Raid Rx: Healing Festergut and Rotface

Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.

With the impending release of the Plagueworks wing in Icecrown Citadel, how about some healer tips for the two abominations? Between the two of them, I think Festergut is easy to understand conceptually but harder to execute. Be prepared to bring on the healing as it will stress the healing team.

Festergut

Your raid group has exactly 5 minutes to blow him up before he enrages and blows you up. For number of healers, Drop it down to 5. If your raid group DPS is amazing, your raid can get away with 6 in favour of stability. Stock up on raid healing if the players are available for it. 1 tank healer should suffice.

But to break it down, Festergut has 42 million health. With 5 minutes, that's about 140000 raid DPS. With 19 DPS players (assuming 5 healers and 1 tank), that is a little over 7300 DPS needed individually. Festergut is the new Patchwerk (almost)!

Correction: Forgot to mention that 2 tanks will be needed on the fight to deal with Gastric Bloat. The current tank will be hit with it and after 10 applications, it's going to explode and deal AoE damage.

When your raid begins the encounter, the room will be flooded with gas. The entire raid is going to suffer damage from it. Holy priests, shamans and resto druids will have a field day healing due to the constant damage ticks that are going off.

Once your tank parks the abomination in the middle of the room, if you have a paladin or a disc priest (or any tank healing player for that matter), place your tank healer in the middle of the room along with the melee. Your tank healer isn't going to be doing anything else other than tank healing.

Players who suffer from Vile Gas need to be healed up. They're going to take some damage over time and will become disoriented. The gas usually targets players who are at range instead of the melee. If Vile Gas hits a player, nearby players will become disoriented as well. In other words, spread out. The damage from the DoT is roughly 5000 every 2 seconds for 6 seconds.

Periodically throughout the fight, players at range will be hit with a Gas Spore (3 on 25). When the gas spore detonates, the raid will take some damage but they will become inoculated. Now, I believe there is a cap on the amount of players that can get inoculated per spore but that may have changed. 1 Gas Spored player needs to run into the melee group and ensure those players get inoculated. The other 2 gas spores need to stand apart from each other and the range should head to the closest one.

As you can see, this encounter then becomes nothing more than a repeat of spread out, collapse, spread out, collapse.

The gas in the room is going to get inhaled 3 times before he exhales. Yes, that exhale will almost certainly wipe the raid unless you have been inoculated. Gas Spores come out 3 times before the Pungent Blight is exhaled. Every inoculation application grants a 25% resistance to shadow damage and stacks 3 times. The Blight itself hits for 48750 to 51250 damage without any resistance. It might be possible to get away with only 2 inoculations but healing and tank cooldowns will need to be used.

Debuffs to note in your raid frames:

Inoculated - Specifically, watch for the number of applications. If a player has under 3, cooldowns will need to be used on them so they can survive.
Vile Gas - Hit those players with HoTs and they should live long enough.

Rotface

Stratfu has a great writeup of what needs to be done with diagrams.

If your raid has fought Grobbulus before, then this encounter will be fairly similar. You can go back to running a 5-6 healer setup here. Run at least 2 tank healing capable players. The raid off tank will have a few responsibilities.

Place Rotfaces tank and the raid directly in the middle of the room. It is the only area that will be safe from Ooze Floods. You'll see thees giant canisters on the wall and they will periodically break covering about 25% of the outer ring (a quadrant basically).

Mutated Infections are a disease. It is very important to not cleanse this immediately. Place an extra healer or 2 on anyone affected by it since healing taken is going to be reduced by half. Rotface will cast this on a player at random. When this happens, your raid off tank will need to hustle away from the raid and stand in an area that has not been affected with an Ooze Flood. After 12 seconds (or if the Mutated Infection is cleansed), a Small Ooze will spawn. That Ooze needs to be picked up and kited around in a circle. The Ooze has a number of abilities like slowing down movement and spawning a puddle that deals damage to anyone near it.

The next player that gets a Mutated Infection needs to run toward the off tank. Once their disease is cleansed, another Small Ooze will spawn and if there is another Small Ooze nearby, they will merge and become (you guessed it) Big Ooze. As the Big Ooze continues to absorb Small Oozes, the damage it deals is going to increase by 20% every time. Be sure to add an extra healer to the tank if you feel it is necessary.

After 5 Small Oozes, the Big Ooze will start casting an explosion. It will target the position of random players in the raid and fire. Since everyone is still standing in the middle, all you have to do is scatter and get away from the middle area until it is safe. Once you're clear, run back in and begin the Oozification process again!

Good luck everyone! Professor Putricide is next up.

Want some more advice for working with the healers in your guild? Raid Rx has you covered with all there is to know! Need raid or guild healing advice? E-mail me at matticus@wow.com and you could see a future post addressing your question. Looking for less healer-centric raiding advice? Take a look at our raiding column Ready Check.