WoW: Guide to Ice Crown Citadel - The Plagueworks

The second wing in Icecrown Citadel is made up of the lab and experimentation area of Professor Putricide called the Plagueworks.  While he is the last boss in the area you must defeat two of his hideous creations before you can reach him.  The creations are called Festergut and Rotface and are both fairly complicated fights.

Festergut

Festergut is the first boss in the Plagueworks and is an undead abomination found in a gas filled room.  The gas plays an important part in the fight as anyone in the room suffers shadow damage the entire time that is caused by the gas.  The damage starts off quite high and must be healed through.  However, throughout the fight Festergut will inhale portions of the gas.  Each time he becomes more powerful and by the third inhale he will be doing much more damage to the tank, potentially causing healing issues.  At the same time the damage caused to the rest of the raid will have dropped significantly.

While this is going on players must watch for the targets of Gas Spore.  This will be directed at random players in the raid and start a 12 second debuff.  Once that 12 seconds runs out the spore will explode dealing light shadow damage to everyone nearby and granting a 25% resistance boost to further blights.  This resistance can be stacked up to three times.  When a player is targeted with a gas spore they should either let other players know in chat, vent, or by pinging the mini-map, whichever way your guild chooses to handle it.

Once Festergut inhales the fourth time, he will let out an attack called the Pungent Blight, which deals huge shadow damage to everyone in the room.  The only way for players to survive this is to have gained enough stacks of the resistance buff by being close to players that have the gas spore.  For most players this will mean having the full three stacks each time he is ready to inhale for the fourth time.  Once the Pungent Blight attack has been done, the room fills completely with the poison gas again, essentially resetting the fight to the beginning. 

Also in the room are several areas of Vile Gas, which cause significant damage to a player.  These need to be avoided while moving through the room, however when the room is full of gas it is hard to spot them until it is too late.

Lastly, Festergut will enrage and wipe the raid after 5 minutes, so even if you can survive the ongoing damage, you still need to push DPS to down him in time.  The fight only requires a single tank, so the other tank should switch to a DPS spec to help out, or to a heal spec, allowing a healer to go DPS.

Rotface

Rotface is Festergut’s “Brother” and the second boss found in the wing.  He requires two tanks and a bit of coordination between all members of the raid.  The main tank must establish agro against Rotface and tank him in the center of the room.  He is tanked near the center of the room due to the fact that the outside of the room has canisters that release slime that spreads on the ground and causes damage.  Therefore players should stay in the center as much as possible.

The tank needs to face him away from the group and everyone forms up behind him, while staying in the center area of the room.  Throughout the fight Rotface will target random players to cast Slime Spray on.  When he does this he will turn to face that player, then cast the spray.  When this happens everyone has a little over 1 second to clear the area in front of him and get to the sides.  Since everyone will be directly behind him as soon as he turns everyone simply scatters to the sides.  Once he is done spraying he will reface the tank and everyone moves back in behind him.

The off-tank stays to the outside of the room avoiding the slime on the ground.  Throughout the fight Rotface will target random players and cast Mutated Infection on them.  When this happens they must move towards the off-tank and have the infection cleansed.  When it is removed they will drop a small ooze and the off-tank picks it up and tanks it.  As more small oozes are dropped near the off-tank they will merge into larger oozes.

The oozes have several abilities, the main concern being an AoE damage effect to everyone near them.  Therefore the off-tank should be the only one around them.  Secondly they spew out AoE slime areas that cause damage and slow people down.  These need to be watched for and avoided by all players.  Once five small oozes merge into the large ooze it will explode.  The explosion throws out areas that need to be avoided, so everyone clears the center until they expire. 

Once the center is clear, everyone repositions and the fight resumes from the beginning with small oozes merging.  The fight continues like this until you have defeated Rotface.

Professor Putricide

Professor Putricide is the last boss in the Plagueworks wing of the Icecrown Citadel.  He is the insane Professor that created the two previous bosses and wants to cure us of all our flesh. 

While not much is known just yet as the Professor was not officially tested in PTR we do know a few things.  One mentioned piece of info is that the fight will require players to drink the various potions on his work bench to interact with things going on in the room.

He apparently will throw around several different types of oozes and clouds.  One nasty one is a poison ooze that continues to spread until eaten.  Yuk! These can only be eaten by Mutated Abominations, which is apparently what you will turn into when you drink his potions.

All of this is speculation at this point though, since he was only stumbled on accidentally in PTR.  We will update this guide once he has been defeated on the live realms.