Lo-Quality WoW

Continuing a hunter’s view on Icecrown Citadel and the boss fights. Today we’ll take a jaunt through the Plagueworks and the Crimson Hall. If you’re looking for strategy, you’re not really going to get it here. Better, more eloquent players talk about such things elsewhere, you mainly get my little pieces of the fights.

Now before you even hit the bosses in the Plagueworks, you hit two “mini-bosses”, Stinky and Precious.  Both are patchwerk dogs similar to Gluth in Naxxramas.  One does an aoe blast, the other summons zombies, and both cast Decimate on everyone.  This is mainly healer focused as they attempt to keep everyone topped off after the Decimate.  Me?  I just shoot things.

In no particular order, next is Festergut.  Depending on the group, you may do Rotface first, it doesn’t quite matter really.  For Festergut, as a hunter it’s easy in that you’re part of the “ranged” group by default.    It mainly means that you dps like crazy, hope the healers get you through the vile gas, collapsing on the spore and then quickly returning into position. 

In our 10-man runs, we usually have two hunters and a mage or shadow priest, with the hunters on the flanks and the mage/shadow priest in the center.  The mage/shadow priest is also our collapse point for the ranged spore.  And for some reasons I can’t quite understand, I’m almost always right flank.  Even in the few 25-man’s I did, I was always on the far right.  Guess it doesn’t matter since either way, I’ve always been able to collapse on the spore person in time and get back out and reset my position with more than enough time.

For Rotface, this is just pure chaos.  Our main tank holds Rotface pretty much dead center of the room.  That puts any hunters on the edge of the inner ring.  Wouldn’t be a problem except that sometimes you’re close enough to get hit by the slime pouring into a quarter of the room, and if you’re off-tank isn’t on it, it’s possible for them to drag the Big Ooze right behind you, close enough to cause you to get hit by the Radiating Ooze attack.

Fortunately, being a bit back, the few times I get Mutated Infection and need to run towards the off-tank, I can usually see where they’re at at any given point.  Otherwise, it’s a normal dps-fest, sidestepping the Slime Spray and just making sure you don’t do something silly like run into the Big Ooze.

Now Professor Putricide, his fight is interesting in that it relies heavily on the person driving the Abominaton off-tank.  If that person isn’t on it with the pools of ooze or either the Volatile or Regurgitated Ooze, things go downhill for your raid really fast.  The fight also requires some decent timing with the dps.  You really don’t want either a Volatile or Regurgitated Ooze up when you go through a phase transition, so you need to time the point where you push Professor Putricide’s health down to cause a phase transition.  It’s a pretty frentic fight (then again, what fight in here isn’t?) but I tend to enjoy it for some reason.

Now on to the Crimson Hall and the first fight, the Blood Prince Council.  Here’s where I get one my usual odd “hunter assignments”.  Now in addition to dpsing the correct boss that has the Invocation of Blood,dodging various attacks and Misdirecting Dark Nucleus to the off-tank, I’m usually assigned Kinetic Bomb duty. 

The first time I went in, I was told “just send your pet after it and don’t worry about it.”  I thought, “okay, no problem.”  That is, until I saw two of the bombs coming down.  We wiped and got a lecture on “make sure your pet is on the bombs!”  I finally had to tell them that there were two bombs, not one, which was something nobody told me about.  And why?  Because none of them knew there were two bombs as well!  But I took care of it, with Mudgie on one bomb and myself on the other.

Ideally, if there are two hunters, or someone else with a directable pet, it’s not as bad since you sic a pet on each bomb.  I generally have Mudgie on follow for this, since I know that if I see him running back to me, then the bomb he was attacking was gone and that I needed to keep an eye out for a new bomb.   Usually it works out pretty well except my dps numbers suck since I’m constantly retargeting throughout the whole fight.

Now for Blood-Queen Lana’thel, this is a fight that you pretty much want to be on ventrillo for.  My group does use dps meters so we sort of know who does the best dps in general.  The problem is the fact that when the Blood-Queen does her first bite, she attacks whomever is third on the threat chart, i.e. the highest dps person after the tank and off-tank in threat generation.

Except, you can’t always be sure who that person will be is.  For instance, since I’m a survival hunter, I tend to be streaky in my dps since quite a bit of it is based of critical hits.  Adding to the fact that I have a half-dozen pieces of gear or abilitys that trigger sporadically.  So if everything for me procs all at once, I can easily be that top dps at that point. 

For us, we always have someone who’s responsible for the “bite-order”, telling whom will bite who when the time comes.  And this isn’t that bad, except it’s a pain sometimes to figure out where exactly your bite target is.  I know of at least one occassion where my target was across the room from me! 

Beyond that it’s just knowing when to move and where, depending on what particular spells the Blood Queen has cast.  Not too bad once you have it down.  Just sit back and enjoy the unreal dps numbers you put up in the fight.

And that’s it for this part of the Icecrown Citadel.  Next up will be the Frostwing Halls and the Frozen Throne itself.  And maybe, just maybe, I won’t be benched tonight…