Ok troublemaker’s diary does a much better job than me trying to fake it.

http://troublmaker.com/2011/02/28/heroic-maloriak-things-you-miss/

check out his blog, I copied the strat for tonight.

Well after our first successful Heroic Maloriak kill it’s time for me to give out some wisdom on this fight like others.  This fight will ask a lot out of your raid so make sure you take your best players, not necessarily the most appropriate ones.

One pre-phase tip I should note is get used to DPS doing interrupts on the lightning thing and tank taking care of interrupting ads.  The lightning blast is really important to get.  You cannot let ONE TICK of it hit.  In our initial attempts we found this out because I started doing interrupts on my holy paladin.  I’m a former warrior gladiator and getting half casts is what I do.  If you cast this before it ticks you will save yourself learning time later in the fight and you will also save your healers about 10-20k mana before the healing actually gets rough.

Second pre-phase tip, make sure you get some abberitions out before black phase, like one

set of them total.  You will be AoEing in black phase and even though it will lower your AoE and make it take longer for you to get out of black phase it will overall make the fight easier as you will have less ads to deal with later.

Phase 1 – Black Oozes

If you’re unaware of the heroic difficulty of this fight you may want to know that this is the only major difference between the two modes.  This phase is absolutely brutal on everyone.  The first thing you will want to do if you want to get this phase done is do some phase 1 practice.  You do not want to move out of the ooze puddles when they land on the ground.  That is simply too slow.  Instead you want your raid getting used to moving out of them before they spawn.  Remember that each tick of this pile is 10k and you’re likely to take 30-40k dmg if you react to it landing.

There is an animation that shows the puddle landing.  It will look like oil is being spilled on that area.  If you move before you lands you will take zero damage.  It is worth a few wipes just getting people used to this without having any pressure on killing the pets.  It’s obviously a little harder for healers to do this but this will help them deal with timings (which are very important in this fight).

I guarantee that if you work on reducing raid damage in this first phase of the fight it will feel insanely easier than out right attempting to just blow through it.  You will have to do two black phases so you probably will want to get good at it.

HEALERS!

I have healed and DPSed this fight and I can say that healing this fight is by far lamer.  So you’ve gotten your phase 1 practice good.  This will help your healers a tonne and will make their mana last way longer throughout this fight.  You will want two people who heal tanks really well and one person who can heal the raid really well.  When I was healing our makeup was holy pally (me), disc priest, and resto druid.  When I switched to my warlock our healing setup was disc priest, resto shaman, and resto druid.

So one tank during this phase will be unhealable for portions of the fight.  Think of Loatheb where you have a limited time to heal the tank before he becomes unhealable again.  You will need a team of healers to deal with this tank.  One healer can take care of this job fine BUT since you are moving around for a lot of this fight the one healer just won’t do.  So yeah place your two tank healers on this guy.

Your raid healer can heal the other tank fine.  However this tank will taking some pretty spiky damage throughout the fight so don’t underestimate it.

So with this setup your two tank healers are going to have to top the tank up in between the boss breathing fire on him.  After he is topped up and he starts breathing fire again you have them switch on to the raid as healing is reduced by 99% on the tank during this part of the fight.

For this fight you will want 2-3 people with really good AoE to carry you through this phase and green phase.  Good AoE DPSers include:

• Fire Mage
• Demonology Warlock
• Survival Hunter
• Moonkin Druid
• Unholy Death Knight
• Frost Death Knight
• Combat Rogue

You need 2-3 of these.  Each of them has such a sick DPS output.  On the other hand you will be needing  proper raid buffs/debuffs that might not be brought by a spec specialized in AoE dmg.  Remember you want to bring at least one DPSer who can interrupt, preferably two.  You can have one be a 20 second interrupt, you just gotta make sure they can bring one.  After that you just need people who are good at DPSing while moving.

FINALLY TANKING.  Tanking is pretty rough in this fight.  Honestly if you have to choose tanks get yourself a prot warrior for ads and a blood DK for the boss. The prot warrior can kite ads so effectively and will reduce so much damage.  Basically his ability to leap around is like having extra survivability cooldowns.  The blood DK is a person with a lot of static cooldowns.  We used a feral druid first and then switched to the blood DK.  The druid would go from 100% to 5% health every time, the DK would only go to half health.

