Viscidus | ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Race | Ooze (Aberration) | |||||||||
Level | ?? Boss | |||||||||
Health | 962,000 | |||||||||
Wealth | 70 | |||||||||
Reaction | ||||||||||
Location | Temple of Ahn'Qiraj | |||||||||
Status | Killable | |||||||||
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Viscidus is an optional boss in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, a giant slime that can be accessed after the death of Fankriss the Unyielding. This boss requires a high Nature Resistance as it uses AoE poison bolts which have direct damage along with DoTs. He resets if taken outside his room, much like the bosses in Zul'Gurub. If you are about to wipe, run outside the room and you may be able to save your life.
Wormie's Classic Vanilla: The Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. Viscidus Once you killed Frankriss the Unyielding you had the chance to do an Optional boss (you didn’t have to do it to progress on into the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj). Go farm 2x daggers that have a chance on hit: cast frost bolt. So the tactic was simple enough: go in, melee and hit. Elemental Damage on Weapons - Zarathustra - 04:43 PM The change is live on the 1.11 PTR. One thing that's odd is that a Hurricane has an 'On Use' 'chance' to deal frost damage on a hit. Faulty wording, or a funky workaround to make a proc work on a ranged weapon?
- 1Abilities
- 2Strategy
Abilities
Viscidus
- Melees for around 1000 on a NR-geared tank. Hits very fast at first, but progressively slows down.
- Takes 50% reduced damage from all attacks.
- Poison Shock: AoE Nature attack for ~1200 Nature damage every 10 seconds or so. Poison Shock has a radius of 15 yards, so be very careful to stay away when not trying to shatter him once frozen.
- Poison Volley: AoE spell cast every 10 seconds that hits for ~1500 resistible Nature damage on hit and will apply a dispellable DoT that does ~500 Nature damage every 2 second for 10 seconds. Similar to Lord Kri and Princess Huhuran. This volley ignores LoS and has a range of 100 yards, therefore it is very difficult to avoid it. Nature Resist gear can greatly mitigate the direct damage, but the DoT is unresistable and therefore highly lethal. Poison curing must be set up for the raid so that no one is hit by more than one tick of the DoT.
- Toxin Clouds: These are spewed out every 30–40 seconds. The cloud hits anyone inside it with ~1500 unresistable damage every 2 seconds and slows movement speed by 40%. Similar to Lord Kri's death cloud. A single bolt will predate the Toxin Cloud (it is the only time Viscidus spits on a single target), so move away asap from the landing point of that single bolt. The clouds look fairly small, but their damage radius is larger than their graphic so beware!
The Three Frost Stages
Viscidus must be slowed by Frost attacks in order to defeat him. Frostbolt, Frost Shock, Icy Touch, Frost Strike, and Howling Blast count towards this objective. The strength of the Frost attack doesn't matter, only the number of hits, so use the fastest Frost abilities possible. Frost attacks are required, but other attacks too, freezing is faster if more people are attacking it.
- 'Viscidus begins to slow.' - Movement and attack speed reduced by 15%. This phase begins after 10 frost abilities were used against the boss.
- 'Viscidus is freezing up.' - Movement and attack speed reduced by 30%. This phase begins after 15 frost abilities were used against the boss.
- 'Viscidus is frozen solid.' - Movement and attacks cease completely. At this point the raid must switch to melee attacks to shatter him. This phase begins after 20 frost abilities were used against the boss.
The Three Melee Stages
Once Viscidus is frozen he must be shattered. This needs to happen very quickly or he will thaw out and continue attacking the raid. Melee attacks are required. Everyone, including melee and ranged characters, should run up and hit him. Viscidus only explodes when enough hits have been dealt (after 30).
- 'Viscidus begins to crack.' - Continue melee attacks.
- 'Viscidus looks ready to shatter.' - Continue melee attacks.
- 'Viscidus explodes.' - Viscidus shatters into multiple small 'Globs of Viscidus' in a circle around the room. These Globs will begin to move towards the center of the room, slow at first, but continuously and steadily gathering speed. Once they reach the center, Viscidus will be reformed.
Globs of Viscidus
- Every time Viscidus is shattered, he splits into 1-20 Globs of Viscidus - each one representing 5% of his total HP. If he is below 5% when shattered, he will die. Each glob takes 10-15k damage to kill.
