6/8HM - Skip H Spine? 10m

[Dracodraco]

Did you kill both of them in 10-man heroic? If you did and that's your own first-hand opinion, you must have some pretty nice setup of impale cooldowns or people to take them. Spine WAS easier in 10-man before the nerfs, but it became 'even more' easier after the tendon HP nerf which isn't an issue in 10-man regardless of the setup right now. Any raid consisting of any 5 DPS in 6/8hm gear won't have any problems with the tendons. The only hard part of the fight starts at the point of the last barrel roll. The progression is LINEAR. That's what it takes for this fight to be way easier than MDW in 10-man. 10-man heroic impales are a pain in the ass. Getting to phase 2 isn't so trivial even after you've covered all the stuff with the cooldowns and/or people taking the impales. 4th plaform often kicks in with some unexpected crap like a person getting one-shot with the parasite+tentacle slap; a rogue getting that low chance at beng hit through his evasion; some small error resulting in a raid wipe. 2nd phase is quite easy IF you can get there consistently and your raid is emotionally stable. The hard part is not getting frustrated when you wipe 10 times in a row even before the 4th platform right after you had a 3% wipe.

Our alt run spent alot more time (and wipes) on spine than we did on madness. Madness is deffo easier. Setup being 1x dk tank, resto shaman/druid/disc priest for madness, and shadow priest for soaking impales. So 1 external cooldown. Impale is not the issue on that fight, at all <__<.

Spine25 > Spine10 >> MDW10 >>>> MDW25. Both fights are really uggly and NOT fun (ragnaros was hard but had really good design and also fun imho, spine is the worst boss designed in wow's history)

Spine 25>Spine10>MDW25>MDW10. It's a joke in 10 man, being able to ignore parasites on first platform and have 1 dps switch to them on second. Let them blow up with 25% hp, feel like a fly is scratching its butt. Don't need external cooldowns either, just go with 1 tank and a shadow priest takes care of the rest. A joke, really.

[nanessa]

Just gear up pala a bit and he should be fine at tanking , really valor points/crafted gear some lfr and he should be more then fine. You have 3 legendaries you ll have no problems in getting tendon in 2 phases, hell with mage and rogue you might get it in one ( well probably not but with more nerfs I think this will be possible as well ). Mage should go arcane, lock demo and rogue sub and tendon wont be an issue.Your raid comp is really fine. Good luck with it , its such a horrible fight, probably the most boring fight in WOW history.

[LaplaceNoMa]

Our alt run spent alot more time (and wipes) on spine than we did on madness. Madness is deffo easier. Setup being 1x dk tank, resto shaman/druid/disc priest for madness, and shadow priest for soaking impales. So 1 external cooldown. Impale is not the issue on that fight, at all <__<.




Spine 25>Spine10>MDW25>MDW10. It's a joke in 10 man, being able to ignore parasites on first platform and have 1 dps switch to them on second. Let them blow up with 25% hp, feel like a fly is scratching its butt. Don't need external cooldowns either, just go with 1 tank and a shadow priest takes care of the rest. A joke, really.

Oh, come on. It's like saying that Yor'Sahj was a joke fight on the 2nd week of DS in your situation.

There's something you seem to be taking for granted.

DK tank

Don't you realize how insanely overpowered they are? Most of T13 heroic fights become as easy as LFR when comparing doing it with or without DK tank.

DK tanks have absolutely no problem with impales after the 2nd platform (- alextraza's buff) even if they have IF on cooldown and there are no paladins or healing priests in the raid to give sacrifice/wings/PS. They have DRW+Army, if used correctly it's almost as another shieldwall-level cooldown. They have awesome bloodshields, you simply don't have to pay attention to him and be able to top people off quickly after tentacle slaps and/or parasite. They have no problem agrroing the blood very fast so it doesn't hit the healers. They can easily drop the stacks on phase 2. They bring a lot of their own spellweaving for phase 2 and can do a shitload of damage to blisterings on their own if they pool rp/runes. They are just... overpowered. Really.

---------- Post added 2012-03-15 at 11:15 AM ----------

Subject to oppinion I guess. Imo it's Spine25 > MDW10 >> Spine10 >>>> MDW25

Personally, I'd agree with this fine sir. Except for switching MDW10 and Spine10.


