Help With Normal Spine

[Skullknight10]

My friends and I formed a new guild a week ago and just started raiding last night. We aren't fantastically geared but we still got all the way to Spine pretty easily but kinda hit the wall there. We were taking a sh*t ton of raid damage and our Healers we're OOM by the time the 2nd tendon was down. Im solo tanking as a DK and was wondering if there is anything I can do short of using Vamp Blood when it's off CD. Im tanking and picking everything up in the middle and when the time comes dragging the Amalgamation to the armored plate. Is there a better way to tank this than in the middle? Also how are people handling barrel rolls? I want to make sure we are doing that correctly as well. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Asher13]

Well lets start from the beginning. i don't know your raid comp, but I can tell you that unless your healers are insanely geared and skilled, you want to three heal this fight. You need a minimum of 2 bursty ranged dps for the fiery grip. One of them will handle it at all times, while the other serves as back up if the main guy gets gripped, and the switch to it needs to be quick. Just make sure they don't kill it. You kill three corruptions, and leave one alive, everyone locks in to one side, and I would advise popping a barrier, spirit link, or similar cd if need be because you do take damage while in the hole. My guild always rolls left.

As soon as the roll is over, everyone pops out, stands in the middle, and burns the corruption you left up. Since you are one tanking, the strat is a little different. You have to be on the ball at picking up as many bloods as you can by taunting or w/e you need to do, and make sure NONE of your dps hit them. You don't do any damage to the bloods until you have nine of them. It's best to tank him by the plate and drag all bloods to you, so you don't even have to move. Once you get 9 (assuming the amalg is around 1.5 mil left) you aoe all of them down fast, and soak them all up. Tendon pops up, and have your ranged kill the one corruption still up to avoid any fiery grips during the burn phase. Make sure you pick up and tank the amalg that spawns.

After that it's simply rinse and repeat. The way the healing debuff works is that anyone who has it, has to be healed for 200k before they can have any of their actual health healed. It's usually best to have one designeated healer for this purpose, while the others back them up. They need to usually spam their big single target heals to be effective. Yes you mentioned vamp blood. Assuming you have 4 pc, that will help your healers out quite a bit to get that debuff off of people.

Hope this helps. Tried to be as in depth as i could w/o knowing comp at all. Any questions feel free to ask.

[Evalonne]

What healer comp are you using?

We have a priest, resto shaman, and a holy paladin (myself). All 3 of us have a new enough version of DBM to have a list of people with the debuff, so that we can call out one person at a time. I usually put beacon on the tank with the amalgamation, which is enough to keep him up. The priest usually goes holy and puts down a lightwell for those with the debuff (important: your raid group has to know that it's for the people with the debuff and that they need to click the heck out of it). Between that and rotating our mana cooldowns (prayer of hope, mana tide, potion of concentration, divine plea, etc), we were able to keep our mana up without having issues at the very end.

For barrel rolls, we make sure everyone knows when and which way we're rolling. It is really easy for a healer to tunnel on this fight, so it is good to call it out.

For tanking, we 2-tank spine. One is in the middle picking up the blobs, and one is tanking the amalgamation at the plate. When it's time to blow up the amalgamation, that tank brings it over to the group to pick up bloods and then drags it back away from them (toward the plate) so that only the melee dps need to run like hell when it starts to explode. This is a good time for your healers to use their raid cool downs.

[gakpad]

For barrel rolls: At the start of the fight and after every tendon phase, kill every corruption but one. Stack up with the spawned amalgamations and cause a barrel roll to get rid of all of the amalgamations, then kill the remaining corruption to spawn the amalgamation that you will use to open the next tendon. Bloods will come out of the wound from the corruptions that are dead.

For the first tendon, you will need to watch how many bloods have spawned and dps the amalg to low health (~10-20%) and kill the bloods only once there are 9 of them spawned, picking them up with the Amalgamation immediately and bringing him to 0 health to minimize time spent under 9 stacks while he damages your raid.

For the second tendon, you will likely have to wait much less time for 9 bloods to spawn, and the third tendon you can probably just dps the amalg as fast as possible and have more than 9 bloods up by the time he is low health, so kill them as they spawn. If you're able to kill the first two tendons without heroism and you're finding yourself overrun by bloods by the third phase, you can pop hero some time during the amalg phase before the third plate lift to help deal with them. Having some dps kill bloods off to the side to help manage them and minimize raid damage temporarily can help too, since their respawn timer will probably be long enough that it won't be an issue towards the last phase of the fight.

If your healers are OOM by the second tendon was down, I'd imagine there's something else going on indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of the fight. Do you have any logs so we/I can see if there's any glaringly obvious mistakes you might be missing? My best guess would be that you're letting the amalg stack to 9 stacks slowly as bloods come out instead of waiting until there are 9 and then killing them and letting the amalg soak them all at once.

If you're having more than one amalg up, make sure your dps assigned to breaking grips are doing the minimum damage possible when doing so, in order to prevent any extra amalgamations from spawning that would increase the healing required on your raid.

