After you’ve killed Pestergut, your next target is Rotface (well, technically, you can do either first). Rotface is a “Do Your DPSers Suck” check. While healing and tanking are important, I think the fight relies more on situational awareness than tanking and healing savy or gear.

The main gimmicks of the fight are Rotface, the Big and Small Oozes, and the Ooze Flood. You want to tank Rotface in the center of the room, and have a zone around the boss set aside for your ranged dps. Healers can float in the middle because you’ll be using your second tank for Ooze Kite duty. In a way, this fight is a lot like Grobbulus, but with some fresh gimmicks.

The first major problem is the Ooze Flood. It lasts for 20 seconds and covers about 20% of the area on one side of the room. The flood causes around 4500 damage every second to those standing in it, as well as reducing movement speed by 25%. Stay the f out.

Secondly, Rotface will occasionally target a player, turn, and cast his Slime Spray. It hits for about 5,600 a second for 5 seconds. It’s easy to avoid by not standing in front of while while he’s casting. Stay awake and it’s not really a big problem.

Lastly, a player will get targeted by Mutated Infection. It causes a small amount of damage, and reduces healing, but when the infection is cleansed or ticks off, a Small Ooze will be spawned. The infected player needs to kite his ooze to the outer ring where the Ooze Tank will be standing by.

If this is the first Ooze, the dps’er will need to hang with the Ooze Tank until another Ooze is brought over. The two Oozes will merge, forming a Big Ooze, and the dps’er can return to the boss. The Ooze Tank kites the Big Ooze around the room until the Big Ooze absorbs 5 additional Small Oozes. When this happens, Unstable Ooze Explosion is triggered. This fires off several Ooze missiles which deal quite a bit of damage (around 10k nature damage to an area). So you’ll want to be aware of where those are heading and avoid them.

The biggest problems in this fight are remaining situationally aware while dpsing away. The key to the fight is doing this as tight as possible, and reducing damage taken by the raid via Ooze Fields, Slime Sprays, kiting your Small Ooze out asap, and staying the f away from Unstable Ooze Missiles.

Festergut a.k.a. Pestergut is really not that difficult. Like Loot Reaver, Patchwerk, and others before him, Festergut is a gear check. The mechanics are pretty easy; made up of elements that we’ve seen before. The three main elements of the fight are Gastric Bloat, Spores, and the Blight which covers the floor.

Gastric Bloat causes the tank to take a lot more damage per stack, if your tank gets a 10th stack, he explodes and probably dies. So you need to do the familiar tank-swap if you want to be victorious. As the debuffs increase on the tank, the raid takes less damage because of the spores. The spores are periodically cast on raid members; which explode and provide your raid with a stacking 25% shadow resistance. The idea is, you need to stack up on resistances so that your raid is taking less damage as your tank is getting hit harder and harder by the boss.

During the phases of the fight, the number of spores available increases with each phase. At the end of the last phase, Festergut inhales the Blight and the fight starts over at the beginning again. Besides the usual gear checking for tank survivability and healing throughput, this fight is about coordinating the spores.

From your perspective as melee dps, there’s really not much for you to consider, unless too many spores pop up in the melee zone. So, you need to pay attention to this for that reason. Stacking ranged on this fight will eventually bite you because the ranged get Vile Gas which in addition to damaging them, damages the players around them too. The ranged will need to spread out.

We used a triangle formation, and swapped out a hunter for a third healer. On healing duty we had a Druid tank healing, and a Priest providing utility heals where needed. Both have significant mobility due to faster cast times and insta-casts. We positioned a Resto Shaman in the melee group for AoE heals. Our Druid, Priest, and Warlock formed a triangle around the boss.

These spores look similar to the spores in the Loatheb encounter, except that they spawn on a player and are not targetable. They deal inconsequential damage and then explode, providing the needed shadow resistance to the raid around them. Ideally, you will have one spore on your melee and one spore on ranged.

When a ranged member gets a spore, it’s necessary for the other members of the ranged triangle to collapse in on the spored player so that they receive the shadow resistance, and then move back to their original position.

The inherent problem with this strategy is that there’s no guarantee that a ranged player will receive a spore. If two or more of your melee receive spores, it’s necessary for them to be ready to fall back to the ranged group until their spore explodes.

Do this, and throw in a well placed heroism following a tank-swap, and you will be victorious. This is how my guild chose to approach this encounter. Do you have a different way that you’d approach it?