Tips for Festergut and Rotface

Festergut and Rotface suck. They are hard bosses and require each and every raider to give 110%. Each player needs to maximize the performance of their role and minimize anything that hurts the overall team effort (especially avoidable damage!).

Here are some dopey little tricks you can use to bring your A game to each fight:

1. Use a slow dps weapon for Festergut

Considering how tight the enrage timer can get, dps from every member of your group matters, and as Paladins we have the luxury and privilege of contributing more than our fair share of tank dps to the pile.

While Festergut may hit hard, he only does during a small window of the fight. Assuming you have the defense to spare, don’t be afraid to use a slow dps weapon (the slower the better) to maximize your damage. The slower your weapon is, the more damage each 5-stack proc from Seal of Vengeance/Corruption will do.

2. When not tanking Festergut, stand behind him

You should be soft-capped for expertise anyway, so to maximize your damage done on this fight, stand behind the boss to avoid causing parries for yourself and the person currently tanking.

3. Make the best use of your Gastric Bloat buff

Let’s combine points one and two. When you hit 9 stacks of Gastric Bloat and get the boss pulled off you, jump behind the boss, cancel Righteous Fury, self-cast Hand of Salvation, pop wings, and go to town.

Doing that in the ten man last night, after my tank switch I ended up pushing little more than 8000 dps. You can see it after that second huge dip in my dps, I slid behind the boss and immediately exploded in damage.

4. Make sure to Judge when kiting the Big Ooze

Judging is an important part of keeping threat on the Big Ooze while kiting. If you’re just shield tossing every 30 seconds you’re going to find the healer aggro riding hard on your heels. So, you definitely need to judge when possible.

The easiest way to manage Judging without getting murdered by being too close to the Ooze is to run ahead of it (as you would normally) until you’re just out of range and the Judgement icon is red on your bar. The millisecond it gets color back, click it/hit the hotkey, unleash your Judge, and then keep moving.

You can also use the range on Judgement to safely gauge your distance from the Big Ooze.

5. Use Seal of Righteousness for Big Ooze kiting

Seal of Righteousness will give you the most threat bang for your buck. Since you won’t be able to get close enough to build a 5 stack, Seal of Vengeance/Corruption is useless. Moreover, Seal of Command is only really good for aoe situations.

Thus, the burden falls on the neglected Seal of Righteousness. Each time you judge with SoR you’ll do more threat than you would judging any other seal.

Tankadin leveling 1-50: speccing the early years

I got an email from one of my WoW-playing friends recently who’s leveling his brother’s paladin in his spare time. He wanted to level by sticking to the dungeon finder tool and initially asked if it made sense to go prot and just farm LFD. I kind of scoffed at the idea and told him just go ret/holy (since he’s a healer usually, it’d be more comfortable for him). Anyway, he emailed me again earlier this week:

so i bucked your suggestion and went prot, because the dungeon queues are literally instant, which i like for my xp/hour
i was thinking – you should write a “how to” for baby prots. like what talents to fill out first, what heirlooms to get, what stats to prefer, pre-divine plea mana strats

And so I shall!

First, a disclaimer: I leveled my tankadin (yes, as prot) during the early days of TBC. Back then we auto-attacked until level 40 and we liked it! … Uphill, both ways. And there was none of this “mounts at 20″ nonsense, we ran ourselves from end of Desolace to the other… and we liked it!

Sidenote: I originally recommended going straight prot all the way, but after discussing it with my colleague Honors on Twitter, I was persuaded to his point of view that it makes more sense to hang out in the Ret tree initially. The reasons why are below in the relevant sections.

Pre-game

There are no tanking heirlooms per se, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use some dps heirlooms to speed up leveling and make you nigh-unkillable in the first chunk of the game. I would recommend grabbing:

Venerable Dal’Rends Sacred Charge (enchanted with Crusade) — 40 EoH
Polished Breastplate of Valor (enchanted with Major Health) — 40 EoH
Polished Spaulders of Valor — 40 Emblems of Heroism
Swift Hand of Justice — 50 Emblems of Heroism

If you want to go the extra mile, and already have it, grab Discerning Eye of the Beast as well. But, don’t go out of your way for it. It’s not critical, just the bonus mana is nice and that would normally be an empty trink slot.

