We took a short break from Archimonde in order to revisit an old friend in the Black Temple - Gurtogg Bloodboil. Previously, our attempts to bring this mutated orc down were not overly successful; however, we came prepared this time. Equiped with our secret weapon, we had little trouble bringing this beast down on our third pull.
For those unfamiliar with the fight, he really has two unique abilities which provide most of the challenge to the fight. The first is Bloodboil, a stacking debuff that he casts every 10 seconds to the 5 raid members furthest away from him, which deals 600 damage to the target every second for 24 seconds. The second is Fel Rage, a 30 second debuff placed on a seemingly random raid member and on Gurtogg himself, which increases size, health, damage, and healing done of both characters. The other aspect of Fel Rage is that Gurtogg will only attack the raid member with the Fel Rage debuff until they are dead or the debuff expires. Even with the massive buffs, keeping up a cloth wearer with Fel Rage requires a significant amount of healing. Combine this with Bloodboil and you have the recipe for an extremely healing intensive fight. In fact, once you get the bloodboil rotations worked out, this fight lies entirely on the shoulders of your raid's healers.
In the end, this fight feels like the first challenging fight in the Black Temple. The prior four fights focused more on execution of simple mechanics (i.e. killing ghosts, containing adds, avoiding volcanoes) rather than intricate healing and raid setups. We are definitely looking forward to see what lies ahead for the remaining 4 bosses.