The Plagueworks opens
Finally, the next wing! Last night was very exciting as all new content nights are. Everyone was pumped, and a little punchy. We didn’t know what to expect, which is always a fun feeling.
For the initial trash I put on the trash spec and started mowing through trash. I felt bad (and hell, still do) because as a Paladin, aoe-tanking a swarm of undead is child’s play, but for a warrior tank and their underpowered aoe threat, it was a huge ordeal for him. He eventually switched to dps spec and I continued to solo tank the trash.
We cleared out both from corners of the room then I moved to one of the back corners. Immediately someone pulls the group in front of the stairs, so I swung around and used a Holy Wrath to grab their attention. Then, apparently a hunter pet dashed off and grabbed the pull in the opposite back corner, so suddenly another pack was incoming. I got those together too and just started aoeing and switching targets as fast as I could. With me belting out an off-key rendition of POD’s “Alive” we slowly aoe’d them all down.
I ended up doing 11k dps, one of the shadow priests did 25k… it was nuts. I know this is just trash, but still, I love my heroics spec.
Anyway, for the first four bosses we did the usual burn through. Deathwhisper is a joke now that her adds and mana shield were so nerfed. Next week we can easily pull one melee off the adds groups on both sides and onto the boss, push it into phase 2 even faster. Gunship was, scarily, almost a wipe when two healers dc’d, Demo died on O, and neither myself or the druid had rocket packs on.
So O turned into the melee quickly jumping over, the healers frantically trying to keep them up, and then them all fleeing as soon as the mage died. It was impressive and I learned a valuable lesson about equipping my damn rocket shirt.
Saurfang was Saurfang. Not much trouble, and even better, when he died I bolted over to the chest and was elated to find not one, but two Conqueror’s tokens in there. Finally! I scored one and still have enough DKP to grab the next one that drops.
After Saurfang the mage (yes, we only have one) darted through the open doors into the next area. Like something out of The Last Crusade, he immediately bought the farm. All we heard was woosh and his head came tumbling back out past us. Another person ran in and made it, emboldening the third who then died to whatever mysterious force was executing people in the next hall.
Apparently this was Frogger 3.0, and traps on the wall would expel gas on people and generally kill them. Unfortunately, they are disarmable by rogues, so our sneaky buddies went to town and we made our way through.
Or, you could just warp up to the Upper Spire. But Frogger is way more fun.
Banging a louie, we entered the Plagueworks for the first time. Picking off some geists and scientists in the initial hall we spotted two giant Gluth look-alikes. I remember something I read from one of Matticus’ PTR reports back on WoW.com that mentioned they share Gluth’s abilities.
We pulled Precious and comically wiped to him the first time, not sure how it was going to go. Once we regathered, what we did was Demo and Purraj (the druid) tanked and switched off aggro on Precious since he applies the mortal wound healing debuff that Gluth had. I hung behind, in heroic spec, and whenever adds spawned I’d use Holy Wrath and pick them all up and help the dps aoe them down. Demo and Purraj kited Precious around the stairway to give me room to grab skeletons.
As for Stinky, again we wiped because we weren’t expecting the decimate+poison aoe combo. And yes, both dogs do decimate, healers need to be ready for that. Anyway, with Stinky his big thing isn’t spawning adds, it’s the periodic poison aoe he does around him. Aspect of the Wild or a Nature Resist Totem helps, since it’s nature damage. Stinky is generally pretty easy, just make sure healers are prepared to quickly get everyone healed a bit so they don’t die to the first poison aoe after the decimate.
Festergut, the big, stinky enchilada that pays a visit the next morning.
Interesting fight to say the least, and a major dps check. Here’s our log of the kill so you can see what we were working with on 25man. 40.4 million hp, 5 minute enrage. Generally that means a lot of dps with five healers and two tanks. I’ve read 7.5k, which seems about right. Also, keep in mind the tanks will be doing around 4k, rather than 2.6k, which will help.
It took us a few wipes to establish some things and for people to hit their comfort zone. This includes the wipe where we had Festergut down to 4000 hp before he enraged and nuked us all. It was horrifying as I’m sure you can imagine.
What we did was figure out it’s generally a good idea to have five to six ranged in the back. Less than that and we got Vile Gas in melee, I don’t know what the magic number in ranged is, probably could have gotten away with an extra spriest or something in the melee pile. Heals stood in melee.
The fight sort of has four phase that rotate. Initially for the first two phases the room has thick orange gas on the floor and he does lots of raid damage but little tank damage. Once you hit the third phase (when he has 2 stacks of his buff) he starts hitting the tank for a lot more. Once he gets three stacks, he’s hitting the tank for around 25k a pop. And he hits fast, so cooldown coordination with healers is a must. We had priests calling out Pain Suppressions on vent while Demo and I juggled our own cooldowns. I also tossed Demo and Hand of Sacrifice and used Divine Sacrifice to help out.
As for tanks, we’re getting a stacking debuff called Gaseous Blight. Each stack increases our damage by 10%, but once it hits 10 stacks we explode. The debuff also takes almost two minutes to fall off. So tanks need to be really quick on switching aggro at exactly nine stacks once the other tank loses their stacks. We had two wipes directly attributable to taunt misses and a tank exploding.
Now, the awesome side of this debuff is the stacking damage increase. When Demo pulled off me, I immediately hopped behind the boss, cast Hand of Salv on myself, popped wings, and poured in the damage. I didn’t think of this at the time, but taking Righteous Fury off would probably also be ideal so you don’t get threat capped by the other tank and can help contribute to getting past the enrage timer.
