Communication is Key

Nerd Rage downed Rotface last night. It was glorious. But it did not come quickly or easily.

Fight mechanics are not our strongpoint as a guild. We really like to just line up, and overpower ever encounter. We have some of the best DPSers on our server, and it shows. I do feel truly blessed, as I firmly believe that our top DPSers could go play with some of the top guilds in the world should they be so inclined.

After downing Festergut on our second try on Tuesday, we took a few shots on Rotface, but all we had to show for it was 8 wipes before we called raid. So Thursday night was dedicated to Rotface. We had all seen the fight. We had all done more research and study. We were ready. We zoned in, ported up to the Plagueworks, and started pulling trash (mmmm……yummy rep). As a side note, we need to get better with the trash pull with the two big Abominations. We always end up getting all of the mobs inside the room and end up with like 6 people alive by the end of that trash pull.

Anyway, once all of the trash was cleared, we buffed up and pulled. I have the easy job. I tanked Rotface. One of our new prot paladin recruits pulled ooze duty (she’s solid BTW. She knows her stuff and is skilled). At first we were using a strat where we blow Heroism right off the bat. But doing it that way, we were hitting a brick. Time and time again, we just couldn’t seem to get him past ~20%. One of our holy paladins suggested that we save Heroism for 30%, as that is when the Mutated Infections seemed to always get out of hand. So we tried that strat, and instantly saw an improvement. We got him down to 17%. Then a wipe at 6.8% on the next pull. We were getting close. Then, during that corpse run, we had the surprise of trash respawns.

/sigh

Usually, on progression nights, if we hit the trash respawn timer, we call it. We usually take that as a sign that we have banged out heads against a wall for long enough. But it was only 10PM at that point. Our raid usually goes until 12. So we cleared trash again (mmmmm……more yummy rep). Once trashed was cleared again, we pulled again, and wiped at 16%. Now we are headed in the wrong direction. While we were running back, I re-explained the Unstable Ooze explosion mechanics. It appeared to me that the raid was running when DBM warns of the ooze explosion, which is before the “ooze projectiles” are actually fired from the big ooze, and therefore spreading the ooze explosion all over the room. So we had one of our healers call out when to move. That helped tons.

We were also having problems with DPS/Healers tunnel visioning and not running out when they got the infection, so we had another one of our healers start calling out who got the infection. These two things combined helped tremendously. On our next pull, we got him down to 8%. Then on the following pull, Rotface went down.

We banged our heads against this boss for about 15-20 attempts, but were only successful when we started properly communicating with each other. Look out Professor…Nerd Rage is coming.

Communication really is the key to success in a team environment.