Heroic Spine NERFED

[Torty]

I think all you're doing is showing that you don't know what the required damage was. EVERY class was capable of bringing the required damage, some just have an easier time of it. Just because YOU could not do it without that mage or rogue does not mean it was not possible. Obviously it's easier with mages and rogues, and you probably killed it sooner for bringing THAT many rogues and mages, but I can say with some confidence that our hunters and dks were pulling the dps required if all things were equal quite a while ago. Our warlocks weren't, but I've seen pie chart and other guilds that had locks that do, beyond the few 'very strong' specs it really was a matter of players thinking outside the box to push that 20 second burst.

It would be silly not to use the advantages you have available to you, I agree with that, but I also would say a 401 hunter swapping to a janky rogue should PROBABLY not be outdamaging himself, for instance. After doing whatever stacking you could reasonably afford I do think most dps could hold their weight.

When we were starting on this hunters', locks', moonkins', enh shamans' and shadow priests' pets were dying randomly when you sent them on tendons. The only thing it shows is that I've done the fight when it was there and you didn't. All the pie charts you've seen are there after most top guilds killed it. There's no way even 410 ilvl hunter without a pet can outdamage 390 subtlety rogue in a 20 sec timeframe (include tott here).

I don't quite understand how it works with what you are saying. Our players don't pull the weight, yet we killed it faster than some other guilds. Huh? It's like saying that KIN Raiders, Stars, Paragon and Method dpsers couldn't pull their weight, that's why they had to stack mages and rogues. But guilds that killed the boss 3+ weeks later surely play better. Excuse me, but this is ridiculous. Don't forget that dps requirements get a lot easier with each reset. Killing Spine on third DS reset is fucking insane and it's nowhere near the difficulty at which our guild killed it (I think it was fifth or sixth? i'm too lazy to check) or any other guild behind us. People in this thread saying that dps wasn't a problem of this encounter are either big hypocrites or never really attempted this boss on third-fourth reset.

[Exiztence]

Anyone claiming that it's player fault when they cannot pull their weight is just dumb, this wasn't an encounter where you could "outskill" or "cheese" the damage, you have set ammount of time and set ammount of cooldowns you could use, if your class lacks cooldowns and has ramp up time you will not pull your weight because it is mathematically impossible, there is nothing to discuss, it's fools from times long fogotten that believe that IF you are a good player (they like to claim they are good players too) you will prevail, it doesn't work like that, not on spine before changes anyway.

[Ashrr]

It's a ridiculous nerf. Last night we were like "hey, lets just pop everything including BL and pots and see if we can get the first tendon down in one lift". We did.

With only 5 total lifts, we saved 2 whole minutes of the fight and also had an extra 6% of HP. The fight seemed trivial like this but in the end, someone failed and killed an Amalgamation before it got enough stacks.

After that one golden attempt, we weren't able to get the tendon down consistently enough in a single lift so we just went with the normal strat and killed it. However, any guild with great burst dps can do this and make the fight a lot easier.

[david0925]

In all fairness they probably should have buffed Amgalmation and Corruption HP to offset the nerf to Tendon, but I can't say I care much for the fight.

We were also able to burst down the Tendon in one go with 2 healers, but since neither of them has a 3-minute burst AoE healing (Tranq/Holy Hymn) they went oom on the third plate. If you have a Druid/Pally combo I can see 2 healing being easy, and the fight will be over a lot faster than those without that healing combo.

It's a fight where your Blood tank does all the work and other people just tunnel their own roles.

[Ashrr]

The thing is we did it with 3 healers, making the fight way easier. Basically we had a good bursty raid comp that came very close to killing it before the nerf (We probably would have had it if our tank's modem didn't die half way through the raid).

There are some guilds who were on the verge of killing the boss after finally ironing out the insane burst dps requirements. If they can successfully killing a tendon in one lift, the fight is faceroll.

[Deleted]

You mean by allowing people to see content and not get cockblocked by an overtuned fight that required a bit of class stacking, even at appropriate gear levels?

No he doesn't; everyone has seen that content on multiple difficulty settings on multiple characters. There is no new content to be seen by doing it once again in heroic mode; the only difference is higher numbers.

[theyanger]

When we were starting on this hunters', locks', moonkins', enh shamans' and shadow priests' pets were dying randomly when you sent them on tendons. The only thing it shows is that I've done the fight when it was there and you didn't. All the pie charts you've seen are there after most top guilds killed it. There's no way even 410 ilvl hunter without a pet can outdamage 390 subtlety rogue in a 20 sec timeframe (include tott here).