P.S.
I'd like to remind people doing 25-mans that your take on the 'difficulty' of a fight in 10man is very distorted. In 25-man, the term 'setup' is almost non-existant. It's very hard to not have a couple of strong personal immunity-saves (or something on the level of sacrifice), not having some raid buff or debuff and so on. But for some strange reason people tend to take the best possible 10-man setup for that one fight, which might be the worst possible setup for another one. The hard part about 10-man raiding is that it's impossible to have a rotation of substitutes. That's the way the loot system in 10-man works. So you have some setup, you have some offspecs, now go ahead and deal with it. So, when talking about MDW/Spine 10 difficulty, we shouldn't really take lifehacks like BDK into consideration. Actually, even having a Spriest or rogue isn't that common in 10-man. I can easily imagine a raid with, let's say, Ele shammie, boomkin, warlock, warrior, another warrior (tank's offspec) and, let's say, a dps DK. Who's going to get the impale here? No one can. So, only 2 tanks with this raid setup.

[Trifande]

You can go Madness or Spine, whichever YOU/YOUR-RAID-GROUP personally prefer. If you kill Spine on NORMAL, then you just need to do a 'soft' reset of the instance (everyone outside for 30+mins) to be able to pull Madness on Heroic.

For Spine, I would 100% recommend you get your Shaman to go RESTO as that will make a HUGE difference. SLT on barrel roll phases is GODLY (for Healing Debuff removal). With two Paladins + 1 priest (grip) your Blood-Ooze tank will/should have NO problems kiting the oozes from the end of phase 2 onwards.
Additionally, ret paladins bring some INSANE burst on the tendons which will give your other DPS a bit more breathing room.

You can go start Madness heroic until you get the above setup sorted, if you can't manage to sort it out this reset.

Cheers.

[Dracodraco]

Oh, come on. It's like saying that Yor'Sahj was a joke fight on the 2nd week of DS in your situation.

There's something you seem to be taking for granted.



Don't you realize how insanely overpowered they are? Most of T13 heroic fights become as easy as LFR when comparing doing it with or without DK tank.

DK tanks have absolutely no problem with impales after the 2nd platform (- alextraza's buff) even if they have IF on cooldown and there are no paladins or healing priests in the raid to give sacrifice/wings/PS. They have DRW+Army, if used correctly it's almost as another shieldwall-level cooldown. They have awesome bloodshields, you simply don't have to pay attention to him and be able to top people off quickly after tentacle slaps and/or parasite. They have no problem agrroing the blood very fast so it doesn't hit the healers. They can easily drop the stacks on phase 2. They bring a lot of their own spellweaving for phase 2 and can do a shitload of damage to blisterings on their own if they pool rp/runes. They are just... overpowered. Really.

---------- Post added 2012-03-15 at 11:15 AM ----------



Personally, I'd agree with this fine sir. Except for switching MDW10 and Spine10.


P.S.
I'd like to remind people doing 25-mans that your take on the 'difficulty' of a fight in 10man is very distorted. In 25-man, the term 'setup' is almost non-existant. It's very hard to not have a couple of strong personal immunity-saves (or something on the level of sacrifice), not having some raid buff or debuff and so on. But for some strange reason people tend to take the best possible 10-man setup for that one fight, which might be the worst possible setup for another one. The hard part about 10-man raiding is that it's impossible to have a rotation of substitutes. That's the way the loot system in 10-man works. So you have some setup, you have some offspecs, now go ahead and deal with it. So, when talking about MDW/Spine 10 difficulty, we shouldn't really take lifehacks like BDK into consideration. Actually, even having a Spriest or rogue isn't that common in 10-man. I can easily imagine a raid with, let's say, Ele shammie, boomkin, warlock, warrior, another warrior (tank's offspec) and, let's say, a dps DK. Who's going to get the impale here? No one can. So, only 2 tanks with this raid setup.

I don't really get the yorsahj comment. He was hard prenerf in 25 man, really freaking brutal. But we took him down in 5 attempts after the nerf x_x.
Anyway,
For the first part of your post:
Offspecs and alts. We have no less than four geared DK tanks from running 10 man normal mode all capable of tanking madness heroic. We don't have any in our main raid. If 10 man raiders aren't dedicated enough to gear alts for raiding, then obviously content is gonna be harder. I have four characters at a level where they can jump in at any DS-hc fight, and another I'm comfortable could handle half of them, just from spending like... 1 and a half hour per char doing DS10 norm a week. It's less than sitting in LFR queue + doing LFR as a DPS/tank <.<.

