[10] Spine of Deathwing

[frontallobe]

I thought I'd give a run down of some things we noticed in killing this. (note we were a bit overgeared - avg ilvl 384) - I will avoid repeating strat guides and just give some tips/tricks we did..your mileage may vary.

- We always killed tentacles in a specific order to speed up the process - CCW for us
- 1 tank
- Everyone must switch to tentacle that's doing the grip - seems like a lot of burst is needed to get him to release
- As the plate pulls up the tendon can be hard to target if the tank has all the adds with him and is helping. 2 solutions - macro to target tendon, or what we did was just have me tanking adds way back so only targetable mob was the tendon.
- The tendon seems to be a dps check. There's no healing at this time so you may want healers to chip in DPSing this thing.
- Just killing blobs near the big guy will not cause a stack of the debuff. You have to run him through the slime pool they leave behind.
- After first plate is up, just aoe down all existing blobs to lesson the mayhem.
- Rolling seems very sensitive on 10m. Make sure everyone is in center OF the center plates to avoid weird rolls.
- The trick, for healing at least, seems to be to get the big guy at 9 stacks with as little hp as possible. We did 5-7% and felt that to work.

Hope these help,
Jay

[KysenMurrin]

We just spent soem time on this but didn't kill it. I have to say contrary to your post it didn't seem like the Grip took a lot of burst to break, at least not enough to require everyone switching. Tendon definately the dps check, we failed to kill it the first couple of times and were very close on the two times we sucessfully removed a plate.

[Técaro]

We just stuck one ranged on the tentacle whenever it gripped someone. The burning tendons feel like a pretty substantial dps check, which might be a problem for several guild. It also seems quite taxing on healers with that 200k absorb debuff, ours were running on fumes a solid 30s-1min before we finished the encounter.

[fafhrd]

We had problems beating tendons in time if a DPS got stunned by one of the tentacles during the burn. We tried using just one person on breaking the stuns, it does work, although tasking 2 to do it is probably safer and a bit quicker.

[Tamarins]

If it helps anyone, what we did to prevent what Fafhrd mentions (stunned DPS during tendon) is, we made sure the tendon was low and then killed it quickly during Nuclear Blast. That way there was a new Corruption up and plenty of time to DPS before it stunned anyone. Don't forget to pick up the extra Amalgamation though.

[2Cute2BeStr8]

It seemed like we had more problems with healing and the healing debuff than anything. Healers just couldn't keep everyone up.

[Zalaria]

The thing we found to help the most with healing was to kill the corrupted bloods in a group away from the amalgamation until it was low (under 20%) and you have 8-9 puddles ready. Bloods don't hit hard, so you can just have a dps "tank" them and stack the puddles together. When ready, have your tank run the amalgamation through the puddles to stack up the debuff, then run to the explosion spot. Doing this kept the tank damage laughable until the amalgamation was almost dead, letting the healers focus elsewhere.

[Nothan]

After wiping a few times I found that our raid had the easiest time to force a roll after each plate break since there would be 3 tentacles up and we'd end up with 3 amalgamations after destroying the 2 new ones.

The tendon only had 2.86 million hp and were very easy to dps down. I broke off the tendon to free the gripped person. Even on a fail, when you blow up the plate again, the hp remains the same on the tendon and doesn't regen. Although, I believe there is a left and right tendon, so it matters which side you bring the amalgamation to do the nuclear blast since only one side of the plate comes off.

[Nikachelle]

No, the plate comes off as a whole. The tendon can spawn on either the right or the left side once the plate has lifted up.

[Zalaria]

I think he was referring to the case when you failed to kill the tendon and you're popping another amalgamation. There is a right and left tendon, and we don't know if the health is shared between them for second-round-same-plate tendons. So if you're doing the second round thing, try to be on the same side as the first round to be safe.

[Nikachelle]

On our kill I don't believe we had a second round on a plate. However, every time we've used the amalgamation to blow off the plate, I had it lined up directly in the middle. During several tries, we did see a tendon sometimes spawn on the right, although the left was generally favoured. (And I can't remember if we saw the tendon switching sides during a re-attempt at the plate, or if that was just a brand new plate lift up.

[fuzzygeek]

Oh, the different tendon thing probably explains some behaviour we saw on an early pull. There are 2 tendons (L/R); their health does not regen if you fail to kill it on the first exposure, but on the next exposure you may get a different tendon spawn.

We went in a little blind and had 2 holy paladins and one resto shaman, a bear tank and a paladin tank. This fight is certainly solo tankable on 10M, and our resto shaman was chortling about how great a fight it is for resto shamans.

The second tank tended to have a lot of downtime, so we started playing games with the pools and adds, such that by the time the tendon was dead we had a second big add at 50% with 5 pools ready to be vacuumed up; this made it possible for us to expose the next plate very quickly. We never needed to roll DW more than once.

This will probably be more helpful when we do this in 25M. With the shit comp we had last night there was no way in hell we were going to be able to do it with the full raid and social raiders.

[Phonic]

We 1T, 3H this fight. It was easily done with a tankadin as rounding up the adds with HOTR was pretty simple. We even missed on our 3rd nuclear blast so we had to get another amalgamation stacked to explode. So make sure it dies all the way next to the plate.

Otherwise, the normal mode is pretty straightforward, just keep calm and make sure people know which Corruptions are dying next.

[Hrobertgar]

After wiping a few times I found that our raid had the easiest time to force a roll after each plate break since there would be 3 tentacles up and we'd end up with 3 amalgamations after destroying the 2 new ones.

The tendon only had 2.86 million hp and were very easy to dps down. I broke off the tendon to free the gripped person. Even on a fail, when you blow up the plate again, the hp remains the same on the tendon and doesn't regen. Although, I believe there is a left and right tendon, so it matters which side you bring the amalgamation to do the nuclear blast since only one side of the plate comes off.

We usually also did this. However, we noted that right after dpsing a tendon there would be a ton of little adds around. Sometimes ppl got carried away with AOE and we would get a second add to 9 stacks very soon after the first tendon. Once, the add was at 50% when it reached 9 stacks, we popped hero and nuked it and the tendon, but I would not advise on planning that route.

Also, on the roll strat. We found that it was best to wait for the roll until right after the remaining tentacle grabbed someone, and DBM should have a timer for it. I did not notice if which side the add was on influenced which tendon was exposed, but it would make sense that it did, and that could help in the event a raid couldn't finish a tendon off.

[Epimer]

It seemed like we had more problems with healing and the healing debuff than anything. Healers just couldn't keep everyone up.

I healed our kill last night, and the healing debuff was much more annoying than I had thought it was going to be. One tank, three healers (holy paladin, 2 x resto druid) and if we weren't careful we would get behind on the debuffs and it's pretty painful/mana intensive to recover from.

Our raid leader insisted for most of the night to start off the fight by killing two Corruptions, then roll the boss, then kill a third. Turns out this means you'll most likely end up initiating a roll with 3-4 healing debuffs on the raid and have some AoE healing to do. This is unpleasant, and I could easily burn through 40% mana to catch up afterwards. Changing to killing three Corruptions first helped a lot with this, maybe due to a quirk in the timing of the debuffs going out.

Healing a solo tank wasn't particularly tough, and I imagine with some decent cooldown usage by the tank ( ) it would be even easier.