- Globs must be assist trained to death, as DPSing one has no effect unless it is killed. Globs cannot be slowed or stunned so you must DPS fast and hard.
Transition Aggro
- Viscidus has a nasty tendency to aggro someone right as he reforms and run off after them. Since he is not chilled at all at this point, and he is untauntable, it is very difficult for the MT to catch up and get him back. Unless he is picked up and tanked very quickly, he will likely run around killing healers until the raid wipes. There are various theories as to what makes this happen, but it sometimes seems as mysterious as Onyxia's Deep Breath.
- Some people say that DPSing blobs without killing them (especially with AoEs and Multishot) causes transition aggro. This seems rather unlikely, as healers get transition aggro as often as DPSers.
- Some people say that players standing too far away from Viscidus will pull aggro. In any case, it is not a good idea to run out of the room too early after a transition; if he aggroes someone out of the room he will instantly reset to 100%.
- Some people say that Viscidus has a limited-radius aggro wipe, or an aggro wipe on a limited number of the closest players, and that the players standing further away from him should not do any healing or curing for 5 seconds during each transition.
Strategy
Ideally, all raid should drink a NR potion 2 minutes before starting, so the cooldown fades. Then, refresh NR potion on every chance. Aim for enough dps to kill your assigned Glob, and then balance stamina with NR equipment. Low stats due to wearing green NR armor may not be the best to stand NR damage. If your raid uses CT_RaidAssist, the raid leader can check the NR resistance, and the number of NR potions on each member. Once you master the encounter, you may try drinking a pot only when you are low on hp.
Beware of the single bolt: it announces the landing point of a toxin cloud, which drains health real fast. There is an addon called Viscidus Raid Warning to whisper people suffering Toxin Cloud.
Viscidus is vulnerable to Frost (spells/abilities and Frost damage), therefore mages are at a premium for this fight. Warlocks equipped with a Frost damage wand, i.e. [Wand of Biting Cold] (usually 1.5 sec) will be nearly as effective as a mage (1 sec casting on rank 1 frostbolt with improved frostbolt still faces the 1.5 sec global cooldown).
The raid is required to get as many frost attacks into Viscidus as possible so that he will go through his several emotes and freeze. After he is frozen, a number of melee attacks must be done to shatter him into 20 or so small blobs. The raid must then kill these blobs in order to reduce Viscidus' health.
The triggering for his normal state into frozen seems to be a hitcounter of ~200 Frost based attacks/spells/abilities.
The triggering for him to shatter once frozen seems to be a hitcounter of ~75 (in 1.12) melee hits, regardless of damage.
All stages have a 15 second time-limit, so if you fail to reach the next stage after that he reverts to his previous one. Time is of the essence. Once people start dying, the fight goes down hill. Killing Viscidus should take around 4 freezing phases to accomplish. Therefore, longevity is the key along with poison cleansing abilities. Mages and Druids are key to this encounter. Shamans make the fight relatively easier for the Horde because of the Poison Cleansing Totems. There might be changes in 1.11 or future patches allowing weapons with +X-Y frost damage to count as (part of) the number of attacks needed. This would mean that Hurricane and other weapons would be very useful.
Melee positioning
Most guilds keep their melee players away from Viscidus so that they don't take poison damage. They have to stay at least 100 yards away to avoid damage. This can be accomplished either by standing on the staircase outside Viscidus' room or by standing inside Viscidus' room far off to one side. The difficulty with this strat is that meleers will take one or two poison volleys while running in and out, and someone has to be in range to depoison them. However, with proper depoisoning, meleers takes much less damage and may not even need to wear full NR.
The alternative is to have high-NR melee players in melee range of Viscidus, DPSing him at all times. This does a minimal amount of damage to Viscidus, but it does hurt him a bit. The advantage is that, with players moving around less, it is far easier to keep in range of shaman totems and of your Druids for depoison. The tradeoff is that you take more direct Poison damage (which is resistible), but hopefully you take less DoT damage (not resistible). You can also make use of [Frost Oil] to help freeze Viscidus.
