HEROIC Spine of Deathwing - DEFEATED 08/05/12

TeaLeaf · April 18, 2012, 07:51:52 AM

We're soooo close on this now. After our initial 'warm up' pull, we had 90% of our tries into the P2-->P3 transition and lasting 9 - 10 minutes. We tended to wipe after the death of the 2nd tendon at the transition. This is the bit we need to focus on and improve our current strategy. To my mind (but I have not checked logs yet) we seem to lose the tank at this point.

Thoughts & suggestions welcome please!

Currently we:

1-mana hymn shortly prior to P2-->P3 transition
2-have TL AOEing full-time on bloods to keep numbers down throughout P2
3-DG through 9 stack add Amalgamation
4-switch to AOEing bloods immediately after the tendon is down and move to our 'mid' position
5-aura mastery & rally cry just after we have got the tendon down whilst tank is being humped
6-spiritlink & healing hymn when we jump into the pit

We need to make sure we have a massive push on bloods immediately after the tendon.

The only other thing I can think of atm is to switch 5 & 6 meaning we have have spiritlink/hymn running during the AOE of the bloods phase to help soak up the Plasma effect+Burst damage from the exploding bloods. That would leave us with AM/RC for the pit along with my healing hymn but it would lose my AOE for 10 seconds on the bloods.

We're tending to die right after the tendon goes down whilst we AOE adds and move to pit to roll, that's the bit we need to do and then this fight is ours.

microid · April 18, 2012, 12:55:49 PM

the blood do explode and do some minor damage. many explodes and that minor becomes major. i think we should not kill any bloods after the 3 tendon dies. blood exploding and pit damage seems to be fatal.

also for that warmup thingy all first kill so far has been on the last tries of the night. but all the rest bosses last from 5-8m a kill. well yorshall was a 10m. spine and madnesss are long fights. 12-15m

i suggest we start on sunday 1h earlier and make it a 4h run to have the same amount of tries that previous bosses. we are old men we need more tries on warmup =)

hubbah · April 18, 2012, 01:28:51 PM

Quote from: microid;348847the blood do explode and do some minor damage. many explodes and that minor becomes major. i think we should not kill any bloods after the 3 tendon dies. blood exploding and pit damage seems to be fatal.

also for that warmup thingy all first kill so far has been on the last tries of the night. but all the rest bosses last from 5-8m a kill. well yorshall was a 10m. spine and madnesss are long fights. 12-15m

i suggest we start on sunday 1h earlier and make it a 4h run to have the same amount of tries that previous bosses. we are old men we need more tries on warmup =)

1 hour earlier is not doable for me seeing i always have dinner @ my mom's house on sundays ( i never have anything in the fridge on sunday either so it works out great

) and i get back home at 19:30ish to log on for the raid

I think more people in the guild have family stuff to do on sunday as well

TeaLeaf · April 18, 2012, 01:55:57 PM

I think an earlier start is probably not possible for RL reasons.

Re the bloods. We do not need ot kill them all, but we should kill what we can, perhaps single target dps is the way forward and then roll, then kite until the end. We're never going to get all the bloods down, but if we can clear 50% of them then that's a win. Part of this will mean Hal will need to pick up and tank some bloods too (but not get them DPS'd and not killed).

Niel · April 18, 2012, 07:20:01 PM

We had one attempt last night where i thought we had the adds nearly controlled at the start of the 3rd plate - we didn't really get a chance to try it but it might be worth dropping as many earth elementals as we have in the raid onto them as well to to divert some of the attention from the tank while we clean em up a little. The issue seemed to be a number of people taking damage and maybe a spirit link with most gathered would even that up for a while while we got the adds under control also. If we can just get into a clean start to plate 3 i think we're clear to go on this and we're looking at a kill.

Niel

Just a thought ......but is there anything to stop us starting P3 with a roll before we kill the tentacles and a roll shortly after ?

TeaLeaf · April 18, 2012, 08:13:15 PM

Only thing is that rolling does not get rid of bloods. We'll roll anyway to get rid of surplus Amalgamations, but then we're left with the one Amalgamation which we need to keep.

TeaLeaf · April 22, 2012, 10:10:20 AM

Been researching this some more and found something interesting this morning.

What we need is Blood of Neltharion (damage reduction buff) on tanks, but we're not sure how to get it to tanks.

Apparently, you can pretty much control who gets the buff as it Death debuff jumps from side to side when dispelled. Hence if we have tanks on left-ish side and rest of raid on right-ish side then when a Death on right is dispelled then it will jump to tank on left. I found this on Blood Legion (World #3) video, the rest of the video is seriously boring but that piece of info is a gem!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uY-Y0tefHo
(positioning shown at about 4:20 in video 2 linked below)

If this works, with some adjustments to positioning we can get the damage reduction buff on the tanks from the first plate and this will remain on the tanks for the rest of the fight and probably solve our P2-->P3 transition problem.