With those items you’ll be ready to level in style. For the other slots though, when you get items from the AH or for quests, always take the highest armor class item with stamina and strength. Those are your two biggest stats (the “of the Bear” item class) and should be the two you focus on gear-wise. Avoid any intellect, mp5, spirit gear. Even though are attacks are technically spells, mana shouldn’t be a big concern for you. And spellpower is garbage, avoid that at all costs.

Levels 1-10

Before you do anything, hie thee to a mailbox and grab all your heirloom items (assuming you sprung for them).

Now, unfortunately, there are no talents at this point in your character’s life. You start off with Devotion Aura, Seal of Righteousness, and Holy Light. Just burn through all the quests and when you hit level 10 you should have your first tanking seal (Righteousness), a judgement spell (Judgement of Light), your first cooldown (Divine Protection), and your extra life (Lay on Hands).

Levels 11-20

10-14 — Benediction (5/5)
15-16 — Improved Judgements (2/2)
17-19 — Heart of the Crusader (3/3)
20 — Seal of Command

At level 14 you get Righteous Defense, your aoe taunt (pulls up to three mobs off a friendly target). At 16 you get Hand of Reckoning, a single-target taunt that does damage (don’t be afraid to use this as an attack when pulling). And, most importantly, at 16 you get Righteous Fury, which you’ll need to hold aggro. Once you get this spell you’re ready to hit the LFD tool with a… er… righteous fury. Lastly, you get Consecrate at level 20, which is key for holding large groups of mobs.

At level 15 you get your first two glyph slots, and for those I’d recommend grabbing Glyph of Judgement and Glyph of Lay on Hands for each.

If you’re tanking dungeons at this point you’ll have to learn how to cope with a limited toolset. Manage pulls by grabbing one add with Hand of Reckoning, judging a second, and then dropping Consecrate. Hopefully the dps you run with will be intelligent enough to know to attack what mob you are attacking. If you lose aggro be sure to quickly pick it back up with either taunt. Be sure to keep Righteous Fury on at all times!

Bless yourself with Might until level 20 when you get Kings, then switch to that.

If you find mana hard to manage, and you’re dealing with lots of downtime, don’t be afraid to judge wisdom. And don’t consecrate for only one mob, because the spell sucks up a huge chunk of mana when you cast it. Consecrate sparingly. However, once you hit 20 and grab Seal of Command, couple that by changing your major glyph to Glyph of Seal of Command. Now every time you judge you’ll gain back 8% of your mana!

Levels 21-29

21-25 — Divine Strength (5/5)
26-27 — Pursuit of Justice (2/2)
28-29 — Conviction (2/5)

At this point we’re just bouncing between the Ret and Prot tree, biding our time until level 30. Enjoy Pursuit of Justice now while you can, you won’t be seeing it again until past 60.

Legel 30: Respec!

Now that we’ve hit level 30, it’s time to hop over to a capital city and ditch our current build so we can reboot as full prot. When you respec, grab these:

10-14 — Divine Strength (5/5)
15-19 — Anticipation (5/5)
20-22 — Improved Righteous Fury (3/3)
23-27 — Toughness (5/5)
28-29 — Improved Devotion Aura (2/3)
30 — Blessing of Sanctuary

Now, the huge, huge new spell at 30 is Blessing of Sanctuary. This becomes your primary tanking blessing for the rest of the game. All the good parts of Kings (stam and strength) coupled with mana return on every block, dodge, or parry and damage reduction to boot. You can’t beat it. This spell will generally negate a lot of your mana concerns and adequately replace Seal of Command.

