It’s not often that I have an entire post writen in my head as I drive to work. But the topic of this post has been gnawing at me since last night, ever since I stepped foot into the Plagueworks. We ran 10s last night, being an off night. We manage two field two strong groups for the zone. The goal: learn everything we can about the 3 new bosses to prepare ourselves for the 25.
I had three reactions to the new content: Confusion, Frustration and Happiness.
Confusion
Let’s start with confusion first. Last night we went into the Plagueworks to face Festergut and Rotface. We were able to get Festergut without too much trouble, but I am not sure how much you should read into that with us being a 25 man heroicly geared guild doing 10 man normal content. I am not sure how 10 man guilds in 10 man gear will feel about the 5 minute enrage timer and I can’t offer an accurate gauge at this time. However, as long as you play smartly I don’t think this fight will be too bad. It does, however, require a lot of coordination.
Then we got to Rotface. Both of our groups wiped enough times on this encounter that we had to reclear the trash (which is no joke). Not only is the encounter challenging, but it is, not surprisingly, bugged. I think it took my group 11 pulls to net our kill, and the other group ran out of time, but got him down to 9%. Almost every pull made it to 30% and then wiped spectacularly as we tried to work out how to handle the increased infection rate.
However…here is where my confusion comes in: In the same week they made an (unessecary) nerf to Lady Deathwhisper, they release a wing where the trash is more difficult that some of the first four bosses. No, I am not joking. It’s not going to be the new bosses that kill “everyone gets to see the content”, because people aren’t going to even get to the bosses. Hell, I wiped four times on “Precious”.
To be quite frank, if you were not able to kill Lady Deathwhisper before a nerf, you have got no chance in hell of downing Rotface and Festergut in their current iteration. Period.
And this is why I’m confused, is the content for everyone or not? This new content is clearly not. Although I, personally, am happy to have challenges again, it seems to me that Blizzard is sending a bit of a mixed signal to the community. In one breath they say “content is for everyone” but then they release content that is so clearly not going to be accessible to those they have promised it to. Festergut…maybe. Rotface? No. Putricide, unknown.
Honestly, if they toned down the “enrage” that he does somewhere between 20% and 30% it would probably put the fight in line with where it would need to be for “everyone” to experience it. But that isn’t what they released. And while I think that focused progression guilds will be able to tackle this sucker, the masses will not.
My Prediction: Rotface will see a swift nerf. It will sound something like this “The rate at which Rotface infects players with Mutated Infection at 30% has been significantly decreased”.
Frustration
While I did enjoy the challenging new content, I find myself increasingly frustrated with the “unfinished” buggy product that we have been receiving this expansion. It’s one thing to wipe on encounters because you are trying to learn the nuances of them, but it’s quite another to wipe because the mechanics of the encounter aren’t working as intended.
As an example, last night on Rotface I had a slime that just wouldn’t behave as it was supposed to, regardless of what I did. We tried everything. We had people cleansed right on top of me in an attempt to get my slime to merge. I ran to unmerged slimes in an attempt to get it to merge. I all but stood underneath the giant ooze, trying to get my damn slime to be eaten. Nothing worked. Eventually I gave up, and just continued the fight keeping myself fully HoTed and letting the fucking thing beat on my for the duration of the attempt. I am fairly positive that the other group experienced the same bug as well.
As best we could tell, what was causing the “rogue slime” was when you had multiple people infected, and a third slime was introduced into the picture before two slimes had merged. While this is easy to manage for most of the fight, post 20-30% when he’s infecting almost every second (which may be a bug within itself), it’s almost impossible to do without getting one bugged. We might be wrong about what is causing the bug, but when we made a concerted effort to just heal through the infection, and wait until we had a merged one before cleansing people, we no longer had “rogue slime”.
Now, it was almost midnight on the nose when we got our Rotface kill last night, so we did not get an opprotunity to pull Professor Putricide. However, as I understand it, he is bugged to hell. This does not surprise me in the least, as he was so bugged 100% of the time that he was on the PTR that he was untestable. And the way that the instance was rushed out to us, I fully expected this bug.
However, what really chaps my hide is that Blizzard has determined that we only get 10 attempts to kill him…yet they presented us with an encounter that they screwed up. This does not seem fair to us. Actually, it seems pretty fucking unjust. “Hi, we are going to give you limited attempts, but we aren’t going to have our shit worked out and you will likely waste attempts as a result of our poor planning. Good Luck!”.
