Unrelated Intro (no, seriously, if you want to get right to the strat, scroll below the image). This happens about every three months. I get burnt out on doing anything that resembles work, and so I spend a week or two just playing the game I write about so often.
But we had a patch this week, which always increases the fervor for information. I’m not going to bother posting the patch notes this time ’round, you’re probably already read them, and everything that changed has been discussed ad nauseam. Good news: heroics are a little shorter and moonkin get a straight dps buff from Earth & Moon. If you haven’t yet, read the notes here.
Now, to business!
You’ve seen unordinary gas clouds and poisoned slime pipes, and you can fully appreciate my choice of the Professor Farnsworth image on my last strat post.
Now the green ooze and the orange gas combine in the hands of an oddly fierce Professor Putricide, and I have this to tell you: put on your running shoes.
There are three phases to this fight, but the first two are basically the same fight with some added mechanics, so I’d rather take you in order of the things you need to consider.
Positioning. You will have to fine tune this to your raid, I’m only going to tell you what we’ve chosen to do. There are two sides of the room: orange and green. You will be running back and forth between them. We start out with the tank, boss, and melee on the orange side and the ranged and healers on the green side. This is so we can try to encourage a slime pool to appear on the green side first; it works about 60-70% of the time. As soon as the slime pool drops, we run to the orange side with the tank.
The Slime Pools. They are big. They are green. They are round. If you choose to stand in one, you deserve the repair cost that will come with your death. They exist in the first two phases for one reason only…
The Abom. An offtank will run in at the beginning of the fight, grab a potion from Putricide’s table, and become an Abomination, which he will remain until the beginning of phase 3. His job is twofold: first, he sucks up the green slime pools, because they grow quickly if not kept under control and they give the Abom energy. It’s important to not just gobble them up as quickly as possible (although there should consistently only be one slime pool on the ground), but to use the slime pools to maintain enough energy to do the second part of his job: using the Abom’s slowing attack on…
The Adds. There are two types of adds, and you will encounter them constantly through phase 1 and phase 2. Putricide will summon the add by casting Unstable Experiment. The green side will always spawn the add first, which is why we have everyone move to the orange side before the first Unstable Experiment. You need to start killing the adds the second they pop, but you absolutely MUST be at max range from them. For this reason, you will run from side to side as the adds die. You’ll start on the orange side and kill a green add, then you’ll run over to the green side and kill the orange add, and do that over and over again until you’re exhausted.
- The Volatile Ooze is the green add, and it will target a random player and apply Volatile Adhesive. That person will be unable to move but will still be in full control of their abilities (so by all means, dps or heal). Hopefully he has been slowed by your Abom, and you can get him killed or nearly dead by the time he reaches that person. Once he reaches them, he will do a ton of AoE damage split between the nearest targets, so you’ll need to clump around the targeted player. Don’t collapse on him or her until the Volatile Ooze is about to catch them, though; because you could unwittingly produce a slime pool at their feet.
- The Gas Cloud is the orange add. It targets a random player and begins to chase them, giving them a debuff called Gaseous Bloat. The debuff will start out stacked, and the stacks will lessen over time. The fewer stacks on the target when the Gas Cloud reaches them, the less damage will be done. If a Gas Cloud reaches a target with 5+ stacks, the explosion done will probably cause a wipe. So that target needs to be healed, and they need to kite that sucker for as long as possible.
Gaseous Bloat...?
Tear Gas serves as the phase shift mechanic. At 80% (and again at 35%), Putricide will throw out Tear Gas, stunning everyone in the raid for about 10 seconds. He will run to the table, drink a potion, and come back with more abilities to contend with. For this reason, we stop dps around 82% and around 37%. Between the time one of the adds dies and he casts Unstable Experiment again, we burn him to the transition; in this way we make sure no adds are standing during the transition.
Malleable Goo This stupid mechanic has wiped our raids a lot. It’s easily avoidable, but it will require your attention. In addition to the Unstable Experiments, he will now also target players and send Malleable Goo in their direction. They are big, green, flying balls of ooze, and if you see one of them coming towards you, you should get the heck away from it, as it does a significant amount of damage and decreases your cast and GCD times by…well, by A LOT. These oozes bounce, too; so just stay out of their trajectory. Although conditional, if you see the oozes flying right at you, the safest course of action is to run to the boss (do NOT clump at the boss’s feet; if there are not enough ranged he will target melee with goo, and that’s BAD!). Please don’t be one of the players that dies to Malleable Goo. Please, I beg you, fellow moonkin–don’t die to this!
Choking Gas Cloud These are two flasks he drops on the ground starting in Phase 2. They are big, orange circles with flasks in the middle, and they’re always together and within 5 feet of each other. They are landmines, triggering when a player touches them and raining AoE damage on anyone nearby. This is really, really bad. Avoid the flasks at all costs. For ranged, this should be ridiculously easy.
So now you’ve been killing adds for two phases, your Abom has been sucking up bellyfuls of goo, and you’ve been successfully dodging Malleable Goo and dancing around Choking Gas Clouds. Time for phase 3!
BURN HIM but don’t stop avoiding hazards! At this point, your offtank will no longer be an Abom, and he’ll need to get with the main tank and other offtank (we use 3 tanks) so they can taunt off back and forth again (yes, another stacking debuff boss–I think our tanks taunt at 4). While he won’t do any more Unstable Experiments, he will continue to do all of his other abilities, so you still need to avoid goo and flasks. Unfortunately, he also continues to drop slime pools. With no Abom to suck them up, these will eventually spread across the room. Your tanks will be kiting him out of the ooze, but you need to kill him as quickly as possible before the ooze fills the room. Burn every cooldown you have and bring that sucker to his knees as fast as you can.
And, as every boss that gives us trouble requires one…a diagram!
Definitely the first truly staggering fight in terms of complexity thus far in ICC (although Blood Princes is a ridiculous avoid-this-that-this-and-this-too fight as well), but I think once this fight clicks for you, you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.
Update! When I wrote this strat, we had killed him in our 10-mans but were absolutely stonewalled in 25. Well, we finally got him! Here’s the killshot:
From Hallow’s End transmogs to Mad King hijinks, there were some great costumes that came out of the October challenge. I’m just glad I finished the Mad King’s Clock Tower, everything else is meaningless now!
