Just do your best to pretend that’s actually a picture of Rotface being downed by my guild on our last attempt of the night and not a picture of Rotface rotated 90 degrees, would you kindly? We forgot to take a screenshot, and besides, my toon was piss-drunk off of an entire Brewfest Pony Keg, because I was thoroughly sick and tired of staring at Rotface and his chin-dick and his angry poo-poos and “Good news everyone! The slime is flowing again!”
And now we get to do it all over again this week. It’s cool, though, we’ve totally got him on farm now. Totally. /cough
A couple tips to my death knight brethren (and a few for anyone) who might, in the course of tanking, end up kiting slimes on Rotface. Especially new tanks, like yours truly. These are all from personal experience, so I’m sure others will have other things to add.
This is one of the places in Icecrown where Unholy truly shines. Bone Shield will give you a 20% damage reduction while it’s up, meaning you can usually run through the slime pipes (though not the slime from the oozes!) with relative impunity, Magic Suppression (if you’re talented into it) will lessen the damage you take from most things in the fight (though not the Big Ooze’s melee abilities… that thing hurts like a bitch), and Anti-Magic Zone (if you’re talented into that) has a couple uses that maybe aren’t so obvious:
Making it really obvious where you are. This is a no-brainer, especially if you have someone who gets caught up in the moment and runs totally the wrong way. “Head for the big pink bubble!” works a lot better than “Come to me!” when there’s slime flying everywhere.
Protecting raiders during the merge. If you manage to get a merge where you can actually stand still - doable if someone merges their slime into the exploding slime, meaning you’ve only got 1 or 2 immediately afterwards - sometimes it can take people a second or two to get started. If the bubble’s popped on top of them while you’re trying to get the Big Ooze’s attention, you might save them a tick or two of radiation.
Death and Decay is really, really effective for getting threat on Big Oozes - they’re not the fastest creatures in the world, and will soak up several ticks on the run. It’s even more useful later in the fight, when there will almost inevitably be two Big Oozes up at once (especially late in the fight, when he starts pooping oozes out like mad). If you have the tanking 2T10 bonus, this is probably the one place it’s actually useful. (I kid. It’s never useful. It’s downright awful. It’s Glyph of Death and Decay.)
If for some reason you haven’t already, turn on nameplates. And get really, really good at targeting correctly and taunting on the run - if you need to get an ooze out of the center, the last thing you need is to miss and accidentally have Rotface running at you. (This is really a good tip for all tanks, I guess.)
Chains of Ice works on the little slimes. Useful to pin them in place before dragging your Big Ooze over them.
And probably the biggest Rotface tip I can give, to anyone of any class on any difficulty:
- Stay calm. I can’t stress this enough. The more that your nerves or anyone else’s get jangled, the more likely someone is to make a boneheaded mistake and cause a wipe. Rotface is, above all else, about flawless execution (or as close to it as you can get). If there are multiple wipes and you can tell things are getting tense, give people a short de-stressing break. If your raid needs to constantly be doing something, and if you haven’t done it yet, we found killing Sister Svalna to be a useful way to get away from Rotface for a little while.