPS rotation. If the expansion weren't coming so soon I'd farm up the arena points for the Season 3 gloves. Near as I can tell, they turn Maim into a proper spell interrupt like Kick. That'd be a noticeable help in phase 2. But arena is a whole different thing and I don't have time to deal with it now. Silly that Blizzard doesn't have some PvE path to gear for that ability.