Professor Putricide is the execution check your raid leader has nightmares about. All the 5% buffs in the world won’t save you from bad positioning on this fight. As hunters, we’ve got every opportunity to do top notch performance on this fight, and today we’re going to talk about how.
First up, the way the fight works
There’s a lot going on in this encounter. In the first two phases, different color slime puddles will grow or explode, adds will have to be kited and/or burned down, and slime missiles will leave a path of devastation in their wake. One of your tanks is going to be transformed into an abomination who will be helping with some of these things by eating slime puddles and slowing adds, but still, there’s a lot going on until phase 3.
Phase one
When the boss is up, burn him. He alternates between creating a green add and an orange add. If there is an add up, that’s your number one priority. All DPS must be transferred 100% to the add. That includes your pet. If your raid falls behind on them or allows one of them to explode, it could mean a wipe.
- Volatile Ooze (the green one) will spawn on the right side of the room, root someone, and head toward them to explode. Your friendly abom should snare it, and the ooze should be burned down before it reaches its target. If this doesn’t work out (because of positioning, low DPS, or DPS not switching fast enough), bear in mind that the explosion damage is spread among people nearby, so group up on the glued player if it looks like the DPS isn’t going to make it.
- Pro tip: positioning is everything on this fight. If the ooze glues you and you’re at the back of the raid, it won’t survive the trip to see you. If it gets close, you can feign death, which will force it to choose another (ideally, distant) target. Don’t feign death until it’s close, though, as it’s just as likely to turn around and try to instagib some poor melee.
- Gas Cloud (the orange one) will spawn on the other side of the room. Until it picks a target, only ranged will be attacking it. Once it picks a target, that target has to kite it (ideally through the melee, who will be running toward it) and hope that the abom slowed it, because if they get caught, they and everyone around them will be killed.
The abom is using “slime energy” to snare these adds. Where does this energy come from? Why, eating slime, of course! Luckily, the good professor is kind enough to periodically throw expanding pools of slime at you and your raid mates, which provide him all the sustenance he could ask for. Don’t stand in these.
Phase two
Once you burn Putricide down to 80%, he’ll stun the lot of you for 20 seconds while he slips into something more comfortable. In his case, that’s a pair of tentacles he uses to add a couple of unpleasant abilities to his repertoire. A rogue can use a well timed vanish to avoid this stun and continue stabbing away at an add or the professor.
Now, in addition to all the fun stuff above, you also have to watch out for:
- Orange beakers on the ground that cause a debuff and explosion.
- Malleable Goo (they look like slime NPCs) being thrown at random players.
If you have a good (and updated!) boss mod, it should tell you if you’ve been targeted with malleable goo so you can run out. It should also make you /yell about it, so people in range can run out. When the goo is thrown, it takes a few seconds to land, and does damage and slows attack speed to anyone affected by it.
You have from 80% until 35% boss health in phase two. If there are slime pools on the ground or adds not yet killed when the boss stuns everyone again signifying the start of phase 3, it might be a wipe. Phase 3 is unlikely to succeed if you have to waste time burning down an add first, so ideally someone will be watching the boss’s health and calling for a stop DPS early enough to allow the raid to finish the last add and then for the phase change.
Phase three
You lose your abomination in this phase, so any puddles dropped will grow unchecked. Luckily, no more adds spawn. Unfortunately, you now have a soft enrage timer. The boss puts a debuff on the tanks that does exponentially more raid damage, eventually becoming unhealable. He also grows his tank damage at an exponential rate. If a tank dies with the debuff on him, the boss gets healed for a large amount, essentially forcing a wipe.
Puddle management is important- nobody should be in the center of the room, and people should avoid spreading too far out. The tanks will run him around the edge of the room.
As a hunter
This is one of the few ICC fights that favor ranged over melee. While the melee need to be constantly running from boss to add and back, hunters in particular have some significant advantages. First, we can just about reach both adds if we stand at close to max range. Second, we can cover ground faster than anyone but an engineer, and can continue to melt face while doing so. Third, we can change targets and generate snap DPS quite well.
Create a macro to /target volatile ooze, as switching to this immediately is very important, and tab targeting is not perfect at range. I spam the macro while doing my rotation when I see the boss finish the cast. When the orange add is coagulating, I mouse turn my camera and prepare to immediately target it and run into range. It’s important for ranged to start DPSing as soon as it’s targetable, because melee have to wait for a target to be chosen before getting too close (or else they’d have trouble kiting it).
If you get picked by the gas to be the kiter, switch to aspect of the cheetah (not pack), disengage away, and start running. Importantly:
- Do your best to run the add through melee, but never at the expense of it catching up to you
- Jumpshot while you go, but only instants and never stop moving.
Right before phase changes, make sure you’ve used your most powerful shots if available, and refresh your sting if it’s close to expiry. A good rule of thumb is that the 20 second stun will almost always occur right after some sort of valuable and rare proc, such as lock and load or the 2t10 bonus.
