Maybe the 2.5k DPS Death Knight was in charge of handling the power sparks?

Anyway, the Malygos fight is a movement intensive fight, with a lot of DPS downtime, especially for the melee. Phase 1 is all about stacking the sparks and intelligent Bloodlust usage. Phase 2 is all about staying alive, also what helps is that you leave the first discs for the melee, which should help their DPS.

I agree about Malygos not being very fun, but what killed it for me was the gimmick that is phase 3.
 

This reminds me of my early Malygos attempts.

This is probably the only real DPS race in the game right now (achievements notwithstanding). Getting to Phase 3 isn't trivial, but to do it properly you really need to manage the spark buff as well as make sure the DPS understands that a single mistake in phase 3 (letting your DoT drop) could potentially cost you 50% of your total damage (those fun quadratic scalings). Unlike most fights, which depend on the tank and heals for survivability, this depends on the DPS, and can often highlight the ones that aren't playing at their proper level.

In my experience, most DPS don't know that they are doing bad because success rarely depends on them to do well. Once they understand this, the dedicated ones will shape up and Malygos shouldn't be so painful.
 

So I'll just opt out of Malygos raids until after Ulduar

OR you could actually do something constructive and talk to your guild officers and try to understand what their viewpoint is about the low-DPS on Malygos.
Maybe people were not standing in sparks as they should have been?
Or maybe the sparks were being killed far from Malygos and the DPS was melee-heavy?
Also as Khai wrote, maybe the 2.5k DPS DK was in charge of sparks?

Regarding phase 3, usually ~3min are enough for us in normal mode. So if your guild needs more, maybe people don't understand the optimal rotation for DPSing in that phase or are spreading out too much and dying from lack of healing so that you are losing DPS too quickly during phase 3?

You should also be looking at MWO parses of the combat log, Recount is nice but limited, you can't really draw detailed conclusions from it.

Anyway my point is, if frustrated at the DPS and want your guild to do better, you need to get more involved, talk to your officers and share your feelings, see what they are doing. Maybe they are aware of the low-DPS people and are in the process of helping them improve but this process is still on-going? Just saying you are giving up and not going raiding with the guild is hardly constructive. Just think if everyone in your guild did the same every time they felt frustrated with another player's preformance... you wouldn't get any raids done...

If the officers ignore you or don't see a DPS problem, and if there really is a consistent DPS problem (after all it could have been that you were having a bad day, that happens sometimes due to e.g. raid composition) well in that case maybe it's time to look for a new guild...
 

FWIW, it's possible to do P3 faster much faster than 4 minutes, and it's the easiest phase to improve at. Just have your raid /follow one competent player. That player will need to watch themselves carefully, but the rest of the raid will be in a solid ball, so the healers' AOEs will hit everyone. They should only need to shield if Maly focuses them twice in a row, giving them plenty of breathing room to stack up the DoTs quickly.

It does sound like your DPS needs to improve though; I'd vaguely guess that if nothing else, DPS could be better coordinated in phase 2 (the big timewaster of the encounter).
 

assign 5 healer drakes at the beginning of raid. (its how we do it, no theorycrafting involved)
decide which way to run away from chained dmg (AoE if you call it) on phase 3. left or right.

Phase 3:

- bunch up at maximum range (you don't need to see or face the boss any more once you target it)
- leave 50 energy for a combo point and a shield when boss focuses on you
- have an experienced raider warning when to move. on AoE move away from that but always as a group. follow the guy that is warning if you want but bunch up people!
- Healer drakes do 3-3-3-3-3-4 but they need to be conscious of alternating between themselves. Also sometimes it's good to pop the combo points on a 3 or 4 stack if you see mates in trouble. Go with your gut on this one.
- DPS drakes do 1-1-1-1-1-2.


Many sites claim that 1-1-2 is better. and it is... for above average raiders. because it allows for a faster stacking of the DoT's on the boss.
But it's much more important to KEEP THEM stacked than to try and go for a fast kill.
Also, it's not impossible to kill malygos on enrage if you still have enough people alive at the end.

Good luck.
 

You are quite right, not enough time left to down him means not enough DPS in phases 1 and 2.
While sucky dps isn't good anywhere, I get the impression that your raid group doesn't suffer from that per se.
That leaves the encounter specific challenge of spark management in phase 1.

My default role on Malygos is tank, and I am therefore quite aware of how to handle sparks.
With proper handling, stacking two sparks on top of each other to multiply the damage output is the rule rather than the exception. That is without using death grip or roots & co. Properly used death grip reduce the spark travel time and increase the damage buff time, but using any type of slow on the sparks just means you miss out and get timing problems.

Spark handling and stacking is critical to avoid wasting time in phase 1. As soon as you have two stacks, throw in a heroism. Since there is no such mechanic in phase 2, that is likely to be the problem of your raid.

For phase 3, you want to be sure that people know what they are doing. We have a few people do 3 on their drake and 4 to AoE heal, everyone else do 1,1,2 to stack debuffs. As soon as he pops a lightning thingie, we all move clockwise. You can see how much phase 3 damage everyone did when you set Recount to not merge pet and owner damage.
 

Why don't YOU post recount data after every wipe? For me it worked. The lowest DPS got offended and left. The replacement was better.
 

Surely this is a complaint your should first take to your guild officers or perhaps the guild forum Tobold? Are you making this complaint in public because of a lack of response from them?
 

3 minutes is viable for finishing P3 even for less gifted raids. The brute force tactic for P3 is the best, i think. 6 healers for heroic spamming AE heals with the rest of the raid doing 1-1-2. If your healers perform well and if you stick people together, you don't need the shield when focused from the beam. Stick to 1-1-2 instead. After 2 minutes 1-1-2 you should see Malygos almost losing 1% every second.

P1 and P2 are pure DPS tests bundled with some coordination for the sparks. If you need more than 3 vortex phases to reach P2, you're screwed. With sparks buff active, your DPS should really pressure the tank aggrowise. If they don't, they underperform very much.

But i can understand your frustration. Everytime i see our healers going down in a void zone at Sartharion, i want to punch something. But that's co-op for you.

The whole encounter is a double-edge sword and i guess the Leviathan in Ulduar will be too. When you "get" the encounter, it's a very enjoyable fight with 3 very distinctive phases. But learning it, is pure torture cause the boss pulls you out of your comfort zone. Furthermore flying should be avoided for future boss encounters. The WoW engine is terrible at illustrating depth within a void environment.
 

Seems your guild does not have the social competence to deal with problems and find a solution for them. This also stinks of "Casualcraft" in the most negative sense.

Right now it seems more the standard procedure of not identifying the problem, but of more finding out who is to blame: DPS or Heal.
Next step: which person? And then please, step on nobodies toes, but blame him behind the back!

This is not the right way. You should talk about it and not give up right away, because some people just do not like vehicle/mount combat. That most people do not like this kind of raid is well known from data/statistics, even Kaplan mentioned it on GDC. The reason why they do not like it, is also a bit that they have to do something new right.

This reminds me of TBC guild drama stories because "Karazhan is too hard" in early TBC. People want fun and entertaining raid content, ideally also "challenging", but in the end the thing they want the most is NOT to wipe more than a few (1-2) times at a boss, collect all loot and clean the instance right away all the time. In the end, they want the new Naxx... free loot for everyone.