Another major glyph slot opens at 30, and you can put the Glyph of Consecration in there. That’ll give you a little more return for the massive amounts of mana it costs you to drop a consecrate. Change your first major glyph back to Judgement now that Seal of Command isn’t part of your toolbox anymore.

Levels 31-40

31-33 — Reckoning (3/5)
34 — Devotion Aura (3/3) [this is putting the last point in there]
35-37 — One-Handed Weapon Specialization (3/3)
38-39 — Sacred Duty (2/2)
40 — Holy Shield

Just a note on the 3/5 Reckoning: generally, 3 points in Reckoning will be enough to ensure optimal uptime in aoe tanking situations. The last two points have diminishing returns, we can better use them elsewhere.

At 34 you can get Divine Shield and thus the ability to bubble hearth. Use it well.

And at 40 you get Holy Shield, which is awesome for tanking dungeons. That extra 30% block means more mana from Blessing of Sanctuary, less damage taken, and more threat when Holy Shield does damage to a mob. You’ll find aoe tanking becomes a walk in the park at this point.

Levels 41-50

41-43 — Ardent Defender (3/3)
44 — Spiritual Attunement (1/2)
45-47 — Combat Expertise (3/3)
48-49 — Redoubt (2/3)
50 — Avenger’s Shield

Two awesome talents at this point. Avenger’s Shield is when pulling gets really easy. No longer do you pull one mob then run in to intercept the rest, now you can hit three mobs at once and build a huge pile of initial threat. And with Spiritual Attunement, you’ll find mana is nearly infinite in dungeons.

You also get a minor glyph slot at 50, which you should put Glyph of Sense Undead into. At this level you’ll probably be spending a lot of time in the Plaguelands and the undead-filled dungeons there in. Coupled with your new Holy Wrath spell, you’ll find aoe tanking undead mobs is where tankadins truly shine.

Contine to Part 2: Levels 51-80. >>

Stomping Putricide’s kids

Sorry for the non-post on Wednesday. I really didn’t have the time to get a post together, and moreover lacked anything interesting to blog on. So in the end I did you all a favor sparing you some dopey half-arsed meditation on what’s a better technique for jumping during Keristrasza. I prefer the occasional twirl, myself, but that’s neither here nor there.

So anyway, Tuesday’s raid was fairly standard: blew through the first four bosses in an hour and then went into the Plagueworks to down Festergut and Rotface. Unfortunately, ever since Saurfang the raid was afflicted by some pretty nasty server lag. On our last attempt on Festergut I was getting on ability off every six seconds or so. It was a mess. Eventually we called it in frustration, the enrage timer being too tight to beat with the hurdles thrown up in front of us.

Last night we assembled on time and headed in with the determination to kill Festergut fast and get some serious work down on Rotface. At the time though I was filled with doubt because many of our top dps couldn’t make it that night. Festergut’s enrage loomed eerily over the potential of our raid.

Sure enough, however, my pessimism was proven wrong and we kill Festergut on the third attempt (after two bad attempts trying to get people to stack/spread innoculations better). And not only that, but the raid dps last night was only about 800 less than it was the first night we killed him. A stinging and welcome rebuke to my negativity, for sure.

Eyes on the prize — let’s kill Rotface

Now that Festergut was dead again (last week: not a fluke) we could focus on the latest roadblock in our progression, Rotface.

One of the biggest issues we had during Rotface last week was, as we determined after, the fight was going on way too long. Our best attempt was seven minutes long, and that was with him at 4%. Ideally, he should be dead by 6 minutes, because that’s the point when infections go out at an insane rate, to the point where the fight is unsustainable to continue.

Remember: infections increase over time, and are not tied to Rotface’s hp, so bring the pain fast and hard is essential.

Part and parcel to our poor coordination last week was, every time there was a slime explosion, everyone just ran for it, usually far away from the boss. This produced raid dps over time that looked like this:

Notice those gigantic sinkholes? That when everyone panicked and ran for it. That’s a huge dps loss to accumulate over time!

