“Anyone have any tips for Malygos Phase 3?”
This is a common question I’ve seen on my Twitter that I’ve decided to address.
The phase 3 of Malygos is difficult for players the first time they run into it. It generally takes a number of wipes before players figure out what to actually do and how to do it.
When I explain this fight to pickup groups or other guilds, I try to keep things as simple as possible.
Setting up
As phase 2 ends, the entire instance is going to fill with bright, seizure inducing colors.
To make sure everyone’s in sync and starting in the right area, I get everyone to snap and move down to the southern side of the platform. Look on your minimap for this if you have to. I ensure everyone stays together as much as possible.
Note the red dot in the diagram above.
As the platform breaks apart and your raid falls, see to it that no one touches their flight controls. Let Malygos settle down and park himself. Once he does that, the raid leader cues the raid to climb.
Climb directly up until you’re at head level with Malygos. For the remainder of the fight, this is where you’ll be on the Z axis of things. You don’t have to worry about climbing or diving. You and your raid are only going to focus on strafing.
Movement
Note the four dark blue (navy) circles on the map above. Those are going to be the 4 points everyone will navigate to.
Now that the raid is head level and starting at the south position, you’re going to move towards the east, north, west, before heading back to the south.
In other words, fly counter-clockwise in 90 degree increments. You don’t have to do this constantly. Only move when the raid gets hit with a static field (30 yard AoE damage spell). See a static field? Move east. Another static field? Head north.
For the DPS
Even though I’ll have anywhere from 6 to 7 healers for phases 1 and 2 on Malygos, I’ll specifically jump into the play on phase 3 to help DPS. I like to get another healer to do it with me. This drops healing drakes down to 4 but increases attacking drakes by 2 (or having a net result of 20 firebreathing drakes).
Flame spike: Damaging fire attack that awards a combo point at the cost of 10 energy
Engulf in flames: Finisher that adds a DoT effect. The more combo points, the longer the duration of the DoT. Can stack.
As you can see, the more Flame Spikes you cast, the more DoTs you can add and the longer they last. It takes a while to build up momentum.
For the sake of simplicity and those doing it the first time, I suggest going for a 1-1-1-2 rotation.
On a side note, I think the guild best is currently at 22 stacks. Can’t remember if it was one of my Warlocks, a Hunter, or Kimbo (Ret Pally) who pulled it off.
For the healers
First thing’s first. What you may realize is that your raid frames are going to be useless! They don’t show the health of the drakes! There are a few addons that combat this, but I’m going to assume that you completely forgot to get them.
Press Shift V. This brings up healthbars on to the screen. At this point, you’re going to be relying on heads up healing. In other words, you’ll have to filter out the players with low health bars, target them, and heal them.
Revivify: 10 second HoT. Each application adds 1 combo point. This can stack up to 5 times.
Life Burst: This is an AoE healing finisher which increases your healing done by 50% (and lasts longer per combo point). If you have maxed out combo points (5 of them), the spell will heal around 15000 across all friendly targets within 60 yards.
This is like extreme whack-a-mole.
You may not have combo point indicators so you’ll have to keep track of it mentally in your head. And since Life Burst is a large AoE, you don’t always have to target the weakest drake. Just pick one and slam the key and it should engulf everyone.
For the DPS and healers
Lastly is the Flame Shield mechanic. Any spell that registers combo points will work (Revivify or Flame Spike). The more combo points, the longer the shield.
You’ll want to use this when he targets you with a Surge of Power. Having Deadly Boss Mods installed will cue a large warning on your screen that Malygos is looking at you.
Even though he looks at you, you still have time to build up points to survive. A lot of players will panic when this happens and feel helpless.
Get a grip on yourself and calm down.
When he looks at you, there are 3 seconds before he fires his laser beams. The beams will last 5 seconds. You just need to have the shield up for a portion of it to survive. With luck, your AoE healers can still catch you while the beam is going off to help mitigate some of the damage.
Let me reiterate, you don’t have to have your shield up the entire 5 seconds to survive. So if you’re caught with your pants down without any combo points and he’s looking at you, fire off 2 or 3 combo point spells and hit your shield. You should be able to survive it with slight scale damage.
Reminders
- Run south going into phase 3
- When Malygos levels up, climb up to him and reach head level
- Strafe in 90 degree increments going counter clockwise
- DPS: 1-1-1-2
- Healers: 3-3-3-3-3-4 and press Shift V to toggle health bars
- Don’t panic when he catches you with no combo points since you still have time
Good luck and good hunting!
Probably worth mentioning also that the Coldara Daily “Aces High” gives you a decent preview of phase 3. The drakes you fly have the same abilities as the ones during that phase, and the Scalesworn Drakes you need to kill have an ability very similar to Malygos’ focus attack.
http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=13414
You should mention that you are only moving when the Electrical sparks are hitting the raid
Fixed.