Sorry to be cynic, but people getting "forced" to do something else than their usual healing duty, tanking a boss at Maulgar, clicking some cubes at Magtheridon... is more about people having an aversion to be REALLY important and responsible to the success of the raid.

Leave the fighting to the others, but be always there, collect DKP and loot. Or just avoid having to learn something new and "opt out". You mentioned two possible solutions for Malygos, gearing up even more or practicing the fight. In the case of Malygos, it is unfortunately much more practice than gear.
 

Do not forget to fire a fresh CoE as Maly leaves off flying in betwenn phases 1 and 2. It should last well into phase 3, increasing the dragon's damage quite a bit.
 

Well, I mentioned after every phase 3 wipe my observation of how many players managed to keep the debuff up on Malygos (only 5 in the heroic raid), which elicited zero response from the raid leader. And after the low-dps death knight accused me in guild chat of preferring "easy" Naxx, I decided to rather shut my mouth than get into a huge fight why I wouldn't prefer wiping in a "hard" Malygos due to no fault of my own. Such discussions usually end up with several people leaving the guild.

I don't think there is much anyone could do anyway. We actually started our first attempt with only 22 people, because there weren't any more online and interested. As Gevlon so correctly remarked, kicking the least performing people out depends on your ability to replace them with somebody better, which isn't given in that case.

So I don't see why "opting out" is not the best solution. For me there is zero value to "having beaten Malygos on heroic", it is not something I'm willing to take a huge amount of effort and aggravation for. You don't need Malygos to proceed from Naxxramas to Ulduar and beyond. "Casualcraft", as Longasc calls it, is only negative if you combine the limitations of a casual guild with the expectations of a hardcore one. If you can live with postponing harder optional raids (Malygos, Sarth+3D) to later, and not get the harder achievements in Naxx (Undying/Immortal), then there is nothing wrong with "Casualcraft".

People want fun and entertaining raid content, ideally also "challenging", but in the end the thing they want the most is NOT to wipe more than a few (1-2) times at a boss, collect all loot and clean the instance right away all the time. In the end, they want the new Naxx... free loot for everyone.

Exactly! A) there is nothing wrong with that. And B) this isn't limited to casual players. Most things hardcore players do have as goal to minimize the number of wipes and collect the maximum amount of loot. Have you ever heard of a player leaving a more advanced guild to join a less advanced one, where he would be more challenged? No, everybody always moves to a more advanced guild, where he is less challenged, wipes less, and gets more loot.
 

I actually did not find it enjoyable that I wiped countless times at Kael'thas, Tobold. But I really loved that we finally made it, which was not guaranteed. There is a connection between frustration and the joy to have finally done it. Subsequent victories are never as sweet as the first one, just as Karazhan got boring as it finally got to "farm status for random groups".

WOTLK offers rather easy instances and raids so far, they lack appeal for me. Their idea of achievements that involve people playing with one hand tied behind the back, one eye closed and intentionally making their life harder to cater to people who want that thrill does not really work. They cater to to-do-list-achievers and loot whores exclusively. :(
 

Sorry about the last sentence... it sounds very harsh, which I actually did not intend, honestly.
 

No, everybody always moves to a more advanced guild, where he is less challenged, wipes less, and gets more loot.

I'm sorry Tobold but you don't know the first thing about hard-core. While it's true that WotLK raids are currently easy enough (with the exception of Os+2/3) so that hard-core raiding guilds wipe less, this was hardly the case in vanilla-WoW or TBC.

Hard-core raiding guilds spent much more of their time trying - and wiping at - advanced, challenging content, as compared to more casual guilds. Where a casual guild would wipe 5 times before giving up and calling it a "wipefest", a hard-core raiding guild can in the same amount of time do between 10-15 attempts and can do over 20 or 30 attempts per night. There were extremely few guilds which found BT "easy" and none (except maybe one...) which found SWP "not challanging".

"Casualcraft", as Longasc calls it, is only negative if you combine the limitations of a casual guild with the expectations of a hardcore one.

There is a difference in my eyes between a casual guild and one which is simply bad. A guild can be casual with regards to raiding:
- raiding only 2-3 nights per week
- raiding only a few hours per night
- limiting raiding hours so that working players with kids can still come and raid

Yet such a guild can still try be as professional as possible in the approach to raiding. Officers of a good casual guild should attempt to bring only players who actually care and should prefer to do a 10man raid in there aren't 25 people online, while at the same time trying to promote, nurture and recruit players who care.
So for example, there is nothing wrong, and everything right, about expecting people to show up prepared, in all senses of the word, for raids. Showing up not prepared is not the sign of a casual player - it's the sign of bad player who doesn't care enough about his time and the time of everyone else; one who is letting others "carry him" through fights.

If you, Tobold, are a person that cares, that shows up flasked and with buff food, that took time to properly gem and enchant your gear - if you do all that and most players and officers in your guild don't share that commitment - if this is the case it's possible you need to look for a new guild. If however you don't care and don't expect the above from players, why rant about your guild's sub-par playing style?

I don't mean by the above sentence BTW that you shouldn't make posts about fights you tried and problems you had - for almost every trash response you'll get I'm sure you'll also get one or ever two good responses with tips and advice. But complaining about people not trying hard enough then saying you don't care yourself and don't want to try hard enough just seems not very constructive IMHO...
 

There's a little Gevlon in all of us, even in Tobold.

SCNR :-)

But, fully agree. If they cannot do DPS by now, they probably never will. No point in talking to the officers, I think.
 

After thinking more about it, WOTLK is raid content for people who actually do not want to raid. But to continue their single-player experience of Jeff Kaplan's guided bus tour through Azeroth with the heads of Kel'Thuzad and the Lich King as guaranteed loot.

I think we need endgame alternatives, for not all people really enjoy or want to try for weeks to kill a boss. But not "raiding for everyone". Some people actually just do it because there is nothing else left to do!
My idea would be a MMO featuring a world, not so much a game, something very different from WoW. But even Wow needs a better solution than lowering everything to the very lowest common denominator.

For raiders the fun is actually more the thinking about the encounter, adjusting to defeat the boss, finding flaws and weaknesses and reacting accordignly. The reward is then finally having killed the boss. This is different to the wish to "see all bosses" to progress through the content as fast as possible, to collect loot for loot's sake, not so much to prepare for the next tier.
 

Their idea of achievements that involve people playing with one hand tied behind the back, one eye closed and intentionally making their life harder to cater to people who want that thrill does not really work. They cater to to-do-list-achievers and loot whores exclusively. :(
...
For raiders the fun is actually more the thinking about the encounter, adjusting to defeat the boss, finding flaws and weaknesses and reacting accordignly. The reward is then finally having killed the boss.

I love how you just contradicted yourself so nicely :)
I couldn't have said it better myself - for raiders, the encounter is fun, not the loot, although that is a nice bonus + helps you advance through the content. Beating a harder encounter is just more fun and that is the purpose of encounters like OS+2. It's not about ticking off a "to-do" list.
 

I fear I do not understand you, SolidState.