Blizzard used to be infamous for taking forever to finish a product, but people waited because they knew when they got it, it was going to be quality. As far as WoW goes, you may say “what about Rag and C’thun”, and my reply isn’t that those encounters weren’t “bugged” they were purposely made “unbeatable” until Blizzard wanted you to kill them. I don’t know if the slick, rushed content that we have seen most of this expansion is a result of Activision’s heavy hand, or if Blizzard is playing fast and loose with their standards. But, I have seen more shit bugged out content in this one expansion than I saw in the previous 4 years of WoW combined. And it’s disappointing.
I would have much rathered that they had held off releasing Ice Crown Citadel until after the holidays, and took the time to polish what was to be presented to us. Perhaps they could have given us the 5 man content prior to the holidays, and then pushed out Ice Crown after. I don’t know. What I do know is that I would have much rather have waited a few more weeks for quality content than to have to find work arounds to kill bugged shit.
Fleeting Happiness
Regardless of all of my complaints, I really am truly happy to have content that is innovative and reasonably challenging again. But sadly, I don’t think it will last in its current iteration. Just over a year ago, the mentality of the game was that you needed to spend time to learn fights and kill bosses. I mean, think about how many weeks you spent trying to get everyone down those damn portals on Kalecgos! Now people expect to sneeze on a boss and have him shit out epics.
While I don’t think that encounters should be slamming your head into a brick wall hard, I think that they should provide a challenge, and I think people should have the expecation that you should have to work at something to reap its reward. Sadly this mentality was largely lost in this expansion by a majority of the people. In a community where everyone considers themselves a “raider”, the act of “raiding” itself has almost been lost and raid instance are almost 10/25 man dungeons.
I have no doubts that the Plagueworks is going to be heavily and swiftly nerfed. I have no doubt that I probably will never have to wipe to “precious” 4 times again. I have no doubt that the cries of those that are used to being coddled and handed what they want are going to be heard, not because they should, but because it is the mentality that Blizzard is largely responsible for creating. They said “You can see it all”, and that has largely been implemented not by making “everyone” play smarter, but my making the offerings more “idiot-proof”.
Here’s hoping I’m wrong 🙂
What are your thoughts and experiences so far with The Plagueworks?
Falling Leaves and Wings 
I’ve done quite a bit of reading about the new wing in general. It sounds like most people thing that besides lag and being possibly overtuned Professor Putricide is fine on 10 man.
The question is with the 25 version. Evidentally you can only use one Abomination on the fight. It was not been confirmed by the Blizzard whether this is intended or not.
I don’t think there is any way in the world that the Plagueworks will stay as it is currently. It is just too big of a jump in difficulty over the previous wing. As I heard mentioned before it’s like going from ToC 10 to ToGC 10.
I’m curious to see how FG and RF go on 25 man tonight! 🙂
haha, well, I suspect we will squeak out Festergut. More than anything else it’s a DPS check, and as long as people pay enough attention to stay alive, I think we should be OK.
Rotface is one of those fights that I think will be more manageable in 25s than it is in 10s. I know that sounds odd, but there are just so many more people to help cover things in 25s, that a fight with this type of mechanic might be more difficult in the 10s. I suppose we will find out soon though!
I think I might lobby for the puppies of doom to be declared mini-bosses. Talk about demoralizing, to blaze through everything only to wipe multiple times on mini-Gluths!
I’ve yet to venture into the 10-man version, as we elected for 25s last night, but thus far I am very happy with the increase in difficulty from one wing to the next. I can only hope for the same trend in the remaining bosses!
lol, someone DID comment last night “wtf, we don’t get badges for this shit”. I think the thing I like most about precious is his “best in show” debuff 🙂
I am really glad we did the 10s first, at least for our group the experience will help in our 25s, I think. I will likely have an opinion to weigh in on the 25s tonight.
I am happy that the difficulty has increased, I’m just worried that for a lot of people it was too steep an increase. However, I think ICC has a very BT feel to it, and I like that, at least at this time, there isn’t the expectation you can steamroll it!
Speaking as a ten-man raider, I think it is tuned just fine for strict-ten guilds. We’re having the same sort of struggles/wipes that 25-man raiders are in the 25s.
Precious did wipe us several times. I thought it was hilarious, as we ran circles around the stairs with a multitude of adds chasing us, our raiders slowing them as much as possible to keep them off me and the other healer. We even paniced and though we had to kill them before she ate them, and in that time, Stinky decided to join in the fray.
