[10] Rotface

[Talderas]

And if your holy paladins, like mine, make a habit of running with RF up for the damage reduction, I suggest asking them nicely to turn it off.

I was hitting my head on my desk (figuratively) of the regression on Rotface my raid exhibited this week. It lead me to a possibly crazy idea to free up the kiting tank to DPS the boss, thus limiting the amount of time you spend <30%.

Have a holy paladin kite. Use RF and self heal. Beacon the tank. Stand in the slime puddles and self heal.

I have 0 clue on the viability of such a strategy, but it does put a 6th person DPSing the boss. In our case it would give us Judgement of Light on the boss (ret uses wisdom).

Anyone have insight on whether this is viable?

[kysu]

I have kited on my resto druid before, my hps suffered since I was out of range of raid at times. I normally kite on this toon but tech yes you can.

[bzzt]

Technically you can kite with anything as long as you can hold threat.

The pally would be fine for threat between taunt & judge (maybe a holy shock), but I'd be surprised if he could put out any kind of impressive hp/s since there'd be so much movement involved. R.druid works quite well b/c they can cover the vast majority of raid damage, so you can 2 heal it while they're kiting relatively easily (giving you 7 dps), but I suspect a pally would be hard pressed to do the same since so much of their horsepower depends on their feet being set.

Pet classes also work well (demo lock, hunter, uh dk) since between the pet and dots they can keep ~2k-3k dps worth of damage on the boss over the course of the fight (which in 10 man generally works out to a fairly significant rdps increase unless the tank they're replacing has horrible dps gear).

[Arnock]

My guild's running into some major issues with this fight, but I can't make most of the raids, so I can't tell exactly what's going wrong other than what the RL tells me, and it seems to be much of what's being posted here: People panicking when they get the infection, not seeing the kiter quickly enough, situational awareness, etc.


I've only done the fight once, and I did notice it getting a bit hectic towards the end, and I was wondering if the fight is still bugged and using the 25m timer, or if it's just the normal functioning of the fight?

[vegardhv]

Friday we wiped 5-10 times, and yesterday we tried again, 13 wipes. We tried doing this before festergut, because we knew we would one shot him, and get that quest reward thing - but ended up having "a break" wiping on rotface, doing festergut, our mage got the debuff thing from festergut, and on the following (doomed) attempt on rotface the mage used invisibility to get away with both the debuffs alive, giving all the raid 5 extra frost emblems.

The thing is, our best attempt was the first, down to 10 %, from then on it just went downwards - the kiting and all works all right - to start with, problem is just towards the end, when people get infections at a ridiculous pace - I was dispelling - to give the holy paladin free gcds for raid healing, but just when I dispelled one, there would be one more up, he would be out of range "what do I do now?" - then another bloke got infection - now there were two - and then another big ooze followed, taunt and AS just give you so much aggro - and it's a lot more difficult kiting two big oozes than one.

Oh well. People seemed to be panicking towards the end, but there are a lot of hints to pick up here, like dispelling the debuff fast, and tell your raid to not panic - but they have to learn to run in the right direction at once, and don't run around like chickens... We even have one dps at 2.6K - but I can understand there can be a lot of downtime on this fight - but well someone manages to stay above 5K most attempts.

[Nexiv]

Wondering if anyone else has come across this problem with the little oozes; We had our 2nd night of attempts on Rotface, but for some reason as soon as someone was cleansed and their little ooze appeared (as the kiting tank I would cleanse the player when they got to me) the ooze would immediately shoot off back into the middle of the raid instead of follow the player it spawned from. Now we couldnt figure out why they were doing this. As soon as they spawned instead of following their player they just headed off into the raid, perhaps heading for the boss. Obviously they are immune to taunt so I couldnt pull them out, and as soon as a second little ooze spawned the same thing happened which meant a big ooze spawned in the middle of the raid. Usually I could pull the big ooze out by then and kite it as normal, but often it would mean someone being killed.
We wiped quite a few times because of this and eventually gave up. Has anyone else seen the little oozes behave like this?