I never enjoyed limiting myself with handicaps in any game, be it board games, team games or computer games, online games. I do not see a contradiction there.

I mean, you seem to follow Tobold's logic that joining a bad guild with severely undergeared and underskilled people would be the ultimate thrill, but this is not true. It is not about making things artificially harder. I would rather prefer to wipe against a dragon while doing my best, to try it again over trying to kill the very same dragon with bare fists, which is for sure much more challenging.
 

I mean, you seem to follow Tobold's logic that joining a bad guild with severely undergeared and underskilled people would be the ultimate thrill, but this is not true. It is not about making things artificially harder. I would rather prefer to wipe against a dragon while doing my best, to try it again over trying to kill the very same dragon with bare fists, which is for sure much more challenging.

Longasc, instead of making snappy statements like that, could you please explain your point of view in a bit more detail? I think that "making things artificially harder" by "trying to kill the dragon with bare fists" has nothing to do with "joining a bad guild". I can totally understand if YOU want to give YOUR best, to the maximum of your class and your abilities. So do I. But ideally I would want to do that with people of similar skill and abilities than I have, and as much as possible always from the same guild. If I would quit my guild and join a better guild, one in which the dps players can easily deal enough damage to Malygos to actually kill him on heroic, how does that increase the challenge to me? I think that most of that talk of wanting challenge is a convenient lie for people who want to quit their casual guild to join a better guild, because all that does is *reduce* your challenge, and increase your chance that you get more loot based on the better performance of *others*, not yourself.
 

90% of phase 1 is about having two intelligent spark pullers, allowing for several double stacks in that phase. High DPS ist just a result of that, and of course the ability of the players to always run back to the designated spark point after vortex. The other 10% is the tank's ability to turn the Boss by 45 degrees if a spark appears right behind him (the tank) to allow the pullers to get the spark before it reaches the Boss and pull it on the spot.

P2 is a healer stress test, but as you do not require any mana for p3, you can go all-in.

It took us all in all 6 hours of practice to make it through phase 1 without screwing up somewhere. Next problem is in P3 activating the shield at the right time, sticking together and of course keeping up the stacks nevertheless. As far as I know there is no option to see only your own stack on the boss, but you can see on recount who does it "best", "not so good" and "worst" (DPS meter). If the DPS is relatively close together, you will kill him easily after a few tries. I'd say an average raid should be able to kill him after 6 to 10 hours of practice (spread over several raid days, of course).

Opting out before a kill is not my style. However, after we killed Malygos that one day in the first attempt, where we actually expected to farm just another ton of rep costs instead, I just do not see any reason to go there again, be it the Best In Slot helmet or not. :)
 

Joining a less advanced guild does not increase the challenge, it just means you typically have to put up with more people who aren't that great. Sure if you were being carried by your last guild then the challenge may go up as you have to pull your own weight, but most people who want a challenge are usually fairly good at what they do.

A progression night should always be challenging, no matter if you're in a top of the line guild or not. 2 wipes then a kill is not a challenge.
 

"Challenge" needs to be:
* hard
* still doable
* outcome depending on your effort

If the task is easy, it's boring.
If the task is impossible, trying it makes you stupid (and feel so)
If the task depend on other people, you will feel frustrated when they fail and nothing when they succeed.

In a better guild you would have the opportunity to face problems that depend on you. If the guild wipes because of few heal, YOU can solve the problem if you are better. In your current guild you can choose between easy tasks and sucking because of M&S
 

I never enjoyed limiting myself with handicaps... I mean, you seem to follow Tobold's logic that joining a bad guild with severely undergeared and underskilled people would be the ultimate thrill,

Now you're just being argumentative. You know very well this is not what I'm saying :)

There is a world of difference between wiping at an encounter after you did your best, and knowing you wiped because half the people cba to come prepared.

The challenge should be in the actual encounter - mechanics, tactics, strategy - yes even gear. Beating that is fun (well less if it's just a gear check). It is fun because it you go into it knowing it is hard to do yet through team effort you made it happen. Plus a big part of the joy is sharing the moment of victory with your friends who were there and put in 100% same as you.

But there is no fun in playing with people who don't share the same level of commitment and same idea of what raiding should be. Wiping with such people is just a pain and frustrating since there is nothing you can do to improve your group's chances of beating the encounter - the problem isn't with you, assuming you gave 100%, it's with the people giving 50%. Even if you should somehow manage to beat the encounter, there is no joy in it - rather than a team, working together to bring down a tough encounter, you were simply a collection of individuals and are now only interested in the loot that drops. This is why I don't raid in PuGs, takes all the fun out of raiding... I see a bad raiding guild as similar to a PuG in this respect.
 

Damn you Gevlon for saying what I was trying to say but so much better than me! :)

Hmmm I guess that makes me an "underskilled blogger"... :D
 

A guild is never totally homogeneous, with everybody having exactly the same level of skill and gear. So there are always some people contributing at least a bit more, and others at least a bit less. As long as the difference isn't huge, that is quite okay.

But in my observation the people who leave to join a more advanced guild are nearly exclusively those who previously were on the high end of contributing. You might say they were tired of "carrying" the others, but effectively they exchange a position in which they carry others for a position in which they are carried by their new guild. I can't find that laudable. For me that is not only disloyal, but also the worst kind of hypocrisy.
 

"Challenge" needs to be:
* hard
* still doable
* outcome depending on your effort

If the task is easy, it's boring.
If the task is impossible, trying it makes you stupid (and feel so)
If the task depend on other people, you will feel frustrated when they fail and nothing when they succeed.

Exactly! (See, sometimes I can agree with Gevlon!) But I would add that the definition of "doable" is variable depending on the guild and the players. Some people will think 6 wipes is still "doable", others will think 6 wipes is already too much. There is no hard number you can set and say "the perfect raid encounter has you wipe X times before succeeding". As long as the guild / raid group agrees on the value of X, any value is good.
 

If I would quit my guild and join a better guild, one in which the dps players can easily deal enough damage to Malygos to actually kill him on heroic, how does that increase the challenge to me?

It doesn't increase the challenge to you for Malygos of course.
But it doesn't sound like you're challenged by it now.
If you can keep people alive in P1 and P2, there's not much more you can do.

But leaving your current guild and joining a guild with more competent dps could
increase your challenge by allowing you to reach other encounters.

Imagine if Malygos was the first boss in Ulduar. You have to kill him to get to
the other bosses. With your current dps, you'll be wiping on Malygos (no challenge to you)
and not getting to try the other bosses (no challenge to you). With a guild with
better dps, you'll get to reach an encounter were you could make the difference.

Not that I like guild hopping. So personally, I'd try to get officers to do something
about underperforming dps.

So I only agree with you 33% when you said:

No, everybody always moves to a more advanced guild, where he is less challenged, wipes less, and gets more loot.

Less challenged? Disagree. If I'm in a Karazhan guild and can do the instance with my eyes closed,
I'm going to get more challenges by joining a guild working on Sunwell (no relevant Wotlk examples exist yet)
Wipes less? Disagree. Advanced guilds tend to be persistent and have high tolerance for wipes.
Gets more loot? Agree. Advanced guilds get stuck further into the instances, thus kill more bosses.
 

If the task depend on other people, you will feel frustrated when they fail and nothing when they succeed.

