Zerg first Tendon?

[Deleted]

We're currently progressing on Spine10 and we're quite consistently reaching the final roll and plate - but not always cleanly getting onto that final plate and usually losing people to aggro/bursts/general crap once we're on that last plate.

We've been at that stage for a few resets now with no real progression forward, so in an attempt to be a bit radical and mix things up a bit we're proposing the following:

Swap our Enhancement shaman for Resto, and our Holy Paladin to retribution. Despite slight gear gaps with these offspecs, we should in theory gain some tendon burst and we'll ofc gain SLT for the rolls. The Shaman would be rolling alongside our Resto Druid and Holy Priest, so we'd have some nice powerful cooldowns to throw around.

I'm also considering suggesting a full potion and bloodlust zerg on the FIRST tendon in order to kill it in one sitting, but we'll only push for this if we can make some good gains on blood spawn rates for the final plate.

It's my understanding that blood spawn rate increases over time, and when each plate pops we get more potential spawn points. If the blood spawn rate is NOT tied to time, and instead just the plates popping - a BL zerg on the first plate would seem pointless.

We're normally able to get the first tendon to about 30%ish in a the first burn using trinkets and personal cooldowns - so adding bloodlust/potions and making the tanks/healers help out I think a kill is within our grasp.

My question to MMO-C is, will it be worth it?

The alternative is to save BL for the end of the fight to make the healing/DPS requirements a bit easier - but with all the distractions and tank requirements we could never hope for a single lift burn at the end of the fight.

[Deleted]

I suggest you make different attempts with different tactics, so 1 pull try it without BL until the end, and see how you do with healing/blood control etc. Then try it with the full zerg on first tendon see if it makes a difference on anything, but i am not entirely sure it will except the 1 less stack of the amalgamation debuff.

[lwalker8]

I would not bother with the zerg idea. I think you probably won't be able to kill it in one lift reliably and you'll just up wasting a lot of wipes on the first plate. Bloodlust can be used just before the first lift on the last plate to give healers an extra push they need to get through that blast, and then to keep people topped up going into the final amalg kill. It's also good to have that last tendon down to 20-30% and know that you really just have to get through a final amalg and about 90 seconds of blood tanking. To be honest, though, once our tanks had gotten themselves organized, the healing load really wasn't very intense.

Make sure everyone is stacked on the blood tank so bloods are killing healers or dps. Not really a need to kite anymore.

[gcsmith]

Way we did it, do all self procs first tendon, do hero/blood second tendon, then you should have all self cooldowns again for 2nd.

[Ragedaug]

Way we did it, do all self procs first tendon, do hero/blood second tendon, then you should have all self cooldowns again for 2nd.

This is how we did it as well.

[Dracodraco]

The reason the blood spawn rate increases over time is a completly linear spawn scale - everytime you kill a corruption, you gain another spawn point that spawns a blood every XX seconds. When you're on the first you have 3, on the second you have 5, and on the third you have 7 (more than double the spawn rate than first plate).
Which means that if you go onto second plate with no bloods up, using lust on the first is useless as you'll gain nothing but a 5% hp increase during the end of the fight vs having lust up.
If you're rolling priest/druid/shaman, that is the exact same setup we do in our alt run - however, we have our priest play Disc rather than holy due to the tank CD + raid CD (healing THROUGHPUT should never be an issue, so the hymn is close to wasted when you have a resto tranq anyway), and the shields for gripped people with plasma.
We also use 2 blood DK tanks, which means we get a vamp blood for every single explosion, so we don't need any other CD's for that.
What we do healingwise to make the damage, dispells, plasmas etc manageable:

Shaman on dispells.
Shaman uses SLT on every roll (as you have just had a period with 3 corruptions up, you'll have more plasmas while rolling than at any other point).

Druid hots every plasma target and keeps lifebloom rolling on blood tank (amalg tank doesn't take any dmg worth mentioning due to being a DK).
Druid uses tree of life while killing off the corruptions during plate transistion to gain extra throughput (movement lowers it without), and tranqs while rolling + SLT to get rid of every single debuff.

