HEROIC Spine of Deathwing - DEFEATED 08/05/12

[TeaLeaf]

2 tanks
3 healers
5 dps

Searing Plasma 280k healing
Blood Corruption Death - dispel it enough it turns into Earth
Blood Corruption Earth - do not dispel as it might turn back into Death

Degradation-  Alalgamation deaths gives a stack, reduces raid's HP thus you must minimise number you kill

Tendon has big health - 13 million HP - takes 2 cycles to do it - 18 seconds per burn phase
BUY VALOR POINT TRINKET - short CD means buff is up for every tendon

[TeaLeaf]

Note the valor point trinket comment in bold.  If you're DPS then go buy the trinket!

I've bought my Bottled Wishes

[microid]

i got this trinket too. whiii =)
tendon got 10,2m hp after the nerfs. for this boss all of our paladins should have the wrath aoe stun thingy glyphed.

[Azunai]

Of course I converted almost all of my VP to Conquest points yesterday.

[TeaLeaf]

Bump for tomorrow!

[microid]

little microid things we should start collecting the bloods 2-3s earlier at yesterdays tries we got a grip always right after or just in end of burning the tendons. i thing we started at 10s before jump that to 13s and the grip guy is happy =)

second thing was the targeting macro i noticed that every time we did the left side tendon my macro worked. on right it failed every time. maybe the macro will try to lock on the left even if its not exposed?

i would also start to use strong healing cooldowns on 4 algamation explosion. we will have then -15% hp. dont know how long the cooldown is for tranq or healing hymm. hope its enough for use in 4,5,6 algamations. 4 tranq 5 hymm 6 tranq again?

[TeaLeaf]

We deliberately delayed the bloods for this reason:
If we pick up adds too early then we get a Grip during the last few seconds of the tendon burn.
If we pick them up as we were then we get a Grip whilst the Amalgamation is moved into position and starts casting Blast.

Dealing with Grip in the latter case is far simpler and does not cost us any dps, so it was an informed choice to pick them up like that.  Timing wise we used 5 seconds before Grip as the point at which the Amalgamation was moved ot the Bloods.  Assuming the bloods are neatly grouped it stacks to 9 almost instantly and then moves to the plate and casts Blast.  If anything I would delay moving the Amalgamation to 3 seconds before Grip to ensure we do not get a Grip at the other enc of the tendon burn phase.

Re the macro:
I have done some reading on this, apparently:

/target Buring Tendons does tend to work on one side only and not on the other side.

/targetexact Burning Tendons seems to work

or Boss2 works (which I have never used).  

E.g.

Code Select Expand

/stopmacro [@boss2, noexists]
/target boss2
/cast [exists, harm] Avenging Wrath
/cast [exists, harm] Zealotry
/cast [exists, harm] Templar's Verdict

Code Select Expand

/cleartarget
/targetexact Burning Tendons
/stopmacro [noexists]
/cast Shadowfiend
/cast Archangel
/use item:77114
The raidwalls are being used on 9 stack AOE rather than the explosion.  The healers reported the main stress is not the explosion itself, but the AOE before it and the massively increased damage the Amalagamation does when buffed with 9 stacks.

[TeaLeaf]

All in all though it was nice progress last night.  I'm pretty sure that with the macro changes above we'll increase our dps sufficiently to the levels to regularly burn through the tendons.  The fact that we got onto and well into the 2nd Plate phase last night was hugely encouraging.

Bloods were an issue if we let them build up, me helping with a shed load of mind sear seemed to keep them well under control.   The key I think will be to get the Amalgamation down to a correct HP level fast enough, so melee might need to ignore bloods and stay on Amalgamation.   If the total dps then does not add up to enough then we'll move the bloods to right behind the Amalgamation to get cleave damage too - however this is significantly trickier for the tank to get a fresh Amalgamation into the tanking area, which in turn means: we might need to switch our tanking positions to put bloods next to the plate if it becomes a problem getting the newly spawned Amalagamation into position.

I'm real encouraged though that we have a bone fide chance of a kill this reset and to go 7/8 HC progress!

[microid]

ahhhhhhh i mean 3 s later offcourse

[Azunai]

i would also start to use strong healing cooldowns on 4 algamation explosion. we will have then -15% hp. dont know how long the cooldown is for tranq or healing hymm. hope its enough for use in 4,5,6 algamations. 4 tranq 5 hymm 6 tranq again?

We should also have a good deal of damage reduction buffs from the Blood of Neltharion debuff so in the end, if dispellers don't mess it up ;-) we should all be at 30% damage reduction (3x 10%). Evens out against the 36% health loss.

[Azunai]

i would also start to use strong healing cooldowns on 4 algamation explosion. we will have then -15% hp. dont know how long the cooldown is for tranq or healing hymm. hope its enough for use in 4,5,6 algamations. 4 tranq 5 hymm 6 tranq again?

We should also have a good deal of damage reduction buffs from the Blood of Neltharion debuff so in the end, if dispellers don't mess it up ;-) we should all be at least at some % damage reduction. 3x 10% for each ideally but not sure if there'll have been enough debuffs for this. Evens out against the 36% health loss.

[Niel]

One dispeller is the trick with the debuff.........two confuses it. There is a bit of RNG in the dispelling as the Death debuffs come in groups with no knowing how many dispells you'll have to do before it turns to earth..........and they are all on a timer ......so don't get it right and as we saw a couple of times on Tuesday its BOOM bye-bye raidgroup.

We had it rolling relatively nicely on Tuesday for long periods - The aoe as the mob hits nine stacks we were dealing with by using a spirit link .....that helped a lot........and of course using spirit link for each gather up.

My only comment - people need to be aware when they have the plasma debuff.........and be very very careful not to annoy anything and take damage that we can't heal.....emergency healing on someone with plasma debuff who is taking damage is very very very expensive in mana terms as our only option is to spam big expensive heals to get the plasma debuff off them in order to heal them up. The plasma debuff is regularly on 4-5 people at all times.

[Azunai]

My only comment - people need to be aware when they have the plasma debuff.........and be very very careful not to annoy anything and take damage that we can't heal.....emergency healing on someone with plasma debuff who is taking damage is very very very expensive in mana terms as our only option is to spam big expensive heals to get the plasma debuff off them in order to heal them up. The plasma debuff is regularly on 4-5 people at all times.

*cough* WeakAura's. I'll make me one

[TeaLeaf]

*cough* WeakAura's. I'll make me one

Tbh, everyone's debuffs should be split AWAY from their buff list and shown in an enlarged format closer to your raid warnings already, so you should already know you have the debuff and not need a WA code.  See my UI as an example.

[Azunai]

ATM I have my buffs in top right corner, and debuffs as tiny icons below my health bar. That's enough of a general visual reference, but I like to keep my eyes on the field. So I prefer WeakAura's for the customization. I'm not stuck to ugly and intrusive icons that way. And not all debuffs are relevant for me personally to have them enlarged on my screen ;-) The end result is the same anyway.