In that case raiding seems to be the wrong hobby for you .. .. ..
 

Not necessarily Tobold.
You are going from 8 to 80.
While you are right about guild hoppers I bet that even you will consider leaving your guild if in a couple of months you are stuck, weeks in a row, on a boss due to lack of DPS and an unwillingness to seriously discuss the issue. This is what Longasc was talking about, I think. And the same can be applied outside gaming. I usually play football (that's real football, what american readers in this blog might call "soccer" :)) on the weekends with some friends. If someone is always late, doesn't even make an effort (and I do mean Effort, for I am a terrible player but give all my best to help the team while having fun), he won't be getting more invites. And we are all friends and friendship has nothing to do with putting up with other people's lack of commitment. And that person can still come to the lunch after the game!
 

It's already been stated, but I'll reiterate:

Phase 3 can EASILY be done in less than 4 minutes with practice. My guild routinely bangs it out in 3m. People just need to learn how to stack the debuffs, and that is a simple case of pressing two keys in a predictable pattern. 112112112112112 *snore*.

As for the "my guild sucks at this so I'll avoid it" mentality - shame on you, Tobold. What a disservice to your guild.
 

I bet that even you will consider leaving your guild if in a couple of months you are stuck, weeks in a row, on a boss due to lack of DPS and an unwillingness to seriously discuss the issue.

Not for Malygos. As I said, I consider Malygos an unimportant side-show. And I'd argue that the "main" raid content of Wrath of the Lich King, Naxxramas -> Ulduar, is specifically designed in a way that the average guild doesn't get stuck any more. Which, in my eyes, is the better design. TBC was horrible, because most people got stuck, causing huge guild drama everywhere, and lots of guild hopping.

As for the "my guild sucks at this so I'll avoid it" mentality - shame on you, Tobold. What a disservice to your guild.

Lesser of two evils. "My guild sucks at this, so I'll cause a huge guild drama and cause another bunch of guildies to leave us" would be the much bigger disservice. I *do* agree that in a perfect guild such matters could be discussed without tempers flaring, but I have yet to see *any* guild where a discussion of raid performance doesn't cause some degree of drama.
 

Malygos is Side-show, especially with P3. However the players who failed on Maly will fail in Ulduar and everywhere else too. P1 and P2 is standard WoW-fights, tank&spank and addhunt. If they fail there, they will fail on every serius content.

They fail in Naxx too, you just don't care since you can carry them.
 

"Have you ever heard of a player leaving a more advanced guild to join a less advanced one, where he would be more challenged? No, everybody always moves to a more advanced guild"

In every level bracket of 60, 70 and 80 I've got to the point where I've gained all the gear I require, and then dropped back to guilds just starting off to help them. Admittedly at level 60 I only had a mixture of T2 and T3 but I remember being bored of the content because of the grind and instead decided I would help/assist those still learning and ended up taking 3 different guilds through MC, BWL, etc.

At level 70 I again got T6 pretty quickly and once Illidan was on the farm got bored of the grind. Repeated said procedure of going back and well, another two guilds I were in got up to BT.

I'm doing the same currently at level 80 - now I'm now saying I'm so amazing I can single-handed turn a guild from 'rubbish' into content smashing, but I think because I can give them tactics that work with their set ups that they are able to advance quicker than expected. I never push their previous well-known and working tactics aside, and I've seen some odd ones! But instead I try and advise/lead them to easier tactical decisions etc. on future bosses. Call me a friendly adviser with two Betrayers of Humanity ;)

For me it's the chance of furthering people's guilds so they can see the content,e xperience the fights and get the kit because single TBC the content challenge has been frankly wank in my eyes and thus I would rather help others than sit around for months grinding the same content hoping for the 'miracle' dungeon.

Shamutanti
letsnothaveabreakdown.tumblr.com
 

In my opinion both Tobold and the DK are the problem.
DK thinks Naxx is a waste of time and beneath him, Farming Naxx helps his guildies gear up for Ulduar.

Tobold thinks Malygos is a waste of time because his DPS can't do their job and he can't do anything as a healer. Although a good healer if not being pushed will DPS also

Both of you are bad teamplayers.
 

They fail in Naxx too, you just don't care since you can carry them.

Gevlon, do you really want me to link you a post by a certain goblin about performance that is "good enough"? The performance which is "good enough" for Naxxramas is lower than the performance which is "good enough" for Malygos. These people don't fail in Naxxramas, they perform "good enough" there.
 

As someone who just did the 6 minute Malygos achievement, I have to say that you are all bad. Since I can clear this content, anyone who cannot is a bad player and anyone who beat me to the punch has no life. Such is the way of WoW.


Stack the sparks. Stack the sparks. Stack the sparks. Stack the sparks. Stack the sparks. You can also heal through a lot of the damage in phase 2, once your healers are geared. Simply stand in the sparks until they despawn, right around the time of the first deep breath.


We do it with 4 healers in phase 3 and no one uses their shields, so as to not allow stacks to fall off.


You can also have a sacrificial warlock dismount and toss up a curse of elements at the start of phase 3. If no one wants to volunteer, make sure that all your debuff classes spam their debuffs as they fall after their mount dies. ~Centuri
 

I can do 3drakes, doesn't mean the rest of my raid can.
 

"But ideally I would want to do that with people of similar skill and abilities than I have, and as much as possible always from the same guild. If I would quit my guild and join a better guild, one in which the dps players can easily deal enough damage to Malygos to actually kill him on heroic, how does that increase the challenge to me?"

I hope this does not sound snappy:
The challenge, if you want one, is to kill Malygos with YOUR guild, with all advantages but also shortcomings and people that it has to offer. But not quitting the guild for another one and also not helping your guild to kill Malygos. After very view tries. You did not wipe a lot there, only 3-5 times so far, right? I mean, does your guild expect and wish to kill every boss after few tries, does it feel eligible to tackle everything and demand that they can really do everything as easily as Naxxramas? Is opting out because the DPS sucks not causing guild drama? I blame this mentality to raids getting easier with every expansion, we already reached a bottom level IMO.

It is extremely uncommon that everyone has the same opinion if it is better to gear up people in the easier raid instance or try the next harder one. Guilds usually have to find a compromise or have decide for one option.

Teamplay also does not really allow "opting out". Nobody forces you to raid with your guild everytime, but if you want to raid with them, you have to raid with them. I and I alone was responsible for a series of wipes because I managed to screw up tanking Capernian in Tempest Keep to the point of desperation. But I could not opt out, only I had the proper resist gear for the fight. Another player not from our guild helped me out on my own wish, but we still failed to down Kael'thas. As we finally got it right, I had to tank Capernian as he was not there, but this time I did my job, and the others as well.

Imagine other players had "opted out" because I obviously was responsible for a series of awful failures. Or had opted out because some people needed an awful lot of time to learn how to deal with Kael'Thas weapons. Some people even left the guild, because I and some other players sucked, thought we would never progress, this happens.

It is your decision to decide if your guild cannot make it past a certain encounter and if you stay or leave them because of that. But "opting out" for your reasons would have started a kick-Tobold-discussion in my guild for sure.