Lastly, blow your cooldowns as often as you can, while ensuring they’ll be available for phase three. As SV, this typically means once in the beginning of the fight, and as MM this means twice or three times.
Cluster what?
This fight is anything but stand and shoot, but it really rewards hunters who know how to play their class, and know how to maximize their stand and shoot time. Not as much as rogues who don’t even have to stop for the stun (entitled sons of… very nice women with very bad luck), but we’re definitely one of the best ranged classes to bring to this fight. Get good at it, and you’ll really be able to help your raid.
I have too macros for each ooze with hunter mark and pet attack
I also have the enemy health bars activated so as soon as I see the slimes life bar I hit that macro
while the other hunter keeps hunter’s mark on the boss
can you frost trap and/or concussive shot the gas cloud?
Nope, only the abom tank can slow it. And it moves bloody fast too…
I absolutely love this fight. And the other raiding hunter in my guild absolutely hates it. We spent an entire evening wiping to this guy a couple weeks ago, using these same strategies, and it paid off in the end with a 25 kill. It was one of those “end of the night over-time final attempts guild leader does a speech for”, too.
I still use tab target on this fight, but I have no issues. I’m usually close enough to the green to target it, and when the orange spawns, there’s nobody around it so I can target it with little to no effort.
Another thing the melee liked in this fight was, if you don’t want to kite the orange slime THROUGH the melee if you get it, kite it over there right before it dies so the melee can IMMEDIATELY go back to the boss.
All in all, fun fight. Found it to be very hunter-friendly, as I was topping the meters for a good chunk of the evening. Except for that one attempt where I died. Twice. And was battle-rezzed. Twice. Good times.
something i use myself is to put a fire trap on the way of the green ooze as you must go on the targeted person and as you know the ways that the green ooze will take.
I find that SV has the same burst potential as MM on this fight, but suffers less from mana deprivation. As SV, you’re better off with a black arrow than a fire trap. If you’re ArP MM or something (and can’t go SV without wasting all your ArP gems) then yes, always drop fire traps.
Hit viper right before the phase changes and you’ll never have mana problems :)
I’ve actually done my best work on this fight by holding back on Putricide himself. The only thing that seems to wipe us is when A. a slime doesn’t go down fast enough or B. A slime is still up when we get stunned between phases, and isn’t slowed when we are back. I usually end up saving cooldowns for slimes, and often we stop dps on Putricide to take him to the next phase exactly when we want to. Only phase 3 is really about burning him for us…up until then it’s almost entirely awareness.
As such, my meter numbers for this fight are lower than they could be by quite a bit. But hey, for the raid, eh?
Also, can anyone confirm or deny that Deterrence works when a slime is about to ram you? I think it does, but my evidence is spotty since I can never stop to pay much attention to it.
It prevents damage to you, but not anyone else. Deterrence also works to deflect malleable goo.
This fight on hrc is currently one of my fav boss fights in game atm.
I didnt read through the whole article but 2 macros i use on it.
/tar Volatile Ooze (Gas Cloud(red) for 2nd macro)
/cast Huter’s Mark
/cast !Auto Shot
/cast Steady Shot
So they’re targeted, marked and being fired at as soon as they pop up.
Also if you get the green ooze on you and your stuck in place.. what we do is wait till it gets almost on top of us and feign death so it sets off elsewhere. Reduces the raid damage taken as at that stage its nearly dead anywho and it doesnt have to hit us and inflict raid damage.
Also wait till you see this mother of a fight on hrc 25.. its bloody awesome and like i said above my current fav fight in game..
There’s no stun in phase changes.. just a red and green ooze together.. pewpew =D
You can’t have more than one GCD per macro… is that a castsequence or something?
If the green slime targets you, just Feign Death just before its going to hit you. Then he starts to cast the spell again and picks a new target. By that time it would be down.
Hey, I can’t let you only give rogues a hard time… Mages can invis right before he starts casting it to avoid being stunned, and rumor has it hunters can FD, but I have yet to see a hunter do it :)
For those rare BM hunters out there, you can Bestial Wrath through the stun and get an extra 20 seconds of undisturbed DPS. However, BM loses a little more DPS with the target switching because the pet spends so much time running around. Still, I think this fight favors BM more than most fights do.
Useing detterence when you have people stacked around you is a bad thing to do and your share of the damage will be split between the others (thats what i found anyway but i might be wrong).
Also some basic tip is to always makesure you get into aspect of the viper before the phase change, this will get you over half your mana back between phases.
If using Feign Death against the green/orange slimes make sure you announce before you do- that way melee has a chance to run away in case the slimes switch their agro to them.
Also if you’re stunned in position by a green slime and the target of malleable goo I find deterrence to a life saver- literally.
Can you drop a snake trap on the green ooze and will they take part of the damage split. Also is you drop snake trap on the gas cloud. do they gain initial threat aggro giving a second or two to put more dps before it picks a target.
It’s better not to- even if the snakes would work that way, wasting time to get in and out of trapping range would lower your DPS too much to be worth it.
If I had a dollar for every time I came to outdps.com! Amazing read.