Monday, May 25, 2009

"Alexstrasza! Another of your brood falls! "

Last night we (the guild) had our first glance of Malygos in 25-man mode Eye of Eternity. We weren't able to kill him but managed to bring him down to around 700k life. This is quite good for a first time though. There are still a lot of things we need to learn from this fight especially in phase 3.

I was assigned to main-tank the fight so I slapped on my semi-stam gear (only changed one of my trinkets [Essence of Gossamer] so that I can still maintain a high aggro during phase 1) which put my health at around 38.5k raid-buffed. This is more than enough since I trust my healers to keep me alive during the encounter :P (we have strong cadre of healers :D).

Phase 1:
While someone clicked the orb I fired up Sacred Shield, Divine Plea (glyphed), Holy Shield, popped my wings then threw my frisbee to Malygos. I changed my spell rotation a bit for maximum threat generation while always running around positioning Malygos. I skipped using Holy Shield once in a while since his melee swings are slow making the threat generated from it quite insignificant (like I said, I trust my healers :P) and instead I used Shield of Righteousness every time I could. Exorcism is also quite handy for threat generation now that it can hit non-undead creatures. Phase 1 was similar to the 10-man version, Power Sparks spawn at same intervals and Vortex duration was still the same. Their only difference would be an increase in damage dealt and Malygos now does his Arcane Breath ability right after a Vortex (I didn't notice this during the fight, maybe I was too busy trying to determine the location of the sparks). Two veteran Death Knights were assigned for spark positioning, gripping them to the center to stack the buffs. For additional threat, I sneak in a shield slam when he starts to cast vortex while standing on top of the stacked sparks.

Phase 2:
At 50% of Malygos' life, he starts to fly away and summon adds. During this phase, we had another tank help in holding the Nexus Lords while the rest burned down the marked adds. When one of the adds die they drop their hover disk. Our highest melee DPS then rides the disk to engage the flying Scions of Eternity. One by one raid members (melee) climbed over the fallen disks and attacked the Scions. After killing all the adds on the ground (Nexus Lords) I threw out some raid heals and fired Exorcism/Avenger's Shield to the nearest Scion. I managed to ride on a hover disk (all melee DPS are already on a disk) and even got the achievement Heroic: Denyin' the Scion :D.



Phase 3:
After all the adds are killed, Malygos destroys the platform where the raid is standing on. Everyone falls down... fortunately the Red Dragonflight arrives and catches everyone on the raid. Each member now controls a dragon (drake) mount and phase 3 starts. Some drakes (may be 3 or 4) were assigned for healing while the rest were DPS.

The drake has the following *abilities:
  1. Flame Spike - 10 energy (adds one combo point, costs )
  2. Engulf in Flames - 50 energy (consumes combo points)
  3. Revivify - 10 energy (builds combo points)
  4. Life Burst - 50 energy (consumes combo points)
  5. Flame shield - 25 energy (requires combo points on your target; consumes them)
  6. Sprint (30 second cooldown)
* from stratfu

DPS drakes will be doing a 1-1-2 spell rotation while healers will target themselves and do a 3-3-3-3-3-4 rotation. During this phase, Malygos has an ability Surge of Power which targets 3 random players and deals a large amount of damage every 0.5 seconds for 5 seconds. The targeted drake should then use his shield (spell 5) to minimize the damage taken. This is usually the part where most members die. Either they weren't able to accumulate enough combopoints / energy to cast the spell or they just didn't notice it. We always reach Malygos' enrage phase, the Engulf in Flames stack just wasn't high enough. They completely fall off when using the shield, especially when Malygos targets a member more than twice in a row.

I learned a few things during this fight and hopefully will be put to good use during the next encounter.
  1. For phase2, it is much faster if the ranged DPS focus on the flying Scions right from the start while the melee DPS handle those on the ground. If no Scion is within range, ranged DPS can then help killing the ground adds.
  2. For phase 3, DPS spell rotation should be 1, 1, 1, 2 or even 1, 1, 1, 1, 2. The debuff time for Engulf in Flames is dependent on the number of combopoints used up. The more 1's you use, the more combopoints is generated and thus the debuff will not fall off so fast giving you enough time to use your shield (when being focused with Surge of Power) and not worry about your debuff on Malygos falling off.
Even though we failed to kill Malygos, I am still quite happy about the progress we have made so far. I did not even expect we were going to reach phase 3. The guild has become stronger as members continually get gear upgrades from our Naxx25 runs. I am however quite annoyed that until today, these words still keep echoing inside my mind... "Alexstrasza! Another of your brood falls! "...

1 comments:

skylynx said...

woot! na-down na gyud ^.^/~