Raiding problems usually causes guild drama, definitely... I had my share of drama and caused drama myself (the worst was playing with some random friends in a guild raid ID... it was my fault, I am still ashamed, and I was in another guild after that)

This is not the solution to make raids attractive to everyone, but unfortunately Blizzard did so in WOTLK:
Let's make all raids very easy so that everything is easy for everyone, so that we can all be happy!


I wonder if Ulduar will be so forgiving, too. I still think raiding is not for everyone, many people do not have the patience. They should be given something else, I personally feel quite limited by the options "raid or die - or do arena pvp" that WoW gives us. There must be ways to keep players entertained without forcing everyone into raiding, even those who clearly do not like it.
 

You did not wipe a lot there, only 3-5 times so far, right?

WRONG!!! I have at least 20 wipes in Malygos normal behind me, and around 8 in heroic. I don't give up THAT easily, but at some point continueing to ram your head against a brick wall is just folly.

Teamplay also does not really allow "opting out".

In what kind of an ideal world do you live? People "opt out" all the time, only most of them do it secretly and simply don't sign up for the raid they don't want. And how is the DK deciding that Naxx is beneath him any different from me deciding that Malygos isn't for me? If people can "opt out" of the lets-gear-up-in-Naxx raids, then you must allow others to opt out of lets-pointlessly-wipe-at-Malygos raids.
 

Am I the only one resetting his Recount..
You dont have to do a hard reset of recount each time. Just toggle it to show the 'current fight' then you can always go back review overall performance or even the past few attempts.
 

Seems as if your guild has come to a dead end, indeed. Motivation goes down with every wipe, and you can sure that some people will leave the guild.

Is your guild really a band of brothers and friends that just cannot kick or replace some bad players who prevent the progress of the whole guild, because they are buddies? "Opting out" openly or silentely actually makes you a candidate for replacement, you need players that WANT to do something. Your ">I< cannot get past Malygos because some guildies suck" attitude is awful, in a 25 person raid 96% of all fatal mistakes involve someone else than you... seems you cannot live with that.

Get over it, it is not easy and usually the reason for guild drama, but your officers have to react or have to continue trying. Or accept that everything above Naxxramas is too much for the guild, which is really just poor. "Opting out" is only the prelude to more drama, unfortunately.
 

I'm sorry to see you not having fun on Malygos. I do agree with a lot of the things you say.
Not questioning the performance of DPS classes is certainly bad practice, as bad as to calling them 'slackers' wholesale and thus devalue their contribution to the raid, lowering their morale (had this happen to me).

I don't think that wishing for a harder challenge is bad in itself though. And low DPS is not always a matter of bad gear. Gems, enchants, consumables, raid buffs from classes, specs and rotations matter.
And then, doing it over and over does help. Power sparks in phase 1, for instance, are key to the encounter. If you don't take advantage of them properly, you will wipe even if you are slightly overgeared for the instance.

Raid victory is achieved by killing bosses. And to kill bosses, damage is needed. Some encounters will put the pressure on the tank(s), some on the healers, some on the damage dealers. That is not only good; that is as it should be :)
I'm glad that you like the feeling of being in charge - in control, if you will, as a healer. But let us slackers have some of that too every now and then. ;)
 

Is your guild really a band of brothers and friends that just cannot kick or replace some bad players who prevent the progress of the whole guild, because they are buddies?

As I said, it's a question of numbers. For the Malygos raid only 22 players showed up that actually wanted to go there. Of those 22, only 19 ended up in the raid, the other 3 were excess healers (yes, I know, it's strange, we have far too many healers) who were replaced by their much less well-geared alts. Then we just grabbed everyone level 80 to fill up the numbers. After wiping at Malygos, we went to Naxx spider wing, where several people replaced *blue* gear with epics. So I *do* accept that Malygos is too much for the guild, and would hope that our raid leaders either come to the same conclusion, or do something to increase the number of well-geared raiders.
 

Tobold, 90% of raid fights involve DPS standing around and waiting for either the tanks or the healers to "get it" so that the raid can win. Very few fights are an equal opportunity for different roles to blow it (see Archimonde). I can virtually guarantee that if you've been involved in fights with your raid that weren't on farm status that there have been DPSers sitting around wondering when the healers would figure things out so that the raid could beat the fight and move on to the next fight. It's the nature of the beast.

You can get angry about healers being publically called out when DPS seems to get a pass, but how would you feel if DPS "opted out" because Tobold couldn't figure out a good tank heal rotation and the guild wiped for a night? "Sorry guys, not coming to Sartharion tonight. Really frustrating to watch Tobold let the tank die over and over."

It's funny how up in arms you get about the lack of social interaction in WoW, and here you have a prime example of people needing each other and your first reaction is to opt out.
 

Tobold - To an extent I certainly understand where you are coming from, but I think that it should be a decision of the whole of your guild, and not you independantly. When we were beating our head against pre-nerf Bruttallus we frequently asked our guild if they were having fun, if they wanted to keep at this task, etc.

And when we asked the guild as a whole, the majority told us "no, Sunwell is NOT fun, we are NOT having a good time". At this juncture the leadership had a decision to make...do we keep forcing our guild to throw themselves at this content they are NOT enjoying? Do we risk burning out the people that we love raiding with so that we can have one more star next to our name in the guild progression charts? And the answer we came up with was "no". But it was a decision our leadership came to based on the feelings of the guild as a whole, and not just one person.

So perhaps what the leadership of your guild should do (maybe with a little prodding from yourself) is find out what it is the majority of people want. If they ask if people want to kill Malygos, and the overwhelming answer is "yes!", then the leadership has a responsibility to step back and look at what parts of the encounter are frustrating people, and how to solve these problems; conversely the members of the guild have a responsibility to help the leadership to do this. If the answer is "no!", then the leadership should make a decision based on what is best for the fortitude of the guild...which may be waiting until the guild has some higher iLevel Ulduar gear before tackling the challenge.

Either alternative is respectable if it is what makes your guild happy, regardless of what those touting that Malygos is EZ MODE feel. That being said, I really do feel that it's a decision that should be made by the guild, and not the individual.
 

I'm one of the people who believes that gear is important part of performance. however, in my experience, no amount of gear will fix the lack of skill or practice. first time my guild got maly 25 was after he enraged, wiped the raid and then proceeded to die from stacks that were still on him. I'm not sure how many weeks we beat our heads on him, but it was more then one with 5 or more tries each week we tried it. I do believe that we had about 2 minutes left on the timer when we started the third phase. practicing on Aces High helped. changing the strategy from 112 to 1112 helped. increasing the amount of healers in phase 3 so that people lagging behind lived helped. realizing that when healing - you don't need to switch targets - you just AoE heal everything - helped. /follow didn't work for me (I literally wouldn't move) so I decided to learn how to move and fire and orient myself in 3d at the same time. at the time we first beat him, we only cleared Naxx couple of times and due to the nature of the way our raid rooster works - we were not exactly fully geared ilvl 213 gear. We do better at him now, because what that fight is truly good for is for testing just how coordinated your guild is. how well can they work as a team, with each other rather then individually.

my guild is far from hardcore. we never raid more then 3 hours at a time and the officially schedule is 3 days a week (and even then, attendance is only seriously questioned when you sign up and then don't show up, or if you are missing for more then 2 weeks without prior warning, but then - its people getting worried if you are all right), people take breaks, raiding roster is in constant flux, people are encouraged to play the class/role they enjoy.

