HEROIC: Blackwing Descent: Maloriak

[TeaLeaf]

Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Heroic Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Zaxx, and in this video, I will be discussing the strategy for defeating the Heroic Maloriak encounter in the Blackwing Descent raid instance.

The heroic Maloriak encounter is essentially the exact same fight as normal mode. The only difference is an additional add phase in the first part of the encounter. Phase 1 of the encounter consists of a rotation of 4 different colored phases. You will always start with a black phase and end on a green phase. Throughout the encounter, Maloriak will cast Remedy on himself which does a ton of healing. This must be spellstolen immediately or purged if your raid lacks mages.

The black phase starts with Maloriak spawning Vile Swills near the center of the room. The add tank must pick them up and start kiting them toward the outside. While alive, Vile Swills will constantly cover the ground with Dark Sludge that the raid will have to continually adjust for as it does a substantial amount of damage. Keeping the adds grouped up is key to maximizing dps during this phase. It is also important that the raid not being the Swill kite path so the add tank has a clean path to kite. Meanwhile, Maloriak will be chain casting a shadow breath at the main tank. The breath will do near fatal damage over the course of each cast, and it will apply a healing debuff that makes them virtually unhealable while the breath is active. Healers need to top him/her off as soon as Maloriak starts to recast. After a minute and a half, Maloriak will enter his next colored phase.

WHen Maloriak enters his red phase, the tank should face him away from the enetrance, and the entire raid should group up in front of him. Maloriak will cast a frontal-cone flame breath that splits the damage over everyone that it hits. Be ready to use raid cooldowns in order to make these breaths easier to handle. Maloriak will also place a Consuming Flames debuff on a random member of the raid and it will increase fire damage taken by 50%. The person will this debuff should get out from in front of Maloriak immediately. And as always, interupts on Arcane Storm during this phase are incredibly important. Just a single tick of Arcane Storm going off before a flame breath can instantly kill a good attempt.

When Maloriak enters his blue phase, the entire raid should spread out around the room. Maloriak will randomly put people in iceblocks which need to be dps'd down in order to break them out. He will also begin casting Biting Chill on random raid members that will deal damage to anyone nearby. Melee that get this debuff need to move out of the group ASAP. Arcane Storm should always be interupted as soon as physically possible as it does a lot more damage in the heroic version of the encounter. If interupted within the first second of the cast, you can completely negate all of its damage and make for some happy healers.

To finish off a rotation of colored phases, Maloriak will enter his green phase. He will debuff all hostile and friendly units in the room to take 100% increased damage and cause the adds to lose their stacking damage increasing buffs for 15 seconds. The goal here is to have all the abberitions dead before the debuff falls off. The number of adds can vary depending on the strategy you want to use. The method we used in this video was to let 3 Release Abberition casts go through for each colored rotation. That way, we would only have to deal with 9 Aberrations each green phase. Some guilds choose to let a single cast go through before each black phase, and just have the add tank kite the 3 Aberrations along with the Swills. Maloriak will also be hitting the tank harder in this phase due to the debuff and should be focused by the healers accordingly. And as always, interupters must maintain that interupt rotation on Maloriak.

At 25%, Maloriak will enter is 2nd and final phase. He will immediately release any remaining Aberrations that weren't released in the previous colored phases as well as 2 larger adds that have a fixate ability. The off-tank should pick these up immediately in order to minimize raid damage and unnesecary deaths. Maloriak will summon Frost Spheres that will damage anyone that gets near them and occastionally cast Acid Nova that does Raid-wide AoE damage. Maloriak will also chain cast an ability called Flame Jets which summons a stream of fire directly in front of where he is facing. Flame Jets deal fire damage and knocks anyone that it hits into the air and cause them to take fall damage right after. The way we handled this was to have the tank pull him close to the outer walls and slowly kite him around the outside. Doing it this way gave our raid more room to be able to move to avoid other mechanics in this phase.

I've attached footage of the entire encounter incase you want to see how we dealt with the various mechanics in detail. Good Luck!

[TeaLeaf]

From Maintankadin:
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=30845

Main differences:
-Addition of Black vial phase.
-Enrage is just over 12 minutes. Lots of addons are giving either 10 or 14 min as the time.
-Frost tombs do damage (~50-60k) upon shattering as well as application so top off before breaking out.

