This thread is to discuss the Rotface encounter in Icecrown Citadel. It's my understanding based on http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t83571-icecrown_posting_guidelines_updated_8_dec_09_a/ that there are no bans on any 3.3 content discussion. I used to really enjoy reading the boss-specific threads on these forums and look forward to seeing them again, so I am starting this one.
Rotface
We successfully downed Rotface this week and I will make attempts to update this post with the valuable points from this thread.
The little oozes have a 'fixate' on whoever drops them - this means everyone who gets the Mutated Infection debuff is 'responsible' for making sure their ooze merges properly, kiting their small ooze if needed.
The little oozes are snarable (Chains of Ice) and possibly rootable but are NOT tauntable - see fixate above.
You can have multipe large oozes at one time - avoiding mulitple large oozes is one of the keys to fight
There is no 'hard' enrage. Rotface casts Mutated Infection starting every 12 seconds and ramping up to every ~6 seconds, regardless of health. For this reason, it is recommended to bloodlust at the start of the fight. The goal is to shorten the total fight length.
Paladins and DKs seem to be the optimal kite tanks. Paladins have range snap agro (avenger's shield, judegement) and can control the cleanse, which can be very useful. DKs also have decent ranged threat (D&D, DC, IT) and can freely run through the slime while kiting through AMS/IBF usage.
The kiting tank should avoid kiting the large ooze anywhere near the raid. Try to keep it on the outside of the room.
The kiting tank should not be afraid to run through the large quandrant slime. It's better to heal that damage on a tank than to kite the large ooze near the raid.
The kiting tank should never be meleed by the large ooze. It is the people with the little slime's job to properly kite their little slimes to merge with the big slime.
As the Rotface begins casting mutated infection more rapidly, it is everyone's job to be aware and properly drop their oozes - avoid tunnel vision dps when Rotface is at 20% - properly positioning the little oozes is still the priority for everyone.
Unstable Ooze Explosion - the mechanic is straightforward. The big ooze begins casting (~1.5-2 cast) and the missiles don't target anyone until after the cast is finished. Have your kiting tank call out when the casting ends for people to run away from Rotface and let the missiles land.
Last edited by The Truculent Gentleman : 01/12/10 at 10:09 AM.
When you have the debuff run to the large slime. We had our pally tank kiting the large slime so when someone with the debuff would get next to the large slime he'd cleanse them, popping a new slime which would immediately merge with the current slime. The only tricky part is the first slime which stays fixated (it seems) on the person who dropped it.
Just keep doing what you've been doing through the soft enrage. People have to keep running out and keep dropping slimes onto the existing one. If your the first person to get a slime after the explosion just kite it around until someone drops a slime near you slime, at which point the off tank taunts the now large slime and he continues to kite.
In addition, I have read reports (but not had the opportunity to test this firsthand) that you can 'destroy' the large oozes if you combine two large oozes with the same stack count on each one. Can anyone confirm this? It seems to open interesting new strategies if it's the case.
We attempted the achievement last night and one of the strats we tried was to have multiple large oozes to collect the smaller ones. At one point we had two large oozes, both with a 2-stack merge to form an ooze with a 4-stack. At higher stack levels you my get a different result but at that level they will do nothing different.
The large ooze not blowing up is apparently if they have greater then 5 stacks when they merge. So combining two 3 stack oozes for example. They only blow up when they have 5. Least that's what I've heard.
Large Oozes will still blow up at larger than 5 stacks.
We had a 5 stack that bugged out and didn't blow up. When it got the 6th stack it decided to blow up.
Are you sure the soft enrage is at 30% vs on a timer?
It seemed to us that it was a continuous increase over the fight - the rate just went up. As a result we ended up burning heroism at about 97% to take full advantage of the limited movement required at the start.
If it turns out to be a 30% enrage that certainly significantly changes when we burn hero. (We killed him but I'd still love to make him easier)
Large Oozes will still blow up at larger than 5 stacks.
We had a 5 stack that bugged out and didn't blow up. When it got the 6th stack it decided to blow up.
We accidentally pushed a few 6-stack explosions, it's not hard to do once we figured it out. Cleansing that 5th person "late" and the 6th person "early" will push a 4-stack ooze to 6-stack before the explosion is triggered. I don't yet think there's any value in this but it is something I'm going to keep in the back of my mind.