As one of my guildies succinctly put it last night in vent: "we're not a hardcore raiding guild, we're a bunch of noobs who are having fun and get'er done"

so I guess my point is - I wouldn't give up on Maly just yes. although if the attitude of the players in your guild is "everyone out for themselves" without exceptional skill to back it up, and people would rather play the blame game instead of trying to find a better solution.. then Maly might just be an indication of more stumbling, insurmountable blocks to come.
 

Yeah, something has to happen. I wish you better luck, more fun and less drama in Ulduar.

I hope I did not offend you too much. I still think opting out is not a good move, but well, we talked about it already.

I wanted to say that WoW opened up raiding for players who are NOT raiders, do not like it, but nevertheless participate because the early content is quite easy and accessible, basically others pulling their weight for them. You might have some of them in your DPS department at Malygos.

I smell it coming for the ominous "NextGen MMO" or a WoW expansion, an endgame activity that involves guilds/groups and that is NOT about raid progress!

Raiding problems inevitably cause drama all the time, and I definitely doubt that raiding is the perfect endgame content for everyone.
This does not entitle successful raiders to belittle those who cannot progress past a certain point, but as long as raiding is almost synonymous with WoW endgame content, this will happen.

I am absolutely not happy about their raiding as endgame philosophy, too high difficulty is not the only reason why we have numbers like only 10% of all players raiding the old Naxxramas years ago. It is just not the right thing for them, they need something else.
 

That being said, I really do feel that it's a decision that should be made by the guild, and not the individual.

Well, give me some credit here at least for saying out loud what I think. How many people simply fail to sign up or show up for raids they don't like? And that is in both directions, the people who prefer harder raids don't show up when it's time to gear up other players in Naxxramas, and those who think that gearing up should have priority don't show up for the harder raids. Congratulations on having a guild where raid targets are decided by vote, but that isn't the case in very many guilds. Most of the time either the officers or the raid leader decide where the raid goes, without asking the rest of the guild. So everybody else just votes with their feet.
 

Word to the wise:

Figure out what you want out of a guild and then go out and join it.

I spent two years trying to shape two bad guilds into raiding form because I wanted friends to hang out with and I wanted to raid properly. In the end I mostly just stressed myself out and caused drama. I didn't go to a hardcore guild because I didn't want to leave people behind. I ended up feeling a lot like you; angry at all the incompetents holding the guild back, wanting to just throw my hands up and quit. Which is what ended up happening.

In the two months before BC came out, I spent every week constantly transmuting hearts of fire and making fire protection pots because my guild was finally attempting BWL.

The reason I had to make the pots was because nobody could be bothered to bring their own. So I would bring 400+ pots to each raid and charge people for them so I could make next weeks batch of 400 pots.

Then they bitched at me for daring to charge them, as if the choice wasn't between charging and not doing BWL at all, since most of my guild were a bunch of lazy jackasses.

I was in the wrong guild, and that was that. They would have been happier if I wasn't pushing them, I'd have been happier if I didn't have to push.

Sounds like you on the same road Tobold.
 

No, I'd say I'm in the right guild, and the people who want that guild to beat Malygos are in the wrong guild.
 

I find Malygos really fun, but only when I'm in a good group that knows what they're doing. The healing is fast and chaotic, way more fun than half of the "roll HoTs on the main tank, yawn" fights in Naxx. People are getting hit all over the place and it's all I can do to keep them alive. One time I was doing 10-man where it was me and a paladin healing, and I was amazed that nobody died during vortex. Their health was always way down to the wire, but I managed to keep them alive every time. I really feel like it's a fight where I have to pull out all of my tricks. I even use Tranquility during the deep breath on phase 2.

On the other hand, if I'm in a group that has no idea what they're doing, it's a nightmare. There was one run a couple weeks back where Maly kept one-shotting people during phase 1 because the sparks weren't being controlled properly. The tank died once because he pulled the boss too far away from where the rest of the raid was standing in the sparklies, and wasn't getting any heals for a short time. Phase 2 with the raid leader yelling at me to get under a bubble because he thought I was one of the moonkin's treants. Phase 3 with people flying all over the place, not knowing where we should fly because somebody forgot to put a raid symbol on someone's head. Just bad in general. I was so happy when the shield finally dropped for my fiance so that we never have to run that place on 10-man again.
 

My guild just got our first Malygos kill last night. Here's my advice:
1) We were not getting spark stacks in phase one. As soon as we consistently could stack two sparks, we saw our time on that phase decrease. On a good attempt it took us about three minutes.
2)The more damage you can do between 50% and when phase 2 starts, the better. Remember, if you still stand in the sparks, you still get the bonus.
3)Our DPS kept dying in phase 2 right off the bat because the Lords hit so hard. You have to let the tank get aggro. You also have to start ranged on the air guys right away. Not enough boards and more air mobs than ground mean air mobs take a long time. Quicker you start on them, the better. Also, our guild was runnign to a new bubble right away. DON'T DO THIS! The more running you do, the lower your DPS. Watch for breaths and move as needed -- Be smart! This helps healers too, because less time between bubbles means less heals needed.
4)Have everyone turn on self auto cast and mix a heal on themselves into their rotation in phase 3. We had people dying over and over and this fixed it, along with the /follow macro people mentioned above.

What I enjoyed about this fight is that there were a lot of components where you could make small changes to improve. An awesome phase 1 makes up for a poor phase 2 to some extent.

Best of luck if you decide to try Maly again. If not, good luck gearing up your guildies in Naxx until you're ready to go back.
 

Tobold,

You really surprise me with this post. Rarely, if ever, do we see you venting in such a fashion, but when you mention above that you had people in a Malygos raid wearing Blues...well, I really dont know what to say to you about this. I've said on numerous occasions that Malygos is the lithmus test for a raid party's gear, DPS and coordination abilities. At any rate, overcoming Malygos requires raid/class leaders to actually do their jobs and make improvements where they need to be made in a tactful and non-humiliating manner....as with all raid encounters. If the guild leadership doesnt want to risk upsetting people, getting people to improve, or what have you, then maybe Malygos isnt the best idea for your guild right now.
 

If you think Malygos is hard (easy but does require a little bit of luck on sparks)

Then you're guild will die in Ulduar.

I think you guys should just go and farm Naxx and before content. Killed KT yet? Killed Archimonde? Killed Neth or any of the old world instance bosses? Looks like you have approx 6 months to go until Ulduar is on farm. Folks on my server kill Malygos in pugs. Life on other servers, You're doing it rite!
 

Our guild beat Malygos-25 for the first time last week. We needed a full team of 25 Naxx-geared raiders to do it, and even then he enraged before he died. As others here have said, it takes a combination of gear and skill (and maybe a bit of luck).

I think the more worrisome thing is your guild culture about avoiding suggestions and avenues for improvement. Our guild only raids 2x/week, but we post WWS after every raid, and people compete on the DPS meters. Anyone doing sub-par DPS over a long term will be noticed and taught to improve.
 

