Heroic mode differences:

[Redcape]

Marrowgar:

Coldflame leaves a high damage dot.
Bone Spike is cast during Bone Storm and does drastically higher damage.
Bone Storm does drastically higher random AOE damage.

Deathwhisper:

Adds spawn in p2.
She is taunt immune.
She has twice as much health (not mana, p1 is the same).
Spirits explode in a 20 yard radius for instant kills.
She randomly Mind Controls someone who becomes massively more powerful.

I have no idea how the fuck you are supposed deal with this. So one tank is unable to make threat, the other tank is tanking the boss, and you need one more tank to pick up add waves? We instantly wipe if she mindcontrols the add tank? Juh?

Gunship:

Explosions knockback.
Random dudes and the enemy ship have more health.

Trivial?

Saurfang:

Gains 4 runic power per tick. We must never allow any more runic power to be gained that the baseline, unavoidable amount.
Blood Beasts root their targets.
Healed for 20% if a Marked target dies instead of 5%.

This fight seems absolutely nuts. We will need to have a strategy for 3 people taking 5k dps each as well as the normal tank and raid damage. Yikes?

Festergut:

Professor Putricide throws Malleable Goo at the raid during the fight.

I have no idea how bad this is.

Rotface:

Putricide casts Vile Gas (as per Festergut) on the raid. Seems that ranged must spread out to avoid it. Rough.
The disease is drastically worse. This is fine, since we dispel immediately anyway.

Seems tricky, but doable.

Putricide:

On phase changes he marks us with a debuff and then summons both kinds of adds at once. Your mark tells you which kind of add you can attack and the other one is invincible to you. Holy shit?
He also appears to have some kind of stacking debuff but I don't understand how it works.

This was the last boss most guilds beat before heroic LK. I bet he is a giant ratfucker.

Blood Princes:

No differences except higher damage from what I can find.

Blood Queen Lana'thel

No differences from what I can find except higher health thus tigheter enrage.

Dreamwalker:

Frostbolt volleys are a manadrain. They must be interrupted.
The stacking buff from the dream realm does 200 dps per stack.

Also, recent changes to regular and hardmode: Stacking buff lasts 40 seconds instead of 35.

Doesn't seem to much different to me. We have trouble with easymode though, so it might be bad.

Sindragosa:

Unchained Magic explodes in a 20 yard radius instead of just personal damage.

Who the hell cares? Obviously we have to have the person with Unchained Magic move out of the group, but whatever.

[LeBKC]

So a few comments from talking to Andrew:

Deathwhisper: Bubble drops the stack, only one add spawns (not 3): Spam MD and tricks.
Saurfang is hard. If the adds hit the target... GG

Val isn't that bad. Apparently we need to make sure our healers don't lose their stacks, (probably to heal their debuff) but it should be quite easy. Especially with druids who can hot themselves while they're flying.

[OldHobo]

A couple notes.

re: Blood Princes

Apparently there is a stacking debuff that ticks for damage every second while you are moving. From what I can gather it does 500 damage per stack every second while you are moving. The stack gains a stack every second while you are moving. The debuff has a 20 sec duration. It is shadow damage.

So basically it only does damage while you are moving, it gets bigger while you are moving and you have to stay immobile for 20 secs to clear it, but you aren't taking damage during that 20 secs. Also, the Keleseth tank has the Dark nuclei to mitigate the damage from it while he/she runs around collecting them.

This might be way off of course ...

re: Dreamwalker

The other big element is that Dreamwalker loses health over time, and a not-insubstantial amount. This is why its so important for healers to accumulate large stacks. The whole first chunk of the fight very little progress upward is made on her health bar. It's a matter of running to stand still while setting up. Gradually, the stacks accumulate and your healing output accelerates away from the constant damage.

[gnomedeplume]

Deathwhisper is not as bad as it sounds, there's a lot going on but it's pretty forgiving on 10 man, you'll never just explode and die if you make a mistake unlike on 25 man or Saurfang 10/25 (hope at least one of you is maintaining their holy set ).

Dreamwalker is a nice demo of why block matters if you have one block tank and one DK tank

Sindragosa on the other hand is pretty hard, harder than putricide I'd say, p2 becomes a big mess trying not to die to all the ways to die in the fight and still get the boss down in reasonable time.

[Redcape]

We both have holy sets, though I don't have a spec to go with it at the moment. Unfortunately reco has only a tanking spec and we only want 1 tank for dreamwalker, so that might be a tricky one for comp.

[OldHobo]

So I was thinking about last night's Festerbutt attempts.

1) Healing was exciting because a lot fo the raid was so spread out so Chain Heal, Wild Growth and PoM/PoH were not opreating ideally. Also, people were sometimes out of range of one of the 3 healers.

