Thursday, January 7, 2010

ICC10: Rotface


Where Festergut is more about raw dps, Rotface is all about add control and survival. Everyone in the raid should focus more on handling adds and staying alive than anything else.

MAKEUP:
  • 1 Main Tank
  • 1 Kiter (preferably with taunt and ranged attacks)
  • 2-3 healers
  • 5-6 DPS; useful if one is a hunter for ranged misdirect
  • at least one person capable of dispelling disease
A lot of this fight is on the ooze kiter's shoulders. They must kite some very finicky oozes around the room through a mine-field of slime pools without being in melee range of them, and it is these oozes that will most likely cause a raid's wipes. It is recommended that the ooze-kiter be a DK or Pally, since they have a larger selection of ranged abilities; a warrior or druid tank will likely need lots of assistance from misdirects. A hunter (ranged misdirect) will be extremely useful in this fight to ensure that a tank with weaker ranged abilities--such as a warrior or bear--will maintain higher threat than the healers.



OOZES:
Oozes spawn when a player's Mutated Infection disease debuff wears off or is dispelled. They initially spawn as little oozes.

Little oozes:
  • Are immune to taunt.
  • Have a ton of threat against their host (pulling aggro off is pretty much unlikely). This threat is there regardless of whether the disease was dispelled or allowed to tick itself out.
  • Have a (relatively) light damage aura.
  • Occasionally throw painful, evil slime puddles at people that you want to avoid ever standing in.
  • Are supposed to want to go merge with another nearby ooze, but sometimes they just want to beat on you instead for a while.

Dispelling:

Whether your raid chooses to dispel the disease debuff immediately or wait until the player is out of the raid before dispelling is up to your raid, but I recommend dispelling it immediately.

Before it is dispelled, the debuff has a significant DoT damage on the target while also reducing healing received by 50%, and quite often this player will be caught in slime floods, slime sprays, and other oozes' damage auras. The AoE damage each ooze causes to the raid when the debuff is dispelled is significantly easier to heal through than the debuff itself. It can also make ooze merges happen more quickly as the player is then running to the big ooze with a little ooze already in tow, rather than needing to stop and wait for it to be dispelled.

It is highly suggested that, if your raid wants to control when the infection is dispelled, your priests avoid using abolish disease due to it lasting as a cleansing buff on the target that could dispel a successive disease when you aren't ready for it.


Positioning:
The first player to get an infection in the fight should move to the side of the room and tank their little ooze themselves until a second person gets an infection. The second person will move over to join the first, and they'll coax their oozes to merge together into one big ooze, while at the same time trying to be move away from that big ooze before it slaughters one of the two of them and the tank tries to pick it up.

NOTE: Mages should avoid using mirror images on this fight. Recently there has been a bug where mirror images will cause little oozes to choose a different player--such as your main tank--to aggro themselves on, making it very difficult to merge them with the big ooze or just generally confusing your raid.

Anyone with a new little ooze should move it out of the raid immediately and coax it to merge with the big ooze:


Big oozes:
  • Are tauntable.
  • Have a normal threat table: they go after the healers first.
  • Do about 45-50k damage in a single hit to a non-tank.
  • Kiter should avoid ever being hit by them, too.
  • Should be kited around the outer edge of the room while the kiter avoids melee contact.
  • Are immune to concussion-shot/mind-flay's slowing effects.
  • Get bigger and angrier each time they get another small ooze added to them.
  • Explode when they contain 6 little oozes; this drops more slime puddles on random players.
  • Combine stacks when they merge with other big oozes.

Formation:

Any two little oozes can merge to form a big ooze: be aware of this when there are multiple little oozes running around the raid, because any newly formed big ooze will have a normal threat table and gun down your highest-threat healer immediately. Avoid letting them merge near healers, and pick them up before they kill someone. I highly suggest having a hunter misdirect a newly formed big ooze onto the offtank.