Tobold, if you are in the right guild and the people who want to do this boss on hard or w/e are in the wrong, then you need to confront them about it and settle the issue.

If you and 95% of the guild are down with the casual style, then the 5% that want to go hardcore need to be told that. People will probably leave, but they will leave eventually anyway, but only after causing a lot more damage to the guild.
 

Delete my post huh? You know when you post something like this, there is going to be some negative feedback. You need to get some thick skin. If your guild is a raiding guild, and you dont want to raid, then you are in the wrong guild. If they are a casual guild being forced to raid against their will (very unlikely) then they are in the wrong guild. It all comes down to the majority versuse the minority.

While it is frustrating to deal with bads, it is also frustrating to deal with primadonnas who post blog posts about the guild drama rather than brining it to the officers. I am sure they would not appreciate you airing the guild's dirty laundry.
 

Delete my post huh?

I don't know what you are talking about. I did not delete any posts in this thread.
 

As an aside, at stratfu.com there's a really interesting article about reading WWS charts. Where someone ranks on the damage meter in a fight like Malygos might not be relevant for some of the reasons mentioned above: did the person have a specific job that effected their DPS (like spark control) or was there a movement issue (lots of running around or a melee person who stayed on the ground with nothing to stab because there were no discs). You can find it at http://www.stratfu.com/blog/2009/01/beyond-dps-part-1-understanding-the-class-detail-page/
 

It's already been pointed out a few times, but I want to make sure you know that I'm laughing at your mindset that "...until after Ulduar, where with the help of better gear the dps should be much better."

Good luck with Iron Council and seeing your bad guild fall apart.
 

20 + 8 wipes on normal and heroic Malygos? It took our casual guild 4 raid nights with about 15 wipes each to down heroic Sartharion 3D.
Welcome to the world of raiding. Sorry couldn't resist :P
 

Sorry, in my previous post I linked the wrong article at Stratfu. That article is helpful, but this is the one I wanted:
http://www.stratfu.com/strats/Sartharion3D#Our_DPS_sucks.21
 

Well, I'm laughing at your mindset that Ulduar will be hard in normal mode. For a guild that did beat KT on heroic like ours, Ulduar-10 will be easy enough. Especially since people will actually turn up for that.
 

I was going to write a response, but realized I had written it all back in 2007:

Why Are DPS Players So Bad?
Response to Comments on Bad DPS
A Perfect Example of Improving DPS
Theorycraft vs Trial and Error

All I can suggest is to point your DPS to a site like Raider101. This was pretty much the exact problem I set out to try and ameliorate.
 

"Well, give me some credit here at least for saying out loud what I think. How many people simply fail to sign up or show up for raids they don't like? And that is in both directions, the people who prefer harder raids don't show up when it's time to gear up other players in Naxxramas, and those who think that gearing up should have priority don't show up for the harder raids. Congratulations on having a guild where raid targets are decided by vote, but that isn't the case in very many guilds. Most of the time either the officers or the raid leader decide where the raid goes, without asking the rest of the guild. So everybody else just votes with their feet."

I do give you kudos for voicing your frustration, and certainly acknowledge that there are people who just don't show up to raid things that they don't want to be bothered with.

Have you ever spoken to your guild leadership to ask them if they would consider querying the guild for their feedback? I think this can be done in a way that will not spark guild drama if it's done smartly and the leadership takes the time to educate the guild on the reasoning behind making their decisions. Don't get me wrong, I certainly set our raid targets every week without input from the guild based on goals we have previously set; but if we see frustration with something, we often ask where the frustration is oriented and try to resolve it...which sometimes means taking a small step back from the progression push.

If you are as frustrated as you have indicated in your original post, I scarcely imagine that you are the only person in your guild feeling this way. I would think that your leadership would have a vested interest doing what is best for their guild, but I can tell you from experience that if no one raises the issues with them, they may not be entirely aware of how bad the issue is.

Whatever you DO decide to do, I wish you the best of luck =)
 

@Jye and the others who talked about using /follow in phase 3, Leah is correct - /follow does not work in phase 3. You cannot target the players and you cannot /follow the drakes.
 

"But in my observation the people who leave to join a more advanced guild are nearly exclusively those who previously were on the high end of contributing. You might say they were tired of "carrying" the others, but effectively they exchange a position in which they carry others for a position in which they are carried by their new guild. I can't find that laudable. For me that is not only disloyal, but also the worst kind of hypocrisy."--- its only hypocrisy if they plan on being carried forever.

I don't mind new people or undergeared people who didn't know what to do or didn't have the gear to do it. That's fine; its when they aren't trying to improve that it bothers me. If they want to tank but won't buy decent gems, or if they don't bother to learn how to do put out decent dps with their toons. It's the guys who wank off for an entire expansion and complain about how the guild isn't getting them the loot they need, when they never show up for progression nights...

Well anyway, whatever. So you want to bitch about it, but DOING something besides dropping out (when your guild is already short people anyway) is the only course you're willing to take. To me that's hypocritical and disloyal, but that's just me.
 

Well, I'm laughing at your mindset that Ulduar will be hard in normal mode. For a guild that did beat KT on heroic like ours, Ulduar-10 will be easy enough. Especially since people will actually turn up for that.

1. It'll feel hard enough if you can't even do Malygos now, after farming Naxx-25 for a while. If you put it off until you have a pile of Ulduar-10 gear, it's still going to suck if your guild never figures out how to do it. I remember back around 2.4 in BC, seeing people all in Isle badge gear (equivalent in itemlevel to BT/Hyjal, if you'll recall) consistently fail to survive on Magtheridon and Gruul, because they just never felt it necessary to understand how the fight works. Skill > Gear.

2. Understand, this isn't the same thing as sour grapes over not being able to do every achievement. This is sour grapes over not being able to finish one-third of the current 80 raid instances. It should feel as humiliating as if you couldn't do Kel'thuzad or drakeless Sartharion.
 

@solidstate and leah:

/follow "playername" does work in p3. You indeed cannot target the player but if you pick someone who knows what they're doing in advance and everyone uses /follow "playername" once p3 starts it works just fine. Someone told me about it last Saturday and using it I was able to put 30 stacks on maly, course I got lucky with getting focused on too. But it does work.
 

if you're failing at Malygos it's one of three reasons:

1) Need to stack sparks better. It's almost a must to get at least one double spark stack during phase 1 to have enough time to complete the fight. This is a team effort between the DKs, the tank, and the spark spotter.
2) Phase2 dps needs to focus-fire better. Kill one mob at a time, don't pull aggro on the ground mobs, and assign a melee-dps order for the discs. Send the best meleers first.
3) Don't let debuff stacks fall on phase3. If you have 2-3 minutes left and you're not even close to killing Maly, people aren't stacking their debuffs correctly. Contrary to what you might think, it does not require 4 minutes on the timer to down him in Phase3. You need to trust the P3 healers to get the AoE off, and everyone else needs to stay out of static and stack DoTs hard. I've found it's a mistake to just assign the P1+2 healers to healing in P3, instead assign 5 competent players who understand how the vehicle mechanics work and who have done it on 10-man.

it sounds like I'm in a similar guild as yours, except I'm part of the management. The very worst thing you can do right now is just "opt out." It sounds like your guild is generally having some "pre-Ulduar" blues where people are suddenly 'more busy' now that the content is played out. This is a very dangerous time for morale. I'm sure you wouldn't want your fellow DPS guildmates to "opt out" of Naxx if you and your healing brethren couldn't keep the Patchwerk tanks alive, so extend them the same courtesy now. Talk to an officer in your guild who you're on good terms with about your concerns whether your guild should even be trying Malygos right now, and let them take it up the ladder to the people it sounds like you're on bad terms with. Don't just take your ball and go home, you're only making the problems worse. That said, if there are more than enough healers for your next attempt, volunteer to sit out.
 

