Tonight, I ran with my friend’s guild and managed to clear Wing 3 of Flex (along with doing a 45 minute run on Wing 1 and downing two bosses on Wing 2), using my paladin. It was a pretty good night, but I felt myself getting tired by the time we hit the Dark Shamans. There were a few hiccups for myself along the way in terms of mechanics and fight and as a retribution paladin, which lead me to this post.
So I did give Flex Wing 3 a try back on Sunday night. We managed to get Malkorok after several attempts but had some problems with the Spoils of Pandaria fight. Tonight, we were able to two shot, Malkorok, two shot Spoils and three shot Thok. Malkorok is an interesting boss in that it’s essentially a raid version of Simon says. There are two difficult aspects to this fight. The first is the possible confusion for players in knowing when to soak up the purple pools of Imploding Energy is one aspect; the difficulty in this is hesitating. If you have enough people covering the platform, then this mechanic shouldn’t be too difficult, especially if you’re range heavy.
The second aspect that I find difficult is what I call the Simon Says mechanic. You have Arcing Smash hit three areas of the room. While it’s easy enough to avoid the Arcing Smash, the big problem is the follow up of Breath of Y’sharrj, where everyone needs to move immediately to the location that wasn’t touched by his Arcing Smash. Otherwise, you pretty much instantly are killed on the spot. Since the area that will be affected by Breath of Y’sharrj does not show up, you have to memorize the spot that wasn’t hit by Arcing Smash. Since you’re moving around a lot and trying to avoid areas or soak up area, it’s easy to forget the safe zones. What I’ve seen some group do is drop raid markers in the four corners of the room where the Arcing Smash hits. Then the quadrant that is away form that spot is the area where everyone needs to move to after Imploding Energy gets soaked. As some people might be in zones that need to be soaked, it’s imperative that you get a speed boost so you can run towards the safe area.
Spoils of Pandaria was a pretty tricky encounter too the first few times. Someone in the raid described it as “controlled chaos.” I just think it’s plain chaos. I think the mechanics weren’t too difficult once we established a good order for opening boxes and learning which targets to focus on. That seemed to be my biggest hiccup. Avoiding things on the ground wasn’t too bad. Maybe the bomb aspect could get nasty but I didn’t get hit with that on the two tries we did on the 2nd night.
Then of course, we got to Thok. This encounter worried me slightly in that I hadn’t done it before and only had seen a few videos and streams. It turned out that the encounter itself wasn’t all that bad. The problem with the encounter is (as with a lot of things) positioning. After that it’s raid awareness, knowing where your team members are, where the next jailor needs to be killed and where you can kite Thok without destroying the raid.
In examining the logs for these fights, I started to think about being a Retribution Paladin and optimizations for these fights. The first thing I feel is that the Retribution Paladin needs to remove all the seals. Most of the problems I’ve encountered seem to stem from the awkwardness of switching between Seal of Truth and Seal of the Righteousness. If anything, they should either remove these two or merge them together. I really don’t see a point in having two separate seals that cause your damage to behave differently. You can compare it to Blade Flurry for a combat rogue but that’s more or less an on/off switch. At least with the combat rogue, all you’re really doing is having their damage spread and split when it’s on once you get to multiple targets. It seems for Paladins you’ll have to create a macro just for that, which kinda sucks and manage that once you hit a certain number of mobs.
Also, the AoE rotation seems odd. The problem is that when you’re in an AoE situation, some add ons don’t really handle that well. Maybe I have to look into certain add ons like SpellFlash and CLCRet more in depth to see if there are options to swap between single target and AoE. It is said that you just switch out Hammer of the Righteousness for Crusaders Strike and Divine Storm for Templars Verdict. But the way several sites talk about maximizing your AoE, these adds become irrelevant as they just focus on 2-3 abilities and ignore builders and Inquisition.
At any rate, the thing I’m figuring out is that not every encounter is fit for a single class/spec. Some do far better than others in certain situations. With the last wing of Flex coming out next week (I believe), it should be interesting to see how things look.