The Plagueworks

Second article! Wheeeee!

 

Happy new year everyone! Or well, it might not exactly brand new anymore at the time you read this, but it's not more than only a little bit used. Plus technically it's still new year the whole year 'round, even if you happen to read this later on. And at the end of the year, it's just damn spot on.

 

New year isn't what this article is about though. Which is a bit of a shame, 'cause it all turned out to be very exciting after the Large Hadron Collider finally got started in June 2012. I'm not supposed to mention that though, so this article will instead be about the new wing that opened up in Icecrown Citadel.

 

 

I don't know how everyone else was feeling, but personally, I was excited as soon as I woke up in the morning. I also had prepared well in time and had taken a look at the new gut-wrenching mechanics. I was also expecting hard fights so that I wouldn't be too surprised or disappointed if everything turned out to be real gnarly. After my visit to the auto repair shop, I was then looking forward to the fights and gut-wrenching mechanics in Icecrown.

 

I had sort of missed the PTR testing on these bosses personally as I was in Irvine at the time they were available (naturally, I was on a mission to steal dataz from Blizzard on the fight for Lich King). I knew how the fights played out on paper though, but it was still "new" for me - wasn't exactly sure of what to do and so on.

 

Igor Ratface and Uncle Festergut

 

Rotface was a bit of a pushover, but shows a lot of promise for a tight DPS-race with a sort of soft enrage in the hard-mode. We made up tactics more or less on the fly based on the PTR-experience and it seemed to work for the most part; a handful of people died at the end I think. It wasn't horribly complicated dodging the few flying blobs and keeping as much DPS on the boss as possible at the same time, so we killed the boss with ease. Tuuttiz managed to hog the first part to his Shadow's Edge too.

 

Festergut seemed more or less Saurfang 2.0 and was in general way less exciting than Rotface. Basically what happens in the encounter is that Festergut stinks up the room with gas so thick that you can almost taste what he had for breakfast. For mêlée, you simply stand still and wail on the keyboard. At one point of the fight I was so bored that I was lifting the keyboard up to my finger instead to make it less monotonous. For casters, you spread out. Every ~30 seconds he infects a few people that explode after short period of time, buffing everyone nearby. Needless to say, because there was not much else to do except tank & spank, he (or "it") fell over quite quick. Tuuttiz was also faster than a greased lightning (which in itself is way faster than lightning) to loot the second quest item for his Shadow's "FPS-killer" Edge.

 

Two oozes, one room - oh the delightful possibilities!

 

So, on to the main course: Professor Putricide. This is a fight a lot of us were excited about, especially after having heard "everyone" say that it's bugged and, quote, "impossible to do at the moment." There was so much pre-whine that it had to be a good encounter; we also knew that no-one had killed it yet in 25-man raids. It always adds that one extra layer of excitement at least for me.

 

We had just went ahead and tried it out quickly on 10-mans before and managed to kill it without much of a fuss. We weren't quite sure of what would be different in 25-man mode. So, we more or less just went at it. The planning on the first pull was quite poor and execution even worse. The result wasn't too much of a surprise: it was a very quick wipe just after the first phase change.

 

Personally, I thought the level of gameplay displayed by our DPS and abomination controller made us look like we were completely out of our depth even on wet pavement. There shouldn't have been any need to take unnecessary risks on a boss that has limited attempts and play as poor as we did; after all we had done it in 10-mans without any issues.

 

Before the second try we went over the different scenarios in the fight that we'd have to prepare for and emphasized on playing properly - that meant dodging the malleable goo, choking gas vials and whatnot.

 

The actual second try went quite good until the Sith-lords started beating down on unsuspecting fans (an expression I never understood, my main language not being english). In other words, everything just started to lag immensely. Trying to hit the orange goo while it's desynced is about as much fun as chewing on sand. After the sand would've been dipped in cod liver oil. TWICE. But still, we hit the last phase and made progress. Most of our raid being dead from the lag and few being dead out of severe case of "the dumbs" (see also: personal mistakes) meant that we simply lacked the DPS to get a kill.

 

Wondering whether the lag was gonna strike again and while waiting for the combat resses, we took a small break. It was time to put on our collective cool wolf t-shirt; it was definitely doable and we could already taste the kill. And a hint of aftertaste from cod liver oil.

 

Cue in a training montage from Storm Peaks

 

We started our third attempt and everything went fine for the first three or four seconds. The lag-monster reared his ugly head again and everyone had left their lag-resistance gear to the bank in favour of higher itemlevels. No-one panicked though; we simply kept the fight going and whittled away on Putricide bit by bit. It was like a slow and steady steamroller paving the way for epics and glory and fame and internet girlfriends.

 

Slimes died on time despite the encounter getting slightly chaotic with desyncs. We managed to hit the end of phase 2 quite smooth however. As soon as Putricide got back from playing "let's drink what's under the sink", everyone went berserk and unleashed their repressed childhood issues (and in case of Lappe, his teenage/moonkin angst and despair caused by lack of mutual love from Taylor Lautner) in the form of DPS and Putricide burned out surprisingly quick. Foolishly, we used bloodlust in the fight even if we wouldn't really have had to, so that's why our kill screenshot wasn't as cool as some others. I mean, our shamans get to the raids solely on their function to make us look cool in a killshot and they can't do it? Give me a break duderors.

 

Loot was crap (read: not useable by me) so I have no clue what dropped. I think I went afk at this point to put some clothes back on or to get another shot of gin, it's all a bit hazy.

 

-Zyn out