High-level/solo strategy
After the post-5.1 hotfix --'Viscidus now remains frozen for 30 seconds (was 15), and it takes 30 hits to shatter Viscidus (was 50).'[1]—it is possible to relatively easily solo Viscidius. Solo players need to be able to land a quick succession of frost abilities and melee swings. Any wand that has frost-based damage, or a weapon with the Enchant Weapon - Elemental Force enchant will fulfill the former category. A [Barov Peasant Caller] or a [Barov Servant Caller] are trinkets that supply several guardians that attack with melee swings quick enough to shatter Visc.
Work through Visc's ~2 million health first without shattering it in the freeze phase. Once it's below 5% total health, switch to frost abilities and get it to freeze. Once it's frozen, switch to melee swings and use the peasant caller.
Demigod or even old God?
This article or section includes speculation, observations or opinions possibly supported by lore or by Blizzard officials. It should not be taken as representing official lore. |
Chemist Fuely suggests that oozes may be connected to the Old Gods, and that an Old(or Demi) god could be Viscidus. Nonetheless, it's currently the most powerful ooze ever known.
Loot
- This boss drops one [Qiraji Lord's Insignia].
First 5 Viscidus Kills
- Death and Taxes. Shattered Hand Alliance http://www.dtguilds.com[dead link]
- Immortality. Skullcrusher Alliance http://immortalityguild.com
- Nihilum. Magtheridon-EU Horde http://www.nihilum.co.uk[dead link]
- Millenium. Archimonde-FR Alliance http://www.millenium-guilde.org[dead link]
- Impervious. Stormreaver Alliance http://www.impervious-guild.com[dead link]
Notes
- There's an unused Legion id.[2]
![Chance On Hit Frost Dmg Viscidus Chance On Hit Frost Dmg Viscidus](/uploads/1/2/4/2/124289982/194483862.jpg)
Patch changes
- Patch 5.1.0 (2012-11-27):
- Viscidus now takes fewer hits to freeze and shatter.
- Now drops Viscidus Globule.
- Patch 1.9.0 (2006-01-03): Added.
References
- ^Patch 5.1 Hotfixes. Retrieved on 2012-12-01.
- ^Wowhead
External links
Retrieved from 'https://wow.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Viscidus&oldid=5526205'
Article originally posted on ManaflaskHi, first and foremost ill like to congratulate Method on their World first accomplishments in Throne of Thunder. But also a special shoutout to Midwinter who took a big step up the progression this tier! Well done! Now we can continue with what we started last time, one of the biggest raids in WoW history (at least as far as square footage is concerned).
Fankriss the Unyielding
If you asked me today I wouldn’t know if this was actually a boss or a trash mob - this fight is pretty much free loot.
The fight consist of very few abilities: one of them was Mortal wound, a stacking debuff Frankriss did on the current main tank, reducing healing taken by 10% per stack and you needed to use 2 tanks to swap around when the debuff got too high. Otherwise the boss didn’t hit particularly hard and pretty much any geared tank could handle it. He spawns 2 different kinds of adds, Hatchlings and some big yellow worms. The worms are called Spawn of Frankriss and enrage after 20 sec starting to do 5 to 10 times the normal damage and 1 shotting everyone they touch. So it was important that dps swap to the them asap, that they are tanked and killed. There can be up to 3 worms spawning in a very short amount of time. The 2nd kind of add is the Hatchling, he spawns multiple Hatchlings at the same time (up to 8 I think) and if you try to kill them single target you just can’t really keep up.
So what most guilds figured out in like 1-2 pulls is, you tank the boss at the start and let the main tanks get a good amount of aggro, and the dps’ers do light dps so they don’t pull the aggro. Then when the Hatchlings start spawning you use AoE fears to fear them away from the raid until you have a decent amount of them like 2-4 spawns. Then you make sure you kill the new spawned big Yellow worms so they don’t enrage and kill anyone. And then you stack up under the tail of the boss and aoe down all the Hatchlings. Once you had done this. It’s rinse and repeat, nothing more to the fight. Below I linked a movie to our first kill of the boss. Like most other bosses you can notice how “non” hardcore style it is, plenty of people having a good time writing in chat and the Mage in the movie didn’t actually dps the first 20% - no need, and you don’t pull aggro.
