Wednesday (17 Mar) - Man I Hate Oozes

Wednesday (17 Mar) - Man I Hate Oozes

I expected to spend the evening with Philly Wednesday night, since there were plenty of raiders signed up for the guild 25 man and Wild was listed as a Standby. At 5:50pm, though, only 22 raiders were confirmed to be in the raid, and that included an invite for Wild. Tuesday night is farm night, when the guild raid typically downs six bosses that have been killed many times before. On Tuesday this week that was their tally - six. Wednesday night is when we bang our heads against bosses we aren't so good at - we call it wipe night, and as is typical of every raid, some raiders always have something more important to do on those nights. Wild will take what he can get. The guild scrambled to fill the last spots. Wild saw that some of his mayhem friends were on and I asked whether they were available and interested. A DK, who Wild knows from the MM group, offered to come on his rogue. Wild forwarded his name, and he was invited into the raid.

Wild was busy buffing and reading over the bosses we would be after, and I didn't notice that a few minutes later the rogue left the raid. Actually, he didn't leave, he was kicked out. Wild learned about it when the shaman raid leader for MM whispered Wild, telling me that our guild raid leader was in hot water with him for kicking his guildie and friend and according to him being quite rude and hostile about it.

I tried to get some specifics, and was told that all the rogue did was ask a question about the raid and got kicked for asking. We were in the middle of clearing trash mobs and setting up for Festergut and I knew I'd never get to the bottom of it during the raid. I whispered the shaman and told him I'd figure it out after the raid and get back to him. We went a man short on the evening, never filling that 25th spot.

Festergut is maybe 50% on farm. We had a quick wipe on our first attempt when Wild's group of four healers and a DPS all "misunderstood" the positioning and failed to find a spore to keep from blowing ourselves up. Well, we blew ourselves up, scattering pieces of ourselves all over the room. The second time Festergut went down like he was supposed to.

Then it came time to face Rotface. Wild has seen him before, and killed him before. I'm sure the raid leaders felt that we would bring this guy down and then go after the real challenge of the night, and one we have yet to conquer, which is Professor Putricide. It was not to be.

We spent the rest of the evening and most of our three hours of raiding trying to kill Rotface. Let me explain this fight from Wild's point of view.

When the tank engages Rotface, the rest of the raid moves right under the arms of Rotface, close enough to smell the fact that he isn't wearing any deodorant. Wild stands with his nose up Rotface's butt, because as long as I'm behind him I'm not getting vomited on by him, which he does often. When Rotface turns, Wild turns with him. Slime pours from spigots on the walls, which Wild watches for and adjusts his position to be out of the way of, while still paying attention to the direction in which Rotface is projectile vomiting. On top of that, every few seconds Rotface tags a raider with Mutated Infection, which spawns a small ooze that lovingly follows the raider around doing damage to the raider and other raiders in the vicinity. While watching for vomit, and for slime pools, Wild is also looking for the raid warning that an ooze has spawned and who it has spawned on. Oh yea, Wild is HoT healing the tank, helping raid heal, and dropping HoTs on the raiders with oozes on them along with everything else.

It really gets interesting when the little ooze spawns and cuddles up to Wild. Because we attempted this fight like 15 times, we had 15 different directions about what to do when "you" have the ooze. The standard, guild approved answer is this: when you get the Infection, you have twelve seconds before the ooze spawns on you. Stand where you are and continue to heal or DPS as normal for 8 seconds. Then look around the room to find the ooze kiter. The ooze kiter is the off tank that collects the little oozes. He usually has a mark over his head so we can see him, although that mark falls off often and the kiter can be a little too busy to re-mark himself sometimes. Once you see the ooze kiter, run toward him and kite your little ooze between him and the BIG ooze that the ooze kiter is kiting. The BIG ooze is BIG because it absorbs the little oozes. Once six small oozes have merged together, there is short wait and then an explosion of ooze missiles. To avoid that all raiders run to the outside edge of the room because the explosion will be aimed at where we were standing when the sixth ooze merged.

Got it? Oh yea, one more thing. If you screw up merging your little ooze with the big ooze that's being kited, the little ooze will eventually find another ooze to merge with. Little oozes don't hurt that much, but two little oozes make a BIG one, and they are deadly dangerous. As time passes the little ooze spawning gets faster and faster. Too many little oozes merging into big ones is what killed us practically every time.

This fight is a pain.

We did, eventually, kill him. By then there was less than twenty minutes left of the evening, and with trash mobs having respawned there was little reason to try to get to Putricide.

Wild didn't get any goodies, which was mostly leather melee gear that made rogues and cat druids happy. As the rest of the raid hearthed back to Dalaran, Wild discovered that the bag that held his hearthstone was the bag that he swapped from his bank when he was crafting Philly's pvp gear. So Wild didn't have his hearthstone on him. Sigh. He waited for the sixty second instance timer to expire, and was automatically dumped at the nearest graveyard, and Wild flew home from there. The perfect cap to Wild's evening.

Rotface is not a hard fight to heal. The problems all stem from kiting and merging the oozes. So all the healer numbers were down. Wild finished 4th out of six at 2561 hps and getting 11.5% of the healing. The leader was the pally that always leads in healing, with 4684 hps and 22.2%. Wild's best fight was the Festergut kill, where Wild hit over 4800 hps.

Wild contacted the guild raid leader after the raid was over and asked about what happened with the MM rogue. The short answer, which Wild shared with the MM shaman raid leader in somewhat more detail than here, was that there was a screw up on our side. With Wild as the go between, apologies were extended and we got things smoothed out.

The shaman, doing his part to mend fences, asked how we did in our raid. Wild, trying to be funny and lighthearted, responded that if it made him feel any better we didn't do well, killing only Festergut and Rotface. He replied that his 25 man had yet to kill Festergut. Sigh.

I'm tired. Night!