How did we get here?


Malygos is a damn epic fight. Really fun too, even if many in my community felt phase three was too gimmicky to make it a true classic. The floor falls, you land on a drake, and, if you play well, it's all over inside thirty seconds. Invariably people don't though and it takes a bit longer but no one's performance could really be faulted last night. The biggest challenge we faced was the horrific server lag we were all plagued with due to other guilds within The Eye of Eternity doing Malygos at the same time. It seemed somewhat ironic that earlier in the day I was ranting about my disdain for the infallible argument presented by those that blame lag for every mistake when we all know that they just fucked up. This was lag!

Thanks to Ardent Defender, WotLK's tank equality, the Shield of Righteousness bug and my gear, I was able to command tanking duties for Malygos. The first phase is straight forward; survive massive spike damage while hoping the Death Knights do their job on the sparks well, live through the Vortex and run in the correct direction upon landing. It's actually Vortex that has prevented my ten man group from trying the non-heroic version of Malygos as you're pretty much stiffed without a Druid and Priest for your healing, of which we only have only one. I was really surprised that it's damage in ten man is the same as it is in twenty-five and disappointed that wasn't a mistake. It needs toning down when they "fix" Circle of Healing and Wild Growth for sure.

The second phase is where the aforementioned lag came into play. I would guess on any other fight, the servers would be able to cope with the amount of people that were present in EoE but the new raid encounters are rife with such sparkly new features. The Lords and Scions floating around a giant spacial area above ever changing pink domes with a giant blue dragon firing a C&C-esque ion cannon at the ground must be pretty intensive. The highlight of the lag was running to a fresh anti-magic shield only for it to hover across the ground several feet. A howl of laughter erupted on vent. Beyond dodging in and out of shrinking domes, this phase is quite simple too once learned, my only irk being our DPS' slight inconsideration toward the tank's abilities to get all the Lords gathered with sufficient threat. It was bad enough when we weren't averaging five globals to every ability.

You can actually learn aspects of the third phase outside with the Aces High daily but it's really not that helpful in practice. The one thing it will teach you to do is grasp where the abilities are, what they do, how the combo point system works and if your UI will display them. Whereas the daily is about killing something that's always attacking you and having a high degree of self-preservation, the actual fight against Malygos involves certain people being designated healers while the majority keep their Engulf in Flames rolling. I like to think I learn fights pretty fast but this one even tested me as I found the entire thing a little difficult to get my head around. Eventually, we all settled for doing two Flame Spikes, waiting for 85 energy, then doing Engulf. Doing it this way ensured that we always had Flame Shield available should we get targeted. It was doing nothing but staring at my pet frame for energy and the skull icon that changed the fight from being a nightmare to comfortable for me and one I shall enjoy doing for the next few months.

Of course, the biggest challenge of this fight comes in looting your fucking Emblem of Valor from Alexstrasza's Gift.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-



Within four days of WotLK being released, I'd gotten 80. As I've mentioned before, I raid in a fucked up way with what is regarded as a community (a channel of people instead of a guild of people) which frees up your guild for whatever purpose you wish. A large part of Redemption's "core" is in my guild and unsurprisingly, the first eight people to hit level 80 were members of both. The very same week the game was out, we were able to squeeze in a Naxx 10 run and get up to Four Horsemen and Patchwerk before being cockblocked. Two days later, we cleared it in it's entirety with some gear upgrades and minor changes.

It's great being back in Naxxramas. My best memories of World of Warcraft were our good old BG days of me being a noob and slowly learning the place. Part of the reason I never attended the plethora of retro raids on Argent Dawn was because I didn't wish to taint what we had back then. I'm almost glad it's so easy just so I can enjoy it to the max and know that I will be doing it at least once per week, every week till the next expansion pack comes out. I still feel that 40 man Naxxramas with BG was one of my greatest experiences in any game ever, online, offline, MMORPG or not.

One scar I have been left with is Bert's mantra of "same left, different right" for Thaddius. Along with the chaining mind flay and various Darm cleave jokes, it's one of those that still gets recited years on. Naturally, I kept the exact same method we used at 60 for my ten man group at 80 - only for my community leader to do the exact opposite in our 25 mans. I always prided myself on never screwing up polarity charges but it's a record I can no longer hold as barking out the directions in reverse every 30 seconds overwhelmed me causing me to call out the wrong instruction and get myself killed.

Aside from clearing 25 man Naxx twice, 10 man Naxx three times, Archavon (never has free loot really meant free loot) on both versions many times, Sartharion 10 twice and Sartharion 25 once, we've also done him with one drake up on 10 man and again on 25 man.

Sartharion+1 on ten man was incredibly challenging. We ended up adapting a strategy whereby Calira tanked both Sart and Tenebron while I dealt with all the whelps and elementals. Due to hit box issues, Tenebron was slowly taken down by three ranged while the melee dealt with the adds. It was incredibly backwards and something I think we can improve upon next time. The twenty-five man version of the same fight wasn't nearly as tough because the logistic issues simply weren't there. I will say though that with four Death Knights using Death and Decay, it is by a huge distance, the most graphically intense encounter I've ever done. With whelps and an enraged amount of elementals on me toward the end, I saw the fire wall go past in three movements.



Aside from having Russta decked out in both full Protection gear and Holy gear and also having Jenkem at 80 and done with heroics, this is the other thing I've been focusing on. I toyed with the idea of leveling another alt but I took a step back and considered just how much I'd done in less than a month and decided that I'd let Glory of the Hero be my crowning achievement for a little bit and scale back a bit to get some quality time in on Little Big Planet and Fallout 3.

Lockdown and A Void Dance are simple RNG achievements that we'll get in time.

Make it Count I'm anticipating having done tonight.

Less-rabi we've failed around thirty times.

Gotta Go is retarded and I'm not expecting to have it done before the time frame gets expanded in the future.

I'll probably do a post and go over some of the harder achievements once I've got the Red Proto Drake in the bag.