Teaching the Professor

The only term I could use to properly define the Professor Putricide fight is controlled chaos.

On second thought, I'm not so sure about the controlled part.

We had faced him a few times before, but without much success, never making it to phase 3 and making it through the transition from phase 1 to phase 2 cleanly only a couple of times.

This week was destined to be different...

We smashed through the Lower Spire and Putricide's two... "sons" on the first night without much difficulty.  This has been a regular ritual for us for a couple of months now, and the second night started out with a roll through the princes and their queen, and we moved on to the Professor.  We've been skipping Dreamwalker the past few weeks even though we've healed her successfully a few times.  Our successful strategy has involved 4 tanks, and we've been down two of our regular progression tanks and one of our backups has been spotty on attendance.  Since adding me into the mix we have 4 regular progression tanks, with an extremely solid backup Paladin tank and a serviceable backup Druid for a total of 6 tanks geared enough to fill at least an OT slot.  Take out 3... and we don't have the tankage necessary.  I suppose at this point we might be able to do it with 2 or 3 tanks (putting our best one by himself on one side for the 3 tank setup...) but that's the raid leader's job to decide, not mine.

Where was I?  Oh yes, Putricide.

Our typical MT and raid leader took the Abom - I don't have any experience with it and I think it gives him less to pay attention to so he can better direct the raid.  I controlled the Professor himself, and our backup Druid - who is usually specced Balance for most of our raids, and is an excellent Boomkin at that - stayed feral but went cat form until the 3rd phase.  This was the role I had on our previous attempts, when we had one of our other main progression tanks with us.

Unfortunately I'm turning into an old man, and our report isn't up yet so I can't check it to remember exactly how many times we wiped... but we made it to the 3rd phase if not every time then almost.  I know we wiped once to debuff stack buildup (and my craptastic hardware crashing...) and we wiped once more due, in essence, to poor handling of Putricide by us tanks not moving him properly.

We did have an issue on 2-3 of our attempts with having an ooze or gas cloud up during the shift to 3rd phase, which draws DPS away from the boss, giving his slime puddles time to grow.  Probably not coincidentally, our successful run had no slime up (and no slime puddles up!) at the time of the shift.

Malleable goos on me were occasionally a problem, but we got that worked out.

In the end, of course, we taught the professor a lesson.  What it is, beyond "don't mess with us or we'll let you kill us a few times before we kill you," well, that I don't know.

We had been planning on locking out next week to have more time for attempts on Putricide and maybe Sindragosa, but after a vote revealed a decent chunk of folks that still want/need the gear and marks from the bosses we've downed we decided that we'll do a fresh run next week.

On the upside there is actually some gear to be had for me.  One of our raiders took a sojourn through another guild to get a LK kill and then came back, opening up our ability to do heroic lootship, which we did succesfully this week (even though we were all dead at the end).  Unfortunately, I lost the roll by 1 to a rogue on the heroic version of Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder.  Add in all the additional Marks we'll be pulling, and soon I have no doubt we'll be knocking on the Lich King's door.

Onward, Epic Adventurers!