Sooo... Festergut!
THE TIPS
The first tip is on how to tell Festergut apart from Rotface. They use the same (hideous) model and their rooms are the same, and both of them cast spells like Gaseous Pungent Stinky Gastric Blight Bloat, so it can be hard to distinguish them! What I did is realize the Plagueworks bosses are in alphabetical order from left to right: Festergut, Putricide, Rotface. And in my opinion it's best to start with #1 alphabetically, since although Festergut has steep requirements for DPS and survivability, it's technically the easiest fight by far.
So Festergut is a cyclical fight. It wobbles between one extreme, Raid Damage to Make a Tree Druid Flail for Joy, and the other extreme, Tank-Crushing Damage to Make a Paladin Cry. When there is a lot of orange blight on the ground, there is raid damage going around, and everyone needs heals. Shamans and Trees will be going nuts here, but you can help out with shields, PoM's, maybe a Divine Hymn if it gets ugly.
Periodically Festergut inhales some blight, which reduces the raid damage, but supersizes the damage he (it?) does to the main tank. When Festergut inhales three times (you can tell because the floor will be blue again instead of orange (also your main tank may start whimpering)), the damage is particularly insane. At this juncture, you should be in full-tank-spam-heal mode. Shield-Penance-Gheal cycles are recommended. Even if you are assigned as a raid healer, there is no raid damage during this time, so you should help on the tank. Divine Aegis and Inspiration insurance for the win!
The other main mechanic is the gas spores. Ranged players need to spread out overall, to avoid Vile Gas. But when Festergut launches gas spores, they need to collapse to share the debuff. Luckily for me, our guild has all the healers stack on the MT so we can heal uninterrupted, but your guild may have you at range, moving around to coordinate the debuff. Follow their lead; trust me that this is one strain of cooties that you DO want. Unless you enjoy eating the AOE he does after inhaling three times!
The fight repeats from there, with Festergut starting his inhale-cycle over each time. It's not a hard fight to heal, it just has sort of a "minutes of boredom followed by seconds of sheer terror" vibe. The only other mechanic is a tank swap (ICC is basically the Land of Required Tank Swap Mechanics. Blizzard could save developer time by just calling all these spells Yes You Need To Swap Tanks Again). But because of the nature of this one, offtank agro may be high, so you may want to be careful with Pain Suppression.
POWER INFUSION TIME
Festergut has a very short enrage timer, necessitating strong DPS as well as strong tank survivability. It's sort of Patchwerk meets the Hokey Pokey for DPS players. All this means for us is, PI early and often, except for when Heroism is up.
BONUS STRATEGY HAIKU
Festergut's strong, sure,
but what role can this guy play
in the Lich King's plan?
All of these raiding bosses sound interesting, I can't wait until I can get through the 70-80 and join them.
ReplyDelete"Maybe a Divine Hymn if it gets ugly". Agreed, and the ugliest part of the fight is his Pungent Blight - I tend to save my Hymn for the Blight exhaling. Inner Focus on Divine Hymn is pure gold at that point
ReplyDeleteYou left out the necessity of using Pain Suppression. Many guilds may not use, it but using during certain points in that fight can help make the fight go a lot smoother
ReplyDeleteIn our 10-man, the tank who is currently NOT tanking, but riding out his debuff, switches out of his high aggro stance (frost, defensive, etc) to prevent aggro from becoming an issue. In this situation, I think Pain Suppression should be perfectly acceptable to pop on the current tank during the 3rd inhale.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed that if your guild only needs some of the healers at range its best to keep the tank healer in melee. its also worth mentioning that it makes the fight easier if the ranged collapse on the healer during a spore
ReplyDeleteI definitely wouldn't recommend using gheal, especially if you're in 10 man 2 healing. A gheal can cost your tank his or her life.
ReplyDeleteI 2healed this with my disc priest and a resto shammy, yet surprisingly I'm not sure who was doing more "raid heals". I stood outside and the ranged would always collapse on me, and the shammy stood in melee collapsing onto tank. Chain heal/LHW through the tank with bubbles and POM from me really helped smooth out tank damage, and I was able to focus more on random raid wide damage with my POH and bubbles. Smoothest kill I've done on Festergut.
ReplyDeleteJust came across this blog, and I have to say I LOVE IT! keep up the good work!
ReplyDelete