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...

Things I love: Illustrated Boss Strats

I dunno if it brings up awesome memories of watching Onyxia Wipe on Youtube, but I'm always tickled by illustrated boss strats. I remember in particular a series that helped my old guild get through T5/T6 content, like this one on Leotheras the Blind in SSC.

Anyway, trolling through my blogroll this morning, I came across a link to this illustrated guide to Yogg-Saron, which just so happens to be the fight that our guild is going to be working on on Monday. Something about seeing cartoon stick figures yelling at each other, rather than hearing my own guildies do it on vent, makes it suddenly more fun.

-Zigi

PTR Testing Notes: Lord Marrowgar

Last night, the US PTR saw it's first Icecrown Citadel boss:
Lord Marrowgar.
I wanted to try him out personally, but by the time I was able to get on and get a raid together, he was bugged out and untestable. This is the information I have gleaned from MMO-Champion and videos and such:

• There are 3 trash pulls up to the boss. They are all very easy and nothing that could really ever kill anyone unless a DPS pulls aggro.


• The boss has 18M health on normal 25 man, which means he should have ~5M on 10 man. This is a REALLY low amount considering Ignis has 5.6M on normal.


• He only has 4 abilities, and none of them look like anything too hard to handle.
  
  1. He has a cleave called Saber Lash which will hit the tank and an off tank for 300% weapon dmg (not 100% sure what he even hits for, so this isn't much information). As a result of this, the tanks should stack. This ability seems like what Halazzi or Koralon does.
  2. He will emote (not sure what the emote is as of yet), and begin to Whirlwind around the room for ~15 seconds, dealing damage and leaving a DoT on anyone he comes in contact with. This is just like what Leotheras the Blind from SSC did, and is pretty easy to avoid if everyone spreads out and melee runs out after the emote. He also drops aggro after the WW and must be taunted.
     
  3. He will target a random raid member and impale them and anyone within ~5 yards of them with an ability called Bone Spike Graveyard. This will become an attackable target (much like a Flash Freeze on Hodir) and must be killed by the ranged ASAP, as it will incapacitate whoever is impaled as well as deal 10% of total health every second.
     
  4. The last ability is Coldflame, a fire that will start at Marrowgar and head towards a random raid member, much like a Doomfire on Archimonde or Legion Flame on Lord Jaraxxas. The fire does 7000 damage every second for 3 seconds (not sure if this is a DoT it leaves, or if this only continues while standing in the fire). Also, it should be noted that 7000 dmg/sec is the 25 man number, and the 10 man will likely be lower. Basically, the targeted raid member and anyone else in the fires path should turn and run in a straight line so as to not bend the flames.
     
  
  

This boss looks pretty simple and doesn't seem like he'll be much of a road block. I look forward to seeing more ICC bosses and hopefully even testing them myself.
~Yigi