Project Lore: Five dudes. Four cameras. One World of Warcraft.

Festergut. He’s big. He’s ugly. He smells bad. And he even has a rat head attached to his shoulder. What else is there to say? Well, plenty, if you’re interested in more than his looks. I finally got to take a crack at the Scourge’s gnarliest abomination yet, and I’m here to bring you the battle report, with a video of the encounter to boot. If you’re afraid of spoilers, scroll on down to the next story, but if you want to take the journey deep into the Plagueworks, by all means, read on, heroes!

If you don't lose your lunch now, Festergut will make sure you do during the fight.

I’d like to start off talking a little bit about the trash leading up to Festergut. The entire Plagueworks wing of the Icecrown Citadel might remind you of a mini-Naxxramas and you’ll find a few familiar mechanics along the way. Before you make it that far, though, you’ll have to deal with a Val’kyr or two in the hub area. In last week’s build, these vicious maidens only had about 70k health and went down quickly. Now, they have over three times that amount and spawn Severed Essences. These mobs are carbon copies of your raid characters and fighting them has just a hint of Faction Champions to it.

Don’t fret too much, they don’t require a whole lot of CC and most of them will do nothing more than auto-attack or case basic spells, but those that can will spam heals constantly. Needless to say, focus fire on those copies first and then DPS down the rest.

The entrance to the Plagueworks features two Abomination guards who will knock people back and reel them in again with their hooked chains. If you’ve fought Abominations before, this isn’t anything terribly new, but do be careful of the Geists running by in the next room as they may aggro while you’re taking out the big nasties. There used to Plague Scientists here, as well, but it looks as though they’ve been removed for the time being.

Downing these mobs, you’ll enter a donut-shaped room with a pair of Pustulating Horrors up front. They’re not terribly tough, but when they got low on health, they start casting a spell called Bile Bomb. We managed to kill them before they got it off, but I can only imagine that it has the potential to do massive damage to anybody in the vicinity. At the back of this room, a Decaying Colossus paces back and forth. He has a lot of hit points, but you should be familiar with this type of mob by now. He does an AoE knockback every so often that can deal a fair amount of damage. Just make sure to pull him back down the stairs a little bit so you don’t end up aggroing the dogs in the hallway.

Oh, the dogs! One stalks either side of the hallway, named Stinky and Precious respectively. You have the option of killing both, but you only need to defeat one to move forward. Stinky guards the passage to the left, which leads to Festergut, so we decided to “pick him off” first. And I use that term loosely. With 3.1 million health and abilities similar to Gluth in Naxxramas, they’re not exactly pushovers. The only major difference is that there is no need to kite the zombies that spawn as, unlike their big brother, they will not consume them to regain hit points. Simply rally them up and AoE them down. We were lucky that Decimate was bugged, allowing us to cut through Stinky like some kind of disgusting, moldy butter.

All that remains between you and the boss at this point are a few Plague Scientists and random Geists crawling around on the piping above. These vile researchers aren’t very hard on their own, but their ability to temporarily turn anyone in your group into a slime can spell trouble if they are pulled with other mobs. As you can imagine, being a slime prevents you from doing just about anything but moving around and even that you do very slowly. Even tanks and healers can be afflicted, so whoever can needs to be quick on the dis-spell.

And then, finally, we arrived. I could say at this point that Festergut was staring us down, but I couldn’t figure out where all of his eyes were. Our group managed four or five tries before we got the notice that raid testing was about to shut down. Though we didn’t kill him, we did get him down to about 10% on our best run. The video that follows is a recording of that attempt with annotations describing the mechanics of the fight (enjoy the Zelda 2 dungeon remix while you’re at it):

Overall, I have to say that I had a lot of fun with Festergut. It’s interesting when Blizzard turns normal raiding conventions on their head. On most fights that feature explosion mechanics (Astromancer Solarion and XT-002), you’re encouraged to run away from other players, and in this case, you want to be as close to them as possible. Of course, with the threat of vomit ever-looming, you’re still cautioned to maintain your distance from your fellow raiders whenever possible. Managing distance and building immunity are going to be the two key factors to this fight, but a few good healers couldn’t hurt, either.

Next on the line-up for US servers is the Gunship Battle on Wednesday. I’m pretty psyched for that one and, Blizzard willing, I’ll be able to bring you the details of that encounter later in the week. So, I’ve “spewed my guts,” so to speak. What do you guys think of this encounter?

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Related Posts: PTR 3.3: Raid Test Schedule 11/6-11/7, PTR 3.3: Gunship Battle Raid Encounter [Video], PTR 3.3: ICC Raid Testing Schedule (11/18-11/20), PuG With the Blues 3, PTR 3.3: Raid Testing Schedule 10/26-10/30, 3.3: Icecrown Citadel Boss List, (Some) Achievements Revealed,

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