Patch 3.3

[Selby]

EDIT: And they spawn faster as time goes by, which is basically a soft enrage on him - when you get too many slimes, game over. Blow cooldowns from the start, in other words.

Once the big one hits 5 total slimes absorbed, they blow up and the process starts over again (assuming people are running their slime over to the big one properly, naturally ;-) ).

[Gobbeldygook]

A night of heart-breaking 5% wipes on festergut-25.  Totally doable for our guild (to absolutely everyone's shock), but I still think it's going to get moderately nerfed sooner rather than later.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Putricide...destroyer of pugs.

Got him after on 8th attempt in 10man while my guilds other group couldn't and they were technically the better geared one.  Trying on 25 as I post but it's looking really rough. I don't see pugs ever getting this guy without a nerf.

[Merusk]

Once the big one hits 5 total slimes absorbed, they blow up and the process starts over again (assuming people are running their slime over to the big one properly, naturally ;-) ).

The explosion is a bit buggy, at least in my run.  Both a rogue and I saw the exploding drops hit hte ground and go 'ka-blooey'  We then ran in to begin dpsing again, and died 2 secs later to explosion damage.  Wtf.

The "running over to the offtank WHEN you get injected, not after the slime spawns" thing is also apparently beyond the comprehension of our ranged DPS.  To be fair, a few melee are guilty as well, since the tank wound-up consecrating a couple onto him throughout the night. However. but every single attempt saw one ranged standing there until it spawned, then running it through the healers or the offtank's healer, killing or majorly injuring them.

[Selby]

The explosion is a bit buggy, at least in my run.  Both a rogue and I saw the exploding drops hit hte ground and go 'ka-blooey'  We then ran in to begin dpsing again, and died 2 secs later to explosion damage.  Wtf.

Yes.  From what I gather it is like a missile explosion (similar to the faceless ones in Old Kingdom) that starts to fire (after the explosion) and then hits some time afterward.  Supposedly it won't home in on anyone except the off-tank, but in our experience it did anyways, which made it a complete bitch to heal through or deal with.

[Soulflame]

A night of heart-breaking 5% wipes on festergut-25.  Totally doable for our guild (to absolutely everyone's shock), but I still think it's going to get moderately nerfed sooner rather than later.

To reiterate (Hi Mode!) we're to the point where replacing two low DPS, or one healer, will get the job done.  Our best effort got him to 2.5 million.  Our top DPS (a rogue, of course, of course) did 2.9 million.  I think (no logs as of yet) our bottom four dps may have done 2.9 million combined.  Replace two of them with DPS that can produce 2.0 million over the course of the fight, or hell, three of them with people who can do 1.5 million, and it's a done deal.  Now where to find them... back to recruiting and more benching.     Better raid stacking would probably help as well, but again, more recruiting and benching, plus bring the class not the player, which supposedly runs against Blizzard's philosophy.

The good news is all the practice we put in on 25 paid off on 10.  We'd have oneshot the fight, but the first tank grabbed him back before his debuff fell off, he blew up at 10 stacks, and that was that.  Second try went flawlessly.  Talk about doing it wrong though.  You're supposed to practice in 10s for the srs bznz 25s!   

[Fabricated]

We got Festergut-10, barely. Rotface we got to ~45% a few times before we called it for the night. We didn't really have our DPS A-Team to be honest and the healing wasn't that great. Also the small oozes were buggy as fuck and kept running towards the people who cleansed the disease rather than the person who had the disease.

Festergut needs a bit of tank-damage nerfing and Rotface needs to just work better.

[Selby]

Festergut needs a bit of tank-damage nerfing and Rotface needs to just work better.

