Lessons from Spine

[hung]

Creating a new thread in which to collate progression thoughts/ideas, specific to the Spine encounter.

General Thoughts:
- keeping 3 Amalgamations up at once isn't a good idea after all. We'll continue to kill 3 -> roll -> kill 4th corruption. I think this way we have a fresh corruption up, and less chance of accidentally killing it.
- 1 tank, 3 healers, 6 dps felt pretty good. Let's continue working on it with that composition for a while.
- Rolling deathwing (positioning issue, relevant to everyone): in the beginning is easy enough; but we need to be careful about not accidentally doing it later on. All healers and Range dps should park themselves center back, and only ever move when we call for a roll (once after every plate). Do not attempt to kite the bloods, or spread out. Melee should also try to stay in the center of the spine. Tendons can be reached from the center, and I don't think they have a reachable back for the purposes of backstab mechanics.

Specific challenges:
- I see 2 big ones (*both new mechanics not present in LFR): dealing with searing plasma (healer specific), and dealing with Fiery Grip (DPS specific).
- Interrupting Fiery grip: I think our DPS is actually reacting too well to them . Fiery Grip ticks once every 3 seconds. Logs show the debuff effecting people for an average of 6.5 secs (hitting twice). Corruptions have 442K HP, it takes 88k (20%) dmg to interrupt the cast. 11k DPS over 8 seconds would be enough. Next time we try it, lets assign 2 ranged DPS specifically to interrupt corruptions, and no more. In theory it should be possible to go through 4 fiery grips without killing the corruption. I think we were getting 2?
- Searing plasma: I don't have much insight to offer here, other than point out that the dmg component of the debuff is actually pretty light (10k every 12 seconds, according to the logs). In fact, all incoming dmg for that fight is pretty light (compared to heavy dmg fights like Zon'ozz and Ultraxion). With the exception of tanks, or fiery grip targets, it should be ok to remove the searing plasma debuff through mana efficient heals. The absorb is 200k however...
Spine is a 10+ min fight, so it must be healed with endurance in mind. And there really isn't that much avoidable dmg..? Maybe having dedicated healing assignments? Holy paladin focused solely on tank and Searing plasma healing? Thoughts?

[hung]

Good practice last night everyone. At our current gear level, it seems possible to 1tank/2heal this encounter; however, that leaves us NO room for error. Specifically we HAVE to down those tendons in 1 exposure. 7 DPS means we won't be able to survive through a 4th Amalgamation/blood wave. Our healers are bringing their best game to keep us alive as it is .

Burning Tendons: 2.9M HP (last night was actually ~2.75M, next week will be ~ 2.6M with the increased debuff).
Seal armor breach is a 23 second cast, though the tentacle is not visible for the first ~5 secs. (figures from icy-veins.com, wowhead comments disagree, showing more conservative figures)

Burst DPS requirements:
- 2.9M/6 DPS/18 secs (strictest conditions): 26,851 dps
- 2.9M/7 DPS/18 secs: 23K dps
- 2.6M/7 DPS/18 secs: 20.6k dps
- 2.6M/7 DPS/23 secs (assumes working targeting macro): 16.1k DPS

Please remember that this is BURST dps, not sustained. Dedicated DPS roles should aim for a minimum of 20K dps for a ~20 second window, or 400k dmg over 20 seconds (preferably more of course). Looking at the logs, most everyone is actually there, or comfortably over the instantaneous dps margin, but we're short on total dmg done. Which implies to me that target acquisition is the issue.

To see how much dmg you did to the tendons specifically, load a specific attempt, browse to Analyze Damage Done, and select burning tendon as a target. Most attempts show 2 separate entries for burning tendons. Do not look at the dps figure, as its normalized based on the total encounter time. Look at the total dmg done column.
Example link (from a phase where we were not able to kill it in time): http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/zdqj ... &target=40

Dot classes are obviously at a disadvantage. If you are a dedicated DPS role having a hard time reaching the marks, please consider having a secondary spec focused on burst DPS, even at the cost of sustained. Even dot classes like warlocks and shadow priests can still put out reasonable numbers here, with some specific tweaks.

[Korhelm]

Do the numbers look any better in the latter attempts? I'm asking because in the earlier encounters there was usually 1 warm body tied up with fiery grip (not sure if that's the correct term). I was incapacitated on at least two tendon attempts. I know we tried to time it differently...just wondering if that worked.

[hung]

The proof is in the pudding: even with messing around with timing the burn phases, we still barely killed the tendon in time, and did not kill it in time for the final attempt (tendon #2), for which we had pretty good alignment of the grip timing.

I would balance that statement with the fact that we were shuffling the 7th DPS role between the healer's off-specs/alts to try to find a successful combination. In other words, I feel the timing change was a significant and positive, but we still need moar burst Deeps!