[Yoshimiko]

My friends and I formed a new guild a week ago and just started raiding last night. We aren't fantastically geared but we still got all the way to Spine pretty easily but kinda hit the wall there. We were taking a sh*t ton of raid damage and our Healers we're OOM by the time the 2nd tendon was down. Im solo tanking as a DK and was wondering if there is anything I can do short of using Vamp Blood when it's off CD. Im tanking and picking everything up in the middle and when the time comes dragging the Amalgamation to the armored plate. Is there a better way to tank this than in the middle? Also how are people handling barrel rolls? I want to make sure we are doing that correctly as well. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

In ilvl 380 gear on a holy priest I found I could push ~20-25k hps with little trouble. The thing your healers need to remember - especially for your first few kills - You're GOING to have 12-15 minute fights. Especially if your dps is lacking. Do not toast all of your mana. Use everything on cd. Aim to be at 90-100% mana when it's time to pick up bloods. When the 9th blood is picked up - this is where you'll toast ~40-50% of your mana. Clear stacks, keep people healed, etc.

You didn't specify what kind of healers you had, but a few things I found helped a lot: At the very begining this is where you'll be using Tranquility, hymn, spamming radiance. You want to clear off those 6-9 debuffs you get at teh start without hurting you too long in the mana department. I suggest saving SLT for explosions personally, but if you have 2 shammys - you do what you can.

You said you were a DK(I am too in my main group) - this is how I personally handle it. We dps the amalg down to 2%, then I pick up 8, move him back by the plate - and death grip a ooze to my amalg. Get the 9th stack, and kill it asap. This is sort of prep for heroic - but it helps greatly if your healres are having mana issues.

This is how we handle the fight start to finish:
We land, kill all but the top left tentacle. Everyone stacks in the bottom left. During the roll we get a grasp - we break it with ranged. After the roll - everyone stacks in the middle. Our Holy Pally spams radiance. After the last corruption is free - everyone seperates out into their respective spots(ranged in the back, with the tank and heals, melee at the front on the amalg) We let a single hunter break grips. Any class can do this - but I highly suggest you dedicate 1 person to it. 20-25% of its hp is the goal - no more.

At this point we dps down the amalg to 15%, where all dots stop.at 5% all dps stops except the tank. I dps it down to 2% while we wait for bloods. I get 8 stacks, taunt/grip an ooze to it for the 9th stack, blow it up - then we use personal cds on the 1st tendon. If you cannot get the 1st tendon in 1 amalg - don't fret. Just keep repeat without the roll.

Repeat everything for the second(kill 2 tentacles, stack below the 3rd - break the grip), except stopping dps. I pick up 8 bloods at 10%, grip at ~5% and kill the blood. We lust on this tendon(5 minute/3 minute cds aren't up) - also lets us lust on the 1st platform of deathwing. Repeat again for 3rd tendon, this is where we used to pot(we don't waste them here anymore), and re-use all 5 minute cds.

You don't have to be as exact as we are, we're just prepping for heroic. You can probably live with 5-10% hp on a 9 stack amalg.

[Asher13]

If you could get me a log of your attempts, I would be glad to go into more depth and see if I could find any major problems.

[Zarantai]

I'd suggest making sure you use a cooldown every barrel roll (bubble or totem is usually best). Also, making sure to minimize the number of pulses once the amalgamation gets 9 stacks works wonders.

[Skullknight10]

To be honest we tried 2 Tanking the fight with me on the Amalgamation and our Feral Druid on the bloods. With 2 Tanks we cannot seem to make the DPS requirement to kill the tendon's. So thus I have to 1 Tank it. Unfortunately I have no logs. Last week's raid wasn't even suppose to happen cause we don't officially start till this week. Thank you for all of the info guys. I will be sure to pass it to the healers as well as the dps. If we are still having issues I will post logs here come Tuesday or Thursday for you to analyze.

[ananoon]

To be honest we tried 2 Tanking the fight with me on the Amalgamation and our Feral Druid on the bloods. With 2 Tanks we cannot seem to make the DPS requirement to kill the tendon's. So thus I have to 1 Tank it. Unfortunately I have no logs. Last week's raid wasn't even suppose to happen cause we don't officially start till this week. Thank you for all of the info guys. I will be sure to pass it to the healers as well as the dps. If we are still having issues I will post logs here come Tuesday or Thursday for you to analyze.

If you're having issues with the tendons on normal mode, then your dps is seriously undergeared or slacking. Even prenerfs, getting the tendon down wasn't a problem with three healers and two tanks. You should first look at getting your dps to be more efficient with dps on the tendon. A targeting macro + good use of CDs/trinkets will make a big difference.

[Skullknight10]

If you're having issues with the tendons on normal mode, then your dps is seriously undergeared or slacking.

Read the original post please. We have 2 or 3 people in the low 370's ilvl and a couple who have never even seen the fight before which includes LFR.

[Karazee]

Read the original post please. We have 2 or 3 people in the low 370's ilvl and a couple who have never even seen the fight before which includes LFR.

They should run raid finder a couple of times to get used to the basic mechanics (even though the things you do change slightly in normal from LFR mode). Also, get those people into heroic 5-mans. There's really no excuse for someone not having full 378 at the worst, considering you can buy them all for justice points now, plus some nice trinkets drop in the new 5-mans. It just takes a little time and effort. Raiding isn't just about raiding, it's also about preparation.