Resto Shaman Healing on Professor Putricide

This fight gave us fits on 25 man for weeks, and I was starting to hate this guy.  This is what happens when you give a grumpy professor tenure.  They just give up mentally and decide to make life difficult for their students by throwing goo at them.  Then, last week we went in on Wednesday and one shot him, and proceeded to down Dreamwalker for the first time as well.  All the wipes from the previous weeks had clearly driven some lessons into our brains.  If your guild is still having trouble with this fight, here’s some advice from a healing perspective.  For a general guide, check out the strategy at bosskillers.  Matt Low also has some healing thoughts here, which you should check out as well.

First, your number one job is to avoid the malleable goo.  Putricide will cast this about every 25 seconds.  On 25 man, I believe he launches two of these bouncing balls of goo at the raid.  He will target them at a player at range, and you need to avoid being hit by the ball or its splash damage (5 yards).  It does a ton of damage on a direct hit, and the splash damage will increase your casting speed by 200% for 20 seconds, which sort of counteracts all that lovely haste you’ve been stacking.  Malleable goo was responsible for most of our wipes once we had the basics down.

So, how do you avoid this?  First, practice.  Second, pay attention to your bossmod.  DBM will call out if you are targeted.  DXE will go a step further and provide a nice little arrow telling you where to run to get out of the way.  Third, adjust your camera angle.  In most fights, I prefer a pretty high angle, zoomed out to see as much of the room as possible.  In this fight, I zoom in about halfway and get my camera angle much closer to the ground (i.e., closer to first person view).  Try to keep your eyes on the Professor, because you’ll be able to see the goo leave his hand and will quickly be able to navigate to a safe location.

Some people advocate standing in the melee to avoid this ability, since they will not be targeted.  I think this is a bit of a cop-out, and is just asking the rest of your raid to do your job for you.  If you are in the melee, that’s one less person to be targeted at range, meaning those out there will be targeted more often.  If it’s DPS, that could slow down your kill, and if it’s healers it will hurt their throughput.  So, just suck it up and learn to dodge the balls flying at your face.  If you’re really having trouble, have your raid leader chuck some wrenches at you to get you motivated.

The damage in this fight can be a bit spikey and is not always on the tanks.  Of course, your tanks will need constant attention during the first two phases.  When the orange gas clouds target a player, they get a damaging debuff and will need some healing while they kite it around.  Riptide and some Lesser Healing Waves work great here.  When the green volatile ooze targets a player, get ready to chain heal around them, because when it hits it will do a knock-back and damage everyone in range.  This works especially when a melee member gets targeting, so I’m pretty much always casting a chain heal on the melee when it’s out, just in case. 

Oh by the way, it’s pronounced “mey-lay.”  Yeah, I know it looks like “me-lee” but that’s just wrong.  When I hear you pronounce it that way on vent, a little part of me dies inside.  Mostly the nerdy part, but still, stop it.

We found proper positioning to be very helpful here.  We had ranged and most of the healers stack up near the tables in the back of the room.  If a green volatile ooze targets one of the ranged players, they will need to stack up on that person to help spread the damage and keep them alive.  Try to be at max range from your tank when this ability is casting.  This will make sure the green goo takes longer to reach you, giving the DPS more time to kill it, and your raid members more time to stack on you.

Once you get to phase 3, you’re in a DPS race to get the boss down before his stacking AoE damage wipes the raid, and you run out of room on the floor due to all the slime puddles that your off tank can no longer remove.  You’ll want to Bloodlust right at the start of this phase.  Although it’s a DPS race, the more healing you can throw out, the longer your raid will last.  Positioning is key.  The tanks will be constantly moving the Professor around to keep out of the slime puddles and the choking gas bombs.  They will also be taking greatly increased damage and will be on a short taunt rotation.  Your tank healers will be going all out here, and even if you’re on the raid, you’ll want to help them out as much as possible.  Try to keep Earth Shield on the current tank if you’re the only resto shaman.

Early in the phase, I like to set up near the middle of the room, where I can hopefully stand still for a bit and pump out a bunch of healing.  As slime puddles begin to spawn, this will become harder to do, and you’ll have to start moving to the outside of the room, trying to stay ahead of where the tanks are kiting.  If you need to, you can stay with the tanks and melee in this phase, but I’ve found that the constant movement makes it tough to put out much raid healing.  This probably works well if you’re a resto druid.  Cheaters.  For the rest of us, try to find a safe spot, heal like crazy, and then move quickly to another safe spot as needed.  

There’s a little bit of RNG involved with the slime pool placement, and your raid needs to stay calm and put out as much damage as they can before the raid damage gets too high.  I think we had 4 people alive at the end of our kill, so it doesn’t have to be pretty the first time, and this fight should get a little easier each week as your raid gears up.