10-man chiropractic team gooooo
Got invited back to the main raid last night. Downed Blackhorn for a guild first, and then spent about 2 hours wiping on Spine. Ouch.
Supposedly this fight is easier than Ultraxion or Zon’ozz. In practise I’m having a hard time finding a rythm to it. My Aegis bubbles seem to go completely wasted a lot of the time, and neither they nor my shields count for removing the plasma debuff. On the plus side, shields are amazing for keeping people alive through Superheated or Tentacles when they have aforementioned debuff.
Thing is, I think I’ve become too accustomed to healing with druids – a little too used to having that replenishment buff. Last night’s raid had no source for it, and I was having severe mana issues. Tried adjusting my spi up from 1900 to about 2250 during a break, but that didn’t really help much. Maybe I’m just spoiled by t12 and its relatively low AoE healing requirements… my highest heal on Spine atm is Greater Heal, which is just bloody weird. Thing is, I do chain GHeal at the best of times, relying on my Inner Focus on cd to keep mana complaints down. That just doesn’t seem to work here.
Another part of it is, I suspect, the relatively bursty nature of the way we’re doing the fight. Our main tank seems to take very little damage right up until oozes start going down, and then by the time the monstrosity hits Superheated he’s barely clinging on. Meanwhile, there are folks taking little amounts of damage from oozes and the occasional fire grip, which is minimal, right up until oozes start bursting, at which point we’ve got about 60k AoE spread over a few seconds and then the add goes nova. This is making it quite hard for me to manage my Rapture buff properly… either shields are falling off before they’re fully absorbed, or I have so many up that I’m haemhorraging mana.
Another part is simply numeric. Last night we just weren’t getting the tendons down in one open phase. It’d take two, and then by the time we had two plates off the oozes were running completely rampant.
So, this is the point where I’d go and discuss the fight with others, but our guild forum is dead, the EU forums are trollbait and everywhere else that I’ve seen just goes along the lines of “OMG this is so easy how can you not do it”. Hence this is where I get to put it all down so that I can look at it tomorrow and realise how stupid present-me was.
…
Thoughts:
- Would it be reasonable to assign a player to DPS the oozes down as the others DPS the monstrosity? That way the tank damage could ramp up gradually rather than jumping massively, and the AoE damage would be spread along the phase rather than coming in hard just before the nuke.
- We’ve tried single-tanking the fight, and that worked out… okayish, but the oozes do tend to go munch on other players. Considering that the base melee damage isn’t that high, the only real problem would be casters suffering constant pushback. Still, maybe we should train folks to run these to the tank.
- Is this a holy fight? My barrier is great for a couple of nuke phases, and my shields can save a player from ignominous death while they’re unhealable, but… it just feels like I’m not getting those healing debuffs off fast enough, and the amount of AoE healing needed in the nuke phases is pretty extreme.
- If I do stick with disc… should I be gifting my PI during the tendons? At the moment I rely heavily on it to keep my mana somewhat level, but if we can single-phase the tendons with just a little more oomph, maybe that’d be the way to do it.
- I’m looking at a WoL parse that a guildie took of our Spine attempts, but… I really can’t tell how exactly it interprets the healing lost to debuff absorbs. There must be some way to find it.
- WHY DOES EVERYONE SAY THIS IS SO EASY OMG
Anyway. Yeah.
int i; 
To lessen your tank damage, have the Amal tanked up by the plate and the bloods killed in or near the stacked raid. Stop hitting the Amal when it’s low and focus on bloods. As soon as you have enough bloods killed, drag the Amal through the puddles to stack the debuff, place cooldowns on the tank, and drag the Amal back to the plate to get blown up. The amount of time your tank takes extra damage will be greatly reduced.
If you are single tanking, have a warrior/pally go sword/board or a DK pop blood (or druid go bear, you get the idea) to pick up the adds. We dual tank but we’ve had a DPS handle this in the past.
It is not necessarily a holy fight, I do just fine as disc. Here’s the catch – don’t look at the meters. Reount (and I believe Skada as well) do not count any of the heals that are consumed trying to remove the debuff. Since my primary focus is taking care of the debuff, Recount will show that I cast maybe 6 GHeals over the course of the fight. Nevermind the fact that it takes about 6 on 25-man to break the debuff per person. WoL seems to cound the number of heals, but it doesn’t do a very good job of sorting out what healing went to the debuff.
Start with Penance whenever possible to build up a quick stack of Grace. GHeal is the bread and butter with Inner Focus every time it’s up. Use Power Infusion early and often (every time it’s off CD, if your PI being gifted makes or breaks this encounter, your DPS just isn’t strong enough). Only shield the tanks or a DPS that’s about to bite it and watch your rapture procs. Use Prayer of Mending to help with the incidental damage. I use Inner Fire on this fight instead of Inner Will – there isn’t a ton of movement and the extra boost to SP means that I can cut down on the raw number of GHeals I have to cast. If you’re Atonement spec, fuck them all during a tendon phase and HF/Smite the hell out of it. You’ll help with the splash healing and get a boost in mana and SP when it’s done. Not to mention, if you can help get it down in 1 lift, you’ll really help out in the long run. On 25, I can pop shadowfiend on the 1st and 3rd tendon, don’t remember what the timing was for 10s.
If you’re getting overrun with bloods, roll Deathwing. Just make sure that you have a strategy before hand for which tentacle spot you’ll be running to and have a healer order to cycle cooldowns between the rolls and novas.
Yeah, I saw the effect on my meters… that’s why I was trying to work out my actual efficiency in WoL. Didn’t manage to figure it out. I’m sure there’s a filter somewhere on EJ that’ll show me what I want to know, but for now it’s unclear.
You’re actually pretty much advising that I handle the fight exactly as I have been so far. :D If I have a free GCD then I switch inner fire out for inner will before the burst stage, though – always need to bubble a few folks during that.
As far as PI making or breaking the fight goes… our frontline DPS consists of two boomkin, an arcane mage with no legendary yet, an arms warrior and a goblin hunter who likes the warm fuzzy feeling of fire toasting his ball-hairs. Oh, and if we’re single-tanking, another boomkin who spends most of his time tanking with his face. Of these, only the mage has any significant degree of burst. Arms’ was nerfed for PvP reasons, boomkin never had any to begin with, and either the hunter’s doing it wrong or his spec has very steady, stable damage that doesn’t really fluctuate. I’m thinking if I can just add that tiny bit of burst then it may be able to get us over the edge.
To compensate for not having PI (and to extend my mana pool’s longevity a bit) I’m considering switching my trinkets out for Fiery Quintessence (moar int during burst, moar mana regen) and Core of Ripeness (because I was so addicted to this thing you have no idea – on cd every cd).