Help please with hc Malkorok

[Merlaine]

For several nights a week, for the past 3/4 weeks we've been wiping on hc Malkorok (10 man).

Link to our WoL: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/n...ses&boss=71454

Our raid set up is as follows:

Tanks:
Paladin
DK OR Monk

Healers:
Priest (tried both disc and holy)
1-2 Shaman

DPS (Various combinations of):
1-2 Warlocks
1-2 Ele Shaman
Combat Rogue
Sv Hunter
Enh Shaman
S. Priest
Monk

We never use more than 2 melee, and have tried to limit most of our attemps to one melee only as recommended.
I'm sure everyone's rotation etc could use some tweaks, but this isn't what this post is about. Normally, when we wipe, we can understand why we're wiping, and what we need to work on to get the kill. A few of our wipes are down to people missing puddles - that is easily fixable with a bit more focus.

In general tho, we don't seem to have the survivability for this and can't work out why. On our best attempts, we've gotten to ph2 a couple of times then die very soon after. If someone could have a look at our logs and see what we're doing wrong, then we would really appreciate it.

What we'd especially appreciate is knowing if people are just taking too much damage from orbs at the wrong time? Should we be dealing with the add better? Is the healing too low? We looked at 3 healing it, and that does seem to work a bit better, but then it looks like we don't have the dps to beat the enrage timer. Is the dps too low?

Would really apprecite some feedback here - thanks in advance

[trystero]

Pretty much every wipe you begin losing people to failing the puddle mechanic; I assume not soaking them since the damage is very high from it. You want to also make sure you only have one person per puddle. The other deaths also look very avoidable, standing in breaths, arcing smashes, etc. I am only paying attention to the first couple of deaths per wipe, because after that killing this boss as progression becomes unrealistic/impossible.

I can't see this in the logs but you need to be actively clearing orbs if you aren't already. That may be making it difficult for getting to puddles later in the fight and not stepping on orbs accidentally. Most people wait until the first Blood Rage before doing so. Your prot paladin can Bubble when not actively tanking to soak a bunch. Rogue and hunter are excellent at puddle soaking, and even your Brewmaster can take Diffuse Magic and clean the room up.

[Merlaine]

Thanks for the reply Trystero, yes, we do clear the orbs right at the end of the 2nd blood rage - when we get that far. Do you mean we should also be clearing them before then also? We did miss a couple of puddles last night which shouldn't have happened, but even when we don't miss any, the damage still seems very high to the people that soak them? Good point about making sure two people don't soak - we'll work on that - we were trying to make sure they were covered as our first priority, but yes, that would help us avoid a fair bit of damage.

[ThunderWolf]

Assuming your monk is single tanking the blood rage phase? My group clears the orbs as the fight goes on as they can, but they run around during the blood rage clearing up everything they possibly can. While the monk is tanking during phase 1, the paladin can bubble and start soaking orbs as well.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Your paladin tank needs to replace about half their gear, just because a piece is heroic doesn't mean it is good (the dodge/parry pieces are garbage). Glyph of the Battle Healer is terrible and needs to be replaced, they have extremely poor CD usage and low uptime on SotR. Your warlock (Emberdrake) isn't using immolate, you might want to replace them if they don't know how to play a spec as simple as Destro. Hunter is failing to keep Serpent Sting applied (they're having 60%-75% uptime on attempts where they are the last person alive).

The only other bit is people failing at the orbs or puddles, the fight is pretty light on how many mechanics are involved.

PS. You might want to consider using Warcraftlogs.com, it has a much easier to use interface for reading logs.

[Koor]

It's not possible to tell your raid movement from worldoflogs. I'd recommend switching over to http://www.warcraftlogs.com.
With advanced combat logging enabled, you can perform a combat replay and diagnose positioning issues.

There is a nice addon http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/malkorok-helper which can help with raid positioning. It shows the sectors on the map (and safe zones if someone with assist marks them) -- it's important that every ranged player knows which sectors need to be covered, and that he returns to the same original position to cover those sectors after moving around to safe zones.

Aside from that, both your healers blow cooldowns on the start to build up the shields, which I think is an overkill since the shields will build up anyway. It might be better to let only one healer use a cooldown to build up the initial shields rapidly, leaving the other free to use cooldowns more liberally in case you get behind on healing and need to recover the shields rapidly.

Specifically for your resto shaman (although healing doesn't seem to be your problem but rather not soaking the pools), two recommendations:

- He's currently running with 21.5K spirit, and using a lot of healing surges. I guess he needs that much spirit since he uses so many healing surges, but he can try using more glyphed chain heals instead (with or without the riptide glyph, can try both ways). This should allow him to drop his spirit to around 10K and gain more throughput stats instead, making the other spells stronger, which will reduce the need to use many healing surges. I'd recommend reforging to crit, it's particularly good on malkorok due to reduced overhealing, and returns mana back on each crit.

- I don't see ascendance used much in the logs, it's a great cooldown, should be used more often.