[vegardhv]

Wondering if anyone else has come across this problem with the little oozes; We had our 2nd night of attempts on Rotface, but for some reason as soon as someone was cleansed and their little ooze appeared (as the kiting tank I would cleanse the player when they got to me) the ooze would immediately shoot off back into the middle of the raid instead of follow the player it spawned from. Now we couldnt figure out why they were doing this. As soon as they spawned instead of following their player they just headed off into the raid, perhaps heading for the boss. Obviously they are immune to taunt so I couldnt pull them out, and as soon as a second little ooze spawned the same thing happened which meant a big ooze spawned in the middle of the raid. Usually I could pull the big ooze out by then and kite it as normal, but often it would mean someone being killed.
We wiped quite a few times because of this and eventually gave up. Has anyone else seen the little oozes behave like this?

Yeah, happened to us. I noticed because it happened at the very first ooze once. The mage was cleansed, and the ooze just headed straight into the melee group at the boss, sticking on someone - I can't remember who - omen was going kind of crazy. That might actually be the reason to the chaotic circumstances later on - then again it might not. It happened to the same guy at least twice that I saw, he said he didn't use blink - so that couldn't explain it..

[Belloc]

If it's happening to mages, you might want to look into mirror images or invisibility.

[Argali]

The 10 man version does still use the same timer as the 25m version. The fix they made was to reduce his max hp, so that the fight is shorter.

And yes, small oozes bugging are the bane of my existence. It appears to be really random.

[Draslin]

We put in another 10-12 wipes on this guy last night. We were 3 healing it, because 2 healers was totally unmanageable.

Our aggregate dps was about 24k. When he got down to 1 infection per second or so, we couldn't maintain consistent DPS, mistakes were made much more quickly, and we wiped.

We didn't have bloodlust last night (our shaman is a flake and never shows up on time - WTB shaman)

The only thing I can see is that we have one DPS (destruction warlock) who is low on the dps scale on this fight (only doing about 3k), the rest of our dps is over 4k. After 3 nights of wiping on this boss, I'm beginning to feel like maybe it's not tuned right.

We're stacking all our DPS and heals behind the boss, and moving on top of the tank to avoid slime spray. Kiting is going OK once we put a healer out with the kiting tank to cover damage from the debuff.

Anyone have a better strat? My people are all pretty good, but fights that require a lot of moving kill us because our ranged dps just get killed on the meter without enough time to plant and cast.

Thanks!

Draslin

[PsiVen]

Your DPS sounds really low. I think if you spread around him and avoided the slime spray wherever it faced, you'd have an easier time than making everyone move at once. The end of the fight may as well be a hard berserk because at some point you just can't keep up with the number of debuffs going out. I would say at 10% just call all DPS on the boss and try to drag him away from big oozes as they spawn.

[balloonknot]

We wiped a LOT for first 2 weeks on this fight before we first got it down.

Our first kill was a couple weeks ago now and we used:
2 healers (druid, shammy) they were at like 3.2k ehps each (for comparison they 2 healed festergut at 5.5-6k each)
34,701 raid dps: highest 6.7k, lowest 4.6k, me tanking rotface at 3k
DK OT kited the ooze
Pop hero right after the first large ooze forms to get the most dps time out of it (lowest infection rate)
He died at 3:33 seconds

The differences between our many attempts that ended at ~10% and getting him down easily was going to 2 healers and maximizing the use of heroism.

My raid thought i was crazy for saying we were 2 healing it because wipes are caused by raid deaths but you have to look at the infection rate is a soft enrage. For us 4 min to 4:15 was the drop dead point, a very fast fail cascade occurred for us at that point in time consistently and with 3 healers is was always the 8-10% remaining health range which was really frustrating.

The other thing to note is that even 2 healing it our healers output wasn't that high. What tends to kill people in this fight is spike damage when dropping off oozes. I'm not convinced that an extra healer actually prevents deaths of this nature, if your dps is paying attention to slime spray its very easy to just have 1 healer on the tank and 1 on the infected with little other damage going on. We actually put the druid on the tank and had the shammy healing the infected people do to the shammies stronger single target healing and the fact that rotface doesn't hit that hard. Holy Paly and Disc Priest makes a great healing team for this fight.