I healed Festergut on my druid last night in 10-m and it is a VERY tightly tuned fight.  We could get him to 700-800k out of 9800k several times and he enraged, which is quite frustrating, even with bloodlust.  Our top DPS was doing 5800 and the remainders were in the high 4ks with a shadowpriest that kept tossing the occasional heal (we told him to be a good DPSer and sit back and let the healers do their job and yell at them when they failed ;-) ) who was giving us 3.5k.  To comfortably have that fight, every DPS needs to do 5k+ and to just barely get there, 4500 or so.  Our healing numbers showed all 3 of us were healing in the 4k HPS range the entire fight and when the 3rd spore came out it required all 3 of us to keep the tank alive spamming everything we had.  This is a fight where DPS is a major contributor as much as healing is, and everyone HAS to bring their A-game or they may as well not even bother coming.  One person not a good player or not raid aware and you've got nothing but wipes for your night.

Rotface most people on my server are not interested in working on because of how certain things just don't seem to work that well (which may be intended).  We worked on him and I am fairly confident if we had better healers we could take him down (we could get him to almost 50% consistently).

[Fabricated]

If your DPS are doing anything under ~5.4k-ish you're not getting it done unless you try 2-healing it. He flopped over right on the enrage with everyone in my group pulling 5.7-6.2k. This was however with me (one of the tanks) and a DPS getting a battle res. The seconds lost on that could be added in so I imagine had everyone stayed up the whole fight and the druids didn't have to stop what they were doing to revive someone we'd have gotten him ~20 seconds off the enrage timer.

The tank damage is ridiculous. I had to start rotating CDs at 2 inhales and I'm in full 245 gear or better. Good fucking luck to strict 10-man only guilds that don't have TOGC on farm.

[Selby]

I had to start rotating CDs at 2 inhales and I'm in full 245 gear or better. Good fucking luck to strict 10-man only guilds that don't have TOGC on farm.

Exactly.  Our run was mostly composed of alts from some more serious raid guilds, and everyone was doing pretty well (except that one shadowpriest).  We 1-shot everything else up to that and then worked on him for 2 hours.  It was good practice to see the fight mechanics when they work, but yeah, unless your guild is hardcore enough to have everything on farm and have done hard modes of the rest, good luck getting this one down.  Supposedly Blizzard likes the new content this way.

[Sheepherder]

Did you completely miss the part where the encounter corrects it's difficulty downwards after a number of resets?  This is not your time, you are not hardcore / geared enough.

[Paelos]

I had to start rotating CDs at 2 inhales and I'm in full 245 gear or better. Good fucking luck to strict 10-man only guilds that don't have TOGC on farm.

Exactly.  Our run was mostly composed of alts from some more serious raid guilds, and everyone was doing pretty well (except that one shadowpriest).  We 1-shot everything else up to that and then worked on him for 2 hours.  It was good practice to see the fight mechanics when they work, but yeah, unless your guild is hardcore enough to have everything on farm and have done hard modes of the rest, good luck getting this one down.  Supposedly Blizzard likes the new content this way.

Their raiding policy is to set the bar ridiculously high for people that can only function is they completed heroics in the past patch, and then they tune it back down after a couple weeks. That's part of the reason why I didn't even bring my 25 group into the place until last week.

[K9]

My guild is far from hardcore, and I'd say Festergut is tuned about right for us. It is definitely a step up in the sense that this isn't a fight you can just cheese with any raid comp; but you can make it a lot easier for yourself.

Having only three people at range helps, as it cuts down DPS time lost to movement. We had out holy paladin sat under the boss for the whole which really helped him, and made the 3rd inhale easier. Surviving the inhale damage is an exercise in healer and tank coordination. The healers need to be on the ball to make effective transitions from raid to tank healing, and ideally you want some form of external cooldown (lay on hands, guardian spirit, pain supression, divine sacrifice etc). Having tanks pop an indestructible potion will also help. The main problem we found was that if the tank wasn't being kept at 100% HP during the second inhale, and went into the third inhale with partial health, they got gibbed. This is an issue with healers failing to transition though, once we got this (e.g. the holy priest is just raidi healing at the start, but starts rolling renews on the tank prior to the third inhale) it gets smoother. Tanks should also save trinket cooldowns for the third inhale.

I don't see the point in two-healing this. If your DPS is so bad that you need to bring 6 of them, then there's no way your healers are going to be good enough to do this as just two. Arranging your tanks such that whoever can DPS best out of the two tanks first, and then continues to DPS with the 80%+dmg buff up will help you too.