The fight consist of very few abilities: one of them was Mortal wound, a stacking debuff Frankriss did on the current main tank, reducing healing taken by 10% per stack and you needed to use 2 tanks to swap around when the debuff got too high. Otherwise the boss didn’t hit particularly hard and pretty much any geared tank could handle it. He spawns 2 different kinds of adds, Hatchlings and some big yellow worms. The worms are called Spawn of Frankriss and enrage after 20 sec starting to do 5 to 10 times the normal damage and 1 shotting everyone they touch. So it was important that dps swap to the them asap, that they are tanked and killed. There can be up to 3 worms spawning in a very short amount of time. The 2nd kind of add is the Hatchling, he spawns multiple Hatchlings at the same time (up to 8 I think) and if you try to kill them single target you just can’t really keep up.
So what most guilds figured out in like 1-2 pulls is, you tank the boss at the start and let the main tanks get a good amount of aggro, and the dps’ers do light dps so they don’t pull the aggro. Then when the Hatchlings start spawning you use AoE fears to fear them away from the raid until you have a decent amount of them like 2-4 spawns. Then you make sure you kill the new spawned big Yellow worms so they don’t enrage and kill anyone. And then you stack up under the tail of the boss and aoe down all the Hatchlings. Once you had done this. It’s rinse and repeat, nothing more to the fight. Below I linked a movie to our first kill of the boss. Like most other bosses you can notice how “non” hardcore style it is, plenty of people having a good time writing in chat and the Mage in the movie didn’t actually dps the first 20% - no need, and you don’t pull aggro.
Viscidus
Once you killed Frankriss the Unyielding you had the chance to do an Optional boss (you didn’t have to do it to progress on into the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj). Viscidus was a Horde boss, which means bringing Shamans made the boss a lot easier than bringing Paladins (for once!). When we first got to this boss, we had no idea what to do and it took quite a few pulls to actually find out what the hell was going on. What happened was when you pull the boss (who does hit fairly hard on the tank) you do no damage whatsoever to him. And you just stand there and hit him. And that goes on for a while. You get a hint by the “world message in the chat” that it has something to do with freezing. And after a while (if you got that far) he starts to freeze up completely and shatters into 20ish small globes that spawn on the edge of the room. Each of these globes represent a part of his hit points and you need to kill as many as you can as a killed globe removes hit points from the Main boss. Failure to kill the globe will just mean it spawns on full hit point again at the new Shatter.
While this is all fine, there is 1 key component which is why this fight was considered ridiculous especially for Alliance:
Posion Bolt Volley
The volley targets the raid and puts on a 10 sec dot on everyone ticking for 600-1000 nature dmg every 2 sec. And this is while most people only had 3000-3500 hit points.
However if you were horde you could bring Shamans to drop Posion cleansing totems that dispelled a whole group instantly when they got it, so you didn’t take much more than a 1 time hit. This fight was really unbalanced between Horde and Alliance, other classes could dispel it but it took quite a bit of time to dispel 40 people and it cost a lot of mana to outheal and dispel everyone. In Curse we brought 6 Shamans for our first kill and later on we had 7-8 shamans to cover all groups to make the kill easier. Even if you had this amount of Shamans the fight still required you to Shatter fast enough so the healers didn’t run out of mana. Frost bolt worked, Shaman frost shock worked and wanding with a frost damage wand worked. But not all classes had natural frost damage abilities, and to shatter Visicidus into smaller globes you had to hit him a certain amount of times with a frost attack.
Once you killed Frankriss the Unyielding you had the chance to do an Optional boss (you didn’t have to do it to progress on into the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj). Viscidus was a Horde boss, which means bringing Shamans made the boss a lot easier than bringing Paladins (for once!). When we first got to this boss, we had no idea what to do and it took quite a few pulls to actually find out what the hell was going on. What happened was when you pull the boss (who does hit fairly hard on the tank) you do no damage whatsoever to him. And you just stand there and hit him. And that goes on for a while. You get a hint by the “world message in the chat” that it has something to do with freezing. And after a while (if you got that far) he starts to freeze up completely and shatters into 20ish small globes that spawn on the edge of the room. Each of these globes represent a part of his hit points and you need to kill as many as you can as a killed globe removes hit points from the Main boss. Failure to kill the globe will just mean it spawns on full hit point again at the new Shatter.