The addition of the black vial phase isn't really too bad. 15 or 20 sec in Nef will show up and spike the punch making Maloriak puke out five slime adds with 1.8 million HP each. The slime adds will constantly spew out black puddles, which eventually dissipate, under raid members so kite as necessary. Maloriak will stop attempting to summon Abberations (don't recall Arcane storms during black) but will channel a mortal strike breath focused on the MT. You have about 90 seconds to AOE like mad before Maloriak then continues the fight in the normal R/B G manner with another black phase after those. Repeat and push before 3rd black phase because you won't make enrage even if you kill that 3rd wave.

The enrage timer forces you to do 9/9 abberations*. We found that all 9 at once was just too much even with CDs. What we did was each Red/Blue cycle was to let 3 out ASAP, interrupt the second summon attempt, kill one, and then let the next 2 summons go out. This left us with a still very pointy but livable 8 adds leading up to and during green phase. For us it wasn't a huge dps problem to just get rid of that one, even stacked with the other two providing it with 20% reduction. We pushed P2 right at the end of our second green phase so our overall dps was fine.

Abberation cast attempt times:
Green/Pre-Black (fight start) 1
Black Phase 0
Red 2
Blue 2

Tips:
-Abberation aura buffs the oozes too. Only let adds out during Red/Blue.
-Have MT turn boss 90 and use Guardian Spirit or AD to negate one of the red phase flame breaths that you normally divide across the stacked up raid.
^If you choose to do this make sure the 90 degree turn/arc is never pointing Maloriak in the direction of the Consuming Flames victim. Pick directions for this at the start.

*This may seem obvious but the damage output from 9 in heroic looked too high to tank at all. Adding to that was non existent paladin kiting options (they have no creature type so no glyph of HW -anyone else assume they were dragons?). Also the first heroic 10 kill video we found from an EU guild posted last week had an enrage of over 14 min and used a 6/6/6 order. We tried that for a while until we kept running into 12:15 enrage.

The MS debuff lasts for the duration of the cast. While it is casting, the tank is taking damage and is unhealable. As soon as it is done casting, you have 3-5 seconds to heal the tank to full before the next cast. It's a non-issue, really.

Heroic Maloriak is, more than anything else, an interrupt fight. If you fail to interrupt Arcane Storm before the first tick, bam, 50k raid damage. Couple that with a flash freeze (which hits for 80k+) and you have a dead player. Couple it with the fire breath and you have a wiped raid. Basically, every failure to interrupt before the first tick is a high chance to wipe the raid in any red or blue phase, or while the green phase debuff is still on you.

So, in other words, use Curse of Tongues and don't fail at interrupts. This also applies to release aberrations. If you let one of those go off during the green phase, you better start DPSing them down before the shadow phase and hope for the best.


Also, Flash Freeze can hit the add tank. If he has 6+ adds on him, he's going to have a high chance of dying. Flash freeze is cast 15 seconds after the phase starts and 15 seconds after that. The adds are CCable, so feel free to time your CCs to protect your tank (just don't chain the flash freeze).


Finally, use pets and cooldowns in conjunction with fire breaths. Snake trap is pretty huge about saving your raid, as are mirror images. I'm under the impression that PW: Barrier and Divine Guardian might not actually reduce the breath damage, but I haven't checked to make sure.

A cast speed debuff is needed for this fight.  CoT works on Release Abberration.

Ring of frost works great as well for when the third set of three spawn and you've got 6 of them beating on you already.

[TeaLeaf]

Bump for RGT.  Start researching & learning this fight!

[TeaLeaf]

This fight is up after Heroic: Atramedes is defeated.  Start reading up on it please in preparation!

[TeaLeaf]

Best guide ever tbh:

[TeaLeaf]

Srs bump time.  We're doing it this reset.  Be prepared!

[hubbah]

i already got this down on 25man.. so if you need info just let me know

[TeaLeaf]

Post up the way you did it before Hubbah please, all help gratefully accepted!

[Slush]

Dont let the long TL posts fool you.... The changes aint that heavy:

Changes to Maloriak Heroic

As usual, everything hits harder and has more health. Arcane storm especially hits much harder (50k/tick). As for different mechanics...