It is a ferocious gear-check, but it's definitely within reach of people in 232-245 gear.

[Fabricated]

I'd love to see a warrior tank in full 232 with maybe 1-2 pieces of 245 gear (ring, then helm or shoulders) survive a 3 inhale Festergut even with CDs up.

[K9]

My warrior tank logged off in DPS gear, but here's the Druid who MT'd the fight for one of the 3rd inhale phases.

Druid

I'm not saying this fight is tuned around people in just 232 gear; but the only people who are just in 232 gear are newly-dinged 80s and old alts. Most people will probably have picked up 245, 251 and 264 gear from the first four bosses, ToGC10 and ToC25, Onyxia, VoA and badges well before they get to Festergut.

[Soulflame]

I'd love to see a warrior tank in full 232 with maybe 1-2 pieces of 245 gear (ring, then helm or shoulders) survive a 3 inhale Festergut even with CDs up.

Does this count?  This was our second tank on a successful Festergut 10 fight.

We downed Rotface in 10 man as well, he is, to say the least, a very very annoying fight.  The key is to have people avoid the avoidable damage, or your healers will never ever manage to keep up.  Also, save bloodlust for the last 30% or so, if you have one.  We did not, which made us very sad.

Putricide 10 is an interesting fight, although I do not expect we'll down him this week.  Only 5 wipes left!

[Khaldun]

Rotface-10 did seem buggy to me on my first shot at it. Lots of weird behavior from the small slimes that doesn't accord with the supposed set-up.

[Evildrider]

The rotface-10 fight seems buggy.  The slimes would spawn and sometimes just do whatever they wanted instead of just chasing whoever it was on.

[Ingmar]

My warrior tank logged off in DPS gear, but here's the Druid who MT'd the fight for one of the 3rd inhale phases.

[url-http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Kilrogg&n=Chazzyx]Druid[/url]

I'm not saying this fight is tuned around people in just 232 gear; but the only people who are just in 232 gear are newly-dinged 80s and old alts. Most people will probably have picked up 245, 251 and 264 gear from the first four bosses, ToGC10 and ToC25, Onyxia, VoA and badges well before they get to Festergut.

I don't expect to see any ToGC gear, or anything from 25 man anything in our lineup before we get to him. I sort of suspect that is going to be true of a lot of 10-only raiders. On the other hand by the time we do get to him, the ongoing nerf aura will be ramped up quite a bit I'm sure.

[caladein]

The rotface-10 fight seems buggy.  The slimes would spawn and sometimes just do whatever they wanted instead of just chasing whoever it was on.

I can attest to the Small Oozes doing strange things at times.  I don't really think that's why my group wiped on him so many damn times yesterday, but it didn't help.  We could just never get south of 1mil health without everything going tits up.

Festergut was a decent amount of fun though.

[Merusk]

We had less problem with the Small oozes being buggy than we did explaining to the Healers and DPSers that aggro dumping is a BAD IDEA.  "Just kite the damn things to the big slime and stop killing everyone else."

I suspect you might find that someone's hitting a fade, iceblock or feign death somewhere.   Or kiting it through a pally tanks consecrate and then doing the same.   

It also appears to take some time for people to understand they need to run between the OT and the Giant Slime he's kiting around.. so that the giant slime eats it.  Ditto on the whole "don't run behind the giant slime, because hte next person will do that as well and then you'll have an untanked giant that will, once again, kill us all."

Festergut was a blast in 25.  Never pushed my DPS so hard before that fight.  Felt good to get him down, even if a few 4% 3% and 10k health remaining wipes.  (After the 10k wipe, one of the pallies said "goddamnit I should have bubbled and sneezed on him!")

9 Attempts on Putricide left.  Fucking complex fight, we took the night off to go watch vids & learn strats.

[caladein]

I'm sure there was a bit of that and after going back again tonight the random "hey where did this ooze come from" was mostly gone.

Also, Rotface-10: DPS fixes everything.