Another interesting point from the 2nd video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVzJS4j4ZJ8
We currently roll the boss immediately after clearing the corruptions to get rid of the surplus amalgamations.
Blood Legion recommend not doing this because:
-initially bloods are slow and a 0-stack Amalgamation does almost no damage, so tank them
-when 9 bloods are down run one through to pick up 9 stacks (needs a bit of tank coordination)
-burn corruption as normal to say 45%
-now you are into the second half of P1, but you already have an amalgamation which is down to circa 50% HP, so you can probably push this one across in one grip not 2

Not quite sure how we would do this in 10 man, the tank coordination might make it a tricky thing to handle, but it was worth repeating here.

Part 3 of the video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP0C8LkoM6g

Worth watching imo, but a small warning, the 3rd one is 1hr40min.

Nice discussion about interraction of Spirit Link and the burning plasma debuff. They recommend using spirit link post roll to get rid of the debuffs, watching the video it really works well, so perhaps we need to consider moving where we use it.

microid · April 22, 2012, 12:08:52 PM

the only way we could do that 3 algamation p1 thingy. is to switch places whit hal and whytee. blood to front algs to back. when we want to blow up one of them whytee just taunts the low hp one it will run to whytee colletct all the bloods.

JonnyAppleSeed · April 22, 2012, 01:26:37 PM

Nice find TL .... With luck these will be the nuggets we need for the kill

Yup micro the tank taunt to gain stacks of bloods looks like a solid tac too

Niel · April 22, 2012, 04:48:52 PM

Sounds like a good plan...from what i have seen when i have dispelled Earth ( as a try on Thursday ) i suspect it has the same chance of turning to Death as Death as to Earth - around 20% or 25%.........so it turning to Earth on the wrong side most of the time should not be an issue as it will only take 1 dispel to drop it on a tank with a high chance of remaining Earth.

Niel

hubbah · April 22, 2012, 08:48:16 PM

I dont really understand why we are switching a perfectly fine tack.. but ok. Normally i would not have a problem with it but i really really Hate this fight and i dont even want to do it. It makes me want to log off :S
Changing tacks makes it even more horrible.

I dont even understand why people are complaining about doing different tacks when the one we are using is working!

TeaLeaf · April 22, 2012, 09:09:47 PM

The problem is Hubbah, that we have a current tactic that gets us perfectly to a wipe in the P2-->P3 transition. Making this change is attempting to put us in a position where we can survive the P2-->P3 transition.

TeaLeaf · April 23, 2012, 08:20:47 AM

It took us most of the night to adjust to the new opening phase of the fight, but I think we're back to working on that P2-->P3 transition now.

Kill 3 Corruptions, off-tank all 3
We ALL stack in our strict left (tanks) & right (everyone else) positions and the tanks are now reliably picking up the buff. Burn Skull & Cross Amalgamations.
Once tanks get buffed we move to normal positions (bloods at plate, amalgamations just behind the raid) and continue. TL continues on Bloods.
DPS bring the Amalgamation to 250k
Blood tank taunts in the Amalgamation when 9 bloods are down to get stacks and DPS immediately kill (we had a couple of excellent goes where we had just one AOE pulse)
Raid backs off slightly for Nuke Blast, then moves forward to blood position to burn Tendon.
When tendon killed, kill Corruptions, roll and rinse & repeat from normal positions.

I thought it ended up quite well last night and we had some very solid tries. Whilst we also reliably got to the P2-->P3 transition last Tuesday, the difference last night was that we got there with both tanks having the buff - and that's the bit that will be critical in overcoming this element of the encounter.

One thing we're clearly still figuring out is when to best use our healing CDs and we need to learn to use them when Searing Plasma is going to cause us a problem.

Niel · April 23, 2012, 08:11:02 PM

I do think it possible to use the original tactic that we were solidly getting through P2 and still attempt to pursuade the Earth debuff onto tanks.

On the new tactics last night i'd did still feel ragged to me - positioning of the raid seemed an issue with people spread out and the tendon dps was for some reason reliably lower than we had got it to only a few days earlier.

Searing Plasma is an issue the whole fight - spirit link gives a temporary respite only. The main issue with plasma is that people that have it need to be real careful about their aggro.....i do see a number of occasions where people with plasma on low HP pick up aggro on a new mob.

As for moving on the Earth buff ...... i did it a number of times last night in an attempt to get it to a tank and not once did it turn back to Death.........bouncing it around is a big gamble and with the 10 seconds available to move it there's no saying where it will end up........if i couldn't get it to a tank i was leaving it on a healer as we do get a lot of love from the blobs due to healing aggro.

Cheers

Niel

Azunai · April 23, 2012, 08:48:15 PM

Then here's a suggestion (as a mash-up):

P1 up to and including first Tendons burn:
We split left/right, let tanks get buffs. This should be real easy if we stick to the strict left/right as we saw last night.
There's no reason why this shouldn't give us at least 1 stack on each of the tanks, with luck one will proc for 2 stacks (it can do that apparently)

P1 towards second Tendons burn and everything afterwards:
We return to the old tried and true method where we tank the bloods in the middle and the Amalgamation near the plate. This has the advantage of the tank being able to assist with the Tendon dps.

That should be the best of both worlds... although I must say near the end we were doing ok on the new method as well, bar some DPS loss on the tendon.