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WoW.com's Guide to Festergut

Now that you've conquered the tragic hero-turned-evil Deathbringer Saurfang, the path is clear for you to go into the Plagueworks. This is where some of the slimy, funky, icky creatures serving Arthas keep their truly hideous and nasty creatures. "Slimy" really is the word here, as the whole area just seems ... moist.

Table of contents



Composition


In 10-man mode, you will need two tanks and three healers. In 25-man mode, you'll need five healers. But, as always, the number of healers you actually use will change a little depending on their throughput.

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General strategy


Festergut
is probably one of the two ugliest bosses in the game right now. The other would be Rotface, who shares the same model as his brother. The fight with Festergut is actually fairly straightforward and only has two different gimmicks. The first is the Gastric Bloat he puts on the tank, which will require you to have multiple tanks. The second is the Gaseous Blight that fills the room when you enter. Here's how all this works out.

The first trick with Festergut is the stacking debuff called Gastric Bloat. This debuff will stack up to 10 times on the tank. When it reaches 10 stacks, the tank will explode in a funky Gastric Explosion. The explosion will hit your raid hard -- it instantly kills the person who exploded and does huge damage to everyone else in the room. So obviously you don't want to let the Bloat go to 10 stacks. Have your off tank taunt Festergut when the first tank has nine stacks of Gastric Bloat. It takes two minutes for the debuff to drop off, which is also how long it takes for the Bloat to get to nine stacks in the first place. When a tank is "cooling down" his bloat, he should be DPSing the boss, since the Gastric Bloat also has the side effect of increasing the target's damage by 10% per stack.

Ranged DPS (and healers) will need to worry about Vile Gas, a debuff that encourages them to spread out at all costs. If you get too close to other players with Vile Gas, bad things will happen.

The other thing to worry about is the ongoing Gaseous Blight that fills Festergut's room. It starts off incredibly powerful and will tax your healers to keep the raid at full health. Festergut will periodically "inhale" the gas, which makes him hit harder but the Blight a little weaker. After he's inhaled four times, he farts a Pungent Blight, damaging the entire raid. So, this is the ebb and flow of the fight: the raid is taking a lot of damage from the Gaseous Blight. With each inhale, the raid takes less damage, but the tank takes more. So your healing will slowly shift from raid-focused healing to tank-focused healing. When Festergut reaches four inhales, he will explode and kill everyone with a big Pungent Blight.

However, there's something you can do to keep the raid from dying from that one, big fart. Festergut will periodically drop a Gas Spore on random raid members. (It drops two spores in 10-man but three spores in 25-man.) That spore will explode, doing light damage to any player within range and providing him with an Inoculated buff. That buff will keep you from taking deadly level damage from Festergut's Pungent Blight fart and becomes key in letting your healers successfully heal through the encounter. For that reason, it's a good idea to keep your melee in a clump and make sure your ranged collapse for spores. However, once the spore has popped, the ranged need to spread out again, lest they murder each other.

In heroic mode, Professor Putricide will hurl Malleable Goo into the room. Not only will it do additional damage if it hits a player, it will also slow the player's attack and casting speed. Not only do you have to deal with Festergut, you have to avoid these hurled goo.

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Abilities

  • Gaseous Blight When Fester has not inhaled yet, the permeating orange gas does the most damage. However, he will Inhale Blight three times before exploding and do more damage to the tanks every time he inhales. He will also do less via this AoE each time he inhales. At first, Gaseous Blight does around 3,000 shadow damage to all players per tick in 10-man normal. In 10-man heroic and 25-man normal, it does around 4.5k per tick; it does around 6.5k in 25-man heroic.

  • Gaseous Blight (1st inhale) In 10-man normal, Gaseous Blight does around 2k per tick. It does 3k per tick in 10-man heroic and 25-man normal, while doing 4.5k in 25-man heroic.

  • Gaseous Blight (2nd inhale) The weakest setting of Gaseous Blight, Festergut will only be doing around 1,500 shadow damage per tick in 10-man normal. In 10-man heroic and 25-man normal, he'll do around 2k per tick. In 25-man heroic, it's clicking for around 3k per tick.

  • Pungent Blight In lieu of a fourth inhale, Festergut unleashes a "fart" of Pungent Blight. If you're not inoculated, you'll take around 44,000 shadow damage in 10-man normal. You'll take around 49.5k in 10-man heroic, 65k in 25-man normal and 75k in 25-man heroic.

  • Gas Spore Gas Spore (discussed at length above) will afflict two random players in 10-man modes but hit three players in 25-man modes.

  • Gastric Bloat Gastric Bloat is the debuff that forces tanks to switch off the boss. It can stack up to 10 times. If it reaches a full stack of 10, the tank will explode in a Gastric Explosion.

  • Vile Gas Will usually target a ranged player, forcing him to vomit and do minor damage to all players around himself.


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Tank strategy


You have two things to focus on. First, make absolutely sure that you taunt Festergut at the time the other tank is at nine stacks of Gastric Bloat. When you're not actively tanking the boss, bust out as much DPS as possible. Be prepared to do the spore dance if you're not actively main tanking.

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DPS strategy


Kill the boss fast. This proves your DPS readiness for later bosses. Be ready to do the spore dance. But really, Festergut is a good, old-fashioned DPS race. Lay down the smack down as fast as possible.

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Healer strategy


There's an immense amount of raid damage in this fight. Tank healing isn't too bad until you get to the third inhale; having a few flexible healers who can go from raid healing to tank healing will be very helpful. Discipline priests will be challenged to get the most use out of their bubbles, if they're trying to double for raid healing.

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Other resources

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