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Danny! We need a slime diagram!

Basically:

- Melee groups up with melee for green slime
- Ranged groups with ranged for green slime
- Ranged hits brown slime when it spawns
- Melee hits brown slime ONLY WHEN IT HAS CHOSEN A TARGET AND IT IS NOT YOU.

DDIAF.

I'll see if I can dig up an informative brochure from the recently-renamed Schadenfreude Department of Fish and Ooze... In the meantime, some basic theory in boring ol' text format for later expansion:

Unstable Experiment A: Volatile Ooze

Our current strategy has DPS generally clump together on the right side of the room with the goal of beating on the Volatile Ooze (Green slime) as soon as it spawns. This maximizes Ooze punching time for melee, at the cost of having less control over which direction the crowd gets pushed away for the first charge. With any luck, though, even after an uncontrolled scatter from the first knockback the Ooze should be weak enough to kill before a second ooze-lock -> charge finishes.

Note that if you've been Ooze-locked you may be able to fake out the ooze with a targeting-loss effect, interrupting the knockback charge entirely and giving everyone a few more seconds to beat on the ooze as it looks for someone new. For reference, I used Feign Death when the Ooze locked me down and it immediately started choosing another target instead of Thunderfriending everyone. Try out different abilities while you're stuck there standing in place and let us know if they have any effect; for all I know this could be Shadowmeld's moment in the, er, sun.

Unstable Experiment B: Gas Cloud

DPS will continue to stay on the right side of the field when the Gas Cloud (Orange slime) spawns on the left; melee should wait until the Cloud has chosen a special friend (identifiable by a vivid orange line and, uh, involuntary growth spurts) before getting too close to the Cloud.
For the target of the Gas Cloud's affections, your priorities are:
a) run away from the Cloud.
b) avoid field hazards or paths that drag the Cloud through said hazards; there's a dozen people beating on that Cloud who would love to not run through slime.
c) assuming the majority of DPS is still alive and available to take down the Cloud in a timely manner, try not to run too far from the tank & Putricide, so that the melee DPS can get back to batting the Doctor. Path-wise, it seems like a good pattern for the newly Bloated might be to run to the experiment table, turn right, and hug the wall Legion Flame style.
General notes on the Doctor

In phase 1 it's important to keep an eye on Putricide's health; if he's close to 80% and it's been a while since his last Unstable Experiment, stop attacking and try to kill the add before taking him to 80% and triggering phase 2.

Phase 2's primary hiccups, in addition to the usual Ooze/Cloud wrangling, will be Putricide's new potion flasks he throws (the "Gummy Bears" you'll hear about over vent). Malleable Goo comes in green flasks that he gently lobs into the air at random targets, sticking a -200% haste debuff on anyone who gets hit. Choking Gas comes in orange flasks that get left on the ground and explode for damage and a -75% hit rating debuff; the tank should be dragging Putricide away from these. Whenever they drop, keep an eye on the floor so you don't accidentally walk into them.

Phase 3's much more straightforward in comparison to the first two, at least for DPS. Unstable Experiments stop spawning, so finish any loose slimes before getting back to Putricide. Puddles will grow much more; don't stand in them. Burn all of your dps cooldowns, don't eat gummy bears, and basically hit Putricide till candy comes out.

Couple of thoughts/WoL analysis/suggestions about the fight:

For phase 3: we have about a minute and half (90s) before we run out of space/die to the tank debuff. This has been consistent on all the attempts we got to phase three.
We need to do about 160k combined raid dps during the burn phase to kill him (35% of his health in 90 secs: 42 mill * .35 / 90). That figure is consistent with the time we got him to 1%, where we peaked at about 150k dps. We can totally do it if we all stay alive/connected.
For reference, the average combined raid dps for phase 2 is about 100k (no heroism + lots of running + lots of target switching).

Regarding phase 3 transition: getting a clean phase 3 transition is critical for us to meet the dps requirement. However, the window we're aiming at (when no adds are up and putricide is not yet casting unstable experiment) is very small. By the end of phase 2, it feels like its only a few global cooldowns. We usually have to burn through 1~2% (= 420k~840k HP) to cause the transition (since we call stop at 37%). If we assume the same DPS which we put out on average during phase 2 (100k combined), then we need 4.2~8.4 seconds.

The fact is: we've missed that window more often than we've succeed in catching it. We have gotten good at stoping DPS when called, but timing the switch remains a crap shoot. Suggestion: at least for the transition, we should have some pre-determined dps-ers (perhaps 1~3?, preferably DoT-ers) switch to Putricide early, like when the add is at 30%. DoTs & bleeds would be ideal for this job since they'll still be damaging the slimes, and DoTing up the good doctor = free dmg during tear gas.

Regarding DPS on adds: The window for transition is so small because it takes us a long time to kill the adds. They spwn on a timer, so if we kill them faster, the transition window gets larger. If you're curious about your contribution to the adds versus the boss himself, you can look up the following WoL report: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/nvcv ... 385&e=8962
Pick a fight, select: Analyze>damage done, By target. Selecting yourself in Source will give you a personalized report.
Keep in mind that range has longer dps uptime, especially on the gas cloud (since melee should wait till it picks a target). Melee seems to average about 8~12% of their dmg on the adds, while range does 13~18%.