2) Dps was sometimes because the melee got goo'ed, ranged got goo'ed and people had to move around a decent amount for positioing.

3) The Blight was rough because not everyone got up to three stacks of Inoculate.

I think all three of these difficulties can be solved with a simple return to our old strategy: Pile under.

If the tanks are in front, and we have 3 ranged people, the rest of the raid can hang out in melee and swap between a 'back left' and 'back right' location whenever Malleable Goo comes at them. Melee should lose really minimal dps time because they'll be in range the whole time and gain by not getting Goo'ed. The loss to the ranged folks for should be at least equalled out by the fact they don't have to move for Inoculates. Healers should be more effective for the same reasons....and because everyone will be in range of all 3 healers. I found I had to move a LOT last night to try and get range on the raid.

Overall, it should mean far fewer goo-ings because there should be way more clarity as to where the goo is going.

We may have issues if Goos and Spores overlap but I don't recall that happening last night....and if it does, we can certainyl develop a strategy to deal with them.

[Redcape]

Is having all three healers move at the same time a safe strategy? I am thinking during the heavy melee phase in particular that could be fairly dangerous.

[OldHobo]

Well, we should have one of us (at least) on the outside anyhow. I actually don't think we need to move very far and we all have times when we are casting instants even in the heavy hitting phases.

I agree this is the most dangerous window but it's a VERY small one and I think with people around the outside we have several dangerous windows (when we are all converged for Spores, for example) that we have to simply weather best we can.

Another option is to have two groups (Back left and back right) so when a Goo comes, only one group has to move to avoid it...then they go back once it passes. This maintains a more even stream of healing. The difficulty is telling which 'corner' the goo is headed toward....which may not be very easy.

[Rhododendron]

The thing with spores is I as a tank know they're coming. I can have a cooldown active and ensure I have a health gain button ready during a spore in case something goes awry. There's no way I'm going to be able to know when a bad situation is coming due to a goo. Now, I'm going to have cooldowns up as much as possible during super-smash phase anyway so it may not be a big deal.

[Redcape]

I don't think we could possibly differentiate which of the two melee camps a goo is headed towards in time. With the bouncing it is not very precise. I would expect that we could just run the same strat we did last night though and beat it if we bring enough dps.

[LeBKC]

I've been trying to save my CD's for the big AOE, so I haven't been using them. Do you want me to punch CD's earlier? My hope was AD would be my CD for the big punch (if you guys didn't keep up) and I could save div sac/prot for the huge AOE's.

[Asharana]

I was thinking that having the range dps in a loose pile (so we don't make each other sick) would make me spend a lot less time running around to get innoculated. Mostly I was still figuring things out last night, but I could almost always tell when the goo was coming at me, and when it was coming at someone close to me.

Also, the goo and the spores definitely come together. This got all the ranged goo'ed at one point, and made me miss innoculate another time. The whole group seemed to be able to move together fairly well - just follow the person with the spore because they have a giant spore on top of them. So the person with the spore has to focus on where the goo is, and everyone else can ignore the goo and focus on being next to the spore - which may move around even after you've reached it.

[Kilan]

Kilan's analysis of doablity:

Marrowgar:
Done

Deathwisperer:
I have not tried, but I think it is doable

Gunship:
Done

Saurfang:
We've done one good add phase a couple of times, but never 2-3 in a row. I suspect that this fight will require a ton of practice to get the adds killed correctly (plus a good raid comp). Also every time someone got marked they died seconds later, so our healers need practice (gear?) to handle people getting marked.

Fesergut:
We need gear or a bigger buff or cloning technology to win this

Rotface:
I haven't tried, but I'd like to since it sounds doable

Putricide:
probably not possible

Blood princes:
I think this is doable with a reasonable raid comp, and practice

BQL:
Not possible

Dreamwalker:
seems very hard. There are multiple things we need to get much better at

Sindragosa:
We have issues beating this on easy mode. I suspect the first step of beating this on hard mode is doing easy mode with stack dropping


I think we should push hard for Heroic: Storming the Citadel. Spend Tuesday and part of Wednesday in the lower spire, and then rush the rest of the zone. The next to easy boss I think are blood princes, and I suspect rotface won't be too bad now that he's been nerfed.

[Redcape]

Festergut required 10% more raid dps than we had last time. I think we can eke out 5% with just 5 more tries of practice, but once we get the next level of buff from the zone we should be able to take him easily.

[tenhitokiri]

How big is the AoE from the goo on festergut? if its only 10 yards or so we could have the range dps at max range (28 yards, more for killan) and just walk a few steps foward to avoid getting hit, then just move back when the effect goes away

We can also put the range units facing putricide so they can easily know when a maleable goo is going their way. As for the melee and healers, i think piling up should be a good idea, so they just have to move to the next place to keep dpsing / healing, having them at max melee range before a spore appears sounds reasonable too