@sdasdaSD, tyvm mate! I tried /target "player" but I didn't think of /follow "player" :) Well even though we have Malygos on farm this should make it easier :)
 

No, I'd say I'm in the right guild, and the people who want that guild to beat Malygos are in the wrong guild.

Heh, disagree. I don't think it's quite as black and white as that, for any point of view. =P

And really, if the people who want to beat Malygos are in the wrong guild, might that include the officers and GM? You might want to try to take some of them aside and point out some of the problems with the guild running Malygos.

Also, I think it's obvious a lot of these disagreements and issues in this whole thread of comments are partly because of the limited amount of raid content available right now. Pointing out that better raid guilds just wipe on harder content doesn't work since there isn't any harder content available right now. So right now, guild hopping is more for just getting easier fights and more loot.

I agree on Gevlon's point too though, and would like to put my own words on it: people prefer fights/guilds where they have a noticable impact on the outcome. It's why single player stuff is so popular.

I don't think there's much of a problem now with your decision, Tobold, but I do think that it could mean that someday in the future, if your guildies don't improve their game, your guild will reach some sort of barrier, and won't be able to pass it unless your dpsers improve.
 

"OR you could actually do something constructive "

Actually healers quitting so that the raid has to quit a fight until DPS gears up IS constructive. They're saying "we are just not ready" and enforcing it. The BEST solution would be for the officers to decide this, but if they don't, and it's a casual guild where no one can be forced to do anything or kicked for not, attendance is the only way for a player to make their feelings known, the only leverage they have.

This post is a perfect example of what I hate about healing: you are completely at the mercy of your group.
 

Tobold, having read you for a while, I understand your frutration, and I'm willing to believe that your post was emotional rather than logical. Sometimes, there's no way for you to work harder to contribute, etc. I felt much the same way as you this week when our casual guild wiped 3x on 4H 10man due to assigned back tanks NOT STANDING IN RANGE of Z/LB. As a tank in front, I can't see what's happening in the back, so it's hard to offer constructive criticism.

That said, if you truly want your guild to improve (and this is me speaking possibly out of turn...our guild hasn't even attempted EoE yet) then use the tools available. WMO/WWS archives lots of fights from guilds of various gear/skill levels...check some and see approximately where they end P1. Raid composition can also be an issue Other people have made several suggestions for P2/P3. There are several addons out there that can track CP's on Maly for P3, also, whiceh provides methods of improvement. It's all numbers, really-- saying "Our raid averaged X DPS during P1, and we need Y in order to win...we should hold off on Maly for a few weeks" sounds much better than "We can't down Maly bc DPS sucks." Of course, if your guild refuses to listen to constructive criticism, then you may need to do exactly what you did.
 

Well, excuse me if I question a set of values where *quitting* your guild is perfectly okay, but not going on every badly planned raid with them is not.
 

Tobold, you're running into the same problem that raid guilds have run into before, which is that raid time is finite. Do we spend time on easy content for gear, or try to clear hard content that is less (gear-wise) rewarding? If your guild has repeatedly wiped in EoE (think you said 20 times?), then I agree, it's time to tell your GL/RL that you're spending too much time on progression content and not enough on farm. Refusing to come on any more EoE raids is a (somewhat blunt) way to make that argument. Based on your original post, it looks like your guild hadn't done Naxx yet that week, which seems nonsensical.
I agree with the no /gquit mindset. I am a casual by time constraints, not by skill/knowledge. While it is at times frustrating when our guild fails at tasks that I know a better skilled guild could accomplish with no problems, it also makes success much sweeter when it does happen.
 

Well, excuse me if I question a set of values where *quitting* your guild is perfectly okay, but not going on every badly planned raid with them is not.

Hehe, you should know by now that questioning people's values, especially wow players' values is just going to get you in trouble. ;P
 

Our DPS was too low at the start too.

But it was mosly because people failed at ph3. They didn't get that they have to stack their debuff (button 2). So the drake damage ranged a HUGE deal from player to player.

If ph1 time is the problem, go do Naxx, gear up. If that doesn't work: kick players and replace them with guys who do more DPS.

Personnally, I don't mind wiping as long as I see progress. If DPS doesn't improve in a whole evening, it's a wasted evening.
 

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Try:
/castsequence Flame Spike, Flame Spike, Engulf in Flames

Spam that and you should be fine. If you're stacked right you can survive a double focus without using the shield ability (5).
Put it on a spot on your bar that you have bound to a key that isn't 1 - 6 (like the letter 'E', for example).

Also, as mentioned,
/follow NAME
works and the drakes can attack even while not facing Malygos
 

"Well, I'm laughing at your mindset that Ulduar will be hard in normal mode."

If you're expecting Ulduar to be _easier_ than current content, I think you're in for a rude shock. I wouldn't expect any guild that can't beat Malygos to achieve any progression in Ulduar.
 

We did beat Malygos in 10-man mode once. The problem, as I repeatedly stated, is that to get 25 players together for Malygos, we need to invite alts and people that aren't geared. Thus I would expect us to be able to progress in Ulduar-10, and have problems in Ulduar-25. Which isn't that much of a problem, because as long as you progress in 10-man mode, you can gear up and hope one day to have 25 well-geared raiders with experience in all the fights.
 

I guess the lesson learned is that you should either focus on being a 10-man guild or a 25-man guild. It doesn't sound like you have the roster to be a 25-man guild.
 

Well I remember you saying a while back you lost some players because your guild is too casual. This is why. Dont expect to clear endgame content and persist with a casual attitude in your guild, because it just wont happen. There are levels of performance required to beat raid instances; some guilds are just not up to it, and never well be. Having said, that I think the fight is a joke; my guild and I find it super easy, and we long since got the 3 achievements for all guildies in 10/25 man. The reason you're not enjoying it is because you cant clear it - because of bad players in your guild. There's nothing inherently bad about the encounter. Casual guilds always want to have their cake and eat it too. It makes me laugh.
 

Obviously if Malygos enrages (and everyone is alive) it`s the weak DPS and not the healing. Your guild doesn`t seem too professional, so to say, and there is no rule that every guild should clear up everything in WoW. If the overall DPS is too low, you can`t do it, simple math. Stick to Naxx, gear up some people and try again, maybe it works.
 

If your guild does not have enough people for 25 mans and you can kill him in 10 man, why are you tyring the 25 man version?

- because it's a change?
- because all the "big boys" do 25 mans?
- because of the better loot?

Take a loot at this great post here:
http://4haelz.blogspot.com/2009/03/guest-post-loot-differences-hurt-10-man.html

Is it because of this?