In my opinion Rotface is much more of a dps test than festergut is, not because they have to move so much as they have to maintain high dps while moving.

My recommendation is to stress dps output as much as you can and push to end fight in under 4 minutes to make it clean. Also look at your logs and make sure people arn't getting slime sprayed. On our first couple attempts slime spray was the vast majority of the raid damage. Really wish bliz would have given it a more obvious graphical effect.

What really sucks about this fight is the randomness of the infections, a couple a attempts we had at least 1 healer almost always infected at which point you may as well wipe it and hope for a better roll of the dice next try.

[Noliquin]

I could us a little help here...

So I'm the officer in my 10 man strict guild. We take pride in the fact that we are able to down bosses in 10 man not needing 25 man gear and keep the "difficulty" of 10 mans... We also take pride in our teams ability to learn and play well... killing on skill...

Well we have skipped Rotface for the fact it was giving a lot of guilds issues and seemed more of a gear check then anything, with prince, queen, and dreamwalker down its now time to go for Rotface...

But for the life me, people just can't seem to understand just how the add and kiting the big add works...

I have a few people that get it, go to the tank, get cleansed take your add to the big add, go back to what you were doing... But I have the other 5 people that just can't seem to get this right...

So I'm ask everyone here, how did you explain this fight to your people, where did you show them how its done? we've post videos and strats even went to festergut's room and did a mock run of rotface to show how its done. But people just don't get it...

Please help me find the cure for downs...

[Cheroz]

Nol,
All I can say is that explain it, show them and have them watch a very good kiter's perspective video. As our guild's slime kiter, I watched almost two weeks of wipes on this guy and was always amazed how a simple mechanic was screwed up royally by our dps/healers. It really isn't that hard of a mechanic, but it seems that there are always at least 2 in the raid that the concept alludes them. It took 4 wipes to beat in the concept of if you get infected during an explosion, you still run to me.
As far as actual advice instead of sympathy griping.
1- Try to run with the exact same group each night. We found it was always the new guys not getting it and the night was almost a repeat of the previous learning night.
2- Keep doing it. Eventaully they will get it.
3- If they don't get it before your patience ends....Boot them from the raid. It really isn't hard and if they suck, then overall....they are a sucky raider.

[Shathus]

Couple other things... random brain dump incoming.

We spent the first couple weeks with many many wipes on this. Even after killing him the first two times, it took a bunch of wipes to do it. Finally the last 3 kills have been pretty smooth, and last night would have been a 1 shot if I hadn't messed up at the start

Being the kiter, I'm also on cleanse duty for the infection. I cleanse immediately and announce who is infected on vent. We had a problem where I think people just didn't know they had it. Cleansing immediately, while maybe causing a little bit of extra raid damage for a second or two made healing the infected person much easier.

If I have to, I call out where I am on the mini-map (north, east, south-west, etc). Have people run to YOU, slightly ahead of the big slime. While the big ooze won't melee the infected people, the 4k+ aoe pulse they do hurts if the person just sits there. Get in front to get the little ooze to merge, but don't just stand there waiting, you'll take a lot of damage.

I just HoF through the slime pools if they happen to spawn in my kiting path. If you're in one and someone has a little ooze, just announce to meet them on the OTHER end of the pool. Don't have them run through the giant slime pools to get to you. You can also skirt along the outside of the pool to bring the big ooze closer, but be wary of dragging it (and it's aoe) through the middle of the raid.

Unfortunately it just takes practice (and wipes) sometimes for the people that don't get it. You'll have attempts where someone with a little ooze is basically running away from you because they're freaking out. Just talk them through it on vent "stop moving" or "come back the other way", meanwhile still announcing who just got the latest infection and when the slime is going to explode.

Makes me jealous of the Rotface tank sometimes. He just has to move out of the way of 1 or 2 things every so often.