I don't quite understand how it works with what you are saying. Our players don't pull the weight, yet we killed it faster than some other guilds. Huh? It's like saying that KIN Raiders, Stars, Paragon and Method dpsers couldn't pull their weight, that's why they had to stack mages and rogues. But guilds that killed the boss 3+ weeks later surely play better. Excuse me, but this is ridiculous. Don't forget that dps requirements get a lot easier with each reset. Killing Spine on third DS reset is fucking insane and it's nowhere near the difficulty at which our guild killed it (I think it was fifth or sixth? i'm too lazy to check) or any other guild behind us. People in this thread saying that dps wasn't a problem of this encounter are either big hypocrites or never really attempted this boss on third-fourth reset.

The tendons and pets were certainly broken early on, but they were fixed before you killed it (I know, I was working on it then and our hunters were doing fine). It's not hypocritical at all to say that everyone CAN pull the required dps, despite top guilds stacking their raid...NO CRAP. I've been in top guilds, of course they're stacking their raid. The first couple weeks a new raid is out you're essentially working with 0 gear and trying to brute force your way to the number checkpoints with skilled play and class stacking. This isn't news. But this is now over a full month later, the gear check had lessened by a ton and and the bugs with pets had been fixed. I never once said Kin or Stars should have used WORSE classes for their kills, but people including you are in here acting like this fight was impossible to kill without 12 staves on mage alts or 5 rogues or some ridiculous nonsense. That's just blatantly false as of the time it was nerfed.

The difference in required stacking between guilds going in with essentially ilevel 390-395 gear, and guilds now where the raids are approaching 400-405 on average is pretty big.

In regards to your comment on a rogue in 390 vs a 410 hunter, the last time you mentioned this rogue he was in 359s, there's a big difference between a heroic firelands geared alt and a Bot/Firelands mixxed one. Our hunters are nowhere near 410 and they do plenty more than the required single person contribution on a tendon, that's why we kept all 3 in when we got our first kill. They're not doing rogue/mage like damage, but if you theoretically had 17 of them in a kill they would put out the dps, so what's the issue?

[Deleted]

We just killed Blackhorn (10hc) and I for one am glad of this nerf.
Can't imagine how we could of have killed it without.
Not that we are killing it WITH it, though.

[Emane]

People complaining about it, sorry, but you had your chance. Blizzard even gave a 3 week warning. Could they have done the 15% nerf earlier? Yes, but they waited until the whole nerf of the place came, giving people more time to work on the original encounter.

So stop moaning, you had your chance, if you failed, the kill wasn't yours to begin with.

[Irielle]

Ugh Godddddd, 1% wipe last night. I HATE THIS FIGHT!

[HhitSappens]

I didn't say 6 classes are op. I said that 6 classes (6 specs, to be more exact) are capable of doing the required damage. Although there are 2 specs that require:
a) less gear
b) less skill
to do the same or even more damage on the tendon. We had a legendary moonkin going on his ghetto mage, we had 401 or so ilvl hunter go on his rogue which had 359 shoulders and some random 378 items, we had our holy paladin play on his shaman and our holy/disc priest play on her shaman. All these things make encounter EASIER. If you have an option to make encounter easier, you do so. We had 5 arcane mages, 4 sub rogues, 2 fury warriors, 1 shadow priest and 3 resto shamans. If it's not class stacking, I don't know what to say to you. You might as well stick to your position, but facts are facts, all top20 world guilds class stacked because of lacking gear to do it with a normal setup.

One might say that other encounters favour certain specs as well. Yes, they do. However neither of the encounters in Cataclysm required us to bring alts over vastly better geared mains (e.g. ilvl390 arcane mage instead of ilvl400 moonkin with legendary). Ragnaros required stacking to some extent, but when we lacked one moonkin and dk online, we just added someone else and tried to work with what we've got. Sure it was harder, we had more transition wipes and took more damage from adds in p2, but we still had a chance. When we lacked 1 mage and 1 rogue on Spine, we called it a night, because there was no way we could bring any other class when we were already struggling with killing each tendon.

If you say demon locks (for eg) are op, what did you expect? People going destro for that fight?

It is obviously that all those classes that can chose their specs will play the best spec for each fight, it doesn't make them OP, the fight was balanced having that in mind.
We got a world 30th-ish kill 25men on that boss and I can tell you as a fact that if we did stick to 2-2-2 strat since the very first pull, we could've killed it even earlier and we didn't class stack.

Ofc, if you can stack to make the fight easier, there is no reason in earth to NOT do so, but saying that "spine was only killable with 12 mages/rogues LOLOL" is a invalid argument.

The problem with spine is that all the guys saw the koreans/world first guilds doing 2-2-2 only "waiting" for 1:30 CDs with THAT amount of mages/rogues and now everyone think the encounter "is about that", none saw <Stars> doing 2-3-3 strat (with not barrel rolls, only you can imagine how creative they went there) with almost non-existencial class stacking, or <FtH>/<Pie Chart> doing 2-2-2 but WAITING for 2 minutes CDs so more classes were viable.