Tuesday 12 January 2010

Putricide bugs and potential fixes.

We managed to get up to Putricide tonight. We made some decent progress, but ran into a couple of bugs which caused quite severe headaches.

Note: The below information is true for 10-man. I don't know about 25-man.

The main issue is that, sometimes, Putricide will only throw out one growing slime pool, or only one will spawn. This is a problem because it causes our abomination to be slime-starved -- keeping one pool up at a consistently low radius is ideal for a constant stream of slime, required to cast the only snare to have any effect on the volatile oozes and gas clouds.

Another issue, I think, is the following: Slime Pools are thrown out where people are currently standing. People who get hit by the Volatile Ooze's Adhesive ability can still be targeted with slime pools. Now, because of the way that the encounter just times itself, it is nearly always the case that a slime pool spawn will occur while a Volatile Ooze is roughly 25-50% of the way into its movement towards its target. This means the abomination has to be busy hitting the slime with a slow, and that there isn't enough time to consume a slime pool that spawns underneath the target.

The reason this is a problem is that it (to my mind, artificially) increases the difficulty of the encounter. If the Adhesive target gets a slime pool put under them, they are immediately taking 50% more damage than they were before. Additionally, because everyone has to group up on that player before the slime reaches them, so that the explosion damage is split and is healable, this increases the damage that everyone else takes.

I propose, then, that -- as with Marrowgar's Sabre Lash ability conferring an invisible immunity from Bone Spike Graveyard to its targets -- Adhesive should confer a mechanic which prevents the target from being the target of a slime pool. I am not at all suggesting that this should be abusable: If someone else (Person B) is standing too close to the Adhesive target when Slime Pools go out, and a Slime Pool targets Person B, the slime pool should still land and grow as normal. The way we are currently dealing with the timing on Slime Pools is that we only group up on the Adhesive target in the last few seconds before the Volatile Ooze reaches that person -- Naturally, this works 80% of the time, but the other 20% of the time a slime pool will target the Adhesive player and we're a bit screwed then.

I don't think anything else besides those two things really needs to change about the encounter. There is a bug wherein if Putricide casts Unstable Experiment shortly before entering Phase 2, the experiment (Which will be Ooze #2 if you're doing it right) will try to cast its Adhesive and, because of Tear Gas, will get an immune error. It will, then, just start charging towards a random player once Tear Gas has worn off. This is something that can be worked around, though: You can aim to push Putricide into phase 2 either before or after you have dealt with this experiment. You can't really work around a slime pool under Adhesive.

It's a very fun fight. We got him to 53% on our best attempt. Another 18% and it'll be a kill.

1 comment:

  1. I haven't been in on Putricide on 25 much. But I have experienced these same issues in 10. Our abom got very frustrated with the few bugs he encountered because he couldn't do anything about it.

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