[MrKnubbles]

Have your pally tank pop Divine Shield and Speed of Light and then run around to pop half of the shadow orbs while the other tank pops a cooldown and solo tanks during Blood Rage.

[Merlaine]

Clearing the room during bloodrage isn't a problem - we manage to clear out almost all the orbs. Malkorok helper we do have, with the MT marking the sections, and find that helps a lot. I will look into Warcraftlogs.com, and see if that will give us more information about what we're doing wrong. One last question - is there any way to tell (through WoL - which we are using atm) if people are losing their shields through taking too many orbs during the first phase, and that is causing them to die when they soak a puddle? Many times our dps seem to die while soaking the puddles, even when none are missed, and I wondered if that was the reason?

[MrKnubbles]

If they die from soaking puddles, they may not have a green shield up. Your Prot Pally can also throw down 1 Holy Power Eternal Flames on everybody. That's what I do and it gets pretty good healing.

[Deja Thoris]

Theres 3 things that matter in this fight. Mechanic, mechanics and mechanics.

Fucking up a puddle is an unforgivable mistake on this fight. You simply can't let any go unsoaked. You also can't afford to clip orbs on the way to a puddle because it removes your shield, pecks away at your health then you die to the puddle damage.

You can clean up whenever with the pally tanks bubble, priests dispersion and hunters deterrence and whatever the rogue has is OP too.

That sort of takes care of the importance of mechanics.

As to "rotations needing tweaks" thats simply not true. Some peoples rotations are awful flat out wrong.
- On attempt 7 one of your locks never cast immolate and cast 3 chaos bolts in 2:29
- Pally (who has battlehealer glyphed - gimping himself so badly I can't find words for it) hit shield of the righteous only 8 times. Hes also pressing buttons about 50% too slowly if you divide time by abilities used.
- The disc priest cast smite 7x and holy fire once

All of this stuff above is terribly wrong. The people need to go back and revisit what they think they know about their classes and be prepared to change. If you want to kill bosses you need to change things. That means executing simple mechanics (run into this - dont run into that) and playing their classes with competence.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

If they die from soaking puddles, they may not have a green shield up. Your Prot Pally can also throw down 1 Holy Power Eternal Flames on everybody. That's what I do and it gets pretty good healing.

Huge waste of HoPo to do that, spot heals are far more useful.

It is pretty easy to do with EF set on a mouseover macro and decent raidframes (default can show enough for it even), should also have LoH set to a mouseover macro for similar things. Though this may prove troublesome if your paladin tank doesn't have any experience playing a healer (or if they are slow to react).

[Merlaine]

Our pala tank is also our raid leader, as well as the one who is doing the markings on Malkork Helper, so although it's a good idea, I honestly doubt he'd be able to add healing to his 'to do' list as well

[Deleted]

Your DPS are hitting orbs and losing their shields (thus losing all the healing you've done to them, basically wasting it) ... and doing that constantly. More than anything else, that's the core problem for the vast majority of every guild's Malkorok HC wipes.

If your DPS and healers cannot avoid the orbs, you will not kill the boss. Think of every orb as being an 750k damage hit that you take if you bump into them, and then you can see how badly hitting even one crushes your healers and your survivability. You've got people hitting 3 and 4 orbs every pull - that's a catastrophic amount of damage.

You simply MUST, MUST, MUST avoid hitting the orbs. MUST.

- - - Updated - - -

Here's your longest try - you had people hit 58 orbs in just over 4 minutes. Now, some of these are intentional (soaking them during blood rage) ... but I'm assuming that the shaman aren't the ones doing the soaking.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/n58p40g1n3c3ywpz/spell/143857/?s=3861&e=4107

Fix this, and you'll kill the boss.

[Merlaine]

Many thanks for all the replies - I've done some research on problems from other websites also, and it does seem like the orbs are the biggest problem for us - we know what we should be working on as a team now, and some members individually also. Hopefully we'll put what we've learned here into practise and start to see some progression next week - very much appreciated

[Deleted]

I have to ask sincerely, but does your paladin click? There's simply no way someone should have so few ability usages relative to fight length as a Prot paladin - never mind the almost complete absence of defensive CD usages.

Secondly, he needs to start over completely with learning Prot paladin, because what he's up to right now is of a caliber that has no business setting foot in a Heroic raid at all. He's dead weight that you're carrying, pure and simple. Here's what he needs to do:

1. He needs to take his thumb out of his ass and press more buttons. If he can't do that and raid lead at the same time, then get somebody else to raid-lead.
2. He's better off not using Eternal Flame, because he has no idea how to manage it. It's pretty clear to me that he just refreshes it whenever he can, rather than refreshing it with at least 3 stacks of Bastion of Glory. Without Bastion of Glory buffing it, Eternal Flame is literally worthless. Having a 90% EF uptime and a sub-50% uptime on BoG is completely and utterly incorrect and awful.
3. His SotR uptime is surreally low - this is a result of his lacking ability usage AND his incorrect EF usage. To put it in perspective, 20% SotR uptime was perfectly achievable with correct play in tier 14. To have such low SotR uptime at this point is almost as fundamental a failing as your warlock not using Immolate ever.

