The Thankless Job For Spaztastic Squirrels
Since entering the Plagueworks, I’ve inflicted a fairly nasty blight upon myself. Maybe I’m a masochist. Maybe I’m just a control freak. But in our current 3-healer team, I assigned myself the duty of cleansing and healing infected targets with a Beacon on the offtank.
This isn’t a true healing guide for Rotface – I’ll post one of those some other time. Mainly it’s a guide for whoever else has this rather thankless job. But mainly, as is customary of this blog, I will be focusing on this role from a paladin perspective. That said, here are some things you will need to be your raid team’s cleanse-monkey:
Cleanse – Yeah, I know. Didn’t expect that one, did you? To make this more than a Captain Obvious bullet point, I’ll suggest you have cleanse bound to something easy to reach if it isn’t already. Mine is bound to 8. Don’t ask why. I’m not even sure.
Deadly Boss Mods – Seriously, if you’re raiding without it, you’re missing out on a big assist when it comes to raid awareness. Update it before your raid and you should be good to go every week.
Decursive/Grid/Etc – I don’t personally use Decursive, but you need to be able to see, at a glance, who has the debuff. If you’re using Grid, make sure you set Mutated Infection at a high priority.
I would also suggest a firm grasp of mouse movement and/or strafing. You’ll be doing a lot of it.
So you’ve got your spell and your addons. Time to start cleansing! (Yeah… it doesn’t even sound glorious, does it?)
First, you need to alert your raid of your intention to control the cleansing. The reason for this is twofold: Your fellow dispellers will know not to dispel unless you’re behind, and your raid-mates will know they need to run to the big ooze as soon as they get the debuff.
As cleanser, your job revolves around monitoring the following:
Mutated Infection – This is the debuff you will need to cleanse. Again, make sure it is prioritized in Grid.
Slime Spray – Occasionally Rotface will turn toward a member of the raid and spew out a lovely rain of slime. When you see him turn, get the hell out of the way.
Radiating Ooze – A constant AE damage pulse coming off of the big ooze. Don’t stand near it unless you absolutely have to: It does 5.5k dmg per tick to anyone within 10 yards.
Unstable Ooze Explosion – Once the big ooze absorbs 5 small oozes, it’s gonna asplode. When it begins to cast this spell, it will take note of your position and the position of everyone else in your raid, flinging slime at those points. Easiest course of action is to make a bee-line for the walls.
Ooze Flood – At all times during the fight, a quarter-section on the outside will be flooded with ooze. Don’t stand in it. It won’t kill you outright, but coupled with everything else it’s something that is completely avoidable- you can see slime trickling out of the pipes before the area floods – and there’s no excuse to be standing there unless everything goes haywire.
Starting the fight, your Sacred Shield should be on the Rotface tank with a FoL HoT rolling as they run in. Beacon the offtank (or whoever you have kiting the big ooze) and hug one of Rotface’s legs. You’ll have some time to help heal the tank here, but pretty soon you'll be focusing on your primary targets.
When the first person gets Mutated Infection, wait until they run out of the raid to cleanse them. When the second person gets it, wait until they get near the first person. Sacred Shield and FoL the infection targets – at this stage they shouldn’t need much healing beyond that.
Once the big ooze is up, you want to wait, ideally, until the infected person gets in front of the kiter’s path before cleansing. This will minimize the amount of time they spend near the big ooze before the little one integrates. Keep doing this until the big ooze is about to explode, then high-tail it out of there.
As the fight progresses, you’ll likely see infections popping up while the ooze is exploding. Try to keep your cool and maintain the situation; don’t cleanse too early unless you absolutely have to. If you get ahead of yourself, you can end up having multiple big oozes spawn, creating a lot more chaos than necessary.
If you get Rotface down to 20%, congratulations! Now prepare to do everything you’ve been doing, but at supersonic speed. Resist the urge to cleanse early, again, because the second you cleanse another raid member is going to get infected.
Be quick with a Hand of Freedom if the kiter needs to run through the flood. With any luck, your kiter won’t be taking more than occasional damage. But keep Beacon refreshed on the off-chance he gets snared and the ooze catches up. It can stack up to 100% damage increase, and anything short of quick and decisive healing won’t save the kiter.
At the end of it all, when the other healers are commenting on how that ‘wasn’t so bad’, you can laugh and continue shaking a bit as you come down from your adrenaline high. Nobody will pat you on the back. Nobody will throw out a rousing ‘Nice cleansing!’. Chances are, most people didn’t even notice. But if you did your job well, you played a pivotal role in a very technical fight.
So here’s to you, Running-Around-And-Cleansing-Like-A-Meth-Hyped-Squirrel-Paladin!