The Festergut enrage timer is a non-issue for any ten-strict guild that has good players and has taken the time to gear up with T9. We killed him with over a minute left on the enrage timer.
Rotface we had similar problems as you faced, and are still hashing out the strat and tweaking our add-handling to figure out how best to deal with it. Think we’ve settled on just using two healers; when we tried three, the dps was so slow that we just got overwhelmed with infections (we think he casts more frequently as time wears on, aside the 30% mark). We’re considering having a hunter kite the big adds and just throw another dps into the mix, rather than two tanks. We’re also planning to just dispel the infections immediately (assuming they won’t immediately then form a fresh big ooze that eats a nearby healer’s head off) rather than deal with the DoT+healing redux debuff.
More details on how you handled rotface would be appreciated, if you get a chance 🙂 Trying to gather all the info I can, today!
I’m glad to hear that you felt Festergut was well tuned. I always worry about how they tune the 10 mans, because so many times they miss the mark and you find 10 man content that is poorly tuned for those the content is designed for, at least in my opinion.
Rotface Tips:
We ran it with 3 healers and two tanks. We had a warrior tanking Rotface, and a deathknight on the slimes. (Brade’s group had a druid on the slimes, but we think the DK was the better slime tank because he had the ability to somewhat “direct” the little slimes utilizing chains of ice).
Our kill ran about 6 and a half minutes, if I recall correctly. Now, I haven’t had time to really analyze the parses, but from my experience our group fell apart somewhere between 20 and 30% without fail. We really had no trouble bringing him to the 30% mark, or managine the ooze until that point. The other group that ran got him to 9% in 5 minutes, and fell apart for the same sub-30% reasons. This really leads me to believe that his “enrage” is percent based and not time based.
We tried bloodlusting at both the start of the fight and the end of the fight, and ultimately decided that a bloodlust post-enrage was better. Even though people were running around more at the end, getting the extra burst during the enrage really seemed to help us pull through.
As for 3 healers vs 2: We ran with 3, although it may be doable with two. However, on a number of the pulls we lost one of our healers, and while we could keep everything together pre-20%, we could not post 20%. There were too many people that required healing and too much damage swimming around and we got overwhelmed. That being said, it may be worth trying to go down to two and seeing what happens. For me, it felt much more “controlable” with three, and ultimately I *do* think that it’s more a control fight than a DPS check (but I could be wrong!).
The Ooze – One thing we discovered about the ooze is that the small ones start with 500k threat on the person they were cleansed from and the small ones are not tauntable. The person with the ooze needs to either wait to merge with a second ooze (if there isn’t a big one up) or “feed” their ooze to the big one (i.e. don’t run away until your ooze has been munched!). Also, hunters should never FD their ooze. They will drop threat on it and it will go to your highest threat healer. However, it also causes the ooze to bug, and there is a good chance that it won’t merge/be eaten.
As for having a hunter kiting the ooze…honestly, I think it would be better to run two tanks and let the hunter DPS, because the kiter doesn’t really have any down time to DPS the boss while kiting (at least as far as I could tell), and the large ooze IS tauntable and does react to threat. I guess, I don’t really see the benefit of having the hunter full time on the ooze as opposed to a tank who would be more lively to survive a hit if the ooze got him, and would hvae better control of the ooze.
As of right now, I’d probably be wary of just dispelling the ooze wherever they are, because of what we *think* were causing our small oozes to bug out. Once you get the ooze worked out, it really isn’t hectic until the enrage.
What we did was this: The first person with a slime went to the tank and got dispelled and waited. The second person with an ooze went to the tank, got dispelled and waited for the two oozes to merge. Once it merged they both went back to the boss. The next groups of people went between the tank and the ooze, called out for a dispell and waited/kited until their ooze navigated to the big Ooze, then went back to the boss. If at any time the Big Ooze was in the green slime, the infected person went to the far end of the slime, called out for a cleanse, and waited for the ooze to get there and eat their ooze.
There are two things that the infected people need to be wary of: slime spray (yes it reaches the back walls of the room), and the green slime. Infected people should *never* stand in it, because the healing debuff on the infection combined with the damage from the infection and the damage from the slime = death.
The kiting tank counted the oozes, and then called out when he was at 5. When the big ooze started casting we all moved out of the middle of the room while he exploded. The person that was infected at that time, or just after would go to the kite tank and wait (can be cleansed when he’s in position to help on the heals), and you start over again.
