Professor Putricide: Video and explanation
On Tuesday night, my guild hit the new Icecrown Citadel bosses in the Plagueworks wing -- Festergut, Rotface, and Professor Putricide. While Festergut and Rotface are both pretty straightforward encounters, Putricide is a different matter. Due to Icecrown's gating system, you will have only 10 attempts on Putricide this week (on both 10- and 25-man, so 20 total if you see both versions of the fight), and mistakes are costly. Moreover, our raid found some pretty good strategies for both Festergut and Rotface, but there's a lot of conflicting information about Putricide.
Our hunter's guess was that the encounter on the PTR might have been buggy, and that's why the different strategies we read seemed at odds with each other, so our raid leader looked it over and took what turned out to be a pretty good shot at what we needed to do. After wiping on Putricide-25 3 times and walking away from it convinced that the encounter was still bugged, we split the raid into multiple 10-man teams and took a crack at it there. The footage you'll see above is our 10-man's 4th attempt and a clean kill (i.e. no deaths), with my annotations on the fight. Past the cut are a few more notes (and one correction) that I hope will be helpful.
As noted in the video, Putricide was not bugged; Blizzard's intent is that the raid is only able to have one abomination up at a time.
To correct a mistake made at two points in the video, Putricide's phase changes occur at 80% and 35%, not 85% and 30% as I initially thought.
We're still somewhat unsure about the specifics concerning some of Putricide's abilities, so I apologize in advance if any of the other information contained in the video turns out to be inaccurate. This strategy worked really well for us, but I wish I had more specifics on why it worked really well for us.
The DPS requirement here is quite high, particularly once Putricide enters phase 3. You lose the abomination in phase 3 and thus the ability to gobble up all the ooze making the floor dangerous, so Putricide has to die before you run out of places to stand (if you've done Firefighter or Lady Vashj, it's pretty much the same deal here).
Our second 10-man made the kill with only two healers, so you should be able to use 2 or 3 here as you prefer. Healing requirements, as with DPS, are very high. The abom has an AoE damage pulse and players take a great deal of damage while targeted by green or orange oozes.
We used an off-tank in phase 3 because we weren't certain whether some of Putricide's abilities would require a tank switch or additional cooldowns (he is tauntable), but I'm seeing other raids not do this. EDIT: after consulting some guildies on this, they're positive the OT is needed to prevent a debuff on the MT from stacking too high. Our hunter is saying have the OT taunt at 4 stacks. Addendum; please read the comments section for additional clarification on this from Heilig and Kalon.
The MMO-Champion page on Putricide referenced in the video can be found here. You'll note that the abom only has 3 abilities to worry about, but your "driver" will need some time to get used to them.