As for your second part, the "P.S"-
I'd like to remind you that if you have a 10 man with a butchered setup, you can use your alts to improve it (we had alts for every single first kill in DS except ultraxion). Refer to above statement.
Second off, I don't think you realise that every single one of the singletarget CD's has to be used in 25 man, and you can still have too few. As the impale hits for about 25% more in 25 man, we need a sac on EVERY impale, no matter what other CD is up, which means you need atleast 2 paladins in the setup. The third platform usually needs us to use a pain supp too, which removes our one healing priest from the equation (can't use on second platform as it might still be on CD, can't use on fourth as it might still be on CD).
Our first kills, we relied on having sacs for the parasites too as the healing on those targets are brutal, especially if crushed at the same time. Which ment 4 paladins.

And while it might be impossible to have a rotation of substitutes, it is your own damn fault if you build a bad raid team thats missing half it's buffs and debuffs. I mean, we just took the 10 people who were interested in running an alt run, juggled around with what alts we had aviable from each player, what specs they could play, and done - we're only missing 30% bleed (with no bleed users in the raid) and 5% spell crit debuff. It's not hard.


So, TL;DR -
If your setup sucks, it's your own fault. Use alts or get a proper raid team together instead of using it as an excuse.

[Deleted]

Deleted my comment, don't want an infraction.

[Deleted]

Dracodraco

Oh dayummmmmmmm

[Strafferen]

I'd vote for your Ele-shaman to go Resto on that fight, regardless of him having the Legendary. I don't know if a pally/pally/priest would be a good setup for healing there; but a shaman/pally/priest would indeed.
- Ask him to view the threads in this forum regarding "hc spine reforging"'s and the likes; lots of comments from players with a setup like yours.

[Politta]

We did spine heroic with 2 tanks (druid, dk) and 2 heals (paly, druid).

[Pokty]

Our alt run spent alot more time (and wipes) on spine than we did on madness. Madness is deffo easier. Setup being 1x dk tank, resto shaman/druid/disc priest for madness, and shadow priest for soaking impales. So 1 external cooldown. Impale is not the issue on that fight, at all <__<.

Yeah problem with madness 10 is that the dps check is trivialized by being able to use 1 tank. Using 2 tanks it is (was) a different story. Blizzard really needs to make sure that kind of cheese isn't available as it so drastically changes fights.

[Deleted]

Did you kill both of them in 10-man heroic? If you did and that's your own first-hand opinion, you must have some pretty nice setup of impale cooldowns or people to take them. Spine WAS easier in 10-man before the nerfs, but it became 'even more' easier after the tendon HP nerf which isn't an issue in 10-man regardless of the setup right now.

Our first night we got to p2 twice (having our 2nd night today) and frankly i'd be very surpised if we dont kill him today.
Ye, we have spriest, rogue, hunter and double prot warrior lol, impales are a joke... :P
The only issue on 4th has been cataclysm timer :/

Compare that to a month on spine, the frustration levels cant be compared imo, not even the 10min "wipes"

[Deleted]

Spine25 > Spine10 >> MDW10 >>>> MDW25. Both fights are really uggly and NOT fun (ragnaros was hard but had really good design and also fun imho, spine is the worst boss designed in wow's history)

MDW10 > Spine25 > Spine10 > MDW25

On topic make your elemental go resto for spine. The gear is almost the same and he doesn't have to be the world greatest, just use STL doing rolls and you'll be fine.

[Puerto]

This shouldn't be to difficult for you... even without the 10% buff.

Fire Mage (legendary) > have him go arcane.
Ele Shammy (legendary) > stay ele, help aoe bloods
Aff Warlock (legendary) > either go destro to help aoe stun bloods when tank is kiting or demo for burst and aoe'ing the bloods
Ret pally (no OS) > stay ret, good burst
Combat rogue (legendary) > have him go sub, really good burst.
Surv Hunter > stay sv, decent burst plus breaking corruption with arcane shot
Disc priest > stay disc for bubble
Holy pally (ret OS) > stay holy
Resto druid/feral OT (according to fight) > tank bloods
DK Tank (no OS) > tank amalg

to reduce the amount of bloods, during each roll phase, have the tanks soak up as many bloods off the ground with the new amalgs before they hit 9.

This should make it easier at the end.