The OMG HE’S INFECTING EVERYONE part – what we found best was having our kite tank basically become ground control for the oozes and cleansing. At the point Rotface ramps up, the KITER would tell us if there was a big ooze, tell us who to cleanse, and who to heal while waiting for a cleanse. This really seemed to help keep the oozes more in control (heh…not that we were “in control”, but you know what I mean!).
The problem, I think, though is that the ooze debuff self cleanses after a certain amount of time, and the ooze spawns regardless. So if you aren’t quick enough getting it sorted you are going to end up with 8 million oozes out anyhow.
We also found that in all the chaos the slime spray became quite the killer. All those people taking damage from infection, plus the OH GOD WHERE DO I RUN factor, plus the spray becomes hugely overwhelming very quickly. So I might recommend reiterating really paying attention to the spray (esp. to your cleanser and healers).
As far as I can tell, there is no set enrage timer. We actually had an attempt where we kept going with 2 healers, 2 tank, and 1 DPS for a good 3 minutes trying to kill him (and came damn close…3%?). It almost became *easier* the more people that died, at least as far as slime control went. Which, ultimately, is what leads me to believe the fight is more about controling the oozes than about the DPS.
*as a side note I healed the infected people by tossing them a regrowth/rejuv and then could largely forget about them, unless they did something silly or their infection needed to sit on them a bit. We also had a priest with body and soul, and it was really, really helpful for getting people around quickly.
*as another side note: if you have a priest cleansing, be sure that they are *NOT* using “abolish disease”. While it isn’t problamatic early in the encounter, when the infections ramp up, it will cause someone to be inadvertantly cleansed at an inopportune time!
Anyhow! I hope some of that rambling was helpful! Good Luck tonight! 🙂
Sounds like exactly the same strat we were using, except that when someone died, it all went downhill, because usually they were dieing to a big ooze smacking them in the face (which would then continue on its way eating other people). We also had the warrior trying to pick them up, and he was relying on misdirects from the hunter to maintain aggro. It really wasn’t working out well. Most of our wipes were at 34% throughout the evening, and then we were around 28%, and finally 24% before calling it a night.
I’ve heard of others/seen vids where they cleansed their infections more quickly to get rid of the healing debuff. That debuff got quite a few of our squishier dps killed as they waited near the big ooze for a cleanse and got hit by the dot, the aura, and a wayward spray or slime pool. I do intend to try their cleanse-quick strat tonight, but my raid will have to keep in mind the number of oozes we have up at a given time.
Ah, we cleansed them as soon as they were in position to be eaten (or as soon as they were on the other side of the slime waiting to be eaten). We didn’t let the debuff sit on them for too long before cleansing it off. When you said “just cleansing immediately” I thought you meant something more along the lines of as soon as they got the debuff cleansing it before they got out of the raid. We just cleansed as soon as they were in position, which did mean the little ooze beat on them for awhile.
Hrm…we didn’t have to misdirect the big ooze into the tanks we used last night (druid/DK respectively). However, now that I think about it I bet that is because Brade was able to hold agro with feral faiere fire, and our DK was able to hold agro via diseases. A warrior really only had what? heroic throw and taunt? Since he can’t be up there building melee threat on the ooze. You run with a paladin tank too, right? They might be good kiters w/ pursuit of justice more ranged attacks, but I bet would run out of mana pretty quickly.
However, in looking back, I think the DK/Druid had it so easy to hold threat was because of their ranged threat abilities (in addition to taunt) are pretty good. I had never really considered that aspect of it.
Maybe try using a different tank on the adds, and see if that frees up your hunter and/or makes it easier for your add tank to hold threat?
We killed him with warrior kiting (misdirects) within 4-5 attempts tonight, and it felt sooo much easier healing! The only change we made was to immediately cleanse the infection, rather than let it tick on the person. The raid healing was light and they didn’t take as much damage when taking the ooze to the big ones.
It did get hectic as normal post 30%, but it felt much easier than waiting on cleanses 🙂 I highly recommend trying it!
Woohoo! Grats!
Actually in our 25 man tonight, we started insta-cleansing the poisons at 30%, and it also worke well for us 🙂
I had a very similar reaction to you. Being geared in a fair share of heroic 25-man gear, I’ve come to expect 10-man normal bosses to be pushovers. We one-shot all the bosses in the first wing the night they came out, so when we wiped on Festergut I was a little taken aback. No one had done much reading up on the fight, and as far as I know no one in my raid played on the PTR, so I guess it shouldn’t be too shocking that it took a few tries to get him down. Now I think the difficulty of that fight is actually good. Once people understand the fight, it shouldn’t be too difficult, but still requires coordination to pull off. I think that’s ideal for a normal boss.
