Many say that this is the hardest heroic encounter in ICC apart from the Lich King, I must say I agree. After a lot of practice, a lot of patience, and many different strategies, our guild has now killed him. I'd like to start out by saying nice work to all of them! Also I would like to send out a special congratulations to Itsabeboo on getting [Shadowmourne], good job buddy!

The main difference in the 25-Man Heroic encounter from its regular encounter is unbound plague. During phase 1 it is pretty much the only thing different in the heroic version of the fight, with the exception that he hits harder and so do the oozes. Practice handling the plague during phase 1, there is a lot more you will have pay attention to in the future phases and it will quickly become overwhelming to try and continue practicing with the plague in phase 2. The tank who is tanking the professor will need lots of heals during this phase as well as whoever has the unbound plague. The way that I kept track of who had the plague at any given time was by adding it to the debuffs that my healbot shows (Code: #72855), for more information on how to add debuff codes click here. I also found it very useful to keep rejuvenation on the Abom at all times (assuming you are spec 'ed into revitalize) to help make sure he/she is able to slow all of the oozes.

Phase transition is different now as well, instead of stunning you he will now spawn both and orange and a green ooze at once. On the bright size however he takes longer to make and drink his potion so that you have time to kill the oozes. There is however another trick that makes them harder to kill, the professor will randomly give ooze variable to half of the raid and gas variable to the other half. You can only attack the green ooze if you have ooze variable and you can only attack the gas if you have gas variable, you don't have to pay much attention to this if you are a healer but it is a good thing to know. Because of the variables both gases will be alive longer and you can expect to see a lot more stacking and usually the gas has time to target 2 different people.

The only addition to this phase will be of course the malleable goo, and you guessed it, it will hit much harder and often kill people if you don't get out of it. One addon that helps a bunch with this is AVR, which draws circles everywhere that the malleable goo's might explode at so that you can get out of them easier (to download AVR click here, you will also have to download AVR Encounters for it to work). I would not get used to this however because Blizzard is breaking it in patch 3.3.5.

This, as in the regular encounter, is when the fight really gets tough. The tanks get hit very very hard during this phase and you will ned to assign several healers to make sure they stay alive. Also the raid will be taking massive amounts of damage towards the end of phase 3 when you run out of room to get out of malleable goo easily, as well as it gets really hard to control unbound plague with the restricted maneuver and will more or likely be bouncing around the raid and cause massive damage. In order to get him down in this phase, before the healing becomes really unmanageable, you will not want any raid members dead (which means no killing raid members to get rid of the plague).

Managing the unbound plague is the hardest part of the heroic version of this fight and it is important to make sure you do it properly. We tried several things in my guild from letting shamans die with it and then using reincarnation, as well as using rebirth and soulstones, we tried having raid members just pass it off to each other, we tried having a set team to pass it amongst themselves (which worked well but left no room for error). In the end the strat that worked for us was a mix of a few, we would have a select team trading it off for the majority of the fight but often times we would just throw it in the melee or the ranged and let it jump around for a while (usually when it only had enough time left on it to jump around and then die off before it needed to be taken out).

• During phase transitions have your entire raid stack on the green ooze to help reduce damage, but for the initial stack, make sure your slightly closer to the wall with your back facing the wall, that way if the gas targets you then you won't be blow right next to it and wipe the raid.
• Download AVR while you can, it is a life saver!
• In phase 3, I know its tempting to worry about the tanks when you see them taking so much raid damage, but trust your tank healers to keep them alive (unless you are the tank healer), the raid will be taking massive amounts of damage and you are the right person for the job, if you loose even 1 person it will make it significantly more difficult to kill him.
• Help out the Abom with your rejuv. Set him/her as your focus and just do it whenever you have spare time, it will help a lot.
• Always stack on green ooze's target, they hit super hard and you can heal while running.