This achievement is a lot easier than would seem to be indicated by our time to get it and also the low number of guilds in the world who have gotten it. It does require a specific strategy and some practice executing it, but it really just isn’t that hard. I’ll revise my previous requirements downand say you only really need 3 Druids and 2 Deathknights to reliably execute it which isn’t that harsh of a requirement.

For those looking for our strategy for this fight, you can view it at StratFu’s Five Minute Malygos entry. This is the distilled wisdom from our two failed kills and a couple nights worth of attempts at the encounter. It’s not hugely difficult but there are a lot of gotchas to it and I recommend going in prepared.

The one gotcha about learning it that caused us to take so long is that you can fail the achievement and accidentally kill Malygos thus losing your chance to try it more until the next raid reset. As I originally wrote about, on our third attempt at it we missed the timer by 13 seconds. We didn’t realize how long the cinematic between phase 2 and 3 was and he had DoTs on him. This Monday we missed the 5 minute timer by one second, again SLIGHTLY underestimating how long the cinematic was. This was after wiping multiple attempts that were within the 10 second range of 5 minutes.

After refining our strategy and discovering a way to give ourselves 20+ more seconds of breathing room, we easily got the achievement at the beginning of the raid night on Tuesday and finally got our 310% speed mounts. It seems that once again we were too cautious in our approach and this actually cost us. If we had simply exploded the sparks as soon as we had four in camp, ignoring any current timers, we would have had more luck earlier on as doing that gives you much more time than the way we were doing it.

We were slightly dissappointed as Might, our only competition on Turalyon, got Immortal Monday night thus beating us to Heroic: Glory of the Raider. We’re used to doing most things first so that’s what we strive for and it’s kind of annoying to miss out on a first due to one second on the timer. On the other hand, I’m proud to be on the server with two of the first 10 guilds in the world to get the achievement (#4 and #5 in the US), and the only server to have two guilds that have done it. I’d be even more disappointed if we didn’t have any guilds on the server who could challenge us.

When all is said and done, I’m very happy we have pursued these achievements. They don’t provide any raiding benefit and many guilds at the top end even don’t really give them more than a passing notice, but they have taught us valuable lessons that we’ll take into the next tier of raiding. They taught us to think outside the box and look at an encounter we already learned in a different way. I think these experiences will prove very valuable because there will be so many similar things in Ulduar, and this time they will count towards progression according to Blizzard. We’ll go into those ahead of the game because we took the time now to push ourselves. We’re always looking for ways to use time during slow periods to increase our performance during the sprints.