Last night the new plan was this: everyone stacks and stands generally on the same side of the boss. So we started with everyone on the left leg (with ranged a little farther back). When there was an explosion, I would call out the cast, and everyone would shift to his right side.

When the Big Ooze begins casting his explosion, he targets where random people were standing at that moment. Coupled with a 2 yard range of the slime rocket damage (once they hit the ground), to negate the threat of the ooze explosions, all everyone needs to do is shift away to the other side of the boss uniformly.

The upside to that change in strat was people could continue dpsing during an explosion with minimal interruption. That gave us this raid dps:

Huge improvement!

After a few attempts working out the kinks and getting everyone used to the new strat, we had an amazing last attempt with expert slime drop offs, quick and efficient shuffling, and exceptional heals. I would occasionally look up at Rotface during my circling of the room, and noticed that he was suddenly at 10%. At this point the infections really started to pick up, and once it got to 5% people just went in to dps and I joined them, being vigilant that if any Big Oozes popped up in the middle I’d grab it and run for it. But 5%-0 took the blink of an eye, and Rotface dropped easily.

An awesome turn around from last week when we were having huge issues on Rotface. It’s always heartening to see that sometimes you just need a strategy change to seal the deal.

I don’t know if everyone was actually expecting to kill Rotface because we weren’t really ready for Putricide. No one knew the strat, had seen him in 10 man, or anything else that would make this a modicum more easy on us.

Despite the 10 minute break we all took to watch the Tankspot video, we basically went in blind, which was kind of fun in a masochistic way. We burned 5 attempts getting him down to 70% or so on our best shot. Lots of work to do there for sure, but whatever. It’ll happen in due time.

For now I’ll focus on the positive: Rotface down.

Bryntroll change nerfs our enchants

Ah, Blizz, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, eh?

Bryntroll was proccing too much for Unholy DKs and Retribution Paladins we were told, specifically in the latter’s case because refreshing Holy Vengeance (or Blood Corruption) was making the axe proc.

So Blizz changes it so Holy Vengeance/Blood Corruption cannot proc the weapon anymore, and at the same time makes it so those two effect applications cannot proc weapon enchants anymore. This was probably unintentional, because I don’t think there was a major outcry on Ret enchant uptimes. But, the fact remains.

Sidenote: I wonder if this will reduce the uptime on Rune of the Fallen Crusader for dps Unholy DKs?

Nonetheless, unintended consequences abound. Of course as anytime something affects Ret, we are inadvertently hit as well. This change now means Mongoose and Blade Warding have significantly shorter uptimes.

Theck crunched the numbers over at Maintankadin and came up with (for hit/exp capped tanks) a drop from 61% to 42% for Mongoose and 44% to 31% for Blade Warding. The numbers are worse, of course, if you’re neither hit nor expertise capped, which you probably will not be in a survivability-minded gear set.

The aftermath

Does this change how we approach enchants at all? A little. According to Theck, if you’re enchanting for threat, Accuracy is once again far and away your best choice, with even the lowly Titanium Weapon Chain beating out Mongoose.

If you’re enchanting for survivability, Mongoose is probably still your best bet, because even with a diminished uptime, it’s still the only enchant that gives effective health. Blood Draining is more appealing and worth getting if you’d prefer the gimmicky heal over the cold comfort of occasional dodge and armor.

As for Blade Warding… this benighted enchant went from crap to super crap. Continue to avoid it.

And as for me, I have posts to edit. Sigh.

Months behind, but we still had fun

Late Friday night a couple of us were online and bored. After throwing out a couple of options someone suggested a good old fashion drunk raid, and the responsibility was passed onto me to decide where to go. After some thinking, I decided that we’d finally put to rest an old bugbear that’s haunted us since 3.1: Yogg-Saron.

You might recall from my 2009 in review meme response that my biggest disappointment from the previous year was that the guild never killed Yogg-Saron, mostly because our raid organization was a little more than slightly askew back them. Now, months behind, we were going to do something about it. The plan was to skip worrying about achievements, just go in, kill Yogg, and get out before we all passed out from lateness and alcohol poisoning.

