Heroic Spine

[Zagam 1,982]

Hi

my group still can't get past spine heroic yet, even tho we r well geared and everyone is above 400ilvl but we seem to have problems.

the way we do it is

we stand on each side of the spine at the start ,the dps and healers on a side and tanks on other side , we give each tank a 40% damage reduction , then perform our first roll , after that as normal

we kill amal pretty fast, we kill burning tend very fast too (normally on the first lift its health reach around 35%)

our main problem is Bloods , killing them will get us killed , and keeping them alive will get our blood tank get killed.

not sure how to manage them ?

we were able to reach the 3rd plate many times , but never had a first lift before our blood tank is dead.

our setup is

tanks are both DK and equally geared

healers are Shaman, Druid and a paladin , all equally geared (shaman on dispelling duty)

dps are Arcane Mage , two SPriest, a Survival hunter and a rogue.

as we progress in fight I try to give the damage reduction to our Resto Druid and Rogue. after that our Mage. these three seem to take more damage than everyone else.

so, how do we manage bloods ? when we reach 3rd plate bloods are almost 30 to 40 of them on tank , this is when we roll a 3rd time , killing them single target will be too slow and healers wont be able to do it.

we wiped many times .

also one last thing , is there anyway to show how much each healer healed throw Searing Plasma ? because it feels like this debuff is really up like huge amount of time.

Ok, so I'm going to list your comp and go through each person's responsibilities. If performed, you should one shot this boss.

Amal tank - DK

Blood tank - DK

Healer - Paladin

Healer - Druid

Healer - Shaman (dispels)

DPS - Arcane Mage

DPS - Spriest

DPS - Spriest

DPS - Hunter

DPS - Rogue

You mentioned that tendon damage isn't a problem...and it better not be. Spriests, Rogues, and Arcane Mages are the 3 best classes for burst and Survival Hunters are right there with them. If tendon damage becomes a problem, your dps'ers just need to dps better. Have them practice on a target dummy for 18.5 seconds and see if they can hit 1,000,000 damage. If not, they need to fine tune their rotation.

I feel like I know exactly why you're dying. Here are those reasons:

1) Don't use a DK tank for adds. This is a terrible design flaw for non shield tanks because of the sheer number of adds. Your DK can't mitigate enough of the damage and his Blood Shield will not be up enough because he will have to use Blood Boil to hold adds off of your healers. If one of your DKs can become a Paladin or Warrior, do that. DK tanks for the amalgamations is a great strategy.

2) Don't use your Shaman for dispels. Your shaman is your most overpowered healer for Spine due to mastery incorporating the absorption effect in terms of increased healing. For example, if one of your raiders is at 100% life with a full absorption effect on him, it will count him as being at 50% health and increasing that person's healing received. Put your Druid on dispel duty because Druids are the weakest healers. For them to be effective, they will be spamming Healing Touch which is much better handled by Paladins, Priests, or Shamans.

3) Don't worry so much about the damage reduction buff going to certain people. We have cleared it with our blood tank having 1 and our Amal tank having 0. They're not crucial anymore, so don't show prejudice to where the buff lands.

4) Plan your healing cooldowns pre-fight. I made my Paladin do dispels because I trust her the most, so during the rolls, my Shaman popped his Spirit Link Totem. When the roll was over, my Druid performed Tranquility and used Tree form during an Amal's pulsing damage right before he blows up. The Paladin was left to use cooldowns at her discretion, but there was ALWAYS a Tranquility post-roll and ALWAYS a SL totem during the roll. This will reduce the damage you take and increase the healing received removing many of the debuffs left on your raiders.

5) This is the most important. Your tanks must be absolutely stellar in managing the amount of bloods that get absorbed during the transition into a roll. For example, here are the events that will happen:

a) Your designated grip breaker will kill the one Corruption remaining as the Amal is performing his Nuclear Blast spell. When the Amal is performing his NB attack, the Amal tank should break away from that Amal and pick up the newly spawning one. All DPS should then focus on the Tendon without worries of a Fiery Grip interrupting them.

B) Your DPS will kill the tendon removing the plate exposing two more Corruptions. At this point, there should be 3 Corruptions up. Your ranged DPS should prioritize one of the ones that just appeared (I make my group kill the top right one because we stack left) while your melee kill the one that popped up prior to the burn. When both are dead, leaving the top left Corruption, all of your raid except your two tanks should stack on the left side. Your Shaman should drop his SL totem and all personal CDs should be used to reduce incoming damage. The Bloods should be AoE'd down without hesitation. Due to the SL Totem and other personal CDs, no one should be taking damage that the Tranquility cannot take care of post-roll.

c) As Deathwing is getting ready to roll, or at about 3 seconds pre-roll, your tanks should join your group pulling the newly spawned Amals through the blood residue that was made by AoEing the bloods. Each Amal will hit 9 stacks and begin to pulse, but if timed correctly, neither will pulse before flying off the back of Deathwing. This will essentially reset the soft enrage of this fight. If you can perform this twice, you will down Spine with no problem whatsoever.