So recap, you want a tank with a lot of cooldowns for the main boss, so whoever has more cooldowns (trinkets/engineering) included you want on the main boss.  The more mobile class you will want on the ads.  Keep in mind mobility can be made up by a holy priest and survivability cooldowns can come from your raid.  But it is optimal to have a DK/warrior for this.

Okay let’s say you get past a black phase that’s great.  Maybe you will get lucky and hit a blue phase.  If you do blue phase is as easy.  Blue phase works the exactly the same in heroic as non-heroic.  Red phase on the other hand… a little scarier.

Phase 2?: Red Phase

Okay so you have successfully gotten through a black phase.  You may have hit a blue phase and lawled a little bit at it.  You think you are in the clear until the next black phase… and then red phase hits.

Handling red phase requires a raid composition that will help you.  The AOE fire that gets split amongst the raid is twice as powerful now.  In 10-man it was hitting for 1.2M damage.  One person has to stay out of the fire because of the debuff.  This means it will splash nine people (including your ads tank) for 130,000 damage… that’s a lot.  We basically sat there praying that people would resist enough damage to survive and when it did.  After so many wipes to red phase it started to hit us, we need something prepared for that.

You are going to have to deal with three massive splashes of red phase damage so you will need three cooldowns available for it.  Below are some solutions we came up with or other raiding guilds we talk with were using:

1. Anti-Magic Zone/Power Word Barrier: These spells both function roughly the same as they have roughly the same effect.  You will have everyone stacked in melee range on this boss so if you drop one of these your entire raid is going to take 10k less damage.
2. Aura Mastery: This is more of an RNG thing.  Your raid will gain 780 resistance for 3 seconds and cast resist from an additional 10-20k damage per person. If you have to rely on this cooldown I would pop this one first so that your transitions are easier.  I used this on my pally and it worked every single time but the amounts of damage people were reducing from it varied heavily.
3. Divine Guardian: Flat 20% damage reduction mmm.  This will take 25k damage off of the scorching breath. making it amongst the most powerful cooldowns available.
4. Disc Priest shields: There is no damage in this phase other than the tanks melee swings.  So if you get everyone shielded up before each breath they will take 10k less damage each.  After each breath you can top up with prayer of healing and start re-shielding again.

As of March 17, 2011 pets will no longer effect the breath on 10-man heroic Maloriak.

I’m sure I’ve missed some possibilities but look at what you have in your raid and use it.  Mages can pop mirror images to mitigate it even more.  Your pets are likely going to be able to survive 2-3 blasts of it before they need to be healed up.

Blue phase will largely represent a regen phase where your healers will get to do some stopcasting and get some mana back.  The only other thing that goes unmentioned is that you will always want to release two sets of ads as close to green phase as possible, so you have one phase followed by another.  Whatever the second of the two is, is when you want to release ads.  It will just make healing that much easier.

Phase 2: The Real Phase 2

Congratulations you’ve killed the fight.  You will have one more black phase before you hit phase two.  Phase two the only difference is that the fire stays on the ground longer so this does end up being a massive burn phase. Also the blue circles on the ground that form balls are bombs that instead of tossing you into fire… just kill you.  If you wipe here you will need to either get more gear, change up your DPS, or rethink your tank for this (if the fire lines are not being stacked close enough together for max dps time).

Keep in mind you have to be able to do basic raid mechanics.  The video below is an attempt on our part where some of our raid members are ignoring the boss mechanics and just trying to burn down.

Here is a video I found. I will add some comments once I watch it a few more times.

1. Healers will need to watch for that shadow flame on main tank. They will not be able to heal during it, so the tank needs to be topped off and rotate cooldowns.

2. Kiting tank needs to kite around the outside of the room during shadow phase.

3. DPS and Healers need to stay away from the outside so the kiting tank has room. Looks like halfway through the first puddles start despawning.

4. We need to be great at interrupting arcane storm.

more to come.

The Tankspot strategy paid off. We put a lot of work into this kill and I am very happy to see a new target!

Last boss? It took 4 attempts… Great Job!