Kiting:
The kiter should pull these big oozes around the outer wall of the room, avoiding slime sprays and slime pools as much as possible. The kiter will need to watch EVERYTHING going on involving who has a new little ooze and where the oozes are, while avoiding getting ever hit by one of the big oozes, while also making sure they don't loose threat to the healers. They will probably be one of the most vocal people in the raid as they give out instructions regarding new merges, misdirects, loss of aggro, changes in expected kite path, additional damage they may need heals for (slime floods), and when to expect an explosion!


Destruction:
Big oozes are destroyed one of two ways:
  • By containing 6 little oozes, the ooze will then explode, sending a deadly rain of globs rocketing through the air at the raid like a missile strike. When the ooze explodes, it does an emote, and the entire raid should relocate themselves to a spot away from where anyone else had previously stood: moving towards the far wall is a good option. Do not return until the globs have landed, as they do take time to cruise through the air.
  • By merging big oozes with each other. When it was first released on live, it resulted in the oozes simply canceling each other out, which is how many early achievements were earned. Within the first week, the oozes had been fixed to "merge correctly," instead combining their stacks as they merge into one single big ooze. These will still explode when they reach maximum capacity.


EVERYTHING ELSE:
Around the oozes, you have to deal with these other things:
  • Putricide slime-flooding 1/4 of the circular room with a relatively mild poison slime (you can run through it if necessary, but avoid doing so as much as possible, especially if you are not the kiter). If you are not the kiter, avoid standing in it; if you are trying to merge a little ooze with an ooze that is currently in a flood, wait for the flood to dissipate or for the ooze to reach the edge of the flood. The flood does not reach the center of the room.
  • Every ooze has its own general damage aura hurting everyone around them.
  • VERY BAD slime puddles cast by the oozes at particular people; you want to always avoid touching them because they hurt a lot more than the room flood. They hurt more because they slow you more, and their damage/slow effect extends 6 yards out from their graphic. Avoid them, they are death traps.
  • Rotface himself will periodically spin towards someone and cast a slime spray aoe. Anyone in the line of fire should move away; the spray reaches all the way to the far wall. Sometimes it will face people who are trying to merge oozes along the wall. It's a pain. Most of the raid should cluster up on Rotface himself, and while they are damaging him, watch where he's facing and move out of the way when he casts the spray in your direction. Your raid may find it helpful to have a single dps dedicated purely to calling out that slime spray is about to be cast.


HEALERS:
It can be two-healed, though if you're having trouble, you can try three. Assign one healer to the MT and one healer to infections/ooze tanks, as their primary heal targets. A resto druid will work best on the ooze tanks due to being able to move while casting many of their HoTs and being able to put HoTs on the players to counteract the ticking damage auras, and swiftmend for unexpected chunks. Of course, both healers will need to cross-heal and keep up the entire raid for incidental damage as much as possible, and cover for each other when one of them gets infection themselves.



SOFT-ENRAGE:

Once Rotface reaches 30% health, the infections will start coming faster and faster. Bloodlust/major cooldowns should be saved for after 30%. There will then be more people with infections running around and, once dispelled, there will be many more oozes running around, which can easily form new big oozes inside the raid. Healers should be especially alert of new big oozes forming near them, and moving away from them, becoming kiters themselves until they are picked up. The raid will be taking significantly more damage from all of the oozes' auras, but it is still easier to heal a cleansed raid with no healing-reduction debuffs and a lot of oozes than one with a ton of infections. The original live release of this boss used the 25-man spawn timer on infections, something that has since been corrected. It should now be easier. Just avoid panicking, keep your heads, and survive!

This is the point in time where a raid is most likely to merge big oozes together to cancel each other out, if they aren't already trying for the achievement.

Burn through this last 30% as quickly as possible; if your raid's cleanser dies, be sure a new cleanser picks up the job.

Good luck!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Achem. And where are the awesome drawings?

*yearns for little broccoli*

Kae said...

lol... added one for the kite/oozeses!

Anonymous said...

Grats Kae!

Lath said...

I'm still laughing at the amazing drawings of the bosses! I love it :)

Kae said...

He's LUMPY! :D

Anonymous said...

Rotface soft enrange is not health based but time based, 3:35 is when you will start hitting the 6 second infections. Shooting for a 4 minute kill time is best less you become overrun by oozes.