While this is all fine, there is 1 key component which is why this fight was considered ridiculous especially for Alliance:
Posion Bolt Volley
The volley targets the raid and puts on a 10 sec dot on everyone ticking for 600-1000 nature dmg every 2 sec. And this is while most people only had 3000-3500 hit points.
However if you were horde you could bring Shamans to drop Posion cleansing totems that dispelled a whole group instantly when they got it, so you didn’t take much more than a 1 time hit. This fight was really unbalanced between Horde and Alliance, other classes could dispel it but it took quite a bit of time to dispel 40 people and it cost a lot of mana to outheal and dispel everyone. In Curse we brought 6 Shamans for our first kill and later on we had 7-8 shamans to cover all groups to make the kill easier. Even if you had this amount of Shamans the fight still required you to Shatter fast enough so the healers didn’t run out of mana. Frost bolt worked, Shaman frost shock worked and wanding with a frost damage wand worked. But not all classes had natural frost damage abilities, and to shatter Visicidus into smaller globes you had to hit him a certain amount of times with a frost attack.
So I was a hunter and I didn’t have any frost attacks I could spam him with. So what to do? Go farm 2x daggers that have a chance on hit: cast frost bolt. |
So the tactic was simple enough: go in, melee and hit the boss until he shatters, then go out in pre-assigned groups and kill the globes. Repeat this until he doesn’t have any more globes left and he will be on 1 hit point and die.
Princess Huhuran
One of the abilities you had to deal with in Vanilla was called Frenzy: it required your hunters to dispel the boss with a Tranquilize shot, that you learned from a book drop in Molten Core. I swear to god Dispelling frenzy on this boss must be why hunters were looked down on for expansions to come! |
If the Frenzy buff that the boss cast on himself wasn’t instantly dispelled it could easy mean the death of your main tank. The boss was poison all the way through with different abilities relating to Poison damage. You again, like most Vanilla bosses, needed a few good tanks to deal with the encounter and make it easier for everyone. What you wanted to do is rotate the stacking Nature dot that she does on the main tank to 2-3 tanks so you kept swapping and not letting the stack grow too high. The boss was Taunt immune so all the tanks had to be pretty close in aggro so you could stop attacking for a bit and the off tanks could pull the aggro from you. This also meant dps’ers had to watch out for their aggro.
Other than the stacking MT debuff she did an aoe attack hitting the 10 closest people with the Wyvern sting equal to the one hunters have right now. However, if you dispelled the Wyvern sting the target in question took 3-4k nature damage before mitigation, and most of the time you would only dispel the tank that is next in line to take aggro. On top of that all ranged had to be spread out to avoid stacking Noxious Poison which was a dot she threw on a player and aoe around the player target, which silenced the target for a bit of time. And like I talked about in the start, every 15-25 sec she would go frenzy which meant you had to rotate at least 2 hunters who dispel her when she went frenzy - on our kill we had 5 hunters doing it to make sure it happened. On 30% she went into berserk mode and your melee group would take crazy damage including tanks. From 30% and down to 0 its basically a fight against time for your healers to keep the raid up. She didn't Frenzy anymore so hunters could also go full dps.
Other than the stacking MT debuff she did an aoe attack hitting the 10 closest people with the Wyvern sting equal to the one hunters have right now. However, if you dispelled the Wyvern sting the target in question took 3-4k nature damage before mitigation, and most of the time you would only dispel the tank that is next in line to take aggro. On top of that all ranged had to be spread out to avoid stacking Noxious Poison which was a dot she threw on a player and aoe around the player target, which silenced the target for a bit of time. And like I talked about in the start, every 15-25 sec she would go frenzy which meant you had to rotate at least 2 hunters who dispel her when she went frenzy - on our kill we had 5 hunters doing it to make sure it happened. On 30% she went into berserk mode and your melee group would take crazy damage including tanks. From 30% and down to 0 its basically a fight against time for your healers to keep the raid up. She didn't Frenzy anymore so hunters could also go full dps.
My guild had huge problems on this boss and it did set us very far behind in the race back then. A lot of guilds got stuck on this boss for a very long time and it was a killer.
