Hello there, first would just like to give an advanced thank you to anyone that contributes anything that helps us kill this boss
We are a very close knit guild, that had the dps to kill heroic spine pre-nerf...but we've been grinding our face against heroic warmaster for almost 150 attempts....its getting brutally painful
Our Raid comp is as follows:
Tanks
Warrior and Paladin [We do have a Death Knight Tank that raids in our alt runs]
Melee DPS
Combat Rogue
Ret Paladin (Usually sitting in favor of range)
Unholy Death Knight (Always sitting on this fight, playing his Fire Mage instead)
Range DPS
Survival Hunter
Shadow Priest
Destruction Lock
Fire Mage
Boomkin (Usually on his druid instead of Holy Paladin for this fight only)
Healers
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman
Holy Paladin (Again usually playing a Balance Druid for this fight)
When we first attempted this we were using a strategy that soaked every onslaught as a raid, and soaked as many barrages as we possibly could. There was alot of movement involved and I opted for the strategy to solo soak most of the onslaughts using a Shadow Priest and Cauterize.
Our Onslaught soak order is as follows: Mage -> Raid -> Mage -> Priest -> Should we have a 5th, we usually soak it as a raid, we usually don't (when we make it this far)
The premise of this strategy as I understand it is that in order for solo soaking to work properly, you must be killing the Twilight Assault Drakes before they fly away.
We have split the ship into very tiny sectors that allows for maximum efficient soaking of barrages while the Drakes are active.
Our Warrior Tank and Combat Rogue (our rogue will often feint and sprint to help with another if he hasn't soaked recently)
Ret. Paladin (solo soak w/DP glyph)
Prot Paladin (solo soak w/DP Glyph)
Survival Hunter/Destro Lock (As a hunter with the 4.3.2 I can nearly always solo soak with deterrence active, only once did it do enough damage to kill me, overkill of 2k)
Shadow Priest/Fire Mage
Resto Druid/Shaman
At the start of the fight, the warlock and myself dot up Goriona with the 1-3 Globals you can get off, warlock is putting up Bane of Havoc on Goriona to minimize if not eliminate entirely any Twilight Flames that will be cast at the Start of Phase 2.
I proceed to run over the ship, Hunter's Mark, Pre-pot and dot up the Drake over head, so are all casters, when the Dreadblade and Elite Slayer land, tanks are keeping them close so that our rogue can do his worst on them. The first set of drakes are usually completely dead before the Onslaught hits the ship. Melee adds die shortly after and everyone is sitting and waiting for that next set of drakes and the Sapper just before that.
We've found that the ships health varies after the first wave of adds around 55% to as high as 72%. Our Goal is always 66/67%, 61% isn't great, but 55% is too low.
Second Onslaught hits after/as we dot up the drakes overhead and the Dreadblade and Elite Slayer land. Everyone Groups up quickly, Diving Gaurdian and spread out even quicker than we stacked. Should be noted here, that Charges and Cleaves are not an issue whatsoever for us.
Our Ranged and Ret Paladin burn the drakes down with as much as we got, they both die before they fly away. The sapper is killed by ranged and hopefully we see more than a concussive shot on it, a hammer of justice works wonders. There seems to be alot of time before the 3rd set of drakes reveal themselves, which isn't a bad thing since usually the Dreadblade and Slayer require a bit of work. Both of the melee adds are dead before the 3rd wave of drakes. And this is where things get really tricky for us.
After the second set of drakes we've found our ship health to be consistently around 28-42%, usually at 28/29% sometimes higher. So we haven't activated the 3rd Deckfire, but its sure on its way.
As the 3rd set of drakes are flying over a sapper is landing...this is probably the hardest drake set for us to kill before they fly away, but we usually pull it off. I've assigned our ranged dps to kill the sapper before they switch to the drakes since more often than not, the deck seems to be just blanketed in fire.
As soon as the sapper is dead we burn the drakes down quickly, if the drakes are allowed to fly away its pretty consistent that our ship health is between 12-21%. At this point we'll go into a soak everything mode, and we'll get that 5th onslaught which if we don't soak as a raid will put us too close to comfort to the ship blowing up. If we get a 5th onslaught, we also get an additional sapper, that range have to kill while we should be dps'ing Goriona.
Our Best attempt was incredible, we entered Phase 2 at 28/29% ship health - Don't ask me what happened but it was very nice to see nearly no fire on the deck.
Phase 2 -its very simple but we have trouble getting there, our range bring Goriona down, she almost lands immediately just from the Bane of Havoc, and I have a star above my head, and try to get range grouped up as quickly as we can, deck fire permitting. For the first shockwave we are probably spread out because of the deckfire, but I'm giving clear warning to the cast on shockwave.
I call out 3 -2 - 1 second warnings on both shockwave and disrupting shout. I preface the Shockwave one with, get ready to move.
Our Problems:
We have ALOT of trouble consistently getting to Phase 2, We've only seen Warmaster with everyone alive a handful of times out of 150 attempts. Our best attempt we had warmaster to 29% but the wipe was inevitable as a tank had died and there was no battle rez available.
US-Malganis - Chainfire If you need to look up the world of logs.
Outside of a deathgrip is there something else we could be doing for the sapper? Our ret paladin tries to HoJ the 2nd and 4th Sapper, leaving the 3rd HoJ for our Prot Pally.
We have Shadowfury, Mind Flay, Concussive shot, Earthbind Totem....but sometimes it seems like the sapper only reveals himself 5-10 yards away from the bridge of the ship giving us almost no time to kill him. We've tried getting the sapper to reveal himself earlier with aoe abilities but honestly that doesn't seem to work too often. As I type this I'm thinking one of the best life savers might literally be me respeccing my hunter to entrapment and place it just before the bridge door.
Deckfire - There are times when we reach phase 2, that it seems like the Gnomes haven't even begun to help put out the fire. Its very unnerving that if we're doing everything we can to get to phase 2, we finally get there, and there isn't any safe place to stand other then on top of a harpoon gun. Is there something that triggers the assistance of the crew member gnomes? I'm aware of the fire that has already been water gunned doesn't do damage, but thats not what I'm referring to.
I've considered bringing in another fire mage that would do hopefully significantly more dps...however I really don't think our issues have alot to do with DPS, 4/5 times we're killing every drake before it flies away.
Do we just have to step our raid awareness up, hope for good rng, hope that fire stays under control? Is there a better Onslaught soak order? maybe Raid-> Raid-> Mage -> Priest?
We were saving lust for the 3rd set of Drakes....but they seem to be dying just as fast without lust...that sapper really throws a curve ball for damage to be done to the Drakes.
Maybe make sure one of the 3rd drakes flies away, raid soak the onslaught, buy us a little time to kill off the dreadblade/eliter slayer before Goriona lands, or even warmaster for that matter and either let the ship cannons kill the 6th drake or kill it as soon as its in range again?
I'm really out of ideas here...and like the title said, in our core group I know that we had the DPS required to kill Heroic Spine Pre-Nerf...we even attempted to do it last week but were met with a message about you must complete every heroic first.
This fight is an absolute joke on normal for us, we have Deck Defender, Chromatic Champion, That Dizzy Achievement, Taste the Rainbow...all things we did because we had to kill a boss on normal.
Thanks for taking the time to read.
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