Maloriak

[Aliena]

Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video I will be discussing the strategy for Maloriak in the Blackwing Descent Raid Instance.

Maloriak is a relatively straightforward fight that requires little more than proper coordination of your raid for one simple awareness phase and the final burn phase. In addition, there are adds that must be offtanked for a short while, as well as a couple spells requiring interruption. Don't be too intimidated, though... at its core, this encounter is a tank and spank.


First, it's important to assign players to interrupt Arcane Storm. You can increase the cast time of this ability with Slow or Curse of Tongues (etc.), so be sure to assign someone to toss that on as well. Arcane Storm is a channeled AoE that can quickly wipe the raid if not interrupted. You will also need an offensive dispeller to remove Remedy, a heal over time spell Maloriak will occasionally cast on himself. It heals for increasingly larger amounts the longer it's on him, so get rid of it as quickly as possible.


During Phase 1, Maloriak will occasionally run to his cauldron and toss in one of three vials: red, green, and blue. Each vial causes him to gain new abilities unique to that color, so be aware of what he's selecting and respond appropriately. Whenever Maloriak tosses in a Red Vial, he will gain the abilities Scorching Blast and Consuming Flames. Consuming Flames is a small Damage over Time spell that becomes significantly more dangerous if the affected player takes any other magic damage. Scorching Blast is an AoE frontal cone fire spell that splits its damage amongst all players in range. Have your raid stack up, and the player with scorching blast can simple run out. Face Maloriak to the raid, heal through the fire damage, and the phase is trivial.


When he tosses in a Blue Vial, he gains the abilities Flash Freeze and Biting Chill. Biting chill causes a single player to deal frost damage to all other players within 6 yards, so have the ranged be spread out and assign an area for melee to run when this ability affects them. Flash Freeze will encase a player and all players within 6 yards in a block of ice which must be broken in order to free the player. They have fairly low health, so a few quick hits will do the trick.


Every third vial is sure to be a Green Vial. Maloriak will coat everything in the room with Debilitating Slime, increasing Damage Taken by 100%. This is your solution to dealing with the adds. During the fight, Maloriak will cast "Release Abberations," releasing three adds at a time. These adds take significantly reduced damage unless under the effect of Debilitating Slime, so your best bet is to have a tank round them up and hold them until the Green Vial phase. There are 18 adds total that can be released, and you only want two Green Vials in order to beat the enrage timer. Allow him to release 9 adds before each Green Vial, and then interrupt any additional casts of "Release Abberations" until Green Vial is cast again and your raid can AoE down the mobs.


During the final phase, he releases two adds called Prime Subjects. These need to be picked up quickly, as they will lock on to their target a few seconds after being released and fixate on them until death. Have the tank pick these up, and your raid can comfortably ignore them to focus on burning down Maloriak. Maloriak will cast lines of fire at your tank, so face him towards the wall, slowly kite him around the room, and ensure that no one is standing behind the tank. There are also two AoEs going out in the form of Absolute Zero and Poison Nova. Poison Nova is a small dot that must simply be healed through, while Absolute Zero summons a void zone under a player, producing an orb that will explode if a player touches it.


This fight sounds significantly more complicated than it actually is. I'll provide footage of the entire fight with some commentary, simplifying the strategy discussion along with comments on how we handled each phase.


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[Kinch]

Should mention Growth Catalyst on the Aberrations, which increase damage 20 percent for every ally within 10 yards. I doubt you really want to single tank nine of them unless Debilitating Slime is up.

Release Aberrations is a 1-second cast, so it's not exactly ho-hum, interrupt it. If you're tasked with the decision to stop it or let it go, you can't really afford to be seeing the Arcane Storm cast as well. You just don't have the time (at least I don't, unless I start taking some serious drugs) to identify then make the decision to interrupt.

[Papapaint]

Should mention Growth Catalyst on the Aberrations, which increase damage 20 percent for every ally within 10 yards. I doubt you really want to single tank nine of them unless Debilitating Slime is up.

It's mentioned, as is the two-tank strategy. It's possible with one, and we've killed it with one twice now on 25.

Release Aberrations is a 1-second cast, so it's not exactly ho-hum, interrupt it. If you're tasked with the decision to stop it or let it go, you can't really afford to be seeing the Arcane Storm cast as well. You just don't have the time (at least I don't, unless I start taking some serious drugs) to identify then make the decision to interrupt.

Curse of tongues or slow, and you can also just make the decision to allow him to cast it 3 times then interrupt everything he does.

[Meloree]

Also note: A stop DPS call is required before the 2nd green phase if your raid dps is high. You can see we stop in the video for about 45 seconds.

