Last night my brilliant idea was to fall back to 10mans and kill Rotface and Putricide so we can convert that experience to easier kills in the 25man. Unfortunate kink in the works: Rotface is really hard in 10man. At least he was for us last night.
Yeah that’s three Big Oozes. We had some spectacular wipes.
Anyway, strike my earlier statement. The boss wasn’t hard, we just weren’t doing the fight correctly. The execution was off, I was trying to juggle too many things at once, people didn’t yet get the hang of dealing with infections.
So tonight we’re going into 25man with no 10man kill, though a wealth of knowledge on how badly the fight can go. So, that’s a plus.
I wish I could decisively say “ok do the encounter this way”, but I can’t. Instead I’m going to take a page from my own book when we were learning Anub’arak, and tell you what not to do when offtanking Rotface.
1. Don’t run in a circle around the room
The tanks rupture in a random pattern, with the only constant being that a quadrant won’t flood twice before the other three flood once. Kiting counter clockwise around the room isn’t going to cut it. Clockwise, neither. You need to half kite; then, once a quadrant clears, bee line for it.
2. Don’t stop moving when kiting the big ooze
The big ooze moves slowly, but not so slowly you can RP walk away from it. You do not want to ever be in melee range of the big ooze, so don’t come to a halt letting someone catch up to you. The room is a circle, your raiders should be smart enough to run a straight line from where they were to where you will be, not try to follow you as you run around the room.
3. Don’t run through a tank spill unless your Hand of Freedom is off cooldown
The spill will eventually slow your movement speed by 50%. You don’t want to run through it unless HoF is available. Otherwise the ooze will significantly catch up to you.
4. Don’t run in front of the slime spray cone
When you see that slime spray emote or DBM warns you it’s coming, check your position and make sure you’re not directly in the line of fire.
5. Triage the dangers of the fight correctly
In terms of deadliness: big ooze melee > running big ooze through raid > running over the tank spill. When presented with the necessity to quickly get across the room and one of those three has to happen, always choose running over the spill if (like said above) your HoF is off cooldown. If not, then skirt the edge of the spill (yes, giving aoe damage to the raid closest to the big ooze, though it won’t hurt that much) until you are safe.
Rotface is a rough fight, fraught with perils galore. As the offtank, yours is the hardest job of the fight–all the responsibility of the raid’s success rests on your plated shoulders. And if you’re the MT, I hate you. Enjoy your sammich!
I dont know if this makes you feel any better, but we killed Rotgore in 4 attempts on 25, and I spent TWO hours wiping on 10 man before killing him in a blaze of glory close to 1 am. I personally think the 10 man was MUCH MUCH harder than the 25. Also, if your dps is off, you will get overwhelmed by little oozes, so if you are dealing with much more than two Big oozes, you need your dps to step it up a bit.
GL on 25 man…
.-= Wrathy’s last blog ..Thoughts on Rotface and Festergut =-.
Actually, that does make me feel a lot better. Thanks Wrathy.
It took my ten man 12 attempts to down Rotface. There was some frustration because while they’re wiping on him, I’m eating banana split pie in california. On the other hand, they have the plagueworks achievement now, and I don’t.
But anyways, the soft enrage is the issue. It’s much more severe on ten man because the oozes spawn at the same rate in both ten and 25, so when you wind up with three DPSers out trying to kite their stuff, that’s half your DPS gone on ten man, but only 1/6th on 25 man.
.-= The Renaissance Man’s last blog ..Sorry Rhidach, but… GREAT NEWS EVERYBODY! =-.
At least you learned about the encounter… :)
.-= Gravity’s last blog ..Unholy, not so bad? =-.
We had 4-5 wipes on 10 man before we figured out the dispell timing then it was cake. 25 man was a one shot and is much simpler then the 10 man.
However I had no issue just running around the room in a large circle kiting the big ooze around so not sure why you mentioned not to do that?
@aderalia: It’s more to avoid the tank spills which will slow you down. We’re doing 25man tonight so I’m heartened by everyone saying 25man is way easier.
@Christopher: No kidding! Well, that explains the 15% hp stealth nerf Rotface was hit with on 10man.
http://rhida.ch/wp-admin/edit-comments.php#comments-form
Contrary to almost all other encounters in ICC (where 25-man has significantly lower success rates), World of Logs parses so far show that Rotface is having a *higher* kill rate in 25-man; 9% vs 6%. That may mean that, compared to most other fights, 10-man Rotface is giving 10-man groups more difficulty than 25-man groups.
Comparisons:
Festergut 10: 1382 Success, 5281 wipes (21.6% success)
Festergut 25: 1860 Success, 18025 wipes (9.4% success)
Rotface 10: 706/11901 (5.6% success)
Rotface 25: 1517/16538 (8.4% success)
Putricide 10: 206/3395 (5.7% success)
Putricide 25: 8/1627 (.5% success)
“One of these things is not like the other…”
Rotface was bugged; he was throwing infections at the 25 man rate, not the 10 man rate. It is supposed to have been fixed.
http://www.worldofraids.com/wow-blue-tracker/us-forums/22418863610-rotface-nerfed.html
BTW, This is becoming a pattern and making me wonder if Blizzard is even testing the 10 man versions, since Marrogar was doing 25 man melee damage in 10 man before he got fixed.
Not having seen Rotface in either version, I am wondering about this off tank thing. So if the off tank is kiting the oozes and not actually able to melee them, would a Ret paladin do a better job? A Ret can also run Righteous Fury and also has two taunts.
