Festergut is usually the first boss a raid will attempt once they get past Saurfang and his merry band of blood beasts. He is as close to a patchwerk fight as you’ll see in Icecrown, but there’s still some hunter strategy involved. Assuming the tanks and healers are able to keep everyone alive, this is a sheer brute force DPS check. He enrages in 5 minutes, and has over 40 million health in 25 man.
The Fight
The DPS gimmick is that we need to get inoculated against pungent blight, a massive shadow damage spell. On 25 man, he will put spores (they look like the ones from Loatheb in Naxx) on 3 people. When the spores explode, they do a short AOE that everyone needs to be hit by in order to increase their shadow resistance by 25%.
The other raid damage is basically a damage over time called gaseous blight. As he inhales the ambient floor fog, he does less damage to the raid, and increases his tank damage. Once the floor is clear, the raid damage stops, but that means he’s about to do massive amounts of shadow damage to everyone with pungent blight. This phase is when the tanks will be whining about cooldowns and the healers will start crying in vent.
The last DPS gimmick is that (surprise!) we need to spread out. On 25 man, he picks 3 people to get a vile gas debuff that will hit anyone in 8 yards of his target.
As A Hunter
This fight is very straight forward as a hunter. Your job is to do lots and lots of DPS. If you have anything you normally save for times when that last tenth of a percent of DPS really matters, here is where you’ll want to use it. For the most part, we can stand still and shoot. We don’t have it as good as those melee ingrates who get to ignore all the encounter mechanics and mindlessly spam their /castsequence macros, but we have less to worry about than usual. And since our skills have been tempered by the forge of all the hunter-unfriendly fights that force us to learn how to maximize our DPS when we’re not allowed to faceroll, we can really show them up on this fight!
The basic pattern will be:
- Standing in a spot where you can’t be puked on
- Stutter-stepping to a collapse point every time the spores go out
- If you get a spore, you must run to the pre-arranged collapse point, however if it look like one of the other spored people will get there first, you need to ensure that you don’t hit anyone with the AOE.
- Disengaging and stutter-step back to your normal spot
- If you get the vile gas, refreshing any DoTs that will fall off while you wander around puking (unless of course you have something stronger to use your last GCD on)
Now if your raid’s DPS is high enough to down him before the 5 minute enrage, but you keep losing people to pungent blight’s shadow damage, you can contribute to the overall DPS best by popping deterrence to increase your resistance to shadow damage. This will free up raid heals for other players, and reduce the chance that you’ll lose a DPS. We sometimes have a holy paladin running shadow resist aura pop aura mastery to cover this too.
You will probably need to save your potion cooldown for DPS, however if your heals are weaker and you are still losing people to pungent blight, you might want to consider pre-potting a DPS potion, and using a mighty shadow protection potion as a survival cooldown. This is not common, though, and will cost you a fair amount of DPS that you could have gotten from another DPS potion. Still, if it’s the difference between a live hunter and a dead hunter, it’s way more DPS than any other potion!
Good write-up!
I wouldn’t say that Disengage is something that should be regularly used. Stutter-stepping is better dps and, with proper raid positioning, you should always be less than a Disengage away from the nearest collapse-to-spore point. Since spore timers are fairly generous and Vile Gas never seems (in my experience) to follow right on the tail of an innoculation, Disengage isn’t necessary as a regular source of rapid movement either. It’s great for emergencies, though, like when some melee is facerolling and doesn’t bring his spore out to the ranged.
I think that point about refreshing dots and Vile Gas is important, because you do have some time between when you know you have/are getting Vile gas and when you are incapacitated.
Thanks! As for disengage- if I’m in a phase of my rotation where I would be using steady shots (which is fairly common), I’ll disengage to reduce the amount of wasted cooldowns, but if I have two instants I can use, I’ll stutterstep for 3 seconds to get back. In general, though, you’re always safe with disengage because all it costs you is the flight time (unless your swing timer happens to tick while you’re in the air, in which case it costs you up to 0.5 seconds of auto-shot time while the game waits for the next “can you autoshot” check)
I guess it depends on where you are. If you are the point or adjacent to the person who is, then ya, Disengage is pointless. If not, then Disengage is your best friend. You can stutter step for 3-5 seconds or you can Disengage and get back into your full rotation in 2 seconds.
As an aside: getting Vile Gas in the middle of trinket procs + RF + CotW is like a big “F U!” from Blizzard. Not that it happened to me last night…
I always disengage back to my spot every time, just shoot off an arcane shot in the air then back to dpsing. Never been an issue with it but everyone has there own way of doing things. Maybe if your raids dps is not up to par for the fight i guess every little bit counts.
I always use disengage for this one – that and laying hte traps for the adds at Saurfang’s feet. You can still get an instant off in the time you’re putting some distance between yourself and the spore carrier and wherever you land is good for turning on the dps :)