The twin emperors: Vek'lor & Vek'nilash
I wish I could tell you this fight was super epic and a great experience but then I would be lying. 2 bosses that share hit points, one had to be tanked by a spellcaster, the other could be tanked by normally. So most people started out with using a warlock for tanking which could work fine, but in the end most guilds found out using a tank spamming Battle shout was enough to keep agro from the healers, as battle shout was dealing “threat” to surrounding targets. Other than the 2 twins there were neutral bugs all over the place so you couldn’t use any aoe spells (like multishot) or a bunch of them would aggro. Once in a while these small natural bugs became big and you had to focus it down before it went to a healer and killed them.
Every 45 sec or so the 2 twins swapped place and reset aggro. So instead of having a warlock in place to try to get agro fast it just worked better with 2 warrior tanks spamming battle shout on each side. The dps always swapped to the one that could be tanked by a melee tank because of aggro issues. This was pretty much the whole fight, other than the random blizzard that he did on the ranged that was very to easy to avoid. Do this for 15 min and you had yourself a kill. Most wipes on this boss were due to failure to regain aggro after the swap or ranged pulling aggro.
I wish I could tell you this fight was super epic and a great experience but then I would be lying. 2 bosses that share hit points, one had to be tanked by a spellcaster, the other could be tanked by normally. So most people started out with using a warlock for tanking which could work fine, but in the end most guilds found out using a tank spamming Battle shout was enough to keep agro from the healers, as battle shout was dealing “threat” to surrounding targets. Other than the 2 twins there were neutral bugs all over the place so you couldn’t use any aoe spells (like multishot) or a bunch of them would aggro. Once in a while these small natural bugs became big and you had to focus it down before it went to a healer and killed them.
Every 45 sec or so the 2 twins swapped place and reset aggro. So instead of having a warlock in place to try to get agro fast it just worked better with 2 warrior tanks spamming battle shout on each side. The dps always swapped to the one that could be tanked by a melee tank because of aggro issues. This was pretty much the whole fight, other than the random blizzard that he did on the ranged that was very to easy to avoid. Do this for 15 min and you had yourself a kill. Most wipes on this boss were due to failure to regain aggro after the swap or ranged pulling aggro.
![Chance On Hit Frost Dmg Viscidus Chance On Hit Frost Dmg Viscidus](http://vanillamage.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/pvefrostspec.jpg)
The trash of doom
A boss with no loot? Yeah that’s pretty accurate for this trash, it was horrible. And there was tons of it. The trash after Twins was especially bad - I probably died more times to this trash than to any other boss in AQ40! (Maybe overestimated but it certainly felt like it). Large groups of trash mobs were roaming the room after the twins (and before for that matter). The special thing about these trash mobs was that they were hitting quite hard and there were quite a few of them. And on top of that they had a mind control ability so if the wrong classes got mind controlled at the same time if often ended up in a raid wipe or you had to kite around for some time. Like a lot of trash in this instance you used a hunter pet to run up there and pull it so you could FD if you f**ked it up and pulled 2 packs (happened quite often). It felt like killing trash in Ahn`Qiraj was as challenging as killing over half the bosses, and it felt really nice to have to run back in this instance for 4-5 mins to get to Twins room again after a C’thun trash wipe.
The final two bosses, Ouro and C'thun, get their own entry that will be coming very soon, as there's a lot of ground to cover there.
A boss with no loot? Yeah that’s pretty accurate for this trash, it was horrible. And there was tons of it. The trash after Twins was especially bad - I probably died more times to this trash than to any other boss in AQ40! (Maybe overestimated but it certainly felt like it). Large groups of trash mobs were roaming the room after the twins (and before for that matter). The special thing about these trash mobs was that they were hitting quite hard and there were quite a few of them. And on top of that they had a mind control ability so if the wrong classes got mind controlled at the same time if often ended up in a raid wipe or you had to kite around for some time. Like a lot of trash in this instance you used a hunter pet to run up there and pull it so you could FD if you f**ked it up and pulled 2 packs (happened quite often). It felt like killing trash in Ahn`Qiraj was as challenging as killing over half the bosses, and it felt really nice to have to run back in this instance for 4-5 mins to get to Twins room again after a C’thun trash wipe.
The final two bosses, Ouro and C'thun, get their own entry that will be coming very soon, as there's a lot of ground to cover there.