It starts at 12 seconds and decreases to what looks like 6 seconds towards the end.
This is a relatively important point for Bloodlust usage. It means you can Bloodlust at the start of fight instead of saving it for the 'enrage' phase, allowing better use of personal cooldowns.
Popping Lust/Heroism on engage seems like the clear choice, yes, since the theoretical benefits of execute-range DPS are going to be far outweighed by the fact that you have a third of your DPS running out for debuffs and/or kiting slimes at that point.
There's a post about this somewhere but I threw something more visual together to try and flesh out the achievement for my guild and figured I'd share. It should be self-explanatory but the long and short is that you never let the little slimes merge with the big ones. Little with little and big with big, and never the twain shall meet. By the end you may have two kiters, each with a 4-stack ooze.
It starts at 12 seconds and decreases to what looks like 6 seconds towards the end.
Looks like it accelerates steadily up to a point, then stabilizes.
Peaks in the graph look like they could be "missed" casts possibly due to some alternate thing taking place?
When you have the debuff run to the large slime. We had our pally tank kiting the large slime so when someone with the debuff would get next to the large slime he'd cleanse them, popping a new slime which would immediately merge with the current slime. The only tricky part is the first slime which stays fixated (it seems) on the person who dropped it.
Just keep doing what you've been doing through the soft enrage. People have to keep running out and keep dropping slimes onto the existing one. If your the first person to get a slime after the explosion just kite it around until someone drops a slime near you slime, at which point the off tank taunts the now large slime and he continues to kite.
Aye, this is exactly what we were doing (I was the pally tank). Immediately following the Unstable Ooze Explosion, we sometimes fell behind on the oozes (having multiple running amok while they tried to combine into the Big Ooze), but once the Big Ooze was up we typically got back in the routine. We began cleansing as soon as the debuffed players were out of the raid enroute to me, leaving the responsibility of combining the oozes to that player, leaving the kiter to focus on avoiding puddles and getting cornered.
Interesting information about the soft enrage - BL at the start would seem to yield the most benefit.
When we were doing this last night we noticed that when two big oozes merged they didn't in fact create a bigger ooze, but cancelled each other out and disappeared. It's entirely likely that this is just a bug and since we were more concerned about getting the kill down we didn't pursue the strat for the achievement last night.
Popping Lust/Heroism on engage seems like the clear choice, yes, since the theoretical benefits of execute-range DPS are going to be far outweighed by the fact that you have a third of your DPS running out for debuffs and/or kiting slimes at that point.
Two big oozes will definitely not both despawn if they step onto each other with the same stack number, we tested tonight. If it was ever intended, it isn't now. Sometimes big oozes still will not explode at 5+ stacks until some time later though.
One thing worth noting is that as far as I can tell none of Rotface's magic damage is a specific school (unlike Festergut's Shadow damage). It's "Shadowstorm" type damage, which sounds like the name a 10-year old would give a D&D character.
Two big oozes will definitely not both despawn if they step onto each other with the same stack number, we tested tonight.
We tested last night (around 18 hours ago) and definitely had 2 merge and cancel. I am unsure of the stack count though. I have trouble believing that it's not an intended mechanic to deal with them due to the achievement;
Dances with Oozes (10 player)
Defeat Rotface without a Big Ooze casting Unstable Ooze Explosion in 10-player mode.
If you can't combine them to kill them off I'm not sure how else you could do it since they have fairly high HPs don't they?
One thing worth noting is that as far as I can tell none of Rotface's magic damage is a specific school (unlike Festergut's Shadow damage). It's "Shadowstorm" type damage, which sounds like the name a 10-year old would give a D&D character.
If I can take a guess, I'd say "Shadowstorm" damage will take the lowest resistance of either shadow or nature, much like frostfire does between frost and fire. So a raid would need both a NR totem and Prayer of Shadow Protection to lower that damage.
*edit: that's what World of Logs thinks too, according to the colors it gives to those effects, although the wowhead datamined spell effects only say nature damage (it only says fire for Frostfire bolt, too).
In the Rotface encounter, big oozes should now properly combine.
it's safe to assume that big oozes should combine, they just sometimes didn't. On our tries last night we had both happen. I guess the achievement just means you will have to use multiple kiters.
