3 March 2009

Construct: the alternative bosses

Blob
Blob is the gelatinous guardian of the construct wing. The jelly of doom lurks beneath a grate in the second chamber where it ambushes unsuspecting solo adventurers as they skip back from a wipe or a failed Pipe attempt (see third boss).

Hit points: couple of thousand

Special moves:
  • Wobble. Stackable debuff that causes deep despair in the affected raider. Each stack increases the likelihood of tears. Persists through death.
  • Tunnel vision: aura that prevents raiders from realising they should all wait at the beginning and run back together.
Strategy: because of the effect of tunnel vision, Blob is incredibly difficult to fight. You will keep running and dying, picking up additional stacks of wobble, and may develop the urge to quit the raid. Don't give up. If you ignore him and don't react, Blob will eventually bore of you and leave you alone. This usually happens somewhere between the fourth and seventh ambush. Wobble wears off once you pass the grate safely. It's ok to cry.

Slimes
Slimes are the obsessive-compulsive spawn of Blob, driven by their neuroses to move endlessly in parallel lines across your only path to Pipe. This is a deceptively simply fight. Slimes are not capable of deviating from their tormented ritual, all you have to do is avoid them.

Hit points: n/a

Special moves:
  • Lag aura. Random instant cast aura of infinite range that freezes all internet traffic long enough to lure hapless raiders to certain doom.
  • Moron: curse of complacency that reduces intelligence by 110% and causes affected targets to bounce into the path of an oncoming slime.
Strategy: for this fight you need a paladin. They should bubble and run through all three lines of slime as quickly as possible. The raid should follow only when the paladin has cleared the third line, so she can resurrect everyone at the far side.

NB: Lag aura and moron may render this strategy ineffective.

Pipe
Pipe lies in wait at the top of the ramp from Grobbulus. The most fiendish of all bosses, Pipe can lay waste even to skilled groups without leaving his inanimate form. This is an environmental fight — Pipe himself, along with the platform approaching him, contains at least 17 violations of the health and safety code, including missing railings and floor markings. These won't in themselves kill you, but any one of them can send you plummeting into Blob's lair below, forcing you to repeat the first two bosses. If you can traverse this gauntlet of dangers, you will prevail.

Hit points: n/a

Special moves:
  • Liquid hazard. Places random pools of slippery liquid on the ground without one of those yellow warning signs. Causes players to slip off Pipe into Blob's lair.
  • Freeze frame: reduces frame rate of affected raiders to 1 and increases the spill rate of liquid hazards.
Strategy: there are two ways to approach this fight. If your guild includes an engineer, you can construct a rudimentary hand rail and mark our liquid hazards with flares. But for many guilds, this method is too slow. The alternative is to set your movement speed to walk, turn off all distractions — Vent chatter is especially dangerous — and creep forward, one tiny step at a time, making lots of painful adjustments to your trajectory to compensate for freeze frame. If you have a warlock, make sure they drop a wardrobe of summoning on the platform before they start, so you can summon people back to avoid a second Slimes run.

Coming soon: the Thaddius mini-boss, Jump.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

LMAO! This is awesome!

Also please note that people who follow the pally directly are idiots! Due to the lag aura, one should always run to the right of the paladin.

I also believe the Moron curse is stackable or we just need mages that pay attention to decurse because no matter how many times this is explained someone always inevitably puts the paladin on follow.

Roxy said...

FANTASTIC. I'm logging onto WoW sooner than expected to share this gem with guildies. Love it.

Anonymous said...

LOL! That lag aura seems to always latch on to the same people over and over, too.

Merlot said...

Lag aura is still the most dangerous of all special attacks, I think. Last night, the slimes all stopped moving and, with a sudden attack of moron, I kept on running without realising what that meant. I died in the middle of nowhere.