Rotface was a whole other story. I also spent a few attempts with a small slime beating on me the whole time. I tried running along the kite path with the tank, but it just wouldn’t get off me. After 6 or so attempts, we ran out of time. It was a very strange feeling leaving an instance without getting the kill. And while I’m sure that we’ll get it after some more practice later this week, it leaves me with a feeling of dread for my more casual Horde guild, who is not in heroic gear.
Rotface may be just a tad overtuned for the 10s, I’m not positive on that at the moment, it just feels a bit that way. It’s really hard to tell though, with parts of it being buggy, and not knowing for certain what’s intended and what isn’t!
I am not exactly sure how I feel about going into the 25s. We have done a lot of really great things as a guild, and we went back for the harder things when a lot of people just gave up (Algalon 25 @17%; HM Anub 25 45%) and so I think as a whole we have grown as players because of those experiences, even if we did outgear a lot of the Ulduar HM content. I’m sorry, but some of that was still harder than a lot of other things that we’ve seen this expansion, including the new content.
I think tonight’s raid will test us a bit as a guild, but I am hoping for a kill or two, and a lot of guild feedback. On the plus side, we had 20 people in the zone last night learning the fights. However, I can certainly see why you have some concerns surrounding how more less progressed guilds might fare with with the new content.
Killed him last night. A big part of it was having a different slime kiter. On our previous attempts we were short one of our normal tanks and a dps had to respec to fill the role. Our pally did an excellent job of kiting the slimes and made the whole thing much easier. Infections were cleansed after about 5-6 seconds.
Got really hectic at 30%, but hectic is fun!
Didn’t have as much luck with Putricide, but I’m thinking 2 healers is the way to go on this one. And hopefully more than one ranged dps for our attempts next week.
I’m definitely glad to see the increase in difficulty, but I agree with you that considering how they’ve already nerfed the first wing (Morrowgar no longer immune to taunt, nerfing Lady Deathwhisper) that the new wing won’t remain at it’s current difficulty for long. The puppies were entertaining (one of our guildies has a name that shortens to Stinky) especially while everything was going to hell during the first pulls.
“Tuesday” lag was a bit ridiculous though. Not only was lag terrible in ICC (hots shouldn’t take 2-3+ seconds to cast), but when we switched to Uld25 to start the clear so we can get our next mace, the lag was even worse (our raid weekly is Razorscale this week) and we couldn’t move in our vehicles during the clear to FL for 5-10 seconds at a time. I expect the lag in ICC due to everyone going after the new content at the same time, but that much lag in old content is ridiculous.
That “Tuesday” lag is precisely the reason that we don’t do progression raids on Tuesdays! 🙂 And everytime that we schedule a Tuesday raid the decision is affirmed for us.
Sadly, I am pretty sure there will be some nerfs. I don’t know how hard or when they will hit, but I’m pretty confidant they will hit.
Blizzard has apparently confirmed that ProfessorPutricide is not bugged and is working as intended to be hard. Apparently the other final wing bosses are just as hard. Deathbringer wad a freebie apparently. Excuse anytypos, I am commenting from an itouch.
Well, they confirmed that there is only one Abom for 25 man. But that doesn’t explain why some people got to use multiples 🙂
Pingback: Rotface | Shields Up!
Pingback: Rotface and stuff « Planet of the Hats
C’thun was intentional? Spawning unkillable eye stalks in the walls that nuke your raid was just blizz making things hard? What about Kael’Thas aggro bugs, or the bug that just made Lady Vashj straight up despawn? Were these intended too? Pretty much everything that Blizzard released pre tier 6 was bugged to hell and back the first month after it was available.
For the most part, Wrath has been extremely clean with regards to bugged encounters. When we downed putricide, we lost a couple attempts to him not spawning enough slime initially, but with some better DPS, we really wouldn’t have needed the abom to slow the adds.
The only real bugs we’ve seen in ICC has been minor, and swiftly corrected. Those being Marrowgar doing 25 man damage on 10 man, and Rotface using the 25 man infection rate on 10 man. Both were fixed within the raid lockout of the release of that boss. Beyond that, the only other hotfixes have been to correct exploits such as typhooning blood beasts off the side.
The fights in the plagueworks are probably overtuned for easy mode. This means that they’ll probably be nerfed soon, however, the bugs have been relatively minor compared to what Blizzard’s released in the past.