In addition to normal blue/red/green phases, he has a black phase (always comes first/after green). In this phase, he first off pukes 5 black ooze adds that have ridiculously high hp (around 6,6mil on 25man) that need to be killed. They repeatedly spawn black ooze on the ground (looks like mini defile) that ticks for 15k/tick in addition to meleeing the tank for decent amounts. Kite them around the room while killing them. You should get them down or at least near death once red/blue phase starts.
Also, while in black phase, he wont really melee the tank, but he will instead cast a cone breath that deals a moderate amount of damage over the duration and reduces healing taken by 100%. Simply heal the tank between every breath to full and youll be fine. DK tanks can use AMS to ignore one breath every 45 secs.

You will either get two or three black phases, depending on your dps. If you are close to hitting phase 2 while you still have adds in tubes/black phase is starting, dont risk it or youll hit phase 3 with slimes, aberrations and prime subjects, which spells disaster.
Mechanics considering aberration remain the same. AoE on green, if they dont die, single out and kill. Remember to purge/interrupt boss as well.

[hubbah]

Well heres the movie you can see how we did it.. it is 25 man.. so not everything should be the same  for us

Black phase : they spawn at the feet of the boss and we just kited it around the room from where they spawn to the stairs and then further to the other side ( hugged the walls ). They spawn black pools on the ground as well.. get out of em or your dead
Green phase : the same as we do it now on normal.. just need abit more dps on em we should be ok with the dps we got on it now.
Red phase : We turned the boss so that the offtank(s) had more room to Kite the adds. Thats the only difference really ( there is someting that melee needs to do i think but i was ranged so dident do that part ) We kited the adds due to them hitting for alot more.. so we used frosttraps and adds were kited tru them.
Blue phase : the same again

In phase 2 dont get hit by the frost spawns.. rest is up to the tank to get the raid not get hit by the fire.

The hardest part we had with this fight was really getting the adds down quick.. due to the difference between health on normal and hc we were lacking alot of dps ( warlocks respect to aoe spec to get more on it ).

I think we should be able to get the tacks down and take this guy down in 1 night Letssss dooo it!

[TeaLeaf]

After discussing this in Council, the plan is to go to this fight as the next heroic encounter for RGT.  That means we will do Magmaw on Normal, then we get Chim, Atra & Maloriak all on heroic.  Prep up folks, it's fresh challenge time!

[Twyst]

Interrupting storms is normally quite easy - there's ALWAYS a storm about 2 seconds after release abberations.
However at the start of a new phase he could do storm or abberations first - this is where it gets tricky as i did lose threat at phase change for a few reasons
1) The boss walks a fair distance to me.
2) One of my fingers is hovering over an interrupt
So please watch aggro at phase change until 1st storm is interrupted. Then you can take yours eyes off the meter.

Although I have two interrupts, the 2nd requires a rune which I may not always have available, unlike runic power which I conserve for interrupts. This means I cannot use it to cover because I would literally generate no threat

Breath management is becoming easier whilst dancing around sludge. I think we can save CD's here, certainly on the 1st breath, maybe 2nd also. It's only then at 3rd where it gets tricky as there is a lot of black goo.
I think that I can pop AMS on 2nd breath, trinket the 3rd and get help with the 4th. I know TL said that we shouldn't see any more breaths, but my count always had 5 minimum, sometimes more. Oddly enough, after the 4th the goo starts to clear which means a CD isn't normally needed for 5th breath. Although AMS is available for the 5th breath, I have to save it for RED phase if I get the debuff. Out of curiousity, how do other tanks handle this as AMS needs to be popped BEFORE he applies it.

[Grimnar]

Well melee point of view:
 
A fun fight, i liked it that is. My problems where:
 
 
Start of the fight:  Black Phase 1 interrupt needed to cancel add spawning, this one is weird i have to say it. We don't always get it. We get storm always first and 4/5 seconds later the add cast comes (or should). But with a couple of tries that cast never came. What i thought at first was that someone else did interrupt it but that couldn't be it as i didn't even get the cast bar for it on my screen. So that confused me a few times.
 
