Nefarian’s chief scientist, Maloriak is the next boss we’ll be looking at. He is one of the three bosses in the lower portion of the Blackwing Descent who must be killed to get a shot at Nefarian himself.

This is yet another complicated fight that requires a significant amount of add management and coordination. Maloriak has three ‘colors’ that determine which abilities he will use, you’ll have to manage these colors as well as the adds he spawns in order to take him down.

Abilities

General Abilities

• Arcane Storm – Deals periodic Arcane damage to everyone in the raid, interruptable.
• Release Aberrations – Spawns 3 Aberrations at a time, up to 18 over the course of the fight. This is interruptable.

Red Phase

• Consuming Flames – Targets a random player and places a DoT on them that deals periodic fire damage. Additional magic damage taken while this is active will increase the damage done by the effect by a percentage of the damage taken.
• Scorching Blast – Frontal AoE cone of fire damage. Deals 750,000 damage that is split amongst affected players.

Blue Phase

• Flash Freeze – Targets a player and causes all players within 10 yards of that player to be frozen for 50,000 damage for 30 seconds. When this ice is broken it deals another 50,000 damage to nearby players. Prefers ranged.
• Biting Chill – Places a debuff on a player that causes them to deal frost damage to all friendly targets nearby. Seems to prefer players in melee range.

Green Phase

• Remedy – Heals Maloriak for 150,000 health and regenerates his mana. The healing done by this effect ramps up the longer it is up. Dispellable.
• Debilitating slime – When green phase begins everyone in the room including Maloriak and his adds are sprayed with slime that increases damage taken by 100% and temporarily removes the Growth Catalyst from the adds.

25% Health

• Release All – All of the remaining Aberrations are released in addition to two Prime Subjects. Prime Subjects fixate on targets making them difficult to tank and deal significant damage.
• Magma Jets – Spawns a line of fire in the direction of a player. Anyone standing in this effect when it goes off will take 25,000 damage.
• Absolute Zero – Creates an ice orb that will explode for frost damage and knock back nearby players.
• Acid Nova – Deals 5,000 nature damage per second to all players for 10 seconds.

Adds

Aberrations

• Growth Catalyst – Increases damage done by nearby allies by 20% and reduces damage taken by 20%. This effect stacks and applies to all allies within 10 yards.

Prime Subjects

• Growth Catalyst
• Fixate – Fixates aggro on a player causing them to become immune to taunt. Lasts 10 seconds.

Setting Up

Tanks: 2
DPS: 5
Healers: 3

Yet another 2/3/5 setup. You’ll need one tank to handle Maloriak and another one to corral the adds. Damage on this fight can range from tame to insane depending on how well you deal with the mechanics, so it’s best to bring 3 healers. This fight does have an enrage timer which is strict enough to be a factor. Bringing less than 5 dps is not advisable, dropping a healer for a DPS may be necessary if you can’t be the enrage.

Tactics

Alright, you’ve read the list of abilities and it’s daunting for sure. This guy does a lot of different things. The first thing to understand is how the adds work. Maloriak will periodically cast Release Aberrations which will summon 3 adds per cast. This cast can be interrupted, also there is a maximum of 18 adds. If you release 18 adds then any subsequent casts will do nothing.

The idea with the adds is to allow 9 to be released by the time Maloriak reaches his first green phase. Before this they are basically immune to damage due to their stacking buff that reduces damage. During green Maloriak will remove this buff allowing the raid to AoE them down quickly. This process is repeated for the next 9 adds which you will kill during the second green phase.

Maloriak will begin with a random phase, either Red or Blue. During each mini-phase he will attempt to cast Release Aberrations twice and Arcane Storm twice also. Your interrupters will decide when it’s best to allow the adds to be released, but they will have to interrupt some of the casts for Release otherwise you will become overwhelmed by the adds.

General rules for the phases are as follows:

      Blue – Spread out!

      Red – Group up in front of Maloriak!

      Green – Stack the adds and AoE them to hell.

During blue there is a lot of avoidable AoE damage. The Flash Freeze will inflict massive damage to a target and require quick reactions from your healers because you’ll have to at least put some healing on the affected player before your DPS breaks the Flash Freeze or it will probably kill them. This is a good phase to allow Aberrations to be released on, especially if it occurs after red because there will be less adds up in case your add tank gets Flash Frozen (very bad).

During red there is massive damage when Maloriak casts Scorching Blast, otherwise this isn’t a big deal.

Add management is a huge part of this fight. The add tank will have to kite the Aberrations to the best of their ability. Aberrations can be stunned, snared, and rooted. The ideal candidate for this task is a Death Knight with Howling Blast and Chillblains, they can kite the adds effortlessly. Because of the stacking buff on the adds they become very dangerous when there are 9 or more of them up. Taking direct hits from them is not an option. Since you can only really kill the adds during the green phase, you will want to have 9 adds up per green phase as was mentioned before. This also means that you will need to have two green phases and that Maloriak will have to be very close to 25% life when he reaches the second green phase so that you can push him into phase 2 when you clean up the adds and avoid enrage issues.

Phase 2 is an all out DPS burn phase. Save bloodlust, heroism, or time warp for this for sure. Maloriak will go nuts and start splashing AoE damage everywhere, Prime Subjects will be running around trying to kill random raid members who will need to try their best to avoid them during fixate, and the enrage timer will continue to be a factor. There’s not a ton of finesse to this phase, just DPS hard and do your best!

This fight is complicated and has a lot of different facets to it, so take your time and make sure you understand everything that is going on so that you save time on useless wipes. Good luck!

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