During the last plate, we noticed our Paladin tank start to get overwhelmed still just due to the sheer number of Bloods that come at this point. Rather than focus heals on him, I made a quick transition into slowly AoE'ing bloods down. Not all at once, but 2 or 3 every 5 seconds. This reduced the tank damage, allowed the healers to focus on the raid, and made it so when the last Tendon was killed, there was only about 10 bloods on Deathwing's back, easily allowing our Paladin tank to stay alive.

The hardest part of this fight is securing everyone's health during and just after that 2nd roll going into the 3rd plate. If everyone is good, alive, and well at this point, keep your raid's composure by forcing them to focus and not get giddy about their first Spine kill. Keep them focused, tell them to do their job, and remind them to use Bloodlust during the last burn phase on the Tendon. An early congrats on your kill!

[Amajed 3]

wow thanks , loads of infos there I'll make sure we do everything you've said ,we are stuck with 2 DKs as our tanks, we can't change that.

about AOE the adds before we performe roll , we tried that before , but it get us killed due to the burst damage that we take from killing the adds, we wipe at that point. 22k per add is too much to handle at that point even with SL totem we hardly survive it without some dieing.

will try it out again and see how it goes.

thank you so much ;)

[Stasis 36]

If one of your Spriests has a Disc offspec try 4 healing a few pulls. Providing you can kill the Tendon in 2 lifts, and have sufficient DPS to kill the Amalg in 2 minutes(ish), you won't miss the 5th DPS. Disc can smite non-stop on the Almalg and Tendon, and only really needs to actively heal (prayer of healing spam) on the Blood aoe. They can wear their Shadow gear, valor trinket, etc. Spec'ing 2/2 Veiled Shadows gives a Shadowfiend every Tendon burn for extra DPS and takes care of mana.

We wiped 130+ times for the same reasons you are. Once we switched to 4 healers it became significantly easier. I know it sounds awfully unorthodox, but the 30% nerf gives crazy opportunities like this.

Disc Priest brings the raid bubble and lots of preemptive passive shielding to take the heat out of aoeing Bloods before the rolls. We were able to aoe them without issue when it was an instant wipe with 3 healers. We basically killed all the Bloods before the rolls. Give the healers a few moments to get the Raid stabilized, and then just pop all available healing cooldowns and go nuts. Again, it's not really an issue with 4 healers under a raid bubble.

Edited August 1, 2012 by Stasis

[Astropolix 10]

I don't know if it's helpful, but take a look at our firstkill

(still named Blutschwingen back then...)

We manage to reduce the blood quite a lot before each roll. We had our Ele-Shaman on 'bomb duty' i.e. use chain lightning. This turned out to be the right pace to kill the bloods at that time.

[Stoove 347]

1) Don't use a DK tank for adds. This is a terrible design flaw for non shield tanks because of the sheer number of adds. Your DK can't mitigate enough of the damage and his Blood Shield will not be up enough because he will have to use Blood Boil to hold adds off of your healers. If one of your DKs can become a Paladin or Warrior, do that. DK tanks for the amalgamations is a great strategy.

OK Question;

We have one DK and one Bear tank. We have no choice on other toons for tanks. Which tank is better to assign to the bloods? :)

[Zagam 1,982]

OK Question;

We have one DK and one Bear tank. We have no choice on other toons for tanks. Which tank is better to assign to the bloods?

The bear, by far. Your bear gets to Swipe on a very short CD, gets to use Thrash, and has his mastery proc off of every single ability he does. Your DK can only proc his mastery from his Death Strike which he won't be using much because he will have to Blood Boil to keep the bloods off of your healers. Put your DK on the Amals and your bear on the bloods.

[Stoove 347]

The bear, by far. Your bear gets to Swipe on a very short CD, gets to use Thrash, and has his mastery proc off of every single ability he does. Your DK can only proc his mastery from his Death Strike which he won't be using much because he will have to Blood Boil to keep the bloods off of your healers. Put your DK on the Amals and your bear on the bloods.

Thanks!

We originally ran with our DK as the blood tank, but at the end of last night decided to try it the other way and see how that works. Nice to know there's a theoretical backup for that! :)

Cheers!