[Selby]

Also, Rotface-10: DPS fixes everything.

Yes.  My 3rd tier alt got this tonight (the one that hasn't done the first part of ICC yet...).  On the 2nd try.  It was neat.  But the DPS was stellar.  I find that I get to excel at raid healing to make that fight not so painful for the first 1/3 of it.

[Soulflame]

Festergut and Rotface both downed in 25 this week.  Fester is way less forgiving, with the hardest enrage I recall seeing (maybe something in Sunwell?  Brutallus?  was as bad.)  Rotface has a lot of avoidable damage.

Fester we got down by execution, moonkin aura, and dropping a healer.  Five healing that was... interesting.   

Rotface is a much better fight from a healing standpoint, so long as people avoid the avoidable damage.  We had to use multiple kiters to get it down, two tanks, and I think a couple of mages were also throwing slows on slimes for the last 30% or so.  Essentially we brute forced Rotface til he fell down.

You can't brute force Fester.  Either you have the dps, or you just don't.   

[Rendakor]

Last week in 25m we got to Festergut's enrage once.  Our OT didn't like calling out before he was taunting, so keep dying pretty much instantly since healers didn't know to heal him. Plus, we had all kinds of problems getting people to stack up right with the spores; we were aiming for 2 groups at range (one left, one right) and 1 in melee, but everyone who got the spores kept running to the right, even if there was already a spore there. It was a PUG, and it was late, so after 4 or 5 wipes people started bailing and we called it.

This week on 10m we got in one half hearted attempt on him before one of our top dps DC'd and didn't come back. PUG, late, etc.

Still haven't seen Rotface yet.

[Merusk]

Fester feels really good when you finally down him.  It seems easier after the first time, too, since we finally got him Monday last week and finished him off Wednesday this week.  Once your individual DPS figure out how to absolute maxdps, it's just downhill from there.

Putricide sucks, however. Such a high level of DPS needed to kill off those slimes, PLUS the movement = not a lot of time on the boss.  Since my guild never got past Faction Champs in 25 TOGC I figure we're just not meant to kill him until we gear up more on the earlier bosses.

Rotface 10 is STILL a lot harder than 25, even with the HP nerfs.  The big slimes seem buggy and wouldn't stick on me as OT.. and you're relying an awful lot on your DPS to know where to run to in order to drop the little ones off.  One person goes down and it just goes to hell.

[Selby]

Fester feels really good when you finally down him.  It seems easier after the first time, too, since we finally got him Monday last week and finished him off Wednesday this week.  Once your individual DPS figure out how to absolute maxdps, it's just downhill from there.

Very true.  My druid got him on the 4th try this week.  4k HPS for the win.  Definitely a "you got the DPS to do it or you shouldn't even try."  My mage got him to 270k health when he enraged, and that was with our top DPS rogue dying when the boss had 70% health left.  We went for it for practice, but with 9 people it's pretty much not going to happen.  The DPS numbers were awesomely stellar though.  Once everyone gets it together, that's a pretty "easy" fight.  Most of our problems have been logistics (one or two not getting innoculated, tank forgot to taunt, healers dropped the ball) more than anything else.

Rotface on 10-m we got to 18% twice.  The biggest problem we had is the sheer amount of healing and coordination needed once the injections start coming every 10 seconds or so.

[Merusk]

The inoculation thing is, thankfully, not a problem for a several high-output classes.  DKs can AMS, Pallies can Bubble and Mages can Ice Block.  I seem to recall the raid lead droning on about what other classes should do as well, but since I'd found AMS worked the first week I was only half-listening.

[Soulflame]

Crimson Hall trash is completely  , I think we spent about as much time working on the trash as we did Blood Princes.  The closest analog is Vezax trash, bring your CCers.  And by "CCers", I mean "priests who can shackle, plus hunters that can trap, no other CC need apply".

Blood Princes fight is completely insane the first few times you try it.  There is so much going on, and I had absolutely no hope of keeping track of it.