The other huge thing everyone needs to watch out for are the Gas Spores that spawn. It’s paramount that everyone in raid gets three Innoculate stacks before the end of the last phase when Festergut exhales and does massive shadow aoe. As a tank you can probably live with 2 stacks but most healers and dps will be one shot or severely hurt with less than the full three stacks.
So whoever in melee has the Spore needs to stand directly under the boss so it gets spread to the tanks as well. Dps and tanks should also try to stand as close to Festergut as possible without accidentally turning him around or (in dps’s case) being considered in front of the boss and then creating parries.
Eventually this fight boils down to staying alive long enough through Innoculates to beat the enrage timer. We were riding the timer pretty hard for most of the night but on the last attempt I think the execution clicked for everyone and we eventually killed him with 20 seconds left on the clock.
Tonight is Rotface, and pending a fix of the Putricide encounter I guess that’ll be it for the week aside form 10mans. So far, so good. I like what I’ve seen and I’m a huge fan of the ramped up challenge factor and love how well my guild has been tackling it thus far.
It was a great experience. Finally getting through those doors and seeing all the new things that Blizzard wanted to throw at us. I also take a lot of personal pleasure in the fact that we fought two fights in a row where the ranged have to run around like madmen- avoiding all sorts of nasty things (and certain death) while trying to keep their DPS up…meanwhile the melee are sitting still, hands off our mouses, silently running through our rotation with nary a worry in the world.
“Tonight is Rotface, and pending a fix of the Putricide encounter I guess that’ll be it for the week aside form 10mans.”
I’m confused. Is Putricide broken right now?
@Rhidach
6 January 2010 at 2:03 pm #
Yeah, apparently you can only have one Abom over the course of the entire fight. In 10man this isn’t an issue, but in 25 you need more than one and will be overrun by oozes/slimes in short order. According to wowprogress, no one has killed him on 25man yet.
According to the blues, one abom on 25 is the encounter working as intended.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/12/22418852670-professor-putricide.html
@Rhidach
6 January 2010 at 3:24 pm #
@Marisuzek: I just saw that, thank you for commenting with the link!
This is a most interesting development. And terrifying.
Blue post says it’s intended.
We ran a pair of 10s last night to warm up to the mechanics, and found 10s to be difficult enough, especially Putricide, that we took all-mains for the 25man run, instead of the original “half alts/half mains” plan that we’d been assuming we’d continue running. Festergut and Rotface actually seemed easier in 25s than 10s. I think on Thursday, we’ll run the alt-raid through, and spend it’s attempts on Putricide25 first, and make sure the mains have the best possible chance to kill it. If nothing else, it’ll give the abomination-guy some extra time to practice.
Putricide 10-man, though, was a phenomenal encounter, it’s miles ahead of anything else in ICC so far, it was amazing fun. It took us 6 pulls to down it, with a pretty well synergized group in full 258+, though, I think it might be overtuned for it’s intended audience. Still fantastically enjoyable. There’s a little bit of something for everyone to worry about.
Wow, that last blog thing, I forgot to click it off, it’s just a forum-post from our website. Sorry about that.
@Rhidach
6 January 2010 at 3:35 pm #
No prob, Meloree. I removed it for you.
Hi, and GZ on kill!
I see you go firstly for T10 gear instead of “emblem” gear (like back, belt…) any special reason for that?
I was healing last night on Festergut, and it seemed to me like a fight which could use bonus armor from emblem gear more than from T10?
soul
The Valkyr adds in the big hallway were comedy gold. There were 3 copies of healers keeping the valkyr up with me telling people to switch to adds. Sadly no one did. By the time I died there were 4 or 5 copies of me, 7 of our priest who was casting 80k flash heals, a few of our hunters. It was quite a long train that chased our hunter back into the hallway.
Stinky and Precious were also fun. We went in cold on trash so I was trying to kite the skele’s away from Precious fearing she would eat them and gain power.
Festergut was almost childs play with me tanking first then using Hand of Sacrifice on our warrior and bubbling. It removed the stack of Gastric Bloat so when our warrior got gibbed at 3 stacks I was able to pick Fester back up and we downed him.
We ran into a wall last night with Rotface. At first I started out on Rot with our warrior kiting slimes. This was not working out well as he was having problems ranging away from the big ooze and getting killed quickly. We switched to me kiting as I could range them a bit with horeck, exorcism, shield, and kite em through consecrate. Our best attempt we got Rotface to 24% or so. Biggest problems were people not properly kiting their oozes to me. Several times I had 2 big oozes up and one huge fail there was one blowing up with 2 running around.
Hopefully tonight we beat him and get to start attempts at the prof.
I apologize for posting in the wrong thread, but I’m trying to find a post you put up once regarding an alternate strategy for Saurfang where you had everyone stack except the hunters and a boomkin or something like that. Is the post gone or am I just totally blind? I wanted to test out this strat in our 25 since we seem to be having issues with the bests kitting the melee too often. Or am I just totally crazy and giving your credit for some other blog I read once?
@Rhidach
7 January 2010 at 1:13 pm #
That wasn’t me, sorry!
If you’re having issues with beasts, what we do is each ranged has a beast assigned to them, and when the beasts spawn the ranged start wailing in theirs and pull it away from melee, and then proceed to kite it. Melee do not do any multi-target attacks while beasts first spawn.
Damn, I suppose I just read so much of your stuff all the time I’ve started to blur everything I read into this blog. lol Thanks anyways!