I was in an Ice Crown Citadel (ICC) 10 man raid last night and the group had cleared up to Festergut. For those that don't know, Festergut is basically the first boss of the second wing of ICC and is basically a 'DPS race' or gear check. Festergut has a relatively short, 5 minute enrage timer, so if a group can't drop him within that time, then they will be unlikely to progress much further with the raid. At this point there was a bit of discussion as to what DPS was required for the Festergut fight, and there seemed to be quite a bit of confusion. With that said, today I thought I'd explain how you can work out what DPS you'll need to beat a bosses enrage timer.

When you want to work out what DPS is needed in order to defeat a boss before the enrage timer ticks over you need two pieces of information:

• the health (hp) of the boss; and
• the length of time between the start of combat and the point when the boss reaches the 'hard enrage'. We'll call this length of time the enrage timer.

Basically if the boss isn't dead before he/she reaches the 'hard enrage' - the point at which the boss goes "berserk" and basically starts 'one shotting' tanks - you can all but guarantee the raid will wipe.

So let's use Festergut as the example.

In normal 10 man mode, Festergut has 9,412,000 hp. His enrage timer is 5 minutes.

Because DPS is damage per second, we need to convert the enrage timer to seconds. There are 60 seconds in a minute, and so 5 minutes becomes 300 seconds.

So...

Festergut
Health: 9,412,000
Enrage timer: 300 seconds

To work out how much damage you need to do to drop Festergut within 5 minutes you divide the health by the enrage timer.

So...

9,412,000 hp divided by 300 seconds = 31,373.3 DPS

In other words, for Festergut to die the moment he reaches the hard enrage, the 10 man group as a whole needs to do 31,373.3 Damage Per Second (DPS). To put it another way each member of the ten group members needs to be doing 3,137.3 damage per second for the entire fight in order for Festergut to drop by the time he hard enrages.

However, an average 10 man group does not have 10 people dealing damage 100% of the time. In most groups there will be two tanks and a minimum of two healers.

Now we have to assume that the two healers are spending all their time healing the entire group, making sure no one dies. We can then assume that these two group members will be doing 0 DPS. This then means that 31,373.3 DPS will need to be done by the eight remaining group members. Assuming then that only eight people are dealing damage, these eight people will need to average 3,921.6 DPS for the fight in order to drop Festergut the moment he enrages.

However, the average 10 man group includes two tanks. Tanks won't deal the same level of DPS as the group members dedicated to damage dealing. As a general rule, you can say that a relatively geared tank will average around 2,000 DPS on a raid boss - maybe more or less depending on the class, gear and spec. Either way it's safer to use 2,000 DPS as the benchmark as a good raid group shouldn't be relying on their tanks to make up for a DPS shortfall.

So for our 10 man group we now have two tanks averaging 2,000 DPS each, two healers doing 0 DPS each. This means that to drop Festergut the exact moment he enrages, the six remaining damage dealers will need to do a total 27,373 DPS. In other words each damage dealer needs to average 4,562.22 DPS.

Just in case that isn't clear, here is a breakdown of DPS needed per person to drop Festergut the exact moment he reaches the hard enrage:

Tank one: 2,000
Tank two: 2,000
Healer one: 0
Healer two: 0
DPS one: 4,562.2
DPS two: 4,562.2
DPS three: 4,562.2
DPS four: 4,562.2
DPS five: 4,562.2
DPS six: 4,562.2

Total Group DPS: 31,373.3

It's important to remember that 4,562.22 is the average DPS required from each DPS'er allowing for no deaths, and this would see Festergut die the moment he reaches his hard enrage. There's absolutely no allowance here for anything going wrong. If anyone in the above equation dies at any point, that's a wipe.

It's very rare for anything to run 100% to plan, no matter how good your intentions. Lag and luck can play a huge role in the outcome but are difficult to factor into the equation. That's why you need to build in some contingency.

In my raid group I said that 4,700 DPS was what we needed our damage dealers to be averaging as a minimum in order for us to be successful. This was where the confusion crept in, as someone suggested 4.7K DPS was far more than what was needed. When you look at the numbers though, 4.7K is not all that generous. If six damage dealers average 4.7K DPS for the length of the fight, Festergut would drop after 292 seconds. That's only 8 seconds before he enrages. In my opinion, 8 seconds is not a large contingency, and really won't help much if something goes wrong.

One of the group members indicated that 3.8K DPS was all that was needed. Not sure how he arrived at that figure, but it seemed low. Here's an example of working backward to figure out how long it will take a group to drop a boss, given their total DPS.

So, how long would it take a group to defeat Festergut if the six DPS'ers average 3,800 DPS?

Festergut
Health:9,412,000
Group DPS: 4,000 (tanks) + 3,800 x 6 (DPS'ers) = 26,800 (total group DPS)

9,412,000 hp divided by 26,800 (group dps) = 351.19 seconds.

So if the six DPS average 3,800 DPS it will take 351 seconds to drop Festergut, which is 51 seconds more than the enrage timer allows. In other words, this is a wipe. Bottomline, DPS'ers averaging 3.8K DPS won't burn down Festergut in time to beat the enrage time, therefore 3.8K is not going to cut it.

Like I mentioned earlier, Festergut was basically designed as a 'gear check' for the second wing of ICC, so he's naturally going to be a fairly decent step up from Deathbringer Saurfang. Deathbringer has 8,785,000 hp and an 8 minute (480 second) hard enrage - so he has less hp overall and you have a significantly longer period of time to deal with him.

In summary

You can always work out how much DPS is required to beat a boss if you have two bits of information. The health pool of the boss, and the length of time the boss will take before enraging. Good luck!

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