[Deleted]

I would say:

Spine25 > MDW10 >> Spine10 >>>> MDW25

However ive never done 25man, so i cant comment, just from what ive heard and seen, spine25 seems a lot harder than 10man, but MDW seems way easier on 25 than 10man

Spine10 now i think is very easy, we've killed it 4x now and 1shot this week, 2 shot previous week, around 4 the previous week(2nd kill). Took us around 90 wipes to down it, most of which were because we tried a lot of different setups and stuff (eg shaman priest druid healers, orginally we had priest dispelin, then shaman, then went 2 druids 1 shaman). Probably shoulda just stuck with the orginal setup!


MDW is pretty tuff tho, especially when 10% of our wipes are because some1 falls on platform 3>4 jump, tahts very frustrating after a 10minute encounter...

If you have a blood DK + good shadow priest, MDW is certainly a lot easier... however we're 2 tankin it with a pala/war (who get raped on terrors) and a 4 melee 1 ranged grp, and its proving to be quite a challenge, however we're at 4% so almost there

[Khragar]

With your dps comp (arcane mage, sub rogue, ret pally, ele shaman) I doubt spine will be a problem.

[Yumisara]

Not to be the bringer of bad news (already stated) but you have to kill Heroic Spine to touch Heroic Madness.

I'd HIGHLY suggest your Ele Shaman go Resto, like no joke. They are pretty awesome for Heroic Spine, you won't regret it.

Just be ready to slam your head on the desk for some weeks, cause spine is... well... One fight you really don't want to be in.

[Divinedoom]

huh, you are just standing too close if the tentacle melees you. you are supposed to be out of melee range. with no one else being in melee range as well. they can return as soon as the impale debuff is cast on you, don't need to wait for it to finish the 5s cast.

and madness hc is certainly easier then spine hc (both on 10, no idea about 25 really). if you don't get to p2, you are executing something wrong (as totemanic showed above :P). then you need a few p2 attempts to sort out the timing with spawns there and that's it.
quite annoying to learn as most wipes are around the 10 min mark, but meh, that's how it is.

I have to disagree about madness being eassier then spine, although i suppose it depends on your raids strengths and weaknesses. Spine only took us like 30 attempts. Thing for us was that we had the dps to kill spine (bit slow sure but our tanks and healers can handle it), on madness we're frankly lacking dps a bit. I suppose if your dps is great but your healing or kiting tank aren't so good spine is harder though.

I mean we can kill madness with our dps but it's close, dps check is harder on madness then spine at this point. If dps isn't what is holding you back but tanks/healing then it can be different.

[Daimon]

Your pally doesn't need MAGICAL gear btw. I tanked our first kill as a prot pala with almost 0 tanking experience in ilvl 386 just fine. (Also had no tier set bonuses) So don't overestimate the fight at least. This was done at the 5% nerf.

Subject to oppinion I guess. Imo it's Spine25 > MDW10 >> Spine10 >>>> MDW25

You're talking about normal right, because spine is very taxing on tanks, I call it BS, my DK is almost 400ilvl and the combined bloods hit pretty hard even before plate 3.
And Spine10 is by far harder than MDW10, unless you have a very bad setup for madness. Yeah if you don't have a DK or Feral tank and a SP your MDW will be tricky, but definitively not harder.

[Dracodraco]

You're talking about normal right, because spine is very taxing on tanks, I call it BS, my DK is almost 400ilvl and the combined bloods hit pretty hard even before plate 3.
And Spine10 is by far harder than MDW10, unless you have a very bad setup for madness. Yeah if you don't have a DK or Feral tank and a SP your MDW will be tricky, but definitively not harder.

DK's were never designed with multi-target tanking in mind, though. While the strongest singletarget (read: Boss) tank, they are by far the weakest add-tank, to the point where you'd never have a DK kite adds on Nefarian Heroic, or do abominations on Maloriak back in T11 (no fights with a shitload of hard hitting adds since those two, barring the now relevant spine encounter). A paladin in 390 average with block cap will probably be alot easier to heal than a DK, because the paladin will get hit for more overall, but in smaller bursts, which is what really matters. With current healing power/mana, taking more damage is not an issue, as long as that damage is less deadly.
Contrary to belief, tanks still do have "niches", they're just all CAPABLE of doing everything. It doesn't mean they're optimal for it, though.

[otro]

Trust me, you group is, and will always be as good as your weakest link.

Raid makeup:

Fire Mage (legendary)
Ele Shammy (legendary)
Aff Warlock (legendary)
Ret pally (no OS)
Combat rogue (legendary)
Surv Hunter
Disc priest
Holy pally (ret OS)
Resto druid/feral OT (according to fight)
DK Tank (no OS)