Paradigm Shift
January 26th, 2009 Posted in Bosses, Wrath of the Lich KingLooking back on my original character, I was never very good at playing a rogue. True, I did OK, but I was never great at the whole thing. If I came top of the DPS charts, it was because everone else was worse than me rather than because I was doing anything spectacular. When I rerolled to my current warrior, everything seemed so much more straightforward. I could understand the rage mechanic far better than I ever got to grips with the combo points mechanic, and my brain was always orie
nted toward tanking. I lost count of the number of times I rounded up random mobs at level 60 to stop them chomping the healer and bring them back to the (particularly poor) tank.
The amount of time I have spent playing my rogue since Namthe reached level 70 is probably in the order of two hours or so. The mechanics seem alien to me (far more alien, even than the mana-using classes that I’ve tried since). It’s seemingly true that you can never go back.
So, on to Malygos then. For the uninitiated, the first two portions of the encounter are reasonably within the norm. First you fight the dragon himself, and following that there are a number of his underlings to dispatch.
And then everything changes. Once the minions are defeated, the entire encounter changes massively. Suddenly, the floor vanishes and you start to plunge to your doom, only to be caught by members of the Red Dragonflight. Yes, it’s a boss based on vehicle-based combat, with the hateful combo points and energy mechanic. In three dimensions.
You can practice this by doing the Aces High daily, and I have done – but the daily is very much different in so far as the dragons you have to kill don’t have all that much longevity – they drop dead very quickly. I would get stuck at around 10 stacks of the dubuff on occasion as the errors introduced in my poor energy management combined with the occasional need for shielding finally caught up with me. It didn’t help that the mod I was using (MalygosCP) to track debuffs and combo points, was lying to me about how many I had applied.
So, this is one area where I’m going to work harder to improve. It’s just annoying that it requires a raid to practice it well.
One Response to “Paradigm Shift”
By Tankette on Jan 28, 2009
We haven’t gotten past phase 1 but probably will soon.
I too have been doing the Aces High daily and have been skeptical on how much help that would be on the actual Malygos fight. I’ll be expecting to read about it here when you figure it all out.