During our attempts last night (in 10 player mode) we encounted two tactical problems regarding the ooze tank (we used a pally for that):
1.) All guides on the net suggest to kite the oozes around the room, near the walls. That makes perfect sense of course. However: What should the Tank do, when a quarter of the room is covered in slime? Should he turn around (see problem nr. 2) or should he kite the ooze around the border of the slime pool, which would mean he would eventually come near enough to the raid to inflict heavy aura-damage.
2.) Every once in a while the ooze would get to melee our tank (while building aggro, collecting new slimes, trying to evade slime pools), which - even though our tank is geared mostly in 245 - resulted in a damage spike almost instantly killing him.
Are there any obvious flaws in our strategy you can derive from the things I mentioned?
Have a nice day
Drachenmond
During our attempts last night (in 10 player mode) we encounted two tactical problems regarding the ooze tank (we used a pally for that):
1.) All guides on the net suggest to kite the oozes around the room, near the walls. That makes perfect sense of course. However: What should the Tank do, when a quarter of the room is covered in slime? Should he turn around (see problem nr. 2) or should he kite the ooze around the border of the slime pool, which would mean he would eventually come near enough to the raid to inflict heavy aura-damage.
2.) Every once in a while the ooze would get to melee our tank (while building aggro, collecting new slimes, trying to evade slime pools), which - even though our tank is geared mostly in 245 - resulted in a damage spike almost instantly killing him.
1. Kite around the room, even through the 1/4 slime pools. We went from a Tuesday wipefest to a one shot kill when I switched to just running through the pools. Healing one tank through a pool seems far preferable to healing the entire center group through a slime aura.
2. I seemed ok blowing a mangle/maul combo on the first double slime to get a threat lead. I don't know if I've just been good at getting out of melee before it gains the ability to attack or if the slime damage goes up substantially as it grows larger. I do know that if you try to get clever by using charge on Rotface to avoid a 1/4 slime pool, the big slime is eventually going to one shot you.
Don't sign your posts, it's not necessary. Have a nice day yourself, though.
The ooze should never get to melee the tank. We used a paladin kiter, which meant he could BoF through the slime if critical. The slime snare/damage isn't bad enough that it will kill a prepared kiter, but in preparation for heroics (which will almost certainly be worse) you might want to get used to kiting around it anyway. If performed correctly, you can kite around the slime and still avoid auraing the raid too much.
BoFing through works fine for the kiter, but the main danger with the slime is that people trying to merge their little oozes will get tripped up and have to go around anyway. The cleanest method is probably to continually adjust the boss off-center to leave a path next to the slime. It may not be necessary on normal mode, but it's surely safer.
It seems that Rotface sometimes "refreshes" the Mutated Infection on a target, which would likely be from casting it on a target already afflicted by it. If the graph was based only on the instances of infections, then this might be a reason for the peaks.
However, looking at the kalbear's log, it doesn't seem so; there is only 1 occurrence of infection being refreshed, and it happens toward the end, implying a single peak toward the end.
Other possible reasons for the peaks could be that Rotface was Slime-Spraying at the time? Each peak as shown seems to be of the same height/delay, which suggests a 'similar' cause for each of them.
It is also possible to make a small circle around the ooze and reverse your direction if you see yourself heading to a puddle. I actually put on my DPS plate boots with my Nitro booster enchant to run around the puddles at times (and as mentioned, BoF is invaluable). Definitely cannot tank the oozes - they hit for ~50% of my HP on 10 man in decent prot gear. I'm not familiar with how much ranged threat Druid and Warriors can put out, but all you should need is enough to keep it off the healers. As a paladin with the damage on our single target taunt, I'm usually able to taunt, throw my shield, and the occasional Judgement (10 yard range) to be more than enough to keep it off the healers.
Honestly, a tank spec isn't necessary to kite except for the additional threat and the survivability in the case that the ooze does catch up to you - getting cornered and having to skirt around the ooze, I know AD procced a few times the night we did it (on 10 man). I'd be interested to see how well a holy spec'd pally in stam gear could pull it off (better mana regen and ranged Judgements).
Did anyone experience getting randomly meleed by a Big Ooze(more than 2, usually at least 4) stacks? At some points during our tries last night, people who would go within the aura range to drop their slime, or people who the kiter passed close to, would get hit for about 40k damage, and get one-shot.
Is that a bug, or are we just too slow/taking unnecessary risks?
01/06/10, 12:59 PM
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