You really want to get that second green phase. The DPS check on phase one (transitioning shortly after the second green) isn't very stressful to begin with. But tanking the two final adds with three or four aberrations makes phase two pretty eventful.

[Kinch]

It's possible with one, and we've killed it with one twice now on 25.

Straight-up tank, or DK kiting?

[Papapaint]

Straight-up tank, or DK kiting?

Straight up tank. Rotate cooldowns, throw a couple extra healers on him. Some light kiting when the damage got high, but it was our pally tank.

[krilz]

Some pointers if you're attempting this on 10 man:

Affliction warlocks rule here. Not only can they cast Curse of Tongues on boss for helping with interrupts, but they can also cast a Curse of Elements on one of the adds with Jinx which will increase damage taken on pretty much everything in the room which helps a lot. Also, the Felhunter has an automatic purge so it removes the buff on Maloriak instantly whenever it comes up so you won't have to worry about it. Not to mention that they also have an interrupt (which they can use on Release Abberations) and Soulburn: SoC which is great for dealing with the adds; just use it on Maloriak first to get a Corruption on all the adds each and then spam SoC on Maloriak himself.

We use a protection warrior for kiting. The hunter puts up a frost trap, the tank lures in the adds in to the middle and then runs in circles around it, effectively slowing down all adds. If you don't have a hunter, the warrior can use Piercing Howl instead. Shockwave also helps for creating large distances when slow effects runs out.

The biggest thing you need to wary of is if Flash Freeze ends up on the kiter. If you're not quick enough, all the adds will run up to him and smash his face in. Here Shadowfury is good for stunning all of them, Guardian Spirit/Pain Suppression in relieving damage and so on.

All in all, not a hard but very fun fight.

[klausi]

Also note: A stop DPS call is required before the 2nd green phase if your raid dps is high. You can see we stop in the video for about 45 seconds..

I argue on this, we just killed him last night with 12/6 adds on 10 man (3 healed him) and didn't wait for another green phase, hunter kept throwing frosttraps and i kited both huge adds and the six smaller ones until the boss was dead. Not a big deal even w/o an external cooldown, just popped shieldwall when the rend-ish stacks of the bigger adds got higher (~8) and used shockwave/leap excessivley.

[Daimon]

If using 2 tanks, and if available, a prot warr makes the adds very easy to OT, they are stunnable. Its not necessary to push 2nd phase before 2nd green vial, and I'd advice against it, makes 2nd phase unnecessarily harder. Also, the 2nd phase starts at 25%, not 20% like some guides say, at least in 10m.
The abilities you must interrupt are split in a way you only need 1 kicker for each, with an Arcane mage or CoT makes kicking very easy.

[Hejgaard]

We are killing this boss with 2 tanks, 2 healers (Rshaman+Hpala), and 6 dps (1 staying on the boss at all time).
This fight is all about interupts! You will need 9 adds every green phase, so make sure that you have assigned some1 hitcapped to interupt the add spell. (we had a warrior do it, while our other dps + me as resto shaman helped on storm). Don't get more or less than 9 adds! AOE is limited to 10 targets only, so if you don't have insane AOE dmg, you will have a hard time getting 12 adds down before the green phase is over. Its important to keep the interupts up while in the green phase (I was on the storm, and our warrior was on the add-spell) to prevent adds from spawning while we were AOE'ing down the other adds.
We had a mage spellsteal the buff, but just get it off tbh, it heals ALOT!
If you can handle the interupts and the adds, this is fairly easy fight, and make sure to stop dmg on him so you dont trigger 25 % before 2. green and you should have a kill.
Make sure to bring a hunter to help you add-tank
Good Luck!

[Irbi]

Great guide - thank you for taking the time to put it together.

"Scorching Blast is an AoE frontal cone fire spell that splits its damage amongst all players in range. Have your raid stack up, and the player with scorching blast can simple run out."

I'm confused why the person targeted with Scorching Blast would run out of the group. If this is shared damage - everyone should stay clumped together?

Did you mean the person with Consuming Flames can run out (they would take a ton of damage otherwise)?

"Allow him to release 9 adds before each Green Vial"

I may have missed this - but I don't think the guide mentions why you want to allow him to release 9 at a time. Some people may be asking themselves why not just interrupt everything he does?

As the guide mentions - you only want 9 adds per green vial (and you only want green vial to happen twice 18 adds total) When the boss gets below 25% if the number of adds he released does not add up to 18 - he will release all remaining adds in addition to the Prime Subjects.

[Dyvine]

Just wondering what the addon is for the range check. Is that Hud Map with some changes made by the user?

