Dances with Oozes, Flu Shot Shortage, & The Plagueworks
An outstanding week for Vox as we managed to down one fairly easy achievement (Flu Shot Shortage), one extremely difficult achievement (Dances with Oozes), and one challenging but very fun normal encounter (Professor Putricide) -- all of which have helped us secure our spot back at #1 Worldwide Strict!
- Kevin Costner is a shitty kiter.
- H1N1 ain't got nothin' on this shit!
- Two oozes, one room! So many delightful possibilities...
It's also worth noting that we did our attempts and successful kill of*Dances with Oozes well after the Big Ooze "merge bug" was hotfixed. I hate to be one of those people that pulls the "our kill was pre-nerf" card (or "post-fix" in this case), but suffice to say before the fix, being able to simply despawn two Big Oozes by merging them together*completely negates the difficulty and intent of this achievement.
Flu Shot Shortage, as mentioned, was quite simple comparatively though perhaps intentionally so considering the difficulty of Dances and Putricide himself.
As for Putricide, I found it an extremely well designed fight (aside from a few bugs) and was reminded a lot of Yogg-Saron Phase 2, requiring the entire raid to watch 3 to 5 various abilities & cooldowns while maintaining proper positioning and movement throughout. It seems very tightly tuned even for a full-245 equipped 10-man Guild such as ourselves and I suspect will present a very hefty challenge for any slightly more inactive strict Guilds who haven't had the time to properly farm Heroic ToC-10 completely.
We got our inevitable first couple of super-wipe attempts out of the way and soon found ourselves in the swing of Phase 1 & 2, but were stumped for a while on how best to manage Phase 3. Big props to our double-druid healer team for somehow pushing us through to the end on our final attempt of the evening! It was extremely close to be sure and I can see why Blizzard said the tuning may be a bit high, but for a final-wing boss, it's nice to see some true encounter complexity.
One (seeming) bug that truly screwed us out of one otherwise solid attempt involved the Orange Ooze spawn. I assume, by the nature of the mechanics, that the Ooze are not meant to target the current Putricide Main Tank, as we had not seen it occur all evening and it only makes sense given the action required by Orange Ooze targets. Unfortunately, one of our later attempts, well into Phase 2, our Putricide Main Tank was targeted by an Orange Ooze, and then the script seemingly realized that was an invalid target and moments later swapped to a new target, landing on a melee DPS who had (rightfully) assumed it was safe to engage and instead promptly exploded, downing a good chunk of the raid.
Also not a bug in any sense, but it would be nice if the Choking Gas Bombs left on the ground were larger and/or more vividly colored, as even people who usually have no trouble distinguishing between visual elements in our raids commented multiple times on the difficulty of identifying where the gas bombs were located. It got to the point, as the Putricide MT, that I just started counting down on the handy /sw stopwatch approximately how long since the last bomb cast and started moving Putricide when I thought the next cast was about to go off.
Other than that, everything seemed to work as intended and proved to be a very challenging but enjoyable fight. It's certainly too easy to make any blanket statements of fact, but we did try one attempt with Nausea, Heartburn, and Indegestion... and it's safe to assume this will prove to be a very difficult achievement for strict raids in my opinion. All the elements of the fight affect each other very tightly, such that upping the raid survival with extra STA or flasks to help with ooze explosions means lower DPS for actually downing said Ooze, not to mention Phase 3 burn. Likewise for adding additional healing. It will be interesting if Blizzard does in fact decide the 10-man version is too tightly tuned or leaves it as is for a sizeable step up in difficulty ahead of the previous 6 bosses.
I could dig it either way I suppose...
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