So, yesterday marked Vanguard’s Deathsquad second week of fully clearing all Wrath of the Lich King content to date.

There are two encounters we have yet to master, three if we count leaving up adds in The Obsidian Sanctum, on Sartharion. Which is on the horizon for us, next week the plan is to leave up one add, see how the fight goes and move on from there.

The two encounters would be Sapphiron and Malygos. Sapphiron is by far the most healing intensive fight in the game, currently. At least from what I can tell when you choose to do it with no Frost Resistance gear. We would have the achievement, but we forgot our Mage had Mage Armor up, pushing him over the 100 Frost Resist Mark.

Sapphiron has some “awesome” quirks about him. For example the “random” luck factor with the Ice Bolts. When both healers get Ice Bolted, leaving our hybrids to heal most often with a Blizzard on top of the Ice Block bad things tend to happen.  For example, everyone dies very quickly.

I also want to know what Dev thought Sapphiron would be even more fun, if he had a cleave that’s the size of Texas that hit’s for Texas. We’ve had our resident feral druid die from the middle of Sapphiron before. It’s not a very melee friendly fight for that reason in my eyes. And I’m all for a challenge but that cleave is just stupid.

I’m very confident we’ll figure out what we’re doing wrong or simply how to tune our strat better. We currently need 3 healers to beat the encounter, and it’s currently the only fight that we need the extra healing on. We had our Boomkin swap to help toss heals Saturday and after that (barring bad luck) we succeeded. Needing a total of 5 attempts to get him down, which doesn’t count as as true success for us.

Soon, all of Naxx will be on one shot status, as Sapphiron is the only one left standing to prevent that from happening. It’s amazing how different 10 people make Naxx, it feels less epic, in a way. Simply because Four Horsemen went from hey this is kinda hard, to Baron Rivendare is dead already on our first transition? Well I guess on to Thane. From an epic 8-man attempt on Gluth to watching him die after only two decimates. We’re already plotting for the harder achievements now. Vanguard will have The Undying title and the Plagued Proto-Drakes.

On Malygos, we’ve mastered the first two phases. And I have to say, as a Melee, the second phase where you get to fly around on Discs has to be my favorite part of the fight. Seeing the giant crits from double sparkbuff  is also pretty fun. Phase 3 is where problems arise, but we’ve discovered it’s a buggy encounter and reading all of his abilities is fairly important. For example, being too close to him makes him nuke the raid pretty hard. It took us two attempts to figure that one out. We then figured out if you target Malygos as he destroys the floor, your flame shield has a bad habit of not working. If you get focused with Surge of Power you go down pretty quick when you can’t shield yourself. Our kill this week was very clean with no deaths, save one random focus burst from the Scions in phase 2 on our poor Boomkin towards the end, but we had a Battle Rez ready and went in with 10 into phase 3.

I honestly have to say Malygos as a whole feels like the first epic fight in Wrath of the Lich King and this opinion may change when we start doing Sartharion with adds up. As it stands right now, Malygos has my vote for boss of Wrath of the Lick King currently.

What’s your favorite fight so far?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 and is filed under General Info, ~ Zasp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.