[zebrahed]

Our 10m raid did this in about 5-6 tries. Our 25m was struggling to get anywhere, using the same tactics.

Suddenly someone decided to have one of our tanks go back from being dps, to tank (a laughable ret paladin :P). 2 add tanks makes that portion of the encounter trivial, as the tanks take marginal amounts of damage when they have smaller packs on them.

We still call for dps stop until the second green phase, and have yet to have problems with hitting enrage. Just less to worry about going into the last phase, which can be fairly hectic with all the things to dodge.



edit:
Also; when hit by an ice block, you take damage in the area of like 50k. When you're broken out, you take the same damage again, so the person needs to receive a heal or two before being broken out. If you target someone as soon as they're frozen and hit the block, you run the risk of killing them if they are too low after both of those. Shouldn't happen that often, since the raid damage is minimal in that phase, with basically just arcane storm ticking for a few, and biting cold. But it can happen.


re: releasing adds. if you release all 9 in the first 3 casts, your OT will take more damage for the duration of the first red/blue/green phase. if you interrupt one in between at some point, they'll take less damage since they'll be tanking 1/2 packs for a bit of time, and then finally get the 3rd pack for only a small portion of the phase. the damage increases with more adds, so tanking 3 total packs for less time will decrease damage, and lower a chance that he'll die after getting caught in a block while tanking the 9 adds, or some other disaster :P if you 2 tank this on 25m, you can ignore, and just let the first 3 release, and interrupt all the casts until after the green phase, in which you can just ignore the remainder of the casts altogether.

[Kinch]

I think you still need to interrupt Release Aberrations after 18 have been released. More will be summoned if you let it go. The 18, I believe, is just the number you need to release before 25 percent in order not to have more released in the final phase.

[Predakhan]

I think you still need to interrupt Release Aberrations after 18 have been released. More will be summoned if you let it go. The 18, I believe, is just the number you need to release before 25 percent in order not to have more released in the final phase.

Nope, he casts something that releases all the remaining abberations and there are only 18 total be released unless you are talking about heroic mode which I am not sure the differences between reg and heroic yet.

[smep]

Hi guys, Smep here again to account for all the reasons why I failed to successfully down this encounter last night. These are a few things that caught me off guard the first time, that I wish I'd known going into it, so hopefully some of this information is valuable to you.

1) Picking up the Aberrations wasn't as easy as swiping and thrashing a bit. They can randomly spawn on two different sides of the room, so be ready to move if you have to.

1a) Going off of that, after being relieved of my horrific add-tanking duties, I realized that the MT/anyone looking at Maloriak during the cast can see where those spawns are going to come from. For a half-second jump on where they're spawning from, look for the pink lightning animation, and that's where the Aberrations will spawn.

2) The Green Vial phase doesn't last nearly as long as I thought it would. I don't think I was adequately expressing the importance of AoE damage during the green phase, but we'd get out of the phase with 3-4 Aberrations at about 10% life coming out of it... so, seriously... do AoE damage damnit!

3) Since I'm a bear, I figured I could pop Berserk, help out with adds, and do a boatload of DPS with Mangle. But also as the main Release-interruptor, I failed to realize that he still casts Release Aberrations during that green phase. That pooped on us at least once.

hope this helps.

[Illidra]

took us a logn time but we did it this way:

interupt the frist abberation cast he does (red/blue)
let the next 3 through ( red/blue)

keep interupting in green.

interupt his 1st abberation cast after green ( red/blue)
let the next 3 through (red/blue)

use curse of tongues/ necrotic strike to slow cast speed and make abberations easier to interupt.

we use hero in the second green phase so we can blitz straight through to release all minions then use traps to kite anythign left over and stomp the boss in the face

[ximera]

I had an additional question. During the final last 25% when maloriak throws the line of fire, as the MT i kept getting knocked up into the air and taking pretty substantial fall damage. Is there an animation I should be looking for so that I can just move to the side and avoid it, or is it unavoidable damage that just needs to be healed through. He does seem to raid his arm before doing it. I could not see well enough on the video. thanks

[Kinch]

He raises his left arm before casting it. There's a video on YouTube showing it, but I can't find it atm.

Edit: Here it is.

[Predakhan]

I had an additional question. During the final last 25% when maloriak throws the line of fire, as the MT i kept getting knocked up into the air and taking pretty substantial fall damage. Is there an animation I should be looking for so that I can just move to the side and avoid it, or is it unavoidable damage that just needs to be healed through. He does seem to raid his arm before doing it. I could not see well enough on the video. thanks

If you are getting knocked into the air then you are running into the white(ish) orbs that appear in the room during that phase. They can be really hard to see with all the fire etc.