And thus, with a gin and tonic in one hand (yes, I have the drinking taste of an elderly British colonialist) and a mouse in the other, I headed into the titanic prison for the first serious raid in a long time.

This rules were simple, generally following the old Naxx rules: socials after boss kills, when a green dropped whoever won the disenchanted mats could instruct someone else to drink, if you died you drank, if you were b-rezzed you had to finish your drink before you accepted it, if you looted a gray armor/weapon you drank.

We took a pretty direct path, rolling over Flame Leviathan, downing the hard-mode XT somewhat by accident, dropping Kologarn while attempting to solo tank it and skip adds, then killing Auriaya and Hodir (drink if you forgot frost resist gear! … and everyone drinks) in short order. On Thorim we accidentally did the hard mode, even while splitting the group down the middle regardless of how much dps was on either side.

Nordicslayer, usually a dps warrior, and he of not-so-Undying fame, tanked the hallway. Towards the end someone warns him not to stand in the runes being cast and he calls out in vent, half-panicked, “no one said there’d be voidzones!!” He was playing to his reputation, but definitely one of the funnier moments of the night.

The funniest, hands down, though was in Freya’s room. At the entrance, someone of course let go the guild motto of “It’ll only take twenty minutes!” We all laugh and start clearing. Finally, after slogging through all the trash and a somewhat messy job on Freya an achievement pops up. Con-speed-atory, what the hell is that? We all click it and the description comes up: “Defeat Freya within 20 minutes of the first creature you kill in the Conservatory of Life in 10-player mode.”

It actually took 20 minutes. I had to excuse myself so I could go convulse with laughter in the other room. I almost lizzed a little.

Once we got to Mimiron, one of the warriors dc’d and I brought in Falowin to replace him. We engaged Mimiron and were doing great until phase 3 when a shockwave finished off three melee too slow to get out of the way. Thankfully, we probably had twice the raid dps we needed and easily dropped him.

Then is was down to Vezax who was mostly a joke. By this point I was sporting a fantastic buzz and really enjoying the colors and lighting. In short, my tanking was getting somewhat sloppy. But, I was having a great time.

And then we walked over to Yogg-Saron, ran in, and in a huge clusterfrak wiped spectacularly. Like someone flipping a switch, I immediately sobered up in nascent panic.

My dumb, drunken idea was to solo tank it, and that generally worked with a little finesse. By the third attempt I had managed to harness what little buzz remained, allowing me to slow down time and dance among the green clouds under Sara. No one tripped any extra clouds aside from myself right off the bat and we pushed it to Phase 2 nice and clean. Then we moved fluidly as a group, slaying tentacles like a Lovecraftian gardener, and the melee hopped into the brain room when the portals appear. Unlike the first attempt when half the melee couldn’t find a portal and then those that did eventually came our mind controlled, this time they maximized dps on the brain and came out ready to go back in.

The time between brain attacks was minimal because dps was blazing fast, and before I knew it we were on phase 3. I quickly remembered what little I knew about the phase and attempted to pick up all the guardians while keeping my back to Yogg when possible. Falowin counted off health remaining while I jumped into a sanity well and panicked over the flocking numbers of guardians. Suddenly a wave of calm washed over me when the numbers hit the single digits, and finally the Beasts with a Million Maws slumped over. I had killed a god. I was like a Ghostbuster.

Anyway, it was a great night. We had lots of drunken fun, managed to snag a (sadly and hugely late) first kill for the guild, and scored a lot of shards for the guild bank. Most of all it was laid back and truly enjoyable. Something I don’t really get often in the high stress, progression-esque 25mans.

Now, back to the hard modes.

Eh, he can still go rot

Nope, no Rotface-25 kill last night. But we were close. Oh so close. So close I could taste it, and you do not want to know what Rotface tastes like.

