Rotface and Mirror Images

OK, I’ll admit that I have not gone out and done a bunch of research on this yet.

That’s plan B.

Plan A is that one of my readers has a clue or possible explanation or can tell me that I’m imagining things.

The situation:

Rotface encounter in ICC.

We run in, I establish myself on the threat table and pop Mirror Images.

My threat against Rotface is now divided amongst my three stooges, allowing me to open up the can of whoop ass.

The RNG then selects me as the lucky winner of a baby parasitic slime.

The problem:

I just burned the hell out of my mouth taking a bite of reheated pizza. Ouch.

The problem regarding the slime:

When my slime pops out of me (off of me? where exactly is this slime coming from?) it does not follow me like a faithful puppy dog to where the off tank is dragging the ever-growing slime pile around the room.

Instead, it immediately latches onto the nearest healer and commences to omnomnom.

The Mirror Image mechanics have always seemed to be rather straight forward.

Their purpose it 2-fold: an additional source of damage and a threat dump.

If you are in combat with something (and therefore currently on its threat list) the summoned images will immediately fall into position and start in with the pewpew.

If you are not in combat with something, they will mill about and start pushing each other and whining about “he’s on my side!”

This is pretty easy to observe when a tank pulls at the speed of light in a heroic.

Pop images mid-combat and they shoot your current target.

Tank has moved into the next room before this lot is dead, run to catch up, images in tow, target the next mob and begin casting.

If a spell with a cast time is used, the images will loaf around until the completion of the cast (and possibly spell impact as well for spells with travel time) before they get the hint.

Use an instant spell and they join in right away.

So unless I’m in the Exodar and about to make good my on my escape without the guards 80 yards away noticing me until my images volunteer to run half way across the city to aggro something that didn’t know I exist… the images will (almost always) ignore any creature that I have not established threat against.

Creatures that I come into contact with after images have been summoned have full threat against me.

Quick experiment, summon MI before a boss fight and open with a PoM Pyroblast or other large nasty spell.

After the boss one-shots you, you’ll notice that the images did not divide the threat you gained after they were summoned.

New creatures wandering into a fight will not recognize that you’ve split your threat over your clones and will munch on your face.

So to get the most out of MI, make sure that you have established yourself on the threat table of the creature you want to ignore you and hope that nothing new enters the fight to bypass your threat dump to the images.

Based on these observations and snippets of research I did a while ago, I would think that when a baby slime is spawned off me, I should have full threat against it since it appeared after the threat division.

Following that train of thought, it should stay on me.

But it didn’t, so there has to be an additional mechanic at play.

Perhaps the slimes are born inheriting the threat values from Rotface?

In that case, I would expect the slime to pick one of the 3 images and chew on it.

But it didn’t. It beelined for a healer.

I’m left with:

The encounter is bugged.

Mirror Images are bugged.

The healing aggro was too much from our awesomesauce healers.

It was a fluke. (I’ve been reluctant to try this again since losing control of slimes is bad.)

Pizza sauce reheats too hot.

What do you think?