Thoughts?

Hi! I'm Ted. Today on This Old Lab we're here in Putricide's Laboratory of Alchemical Horrors and Fun. Our friends at the Schadenfreude Department of Fish and Ooze have called us in for a special renovation project: we're going to help the good Professor paint his floor. In accordance with SDFO dying-in-fire regulations, our goal is to cover this room as slowly as possible.

Professor Putricide has been kind enough to provide us with the paint we'll be using for our project, a certified quasi-organic slime-based blend in soothing Neon Green. He'll be handing out buckets at regular intervals, but don't trust his potion-addled aim to do much more than hit the ground at your feet. He's told us that it's safe enough for use around children and both of their pets, so that's good news, at least; just the same, please step out of the pools when you see them to ensure even coating.

In the third phase of our project we won't have access to our usual Shop-Vac, so we'll have to deal with whatever slime is on the floor. For the start of this phase, a recommendation for all painting crew members not standing next to Putricide: try to stay close to the wall, so that the first two buckets land near the edge. This will give us more workspace in the long run, with the added benefit of fully covering those pesky room corners.
From there, it becomes a matter of standing close to (but not in) the existing pools, to allow for maximum overlap between buckets. This may involve starting along the right wall and painting across the entire edge before ending towards the middle, or it may require us to paint the right wall, turn to the center, then finish along the left wall. Consult with your project leader about what path to take when using this method in your own home; with practice and planning you'll find a path that maximizes face time with the Professor while not stranding too many project hands behind expanding pools.
Note that our host is also in the process of fumigating his laboratory; something about pesky unplagued flesh flying in from next door. If the professor accidentally hands you a slow, bouncing green globule, be sure to step aside quickly and let it pass. He'll also be leaving orange pesticide misters on the floor as he walks, so don't disturb those, either.

On behalf of This Old Lab and our sponsors in the SDFO, we'd like to thank you for spending your time with us. We would also like to thank Professor Putricide for taking time off from his research and sharing his workspace with us, but with any luck he'll be dead long before we finish painting, so I suppose that won't be necessary.

question: as the third tank (not the one in the fat suit), this is a very frustrating fight for me. I feel like I contribute nothing except for sunders until phase 3...

Is there anything I could be doing to help? I try to max my DPS... but if i'm not getting hit, i can barely break 2.6k

Is this a strategy tested with Big Guilds(tm)? As a class that has essentially no ability to dps while moving, standing on top of a group of people near the wall and near a pool of slime means that a major portion of my time will be spent moving and not dpsing. I suspect I'm not the only class / category with this issue as several flavors of dps and healing also require standing there to do their thing.

A similar issue that we had before with grouping up is making a tasty target for death by goo. That many of us eating an explosion or two will likely also be a wipe.

As third tank on Putricide, it honestly does suck because you're sunder man. During phase 3 you're one of the three most important people in the raid, but for phases 1 and 2 you feel like spare meat. To relieve the boredom, we can switch you in and out of the fat suit, too.

As for why we wiped this time and didn't wipe the previous two weeks:

Simple. Look at the logs, and compare them to last week's and the log from two weeks ago. We were missing a full 10k raid dps compared to our successes. That meant messier phase 2s, longer phase 3, and wipes.

We need more damage as a raid, and there are a few red flags we can look at and improve on next week.

Chamomile wrote:Is this a strategy tested with Big Guilds(tm)? As a class that has essentially no ability to dps while moving, standing on top of a group of people near the wall and near a pool of slime means that a major portion of my time will be spent moving and not dpsing. I suspect I'm not the only class / category with this issue as several flavors of dps and healing also require standing there to do their thing.

A similar issue that we had before with grouping up is making a tasty target for death by goo. That many of us eating an explosion or two will likely also be a wipe.

No, this is not a strategy tested by Big Guilds (tm). This is an idea I came up with, with the sole purpose of "minimize the amount of floor space lost to pools", which, at the end of the day, is only part of the equation. There's no shortage of enrage mechanics (soft and hard!) that the raid damage needs to outrace, so lost dps definitely takes precedence here. The only takeaway message I really wanted to illustrate was that the first set of puddles can easily take up 50-60% of the real estate over the course of 90 seconds or so if one lands in the center, and if it doesn't land in the center, it has a substantially lessened effect. Anything past the first twelve seconds of phase 3 is generally gonna have to be played by ear, subject to where Putty decides to drop his puddles, his goo and his gas.

Also perhaps this is relevant. Andy mentioned something about "is it just him" or was there truly a smaller window for people to get out of the orange gas bomb jars. While I believe the window for people to get out of the gas bomb jars did not change (since I tend to always notice them and I didn't notice any difference), I also think that in the past weeks, Tony has been the first one to call out the gas bombs whenever they form, and this week he was only there for the last try, and even so, he wasn't calling them out. And so there was lost dps which came from people being affected by the -75% hit debuff, which costs valuable dps. If kiters happen to kite the slimes through the orange jars because they can't really see what's behind them, we need to be smarter about running around them and not into them.

To be honest, I was calling it out 5 sec early, too. Not to compensate for vent lag, but to compensate for reaction times. I think I wasn't calling it out because even I wasn't fully attentive of the boss-mod timer bars in the middle of my screen.