I bring this up because of of Hofflerand’s Ret PvP post here:
http://ferarro.blogspot.com/2009/11/specing-for-pvp-ret-bit-more.html
He describes a Ret’s ability to stay mobile and out of melee range of other players. This sounds a whole lot like the utility required of the “off tank” for Rotface. This is just me putting two things together in my head and I admittedly never Ret and only tank heroics (Patchwerk 10 last night for the weekly doesn’t count, does it?).
@ Joe Ego.
If a ret pally even get’s hit 1 time he’s done. So prolly not a great idea.
This makes me not feel so bad about our many wipes this week. Persevere and we shall triumph. OT’s Unite!
Downed Rotface/10 after 4 attempts I believe…..
Our strat basically made me feel like a god…..I was incharge of kiting and cleansing,,,,being an OG is hard sometimes ;P
10 man infection timing was apparently bugged for rotface. It was set to 25 man speed resulting in more infections near the end of the fight. To compensate Blizz has nerfed his health in the 10 man version. My guild saw the hotfix almost live. Wipe with him at 8.4 million health, get back in and he has 7.4. It left us scratching our heads for a bit. Of course once he lost that 1 million health we killed him first shot without a death.
http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/3-3-balance-adjustments-rotface-%2810%29-nerf-blue-posts/
And yes, poisons at end were insane…This is probably my fave fight in WoTLK b/c the sense of accomplishment at the end, not to mention all the ego stroking that insued after poisons started blowing up and i was still kiting and quick to cleanse
Why did they nerf his health, rather than simply fix the Mutated Infection timer? The problem here is that the 10 man timer is the same as the 25 man timer. So to fix it, they give him less health? Seems like a lazy fix to me. I wonder if Phelps is correct, and Blizz is barely even testing the 10 man fights?
Well, thanks to this I feel so much better Rhidach. After our inglorious defeat on Tuesday night (which was, all not-working-as-intended aside, my failure as an offtank) it’s nice to know that some things were not working as intended. I don’t know if the stealth health nerf was necessary, but if it is, in fact, true that his infection spawn rate was higher than it should have been, it explains why we so often would end up with a 2nd big slime spawning. Sure, it was do to our poor play, but we’d have been given a little wider mistake latitude. We would routinely get him down to about 50% before things would start going out of control for whatever reason (apparently he speeds up the rate at which he infects people as the fight goes on). I may be incorrect in this, but do the large 1/4-of-the-room slime pools actually slow you, or just the very small (and easily avoidable) slime pools that the big slime shoots out in front of you when kiting them? I tried to avoid the larger pools whenever possible but for the sake of ease of kiting, was just planning on running right though them in our next encounter because it was preferable to the alternatives.
One shot Festergut and then wiped for 2 hours on Rotface until the morale hit a point where I had to call it. Seemed like right after the first big ooze explosion we’d get 2 or 3 small oozes at the same time and I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what happened.
Then I realized some people were failing to get their small ooze into the big ooze right away which is what led to left-over oozes and…. yeah.
If only there was one more raid night this week….!
I asked the same thing to Wrathy – but I’d like both of your thoughts:
Question regarding the Big Ooze – will Judgment of Justice slow down the Big Ooze?
And do you think its worth specing into Pursuit of Justice? (I have 2 points in Conviction that don’t seem to be doing much good except giving me enough points to get to Crusade)
I’m the OT (paladin) that has to kite and cleanse the Big Ooze. Did it for the first time last night, and while it required some skills, it seems like is should not too difficult however, my raiders with Mutated Infection keep running too far behind me and I either stop or try to do a U-turn to get the oozes to merge – which is when things go bad. I figure with Judgment of the Justice (slowing down the Big Ooze) plus Pursuit of Justice (speeding me up) – I should have some more ability to move around while kiting. Thoughts?
As far as I can tell, the Ooze doesn’t speed up, so Judgement of Justice seems unnecessary. I may be wrong on that, though. Definitely I would recommend speccing PoJ. The speed boost is HUGE for us considering how poor our mobility is.
Don’t do u-turns to get to your raiders, the Big Ooze hurts way too much. Your raiders need to be smart enough to realize the room is a circle and so they should run a straight line from their position to when you’ll be so they can drop their ooze off.
This post was hugely helpful to me my guild and I think I mentioned on twitter that it was linked in our guild forums. I actually had it up in the background familiarizing myself with How To Kite According To Righeous Defense while listening to vent between kills.
My guild successfully killed him on 10m after a few wipes (4?) learning how not to do things.
For example, I learned that when I (the OT/kiting tank) get mutated infection, I can’t just sigh in relief that someone else is saved the inconvenience of running over to me & cleanse myself & expect Big Ooze to catch up. Ooops. He won’t. After learning how to do that wrong (hallo wipe) I dealt with my own Mutated Infections from then on out by popping DP and U turning to bring Little Ooze over to Big Ooze.
And damnit, yes, Big Ooze can hit the OT from clear across the freakin room. Once or twice I tried to get cute and hit him with a Judgement. He was not amused and kicked my ass.
I lost Big Ooze to healing aggro several times. Is that normal? We 2 healed it, and our pally healer had RF on, but I wasn’t expecting it at all. I tried to lay a bit of threat on it at the start and hit it with AS every time it came off cooldown, but occasionally it didn’t seem to be enough and Big Ooze would decide he wanted some heals for lunch.
I’m glad to hear it was a big help for you, and I’m totally pumped you guys got him down!
Forgot to link my twitter above… neat trick, that.
.-= Anafielle’s last blog ..anafielle: @That_Ghoul_Ava Nope, I have to work too. Was surprised to hear it is a holiday. /shrug =-.