Heroic Professor Putricide 10 man

 
Last week we had a lot of fun finishing off the Sindragosa and Lich King achievements so that we could finish off ICC in a single raid lock out. Sindragosa required some precision in order to avoid stacking Mystic Buffet over 5, and once we got the tank rotation together, things started to proceed like clockwork. We would flip the boss from side to side, so that the tanks only had to run straight out to find the next ice block and by the end, the taunting was tight enough that I had to avoid running straight into incoming toons who were Frost Beancon’d. I had to grab a couple of extra toons for the night, and to my surprise advertising for the specific achievements resulted in some pleasant and competent toons; to date my best pugging effort.

The LK achievement took a couple of attempts to get the disease stacking correctly, but once we got it going it was a matter of a clean kill after that to bring the achievement home. We had a couple of hiccups with tank deaths due to a couple of enraged Shamblers, and once we had the plague skip from 29 to 31. It was also a joy to have the regular mechanics of the fight reasonably well known, and it was satisfying to see how fast some of the Val’kyr went down.

This last week our big challenge was the remaining two hard modes before LK, heroic Putricide and heroic Sindragosa. Heroic Putricide takes a bit of getting used to, since the unbound plague mechanic takes a reasonable amount of raid awareness and communication to coordinate. We found (like many groups do) that there is limited value in assigning an infection order, or a location from which to share the plague. Instead, everyone needs to fully understand the mechanic, and focus dealing with it in the most productive way given several variables.

First up, the unbound plague lasts for 60 seconds. After being infected for 10 - 12 seconds you become extremely difficult to heal (the damage increases with every tick) so you need to pass the plague (with the remaining duration) to another toon. The flip side is the the plague is that each time the plague moves, it leaves a stacking debuff (plague sickness) on the original target that increases the damage done by unbound plague by 250% per stack. In the normal course of dealing with the plague you can expect about 5 - 6 people to be infected if all goes well, however the more the plague bounces around, the quicker toons need to pass it off due to increasing stacks of sickness.

So the goals with the sickness are to:

• Keep the sickness as long as possible while remaining easy to heal (10 - 12 seconds)
• Pass the sickness to someone with as few stacks of sickness as possible (zero is best)
• Pass the sickness to someone who can easily identify the next person to pass it to
• Deal with strategy that require people to stack or move quickly, which can make it a lot harder to sensibly share the plague
• Deal with the regular mechanics at the same time while putting out significantly more healing / DPS / tanking than in normal mode

All that takes a little practise, and it really helps if people are able to communicate over vent to coordinate.

The next major change is for transitions, instead of getting stunned in place, you get to deal with a Green Slime and and an Orange Gas Cloud at the same time. The strategy we landed on was to zerg the green slime (all stacking near the spawn point) and kite the orange gas cloud until we got around to finishing it off. So if the Abom has more than 90 energy, it can slow both and if not, the orange gas cloud is the priority. At best, the tank in the Abom suit can spit on both slimes and everything goes nicely... at worst you can be dealing with a plague, people getting separated when the green slime explodes, and several toons dead in the process of a transition. It is also important to time the transition properly, since if you already have a slime/cloud up, you will end up with 3 which will most likely lead to a wipe. If you are running just a touch late on the transition, don’t worry if you force a transition just as he is starting to cast you can only end up with two. When I say a touch late, I’m not kidding, we forced a transition just as the ooze started to form, and we got three - so don’t try and take advantage of this as part of your strategy, just be glad if you you’re running late and only get two.

We ended up running with four druids, and while learning the fight the extra battle resurrections were valuable, but in our kill we needed none. If you have good enough execution for the last transition, you can have PP under 30% by the time he’s finished drinking his concoction which helps a lot with the soft enrage for the last phase (which aside from everything hurting more, requiring higher DPS and potentially having to deal with unbound plague is essentially the same). Since you aren't frozen, once you've killed both oozes feel free to give PP a whack while he's still drinking his concoction.

Big thanks to Therepoman, who ended up tanking on his druid, Healforreal. I’m still not sure it’s sunk in (for me), but he ended up with a well deserved (heroic) [Unidentifiable Organ]. Many of us would be a little reluctant to switch to an alt being so close the our ICC Drakes, and others oblivious to the opportunity they are getting to say... kill Lich King for the first time AND get Been Waiting for this for a Long Time. However, Repo logged without hesitation and did a great job in the meat suit.

So, speculation is that the patch is looming this week, leaving us just 2 more heroic modes in ICC.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention Moordenar picked up the heroic [Flesh-carving Scapel] just in time to see assassination make a comeback post patch.