[Amajed 3]

We've finally cleared Spine HC , thanks for the tips/guide . was really helpful :)

about the Shaman's Mastery (Deep Healing) it doesn't work with Searing Plasma debuff as an extended HP , so Mastery will be useless for that unless the actual HP is low ofc ;)

thanks again and have a nice Pandaria :P

[Stoove 347]

I just wanted to thank everyone here for the helpful tips on Spine. Our guild got our first Spine Heroic kill last week (on the 3rd) and our first Madness Heroic kill last night. We would never have done it if it wasn't for the awesome help of threads like this. On behalf of The Silver Raven, Ghostlands EU:

Thankyou!

[Dex 0]

I really cant seem to understand why people have problems with this fight after the nerf. We killed it on our first attempt with 2 healers.

[Zagam 1,982]

I really cant seem to understand why people have problems with this fight after the nerf. We killed it on our first attempt with 2 healers.

Not every player or guild or group of players plays at the same level you do. Whether they just got back in the game, dealt with high turnover, or just dealt with subpar play, some groups just now getting to Spine are asking for advice. They're receiving advice here and turning it around into kills. I'd think that the age-old saying "if you don't have anything nice or positive to say, don't say anything at all" applies here. Your elitist attitude isn't appreciated here, as I am sure there are some players on this board who killed Heroic Spine before you.

[Zagam 1,982]

I just wanted to thank everyone here for the helpful tips on Spine. Our guild got our first Spine Heroic kill last week (on the 3rd) and our first Madness Heroic kill last night. We would never have done it if it wasn't for the awesome help of threads like this. On behalf of The Silver Raven, Ghostlands EU:

Thankyou!

Congrats, Stoove. Onward to the disappointing finale of Cataclysm! Once your guild has downed Spine, Madness will seem like a short order. Just focus your group on not making mistakes on the first 3 platforms since the last platform is where the fight ultimately starts. Have your AoE and slows prepared for phase 2. If you manage that, don't be surprised at a 1 shot.

[Stoove 347]

Congrats, Stoove. Onward to the disappointing finale of Cataclysm! Once your guild has downed Spine, Madness will seem like a short order. Just focus your group on not making mistakes on the first 3 platforms since the last platform is where the fight ultimately starts. Have your AoE and slows prepared for phase 2. If you manage that, don't be surprised at a 1 shot.

Thanks for all the support! (actually as I said, we got the Madness kill last night; Spine was last week =3). Also, I think that the post you made in response to Mr. Solidwall was appropriate. Thanks for standing up for 'us'. TBH, if I'd seen his post first I'd have torn him to shreds with a wall of text.

For us, it's been a combination of high turnover, summer holidays, fatigue, slow raiding schedule (we do 2npw) and a fairly casual attitude to minmaxing. We're not bad players, but we're not in it for the race - we just like killing shit.

I think that if the nerf had never applied, we could still have got the kill given enough time. It's not like we're idiots or anything. We had a look, and the kill puts us in something like the top 200 players on the server (by a rough measure).

[Zagam 1,982]

All I can say is that it's never best to fight fire with gasoline. This GAME is supposed to be played for fun. Fun is an objective term that can be applied in so many different ways in WoW that it would take me all day to list them. All that matters is that you and your boys and girls got your satisfaction from this content. Best of luck in Mists!

[Stoove 347]

All I can say is that it's never best to fight fire with gasoline. This GAME is supposed to be played for fun. Fun is an objective term that can be applied in so many different ways in WoW that it would take me all day to list them. All that matters is that you and your boys and girls got your satisfaction from this content. Best of luck in Mists!

No, but oil well fires have to be fought with controlled explosions :P

As for Mr. Solidwall?

I pity the person who derives fun from belittling others.

[Dex 0]

No, but oil well fires have to be fought with controlled explosions

As for Mr. Solidwall?

I pity the person who derives fun from belittling others.

I'm sorry, I think you misunderstood me. What I meant was that I found the fight to be very easy while I'm not a very good player so I thought it was awkward that others still were struggling with it. I never intended to sound like an elitist prick or to look down upon those who didnt kill it yet.

[Stoove 347]

I'm sorry, I think you misunderstood me. What I meant was that I found the fight to be very easy while I'm not a very good player so I thought it was awkward that others still were struggling with it. I never intended to sound like an elitist prick or to look down upon those who didnt kill it yet.

Ah, in which case I'm sorry my reaction was a little overboard. We can all call this quits now. :)

Incidentally, I've never found Spine or Madness hard on an individual level; from my PoV, Heroic Hagara and Heroic Blackhorn are harder on an individual level because of the extra levels of work involved. However, on a **raid wide** level, we found Spine hardest. The difference is important.