Facing Rotface

Our intrepid band ventured back into the Plagueworks. Our first disappointment was how little trash had despawned from killing Festergut. Usually when you kill a boss, part of the reward is the removal of the trash associated with that boss. It looks like the only trash mob associated with Festergut is Stinky. All the other trash remained.
Well it's more rep! Let's get clearing!
We cleared the trash, and still mispulled the first two abominations and got the room behind them. This time we were more ready and got it down without wiping. In short order, we were face to face to Rotface.
Rotface had not changed from our initial foray on Thursday, but we had a much better idea of what to expect. This is part of the excitement of the being on the cutting edge of content, sometimes you get some surprises.
We had been following the thread on Tankspot where user Kinch of Uldum posted his findings on the Mutated Injection timer. He had parsed several logs and discovered the timers did not change regardless of the raids DPS. This indicated that the spell was on a timer and not health based.
Here's what he found out.
He's got five timers for Mutated Infection, 14, 12, 10, 8 and 6 seconds. The raid will get four applications at each timer, then 6-second intervals until dead.
Links to triggers on Wowhead:
14-second trigger
12-second trigger
10-second trigger

8-second trigger
6-second trigger
Boston made some additional adjustments to our strategy to maximize our DPS. We split the DPS into 2 groups, so only half the DPS had to run when he turned to spray slime on them. The others could keep going without issue. We also blew Heroism/Bloodlust right off the bat. That way everybody got it before anyone had to worry about kiting or dying.
Boston would also call for Hand of Freedom at various times that he needed to cross a slime pool.
With all these improvements to our game plan in place we felt better about our chances. We initially started with 2 healers, but went to 3. We’ll eventually be able to do this fight with 2, but 3 gives us more room for error. As we are still learning the fight, errors were aplenty.
One lesson we learned is that it’s a really bad idea to use threat dumps if you are the Little Ooze kiter. Our Hunter feigned when he got the Little Ooze and it decided to go spray our poor Resto Shaman.
We had good attempts followed by bad attempts, but we were learning. The mob pathing bug really gave me trouble positioning Rotface. Sometimes I’d run through him and he’d turn around and position perfectly. Other times, I’d run through him and he’d do a lap around the room before coming to a stop to the left or right of me. (This is a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea.)
We could push him to just under 20% when things would get crazy, and we would start losing people. Then on one attempt as things started to fall apart, our Healers somehow got it back under control. We were able to push him to 10%, then to 5%, but the slimes were everywhere and people started dropping health. The whole raid was at sub 50, and Boston called for a Hard Burn. I hit my Bubble Wall to try to lessen the damage. The percents ticked off in slow motion, and then finally, finally, Rotface yelled, and fell at our feet.
Bugged or not, Rotface was down. We had done it.
We finally got some spell power leather for our Moonkin, though he said the piece wasn’t that well itemized. We made him take it anyway. There was also a staff which I think went to our Hunter.
We still had some time left so we decided to try Professor Putricide. The first problem we had was figuring out how to open the doors to his lab. We finally figured that out and watched the doors open. It was pretty cool. Not Lady Vashj’s door opening/bridge building level of cool, but pretty cool nonetheless.
There is a small antechamber before you get to Putricides room. I saw the oddest thing in there, a Level 75 Critter. How odd. Someone, and I didn’t see who exactly, so I’ll pick someone at random from our group, let’s say it was Blue, decided to kill the Critter. I picked Blue because he’s a Warrior and Warriors seem to be the guys who love killing Cirtters the most. I once rolled a Warrior and named him Rabbitslayer to commemorate this fact. Plus Rabbitslayer was Tasselhoff's dagger/sword, and who didn't love Tasselhoff?
As soon as the Critter died to the door to the Antechamber closed. It was only now we noticed that the door to Professor’s Putricides room was still closed. Suddenly, the entire antechamber filled with bugs attacking us. It occurs to me now that the trap may have been invisible and the killing of the critter may have just been bad timing. Naw, I'll blame Blue anyway.
Channeling Admiral Ackbar, I said, “IT’S A TRAP!”
We killed the bugs, and the door to the Antechamber opened and a dozen giests flooded into the antechamber. GO GO HOLY WRATH! Between Holy Wrath and Consecrate I was able to corral them.
With that bit of excitement out of the way, we entered into Professor Putricide room and we were met with Limited Attempts Counter. 10 shots at this guy.
I was going to tank the Putricide while Boston took the Abomination. I was supposed to take Putricide south. For some reason I thought that meant to bring him to the door we had entered. But the door is on the east side of the room, not the south.
I would need to kite Putricide around the room to maximize the room between the Slimes he spawned and the party. Boston would slow the Slimes so we could kill them. We spent our first couple of attempts with Boston learning the vehicle controls and some counterintuitive targeting mechanics.
By this point, the trash had respawned. It looks like all the trash in the Plaugeworks is attached to Putricide. Only the ‘dogs’, Precious and Stinky, are attached to the other two Bosses. I think if we had had one more attempt, we would have gotten through Phase 1 easily. We plan on learning this fight one Phase at a time, attempt counters or not.
Once Rotface hit the floor, it was a successful night, irregardless of what happened with the good Professor. I’m so glad we got him down. We’ll find out soon how repeatable of a kill it was.

Comments

Brock said…
Good read, congrats on downing Rotface!

I'm wondering about the addon you are using for your action bars and unit frames.

feel free to send me a tweet
'B_ROCKx' on twitter of course.
Honors Code said…
Here you go: http://honorscode.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-tankadin-ui-guide-part-i.html
Ingerimm said…
As a fellow Tankadin focussing mostly on 10-mans, I find it's way easier to let the Big Ooze be kited by a prot paladin on Rotface.

We first started with a prot warrior on slime duty, but switched after a couple of tries, mainly due to 3 reasons:

- warriors have almost no ranged TPS tools, but at least for you this is not an issue.

- you can self-Hand of Freedom which is way faster than reacting to another person.

- Most important: you can dispel the disease from the players when they are close to the ooze. This takes some stress from the healers, as well as doing the dispel when the player is in the right position.

Just wanted to give my 2 cents, keep up the good work :)
Yeah I was originally on slime duty on my prot warrior. As ingerrim mentioned that is a bad idea and so the MT prot pally kited the slimes while I took rotface. Certainly a fun fight took us 8 or 9 attempts to finally kill him. By then it was only a few minutes before the end of raid. A few of us messed around with putricide so that I could learn the abom mechanics. Glad we did because that sucker is awkward for sure.
Salt said…
You referenced Tasslehoff! You are officially more awesome now.

Caramon Majere named the dagger for him, 'cause that's all he thought it'd be good for.

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