After a number of tries with a warlock tank for the caster boss, we gave up and used a real live tank instead.  He ended up tanking two of the bosses at the end, which astoundingly didn't prove to be terribly troublesome.

As is typical with the guild, we downed them last pull of the night, in a chaotic fight that ended up with multiple BRs and ankhs, plus nearly 1/3 of the raid dead by the time the bosses died.

Overall, my irritated impression is this is a fight that will be trivialized by having DBM yelling at you.  Even without DBM quite working right (it manfully tried, but wasn't correctly calling out everything) it wasn't too hard to have someone simply yell out "EMPOWERED VORTEX", which I think is really the only thing that has a serious impact on the raid.

[Merusk]

I didn't notice anything big with the trash.  I heard the tacticians can sap/ cheapshot while engaged but once that was worked-around things went great.  The first room's pull was the usual AOE-fest and the healers complained about having to heal so much, but there weren't many deaths. 

We didn't down the Princes, but sticking one or two guys on permanet bounce-ball duty turned out to be a must for us.  Our ranged DPS has always suffered from tunnel vision and it killed us handily the first few attempts.  Once oneo f those things hits the ground EVERYONE is knocked-back and takes massive damage.. which strans the healers even more.  Bad scene.

Melee was also suffering from "can't run fast enough."  I was watching his bar obsessively and never seemed to be out of range of at least 1 or 2 other melees.  A few never ran out at all apparently and caused wipes a few times. (I hope we're not bringing them back.)

I agree with you on the DBM thing.  I've wondered if there's a way you can create announce .wavs or .mp3s instead of the damn *Dong* without making the download & install some monstrous size.   Some fights (like this) are so busy you hear a dong every 2-3 seconds, which isn't useful at all.  Having it announce "Inhale"  "Nether Vortex Spawned" "Melee Run OUT" etc would be so much nicer.

[Ingmar]

There's an addon called SharedMedia that lets you add custom sounds to any addon that uses a backend addon called LibSharedMedia - I used it to make my Omen "you're pulling threat" sound the Big Bad Wolf from Karazhan yelling RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL, but if DBM (or Bigwigs) uses LibSharedMedia you could use it to add custom sounds. I'm not sure how granular you can get on changing the alert sounds for those mods, but I think with some effort it could probably be done.

[Soulflame]

One or two of those trash SHADOWSTEPS.  The hunters were actually kind of amused by it, they were using frost arrow to try to lay down traps for the mobs, only to watch some (all?) of them simply warp to the raid.

On one pull, one of them shadowstepped to me, three shot me, and then went methodically after the rest of the healers.
 

The critical things, from what I could tell, are keeping the kinetic bombs up in the air, avoiding vortexes, and putting someone who can manage aggro on a boss, and shadow nucleuses (or whatever they are) on the caster guy.  The fire orbs never really seemed to be a problem, probably because the rest of the "FIRE BAD" is cured by excessive healing.

[caladein]

Crimson Hall trash is completely  , I think we spent about as much time working on the trash as we did Blood Princes.  The closest analog is Vezax trash, bring your CCers.  And by "CCers", I mean "priests who can shackle, plus hunters that can trap, no other CC need apply".

Fears work on the elves, at least in 10-man.

[Selby]

Overall, my irritated impression is this is a fight that will be trivialized by having DBM yelling at you.  Even without DBM quite working right (it manfully tried, but wasn't correctly calling out everything) it wasn't too hard to have someone simply yell out "EMPOWERED VORTEX", which I think is really the only thing that has a serious impact on the raid.

Yeah, this fight is pretty crazy.  We decided to give it a try a few times last night and while we made progress every time, there is definitely a lot "watch out!" going on.  Once we work out the vortexes, we'll have it since that was the *only* thing that was killing people.

The trash is honestly pretty easy as long as you prioritize kills, focus the DPS, have a dispel and poison cleanse, and make sure you watch whoever gets the rend debuff even after combat, since it is annoyingly long and will kill someone if you aren't watching 30s after combat is over.

[Soulflame]

Fearing is inadvisable.  (Said the paladin who feared a mob, watched it run for help... and find it.    )