Thursday, February 25, 2010

The largely unnecessary strategy guide for the Rotting Frost Giant!

I was jealous of Kae's amazing illustrated strategy guides and wanted to post something of my own, but I forgot that:
  1. I have no artistic talent and
  2. All raiding content that I have seen has been covered to death by other, better blogs and strategy forums


With those 2 limitations in mind, I present to you my entirely unnecessary strategy guide for the optional weekly boss in ICC, the Rotting Frost Giant!

Background


There are 4 randomly generated weekly raids for Icecrown Citadel. Somewhere in the instance, you will find one of these questgivers. In my opinion, the easiest one is the quest "Securing the Ramparts", which asks you to slay an optional boss in the area before the Gunship battle.

Fight Mechanics and positioning


The Rotting Frost Giant has 3 abilities you need to know about.

The first is a Stomp ability that hits everyone for about 12k damage, and throws you up in the air. This will interrupt casting and generally just sucks. Not anything you can do to avoid this damage so keep everyone topped off.

The second is a randomly targeted Arctic Breath ability which will stun and damage all targets in a cone, exactly like Icehowl from TOC. To avoid this, the raid should be grouped in a circle around the boss. This will do about 15k dmg over 5 seconds. This is why it's important to keep everyone topped off, as a combination stomp, breath will nearly kill clothies. It is also important to distribute healers so that no more than one healer gets stunned at a time.

Here is what our positioning looked like for a 10 man raid.


The last, and most complicated ability, is the Death Plague. This will affect a randomly targeted raid member. It lasts for 15 seconds and does a minimal amount of damage and cannot be dispelled. After 15 seconds, it will explode, doing 8k damage to you and all other raid members within 8 yards. All members hit will become infected with new copies of the Death Plague, and the person who just had it receives a debuff called "Recently Infected" which prevents them from receiving the Death Plague for another 30 seconds.

To combat this mechanic, we used a "Hot Potato" strategy. First, dps the boss as normal until someone becomes infected:


The infected person would find someone next to them that does not have the recently infected debuff and hug them until the disease expires. Make sure you are only infecting one other person (this is why you spread out 8 yards apart initially).


After passing the disease, go back to your original positioning, and keep passing the disease every 15 seconds to new people.


That disease is then passed onto a third person, with the original infectee's immunity about to wear off:


Keep passing it around the circle among your range and healers in this fashion. Eventually there will be 2 copies of the disease going around, and this should be managed in the same fashion. It may be a little tricky distributing the buffs accordingly, but you eventually want the passing circle to look like this:


You should not need to manage more than 2 copies of the disease in 10 man mode.

Rewards


The Rotting Frost Giant drops no loot, but he does reward 250 rep with the Ashen Verdict, and turning in the weekly quest will get you a Sack of Frosty Treasures which has 5 Emblems of Frost, some gold, and a chance at a 264 BOE epic.

Alternate Strategies


After I made these slides, I read online that there is a simpler, although probably unintended strategy. You can pair up, and when someone gets infected, they will pass it to their partner after 15 seconds, and then if you stay up, supposedly the partner will pass it back to the original infectee, and the debuff will simply go away (the aoe damage will still occur). I have not tried this strategy, but if it is true, it is much simpler, and trivializes this encounter. Maybe I'll try it next week...

3 comments:

ambient said...

We haven't gotten this one yet (nearly always the Deathwhisper one), and I was unaware there was an significant strategy to doing it! So this was actually quite useful, thanks.

Rakhman said...

We used the alternate strategy last night and it worked very well in 10 man, apart from when the Stomp went off at the same time as the Death Plague exploded, resulting in a dead me. However a combat res soon put me back into the fight.

Alexis said...

You can't pair up, per se, because it kills the infected person if there's no one to pass it to and the length of immunity is longer than the length of the disease (about twice as long).

so what you do is have your ranged stand in clusters of three. So, for example, my cluster is disc priest, me, and balance druid. If I'm the first person to get it, the balance druid runs away from us so he won't get it. It explodes, infecting the priest and making me immune. The balance druid comes back and we basically play musical disease--the priest will infect the druid but not immune me, and by the time the druid explodes i'll be vulnerable but the priest won't, and then i'll infect the priest again...

Works out easy for the ranged, the only problem is all the melee having to run around a bit more to make sure there's always an un-immune person around.