Ok, angry poo. There, I said it.

(That would be more funny and less disturbing if you’re familiar with his emotes.)

Anyway, our best attempt we had him at 4.9%, and we spent multiple attempts dancing just about that number.

We were probably approaching the fight wrong too. More interested in the long game, we had six healers and it being a Thursday not our best of the best dps. I think next week we’ll do five healers and try to get him down faster. There’s just no way to hold out once you get to the six-second, crazy Infection time. You just get overwhelmed, it’s a total enrage timer and we were not giving it the proper respect.

I wish there was some magic advice I could offer on this fight, but it’s really just coordination and praying your raiders can pay attention to having Mutated Infections. The dreaded Situational Awareness.

If you have raiders that could walk the Atlantic City beach, step on a hypodermic needle, and not notice… you’re screwed.

Also, Blizz really needs to reduce the hit box on the Big Ooze. That thing could reach across the room and knock me out cold if he wanted to.

All in all it’s nice to have a challenge again. The fact that we have to spend more than one night learning a boss isn’t as soul crushing as I imagined it might be (ToC surely spoiled me). We’ll get him sooner rather than later.

He can go rot

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!

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.

Thanks for the memories Flipmattic

So there I was, last night, home from work and looking to bang out a quick random and get my Emblem of Frost fix before I went out for the night. I queued up and of course the “Your dungeon is ready” dialogue popped immediately (the joys of tanking). I went in and was happy to see the loading screen for Gundrak. One of the quicker ones, and five emblems to boot. In fact, Cold-Comfort calculated the place to have the shortest time-to-emblem ratio.

Anyway, I had high hopes for the place. We all zone in and I look at my grid to see one of the squares was colored green which denoted that person was in a vehicle. A Kor’kron Suppression Turret, apparently, which means he was doing the Assault by Air daily. “I’ll be there in a bit” he says.

Rather than wait for this considerate person, Flipmattic of Nazjatar, I just pulled the first pack and was off to the races. Thankfully, Flipmattic was able to join us in time to roll need on the wand that dropped off the first boss. When someone pointed out that he had a 219 epic wand, he replied “sorry auto-need lol”. Whatever that means.

At this point all signs were strongly pointing to the guy being a ninja, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt that it was an accident and kept going. Second boss down and he didn’t roll need, which at the time reassured me that the previous incident was an accident. It occurs to me in hindsight, though, that he probably couldn’t roll need on whatever the item was, or else he would have.

Third boss down and some cloth items drops and you know that he needed it. At this point the obvious had manifested itself. Everyone just said “lol” in party chat and I scrolled up to Flipmattic’s earlier “auto-need” defense so I could right click on his name and ignore him (and thus never deal with him again). The 15 minutes had yet to elapse, so we couldn’t kick him.

Eck drops and so does his loot. But it was nothing he could ninja, so it went to DE.

Once we got to the last boss and downed him, Flipmattic quickly needed the orb and the other item he could grab, won both, and immediately dropped group.

Indeed.

So, here’s to you, Flipmattic of Nazjatar. With your 2.2k dps in 5/5 232, unenchanted, ungemmed tier 9. Congrats at mastering the art of being a parasite.

Let’s do something about it

With the advent of cross-server instances and the eventual Battle.net upgrades, Blizzard should look into instituting a system like Xbox’s Reputation system. Every WoW player would have five stars and at the end of the instance you could go to a tab on the Dungeon Finder tool and grade the people you just ran with on a scale of 1-5 stars.

There’d be safeguards in place (like if someone was constantly rating people one star and only one star, their contributions would be excluded from the averages) to prevent griefing.

Then when queueing up for a dungeon, the system would first try to match you with people that had the same reputation with you. Considerate, five star folks would only be matched with other five stars (if none available then they get four star people in their group). Contrawise, all the one star ninjaing, gogogo-ing, dropping-during-a-wave-of-mobs-ing jerks would be stuck with others of their ilk.

Sounds like utopia. It’d probably never work.