EZ heals:
Target anyone (self will do, but you’ll actually have to click your dragon), Revivify X3-5, then aoe heal. Repeat. The aoe does a lot more than targeted revivify. The one time I forgot to pull out the standard raid bars, I just targeted me and aoe healed like a mad dragon. It worked great.
We usually have three healing drakes on 25-man. As Sydera described, I heal pretty much exclusively by targeting my drake, ‘healing’ myself with 5xRevivify and the using the AoE heal. I’ve found that I can actually heal myself thru a Surge of Power that way.
We stay grouped up for the entire fight, which makes AoE healing easy. When the static field hits, we all just move left, following the RL who’s marked with a star.
Malygos is buggy as atm in Phases 1 and 2, and until he’s fixed we’ve found that putting all pets away in Phase 1 (including ghouls) has made a world of difference.
If you configure Grid with auto-layout to 25man with pets, it will show 50 bars, 25 for the group and 25 for the drakes. No need for HeadsUpHealing. Just make sure your grid window is far enough to the left that the double width will be visible.
We use three healers for phase 3 and use the exact same healing method that Sydera mentioned above. Target your own drake, revivify five times and then AoE heal. It works like a charm.
Or you also can pull out default blizzard frames from Raid window. They automatically show drakes’ health in phase 3.
Totally, if not one of the best articles for it that encapsulates the thoughts on Malygos Phase 3. I’m training some guildies in the fine art of this fight, and this article hits the points sexcellently.
Also, first time poster, recent reader. Every article here? Golden.
If you’re not up to the 5 (now 6) minutes achievement and want to go the extreme safe route (which you sometimes want to do in a pug raid) I suggest using 10-12 heal dragons and let them spam aoe heal with 3-5 combo points and have 13-15 dragons do damage.
These damage dragons can now focus solely on stacking the dot and don’t have to care about the Surge of Power anymore. The aoe heal will keep them up anyways.
Bonus points for having 2-3 heal dragons build up 5 combo points and keeping the aoe heal for when you’re raid is hit by the static field.
It helps a lot if a player preferably someone with a sence of direction has a mark over their head everyone can follow. this keeps the raid closer together for the aoe heals.
“sense” that is
what syd says works pretty well for me. I target a drake in the group, spam revivify 3-5 times, then aoe heal. rinse and repeat. Because we’re all bunched up together, this aoe really does well in keeping everyone’s health up.
Our 3-4 healers take a different approach – they build up combo points by casting flame spike instead of revivify. This helps take down the boss quicker, and the AOE heal is plenty good enough to top everybody off.
Though we’ve done it a few times and our DPSers know when to move and when to shield, so that helps with not really needing to target-heal.
Very good summary. We just tweak ours a little bit.
We usually mark the healing lead and then everyone knows to stack on the marked target. Then we assign 4 healers and use AOE healing like Syd said in the comments. Usually if you get unlucky and Maly targets you a few times in a row you’ll usually wind up dying but overall its pretty effective.
And we don’t use 1-1-1-2, we use 1-1-2. I think my personal best was 24 stacks, but that was with a pug. Usually when more people know what they are doing and a lot of people are building high stack numbers he goes down quicker.
And to register a formal complaint – I don’t like that if you die you have to release and run. If you beat Maly they should give a free raid-wide rez to everyone. I’ve been in a few Maly pugs where people were denied loot because someone opened while another person was running back.
Great advice Matt –
We use 2 things now:
/script SetCVar (“cameraDistancemax” ,50)
It allows you to zoom out considerably so it’s really easy for everyone to know their position relative to the static fields and to the group as well. We use this for Sarth to allow players to judge the lava walls easier.
Second thing is the MalygosCP addon. It lets everyone view their combo points, energy and the Engulf in Flames on Malygos in a nice window.
The camera setting helps immensely and the addon is really helpful for people to get the 112 or 33334 timing down.
Very usefull thank you
Ok, 3 healers should always be enough, as the AOE heals multiple targets and with everyone stacked, there should be no reason heals can’t keep everyone up (though next time we will be trying 2 healers to see where that gets us)…. I haven’t really kept track of the stacks, because it is of little importance, as you have a designated rotation, regardless (as I see it, the more stacks means the less dps actually doing their part)… we commonly use the 1-1-1-2 rotation for dps, but 1-1-2 would in fact increase the stacks as your using 2 more often, though 1-2 does not seem to make a big enough impact, therefore 1-1-1-2 is a safe method… As for healers… I find it is best to have the first healer begin with 3-3, then the second healer starts 3-3, then the third begins (of course this is organized through vent)… All healers go up to 5 stacks, and if done right, all players will be constantly getting healed so no one should be going low in health… As a side note, I use Grid, so targeting is not a problem…