Normally, most bosses are kept still. There’s a cleave effect or some other ability which makes it difficult for tanks to herd them around. Every so often, a boss comes along where even though it isn’t necessary to move them, it can sometimes be extremely beneficial. In this week’s Raid Leading 101 post, I want to highlight a little trick that Conquest used during our first kill of Professor Putricide. It’s a really minor adjustment that our raid leader came up with and looking back now, I almost wish I had thought of it first. Who knew something so simple and minor would’ve helped out so much?
Initially, we had a DPS problem. We were having a difficult time burying slimes and phasing Putricide within a timely fashion. We were rocking six healers at the time. The raid was taking obscene amounts of damage and many players were struggling with avoidable damage. I myself hit a streak where I went 9 consecutive attempts being hit by Malleable Goo on the same night. That’s some serious tunnel vision going on.
If we downgraded to five, we’d solve our DPS issue but our stressed healers were going to be stressed even further. We found a way to help resolve these issues and it’s nothing to do with player substitution or gear. It was all due in part to improved movement and positioning.
In last week’s post about Placement and Direction, blogger What’s My Main Again made an excellent suggestion:
If I may make a suggestion on putricide… after the green ooze dies you waste a lot of time moving all the way to the other side of the room. Just have everyone move to the center. Ranged can dps the gas cloud as soon as it spawns and then melee can quickly switch after it targets someone. This also makes it easier to run back into the orange corner for the green ooze.
We’ve actually been doing that for a while, but I wanted to elaborate on that further and illustrate how we tackle it.
The orange ooze
We’ll use the Professor Putricide example.
When the orange ooze was active, we used to tank Putricide on the far right very close to the green wall. Our melee DPS had to run the length of the room to open up on the orange ooze when it fixated on a target. It was during these parts of the fight that we were able to close the gap on our damage. In order to do that, we made two changes.
First change: Instead of tanking him on the right, we placed Putricide closer to the middle where the pattern is. The orange ooze spawns, it locks on to a target and goes after them. If it happens to be a melee player, they still have plenty of time to hustle it and kite it around the room. Regardless, we cut the distance the melee had to travel to DPS the Ooze by half! They didn’t have to run as much. There was more DPS on the ooze meaning it died quicker which led to more DPS on the boss.
Second change: Instead of simply keeping Professor Putricide stationary, our Putricide tank was instructed to keep Putricide as close to the orange Ooze as possible. The reason? It allowed for incidental AoE attacks from melee to hit multiple targets. Chain Lightning would help. Divine Storm would help. Cleave, and the list goes on. The orange vials that the Professor drops wouldn’t be a problem since the entire melee group is constantly moving alongside the Professor and the orange Ooze anyway.
While it doesn’t seem like much, those two changes were enough to help put us over the top on our kill.
The lesson here is when working on a boss, try to set your tactics up in such a way that will cause the boss to take extra damage. Again, not every encounter will allow for this, but the possibility is there. Put those AoE strikes to maximum effect whenever it is feasible to do so.
If you’re curious, here’s a video of our first kill up:
Conquest_Professor_Putricide from Dannamoth on Vimeo.
This is from the perspective of one of our top mages. Look at how our tank gradually follows the orange ooze around. We have a set path to use when orange oozes are up that involve running toward the green wall, up to the table, then down the orange wall.
Also, excellent use of Invisibility during tear gas phases. Such cheater DPS!
If you look closely at the end of the fight, there’s about 6 or 7 players still alive. Yeah, we barely scraped by on this kill.
Last night, we managed to take down Sindragosa on 25. I want to stab my eyes out. We managed to get a video of it as well, so I’ll see if it can be placed up somewhere.