Your paladin needs to take a long, hard look at what he's doing and consider whether Prot is the spec for him, because what he's up to right now is an outright disgrace that requires immediate fixing if you guys are ever going to kill Malkorok, let alone any later bosses.

[Illana]

1. Stop using WoL and switch to warcraftlogs

2. How does it take 7 seconds to soulstone someone?

3. How does a hunter get hit by a smash?

4. Why is your warlock trying to soak blood rage?

5. Is your priest blind or does he just like the look of the bubbles?

6. The dps in your raid is REALLY bad. You won't ever kill this boss unless your tank can somehow survive a second blood rage (or you know, your dps gets better).

6.1. Jynxed has an average 55-60% uptime on flame shock, gearing completely wrong and using the wrong 90 talent. Also is 4.15% over hit cap.

Mastery should be roughly double the amount of haste for ele and he should be using unleashed elements at that ilevel. Should be picking up intellect socket bonuses with mixed gems also.

6.2. Ruonjian, despite being your best dps, could be doing better.

His gear is fine but an 80-90% uptime on slice and dice is hindering him from the higher numbers. It should be close to 100%
Also used tricks of the trade once per fight, if this was used on another dps it would significantly raise your raid dps.
He's also not using any potions.

6.3. Kanira is also gearing incorrectly and using the wrong 90 talent although is doing a lot better than Jynxed (relative to their gear differences)

He has a 99%+ uptime on flame shock which is excellent. Only real things that he needs to work on is using earth shock at 5 or more stacks, sorting his gear and using the right talent. One of your better players tbh, but also needs to use pots.

6.4. Destris doesn't seem to understand his spec. Low uptime on immolate and VERY few chaos bolts. He needs a lot of work and I can't be bothered to copy and paste a whole destro guide here (and im sure nobody wants me to). Get him to read some guides, watch some videos and practice on some dummies. Otherwise you're better off without this guy.

6.5. Not sure why your monk is using rushing jade wind on a single target fight. He is not expertise capped either. Tbh it looks like he's in DPS gear and he's not going to be able to tank properly.

6.6. Shaylarran is severely underperforming. Extremely poor DoT uptimes and explosive shot usage. Overall bad play. Needs to spend more time hitting a target dummy until they can produce acceptable numbers.

6.7. Emberdrake is terrible as people have mentioned before. Not even casting immolate at all.

6.8. Your shaman healer has no clue what is going on and most likely oom before blood rage spamming healing surge. Has no idea how to gear, gemming full spirit is awful. Resto shamans should be gemming crit in all available places and picking up socket bonuses with int/crit and spirit/crit gems.

His glyphs are hilarious, please tell him to use totemic recall and learn how to recall totems for mana as well as using riptide glyph for EVERY encounter. Third glyph should be healing stream totem for any fight with fire/frost/nature damage and spiritwalker's grace/healing wave for anything else.

Healing malk as a shaman goes like this:

1. Unleash Healing rain on melee at all times.
2. Healing stream totem on cd
3. Riptide for 2 stacks of tidal waves
4. Healing wave the 2 people with the lowest shield
5. Repeat from 3 until healing rain or healing stream is back up

He used unleash 8 times in a 4minute try, didn't use ascendance

6.9. Priest should be using halo on this fight. If done correctly can hit the whole room and immediately fill everyone's shields in case something bad happens or right after pull/blood rage.

Not sure what talent he is using for malk but it should be divine insight. Otherwise he's doing ok.

Not going to comment on pally, other people done that well enough

In summary, I don't even know how you made it to malkorok with this team I guess gear really does make things too easy.

[dean771]

Mostly good advice

Plenty of wrong advice for shamans, element blast is fine for a level 90 talent, it is easier to play

No idea why you mentioned healing wave or the healing wave glyph

[Illana]

Mostly good advice

Plenty of wrong advice for shamans, element blast is fine for a level 90 talent, it is easier to play

No idea why you mentioned healing wave or the healing wave glyph

at those gear levels unleashed fury pulls ahead significantly

Healing wave is a perfectly adequate filler for when you are not stacked up and the glyph will help top yourself from residual damage.

[dean771]

at those gear levels unleashed fury pulls ahead significantly

Healing wave is a perfectly adequate filler for when you are not stacked up and the glyph will help top yourself from residual damage.

1. it pulls very slightly ahead and takes a bit more skill and effort which I doubt they have

2. No reason to ever cast it ahead of greater heal or chain heal with current regen

[Illana]

1. it pulls very slightly ahead and takes a bit more skill and effort which I doubt they have

2. No reason to ever cast it ahead of greater heal or chain heal with current regen

1. How is using unleash every 15 seconds more complicated than using ele blast every 12?

2. Yes there is because greater heal has less mana return and if you don't need the extra heal you are wasting mana that could be used for emergencies.