Cleaning up our Putricide 25 kill

[Texaporte]

Looking at the logs, these are some of the differences between this week and last week:

- More deaths to green ooze adhesive. This one's on healers and raid positioning. We need to have a healer ready to heal the adhesive, which means that we need a bit more cohesion in the healing team on whose job it is to heal the green goo target.
- Messier transitions to phase 3, even when we called the DPS stop
- Only about a half-second to DPS Putricide after brown slime comes

We've gotten way better at the brown slime kite, though there were a couple of mistakes by people not running close enough to Putricide to give us more DPS time on the boss.

However, there is a lot of room for improvement, including on the DPS front (I'm going to contact the lowest DPS on the totem pole and work with them to see how they can improve) and on the coordination/positioning front for green slime.

The Green Slime Debate

My official position on the green slime is, when it explodes, make sure that a) there are 6 or 7 people (at least) to take the hit and b) you get hit toward a wall.

If all of the ranged group bunches up, we lose a lot of dps in phase 2 (where the dps timing is most important), but what they can do is avoid hanging out in the middle out of range of healers/etc. Try and put your back to a wall, so that you don't get blown too far away from healers.

However, I'm open to suggestions on this one, including your reasoning. "It worked last week" only goes so far, since we're all parts of a machine and we need all parts running on Putricide.

Speeding up brown slime phases while not sacrificing boss damage horribly

Also, we're losing a lot of time on brown slime. Short of upping everyone's DPS, the thing we can do here is have one or two melee just plain stay on the boss during brown slime, since we're doing the brown slime run near-perfectly now.

Any other thoughts?

[Logos]

Here's an idea. Maybe have melee line up next to the green slime in the direction of the range. That way, when they get knocked back, the slime will almost assuredly follow them (in the direction of the range), increasing melee's dps on the green slime. Hopefully the slime will be killed by the time it gets to range so they don't have to scatter beforehand and lose dps, since with melee's dps increase with this strat we should see the slime go down before then. Just an idea.

greenslimeposition.gif (10.61 KiB) Viewed 292 times

[Werehamster]

Like so many other things in this fight that make it desk-smashingly hard to dps as a cat, I have no control over where I stand when I dps the green slime. I am behind the green slime, otherwise my dps drops even further.

[Texaporte]

Until our DPS improves on 25-man, would it be useful for us to go back to the standard, raid-moves-lots strat of moving clockwise around the room and being on the opposite side of the room from where the slime poops out, thus giving us max DPS time on each slime before it explodes? Or is it best to stick with what we were already doing before, which requires the least raid movement, but the most individual responsibility/least margin for error.

[Chamomile]

I think that if it worked for us in the past, we probably don't need to change it. We don't need the entire raid stacked on the green when it goes off, just enough to keep the target from dying.

[Thunderfly]

Until our DPS improves on 25-man, would it be useful for us to go back to the standard, raid-moves-lots strat of moving clockwise around the room and being on the opposite side of the room from where the slime poops out, thus giving us max DPS time on each slime before it explodes? Or is it best to stick with what we were already doing before, which requires the least raid movement, but the most individual responsibility/least margin for error.

^^^ This.

What was frustrating on Tuesday was the amount of running around it seemed people had to do to get to "green slime position". It's DPS time lost and didn't work, imo. It was taking longer to run to position, get slime down, get back to Putricide, run to brown slime hit range, down brown, back to Putricide, back to green slime position. So on and so forth.

Almost every successful fight I've seen, either on the Interwebz or over the shoulder of friends, uses the above strategy. It's quicker and it maximizes DPS time.

The other thing to consider is that *everybody* needs to understand the slime mechanics. It seems like some people aren't sure of the brown slime kite path to take, how to avoid malleable goo, or how not to take uberdamage from exploding green slime.

[Texaporte]

This brings up a question of "who's supposed to eat explosions" - as some people have noted, it doesn't require the whole raid to survive a green blast: our usual group involves the tank and all melee (including hunter/warlock pets, who are beautiful beautiful anti-slime creatures) to eat explosions, with a few of the more mobile healers (druids and priests, usually) trying to tag along and make the load easier. How many ranged are coming in there, and how many of them SHOULD be there? For example, hunters and mages should be as far away as possible, and they can ice block/feign death in order to force the green slime to change targets, which helps not just the melee, but healers and ranged dps as well.

edit: Also, when you've seen this strat, how much does it affect melee? We started our current strategy to accommodate the melee dps, who under the current system spend as little time running to the next target as possible. It's pretty much "run to brown slime once someone's bloated, then (ideally) the brown slime dies next to putricide."

[Thunderfly]

This brings up a question of "who's supposed to eat explosions" - as some people have noted, it doesn't require the whole raid to survive a green blast: our usual group involves the tank and all melee (including hunter/warlock pets, who are beautiful beautiful anti-slime creatures) to eat explosions, with a few of the more mobile healers (druids and priests, usually) trying to tag along and make the load easier. How many ranged are coming in there, and how many of them SHOULD be there? For example, hunters and mages should be as far away as possible, and they can ice block/feign death in order to force the green slime to change targets, which helps not just the melee, but healers and ranged dps as well.

edit: Also, when you've seen this strat, how much does it affect melee? We started our current strategy to accommodate the melee dps, who under the current system spend as little time running to the next target as possible. It's pretty much "run to brown slime once someone's bloated, then (ideally) the brown slime dies next to putricide."

From the successful and clean kills that I've seen, both ranged and melee can eat the explosions for the most part, but ranged are responsible for controlling it. Essentially, the best strategies I've seen go something like this:

1. Start by kiting Putricide to the south side of the room (opposite side to where green slime spawns). Melee stay on Putricide. As soon as green slime spawns, OT pukes on it to slow it, and it is ranged's responsibility to nuke Slimer while melee continue to wail on Putricide. If it targets a ranged dps, all dps collapse together to absorb the explosion. It's recommended that at least one ranged is marked so it's easy to identify the collapse point. If it reaches melee, melee eat the explosion. Only ranged should be DPSing green slime.

2. When green is down, kite Putricide to the north side of the room. Brown spawns, OT regurgitates, and ranged wail on it. The target of brown slime kites it exactly as we have been. Only ranged should be DPSing brown slime.

3. The caveat to these two scenarios are if Putricide is close to 80% or 30% HP, then all DPS focuses on the slimes so there are no slimes up when Putricide casts Tear Gas between phases.

4. Rinse and repeat for Phase 2, now with everyone avoiding Choking Gas Bomb and Malleable Goo.

5. In Phase 3, kite clockwise or counter-clockwise, starting in the corner closest to Putricide. Wail on him. Avoid slime puddles. Pop CDs. Do whatever it takes until he's dead. Enjoy phat lewt.

[Tsquared!]

Quick question, since I pay less attention to the dps...do we have strong enough ranged dps...since this strategy heavily relies on that...I have the impression that the top 5-10 dps are usually in the melee camp (perhaps this has changed and or the mechanics favor ranged in this fight...i don't know...I cant see the logs from work)

[Texaporte]

The answer is "it depends on the fight." This strategy would make it so that the melee dps is way over the ranged DPS for the fight, but even for Saurfang (a comparable fight if we switch to this strategy) our ranged DPS is very solid. The same people tend to float to the top: 3 rogues, a ret paladin, a shadow priest, an elemental shaman, 2-3 hunters. It's pretty well spread out.