We did our first heroic Putricide pulls last week, I think it was. And we got him down tonight. I think we spent 22ish attempts on him this week, maybe 25 or 26 total.
Honestly? Not a big deal.
Granted, our kill was messy. I was absolutely the LAST healer standing and that is ONLY because I actually used a healthstone. And I should have used Lay on Hands but, as it turns out, I didn’t need to.
WHEW.
I thought heroic Sindragosa had a lot of stuff to be aware of — positioning, instability stacks, who has unchained magic, the Icy Grip cooldown…
It feels like heroic Sindragosa pales in comparison to heroic Putricide. What’s really dumb is that there are not a lot of changes on heroic Putricide, except for the addition of Unbound Plague and some changes for the transitions.
I guess that, ultimately, we knew the Putricide fight on normal well enough (and we should know it that well!) to really be aware of the regular mechanics and deal with them being thrown at us differently and adjust to a new mechanic.
We don’t have that kind of familiarity with Sindragosa. We’d only done 3, maybe 4 kills of her before we killed the Lich King and started in on the heroics.
Having said that, I don’t know if I would have been able to do heroic Putricide without AVRE for the Unbound Plague graphics. It shows who has the plague, what the range is on the plague before it passes to you and shows a cooldown ticking down for how long you’ve had the plague for. And if YOU have the plague, anyone without the debuff from the plague gets a little white circle on them, so you know you can pass to them.
Due to this graphic enhancement, I pulled off the most awesome move EVER on an unsuccessful attempt.
The hunter officer had Unbound Plague. She was actually moving towards me to pass it to me. And then she got Volatile Ooze Adhesive on her. Not only did this mean she couldn’t move, but it meant that ALL THE MELEE were charging over to her to prevent her death from the ooze.
But then, I realized, all the melee would get Unbound Plague.
I took five steps forward, grabbed the plague and backed up so that no melee would get the plague from me.
The hunter didn’t die, no one in melee got the plague and I passed it off to my RL friend the resto druid before I hit 10 seconds.
So, 10/12 HM ICC25 and I pulled off possibly the sweetest move I’ve pulled … basically in this whole expansion. I cannot think of a finer moment and it’s too bad that it didn’t lead to a boss kill.
And the Cataclysm alpha is out, to boot. We live in interesting times.
Sounds impressive. The closest I’ve come to anything that badass is beating a 19 mage on my 10 paladin by a clever use of racials and my stun (and a fair bit of luck, admittedly).
Damn it, Kurn, I want to be awesome like you. :(
I think the most badass I ever got was in a Northrend dungeon before I hit 80 – our healer’d gone down from an accidental add that the tank didn’t notice, and she’d released and started running, saying “DON’T DIE I’M COMING BACK!”
Tank goes down. Mobs all target us DPSers. The other two DPS go down. I was still using my Blood spec levelling build, which meant I had basically every self-healing ability available in the tree. I popped Mark of Blood on the guy with the highest health, targeted one of the others, and kept hitting. I popped Rune Tap, Vampiric Blood. My blood worms spawned. One of the mobs went down, so Vendetta kicked in. I drank a health potion. And the healer got back just in time to start healing me up from about 10% health, and I ended up killing them before the rest of the group got back.
It made me feel pretty damn awesome. ^^
(you, however, were EPIC smooth there, and I bow to your leet moves)
ooooh congrats on your kill! I’ve got at least another week before we start attempting Heroic Sindragosa or Prof Putricide: we’re up to Deathwhisper and Saurfang next lockout.
I’m hoping like hell that Professor Putricide will come relatively easily to us because we wiped for so long on normal mode. We had more attempts to get Prof Putricide than we did Lich King. That’s how bad it was. Since our first kill we’ve never really struggled again so I’m hoping that those basic lessons are firmly cemented in our memories so that we can concentrate on the new, hard mode bits.
Sindragosa … I don’t look forward to. We didn’t wipe all that much on her during normal mode and all our kills since have been less than perfect. We’ve given her one go on heroic for fun and as I was saying “so how do I run out of the raid in time if I get sucked in for her aoe thingy?” … about 5 seconds before I blew up the raid with my instability stacks.
The other Shadow Priest (who lived too) was clever enough to strike a deal before hand – gold for killing a certain player. I wish I’d thought of it.
X – My crowning moment was a Lay on Hands crit on our last remaining tank on Lady Vashj in SSC, right before he was going to die. It resulted in a 9% overheal. Vashj died, we all rejoiced, and that LoH crit became the stuff of legend!! :D
That said, level 10 vs. 19? Good Lord, man, I’m actually impressed. ;)
Apple – DKs are OP!!! ;) Seriously, though, that’s pretty sweet! It’s always nice when we can step in using our lesser-used abilities and save from a complete wipe. ;)
Cassandri – Thanks! I think the major problem we had with Putricide is that we got complacent. After having Putricide on farm almost since he first came out, people weren’t used to stacking on each other to eat the ooze explosion anymore. That alone was causing a ton of deaths. People weren’t healing others through Gaseous Bloat until I specifically assigned healing for that. People weren’t healing people with the plague. People WITH the plague weren’t handing it off to others. I think that it’s really a matter of knowing the normal mechanics extremely well and watching out for them, almost more than the issues with the Unbound Plague.
IMHO, a guild that knows the encounter well will have little trouble with it, especially if they look through parses to determine what’s going wrong on their wipes.
For Sindragosa, what we do with Instability is stack it to four, run out of the raid, let it drop off. Then look at the timer for the Icy Grip cooldown. If it’s 5 or less, just don’t cast and run back to the group. Otherwise, toss up another cast, let it drop, then get pulled in for Icy Grip. The major difference between hard mode and regular is that you can’t “cheat” (and I use that term very loosely) by still casting when you have Instability. You really have to stop casts after you drop it initially, so that you don’t still have stacks going into Icy Grip or going into an air phase. (Having Instability drop off of you while on top of the stairs with your whole raid up there with you? Very bad.)
I like the idea of a contract like that to kill a specific raid member. ;D I can think of seven or eight people I would love to deliberately blow up!
Unbound Plague exasperates me, because it seems to behave very unusually with regards to Disengage.
I’ve had someone who passed through where I had Disengaged from take it from me while I was still in mid-air, and I’ve had someone who was under me while I was Disengaging strip it from me as I passed.
That said, the Plague is the least of my guild’s problems (that would be healers tunneling things and standing in Malleable Goo night… after night… after night…). Congratulations on the kill, though. :3
Rilgon – That’s so weird, regarding Disengage! I know that there are a lot of mechanics where if you jump out of it (fire, void zones, etc), you’re not seen as being out of it until you actually land (which is why strafing or running out is generally better), but that is a really strange way for Unbound Plague to behave!
As to Malleable Goo, I have to admit several failures on my part here. However! He throws out at least two if not three of them on heroic 25m and every boss mod I have only identifies one of them. AVRE, DXE, everything is just showing one of them. So if your healers are listening to their mods, they might STILL be beaned in the face with Goo. You really need to watch for it, which is difficult and will take some practice.
Good luck on your attempts and thanks for the congrats. :)
Well this is sad. I’m trying to do some research on tips to approach (preferably strategy, but I’d take some tips) the remaining hard modes in ICC: Prof Putricide and Sindragosa in particular.
And I come back to this article and my own comment on the very first page of google. WTH? There is seriously a dearth of information about ICC hard modes on the web atm. Videos, sure, but very little strategy discussion to supplement them.
Cass – Oof, that IS pretty tragic. Drop me a line at kurn [at] apotheosis-now [dot] com and I’ll try to let you know what we do, as best as I can explain. :)