Then the small blobs:  At start it went fine with me using standard swipe and tigersfury. And avoiding black pools of death was doable.
Avoiding those pools became a problem when our gnome friend came in and also i sometimes couldn't even see the adds. So a few times i got stuck within the deathpools with nowhere to jump to so i took alot of damage because of that and it even killed me twice i think.
Then my little stunt of beating our hunter on add dps, it is nice dps on the adds for sure but it also killed me 2 times out of 3 tries using my fun rotation. There was no way the tank could keep agro on all mobs not even with me swapping between the adds for my white damage. So the question is should i keep using beserk for it or save it for the bluephase as i did a few tries.
 
For the rest interrupts went fine, except for me hitting mine to early and hitting the storm and not the adds. (yeah both tries that happend where my fault:devil:) But that was just me being trigger happy, to focused on it.
 
 
Fun fight with a little tweaking to do for melee on interrupts mainly.

[Tirkad]

Ok, healer PoV: pain train incoming!
2 tanks: MT (boss) and Adds tank (guess what's he tanking?)
for the MT healer: you have only a 3 secs window to pull the tank's hp back to full or as close to full as you can, since while he stands in the flame he will take a reasonable amount of dmg while the boss is casting [ITEM=http://www.wowhead.com/spell=92754]Engulfing Darkness[/ITEM]. Once finished casting he will channel a cone of flames in front of him directed to the tank that will apply a 100% healing reduction debuff to everyone in the cone while dealing dmg.
N.B.: It is NOT required for this phase to use any major cooldown. It can be done with just the tank minor cds, and you're so gonna need all the tricks you can save for the red phase. In fact we noticed that there isn't much black puddles close to the boss.
About the adds tank, he should only require healing during the black phase and when 9 or more adds are up. The black phase shouldn't be a problem, but the 3 phase will be, in particular in case it's a red one: The damage going around will be simply overwhelming and will require all the cooldowns you can dispose of. Spank hard the storm interrupter if he/she doesn't interrupt within 1 second since he start channeling or doesn't call for a backup in case he has to run away from the boss.
Protip: if you get a red phase just after the black one, you've been lucky, since it will only require all the healers on the raid to keep people up, with the adds tank just tanking 3-6 adds and the MT within the range of all the aoe.
Black phase tips: i was healing the MT, and i just had to stand way on his side to stand a bit further away from the others, thus dropping the chances to have a black puddle spawning under my feet. Start casting your big heal timing it with the channelled spell, so it will land as soon as the fire cone finish: it will make it all a lot easier. As MT healer, if you only do this, it's not hard or even mana requiring so save as much as you can for the red phase. As a MT healer, sometimes i had to stand aa second or 2 in the black puddle to finish casting my heal: this is the ONLY exception, since the MT will only be healable for 3 seconds every 10; all the others (ranged above all) should be watching their steps and take the least dmg possible. Edit: Almost forgot: Remember to shield/grip/whatever Grimnar before he kills himself on the adds
Blue phase tips: get ONE healer to call out the "shatter" on the freezes, it will help a lot. The spreading out shouldn't be a problem, since there's lot of room. During this phase the dps will be nuking the boss hard.
Red phase tips: Bunch up on the MT, and nuke the boss as hard as you can. In this phase the dps will be nuking the boss hard. This phase will stress a lot the healers, in particular if it happens after a blue phase: in this case you'll have both a LOT of raid damage going on and the risk of losing the adds tank if he commits a mistake while kiting the adds. I suggest to use the mitigation starting from the 3rd-4th flame breath, each class who has a mitigation cooldown should contribute, and remember you should have an hs, if you have a lock in the raid. The healers may need to blow some major cds from the 2nd-3rd flame breath onward, and the storm interrupter MUST be faster than the light with the interrupts: even one tick of the storm can wipe the raid if too close to the flame breath damage, as we experienced more than once.
Green phase tips: Heavy nuke on the adds, and be fast on interrupts, i think it is possible that the boss will summon 3 more adds in this phase, we wiped once becouse of this (correct me if i'm wrong here, but if i recall correctly the adds spawned during the green phase, not before).

That's all for the night, when we'll progrees on the fight i will be able to add something else.

[Jesung]

Obviously my major hindrance In the attempt's tonight was my lack of experience of using a Demolology spec. Also with the spam of Hellfire, it became difficult to even see the black sludge, but a Tealle pointed out in raid I just need to watch my debuffs more. The problems which i had can be easily resolved on my end, and I didn't notice many glaring mistakes on the parts of other.