In the end, it was just a heroic

And I don’t feel that aggrieved over the loss of two dream shards and an orb. I don’t care about the loot; I just care that this little punk is going to keep queueing up and keep pulling this crap on other dungeons. It’s be nice if there was some form of redress against such blatant douchebaggery.

In the meantime, if you’re in the Shadowburn group and get in a random with this guy, just drop group (since we can’t kick right off the bat). Don’t give Flipmattic the satisfaction of carrying him to the end.

Monday, how I loathe thee

Nothing worse than the first day of work after a long holiday weekend.

This long weekend though was pretty productive, though. Not just for Rhidach but for my other alts as well. My shaman, for example, broke past 40 and finally got the ability to dual wield. The play style did an immediate 180 from slightly boring to an awesome flurry of pain. I bought for him two heirloom maces and enchanted both with Crusader, and with Windfury Weapon on both it’s just… awesome. That really is the only word for it.

I need to get this guy to 80 pronto so he can start farming Emblems of Frost–and thereby Primordial Saronite–for Rhidach. The main demands tribute!

Speaking of the Shaman, I’ve did a few random dungeons on him over the weekend. Each had about a ten minute wait, though was seemingly worth it for the chunk of experience and free blue item I would get for completion. The trouble was, of course, getting to the end of the dungeon. I had one really good SM Library run that got me all pumped for the system, but then the next one in the Armory was a disaster. The tank was a Ret pally (not necessarily a bad thing at that low level) whose idea of tanking dropping a consecrate and standing there.

Noticing he was not holding threat at all, I asked why wasn’t Righteous Fury on. “lol never trained it.”

Super.

Anyway, about halfway through the run the hunter finally drove the “tank” away by constantly casting Eyes of the Beast on his pet (a dog named Kitty) and sending it ahead to “scout” thus pulling mobs. So the “tank” quit and eventually I just had someone pass me lead and got Cendra to come in and lay a level 80 smackdown on Herod.

Finally, once I was high enough to be sent to Uldaman I started to see real tanks with–I am aghast–actual SHIELDS on. And what’s more, they use Righteous Fury or Defensive Stance and actually hold threat and try to taunt mobs off you if you accidentally pull. Miracle of miracles.

At least random dungeons break up the monotony of leveling. I can only take so much Monstrous Crab hunting in the Swamp of Sorrows before I feel like I’m going to snap.

As for Rhidach, late Friday night I couldn’t sleep and got pulled into a ToGC-10 pug a guildee was stuck in along with Ildara. Apparently they wiped about 20 times on Twins with the orbs just killing people left and right. After too many wipes a wave of puggers left and I, Cendra, and some others from random guilds came in to fill their spots.

On Twins the strategy they were using was everyone go one color except for one dps whose job was to run around “soaking” the orbs others were not. Maybe that might work, but that one dps focusing on orbs wasn’t working on shields, and we had two heals go off because there wasn’t enough damage to bring the bubble down in time.

After the third wipe on this strategy I proposed what ES does for Twins: two groups evenly split. Tank them in the middle. Of course, we killed them with ease. Superior tanking clearly won the day. Ahem. In any case, one of the Twins dropped the heroic Greaves of the Lingering Vortex, the final piece of gear I was coveting from that raid. And being the only plate tank I had no competition for it.

Then on Anub we wiped a few times since it was like 3 in the morning and everyone was crazy tired. We got it on the third attempt though, and everyone was free to go after being stuck in there for what apparently was hours. Meanwhile I was there for 45 minutes and walked away with a primo piece of gear. Score.

This week looks to be pretty awesome: new wing of ICC (presumably) will make raiding a little more exciting again. Add some spice to the mix of the 1.5 hour clear. Putricide we’re probably going to put off until Thursday so we can do everything in 10man first where the stakes are lower and it’ll give us two days of raid strats to soak up from around the blogosphere/the forums/elsewhere. Totally going to play it safe with the limited attempts counter.