My Friday night 10-man group that I run with my Paladin killed Festergut last night after 4 attempts, and then went on to get Rotface down to 40% on two attempts before we had to call it an evening. While the bosses are definitely "easier" in 10-mans, the fights are still largely the same with the exception of mechanics like the blood beasts in Saurfang being only two, instead of 5 as they are in 25-man and the adds in the Deathwhisper encounter only coming from one side at a time instead of three. The Festergut fight is identical as far as I can tell, though tuned down for 10 players. The fight requires about the same level of coordination that you would give to the Deathwhisper encounter, and while healing is stressful to the healers, is manageable with good group placement and pre-planning responses. The raid leader needs to plan for several eventualities, like what everyone is to do if both spores end up in Melee, or both end up in ranged. What happens if one of the healers gets the Vile Gas? Who will cover the tanks and who will temporarily pick up healing of the ranged and the melee, while also healing the indisposed healer?
And that is really why it took us the four attempts last night to finally down him, because we hadn't put in enough thought and coordination that the fight demands. Ultimately we had one healer out with the ranged, and two healers with the Melee, one of which was dedicated to the tanks, and the other covering for the ranged healer should she get the vile gas. And we decided that the ranged healer would always remain where she was, that all ranged would always converge on her regardless of who got the Spore. And we decided that if two ranged ended up getting the spore the right most ranged would always run into the melee, unless it was the healer who would remain where she was. The melee did the same. And once we worked out all the kinks, including figuring out exactly when the tanks needed to taunt off each other, and that we ended up needing to bubble one of the tanks to help with the buff they got, things went off superbly.
I think I was simply in shock the other night when I was watching the amount of damage that everyone was taking in 25-man on this fight, but now I realize it was simply a product of everyone being completely unprepared. We hadn't spaced people properly, people weren't getting the inoculations, or all of them, and we hadn't properly coordinated the healing assignments. With three groups doing these fights in 10-man every week it should give us a leg up on the 25-man side of things, as the fight is the same, just a bit harder. And I think I might need to retract the opinion I expressed saying the difficulty of this encounter was much higher than it should have been, coming from the Saurfang encounter. The key to this fight is clearly coordination, and ensuring the tanks use cool downs appropriately, and perhaps supplementing those with cool downs from the rest of the raid to assist them. I'm actually somewhat glad we didn't get in there Thursday night to attempt this, as it gave the three 10-man teams an opportunity to look it over on a slightly easier mode. Whether we can get in there on Monday or not remains to be seen. With the next wing coming out on the 19th I certainly hope so.