Priest heals the blood target pretty much fulltime on the later platforms, leaving plasmas to druid and shaman. Shields on gripped targets to be able to take an extra tick of damage. Barrier is used when "neccessary" - depends on the raids situation.

Something you may want to consider to ease the amount of bloods (if your healers are up for the task), is this:

After plate gets ripped off, we kill off all the neccessary corruptions. One tank picks up all amalgs.
The blood tank places himself close to the vent that we stack in, and assigned dps aoe's down all the bloods. Everyone gets into the vent except the amalg tank. With 3-4 seconds to go before the roll, the tank drags the amalgs over the giant pile of bloods - they will soak it up and possibly get off one pulse of AOE, should one of them manage to get 9 stacks. After that, they're thrown off, and the bloods are completly gone and won't respawn and bother you.
We do this for both plates, as the healing is so easy to manage with proper use of raid cds.

[Whoopsa]

Silly Koreans making my point null and void.

[Makarena]

lust on 6th amalgamation.

[Deleted]

My guild tried blowing up a tendon within a single lift a week or two ago and we got it down to 8% without really putting too much focus on optimizing (we did use hero + pots) so I doubt it's impossible to do if you have a few 416 weapons in the raid, (we only had an arms warrior with a 416 gurth when we attempted it iirc). With the 15% nerf next reset I fully expect it to be possible to burn a tendon in a single lift. Also, this was on the third lift.

Anyway, while it may be possible to do, it's not really worth it unless you can do it reliably, and even then you don't gain almost any benefit from doing it on the first lift so you'd have to be able to preferably do it on the third, which will be fairly difficult.

Under normal circumstances I'd recommend just saving hero for the last amalgamation to help the healers out with getting rid of your debuffs and helping the dps burn the amalgamation down faster.

[Deleted]

Think about what you gain from doing this... a small amount of healer mana. That's it. Considering healing isn't exactly difficult at this stage in the fight you're gaining very little.

It's really not worth it.

[Deleted]

This is definatly possible with the right setup, we have tried it once to see if it was possible now with the 10% nerfs and we got it to 9%. We didn't have alot of strong burst classes in our raid, so with the right setup it should be possible.

[Deleted]

Your answer can be found here http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...1#post16106571

Zerg all 3 tendons !

[jamlol]

Way we did it, do all self procs first tendon, do hero/blood second tendon, then you should have all self cooldowns again for 2nd.

This is how we did it as well, was going to recommend this.

And blood spawn rate increases as the fight goes on since there is more dead corruption spots pooping them out.

[Deleted]

Single-lift burns aren't really possible yet (especially if you have no 416 trinkets/weapons). Even if you have the best of the best DPS, it won't really be possible until the 20-25% nerfs. What Draco said is pretty much spot on for this fight. As for the third plate, you should AoE the bloods just before and just after the roll, the latter one leaving you with enough bloods for the 2 Amals, and then (very important) do NOT AoE bloods for the rest of the fight. One of your tanks needs to gather all of the bloods (DK or Warrior is best for this, but my guild has a Pally that does it), and once healing gets too intense on him (generally around the first life, before the Superheated Nucleus), start kiting all of the bloods. Then you can lust on the 2nd Amal to get it down quickly, utilizing any stuns you have (Shockwave, glyphed Holy Wrath) to kite the bloods around the Spine.

While that kiting is going on, the rest of the raid needs to be standing on top of the Amal tank, who needs to be spamming AoE and taunts to gather all of the bloods that spawn after the blood tank starts kiting. If you can live for a good minute, the fight is yours.

Seems you do not know koreans yet.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-1-lifts-video

[Deleted]

blood spawns every 7/5/3sec depending on the phase of the fight. so if you rush the first one, you still have bloods every 3sec on last plate.
seeing as most healers dont have mana problems on the first "station" it shouldn't be too much help to rush that tendon.
only way to improve the situation is to either burst the second, or even better the third tendon down, which is very hard without a perfect setup (read: lotsa "legendary" arcane mages ^^)

[hasslehoof]

Single-lift burns aren't really possible yet

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7LXmjAMz9k 5% nerf.

[Deleted]

Thanks for all the comments, although most of you did a real good job of not actually answering my question - just told me that you know more about our raid DPS than I do... cheers :P

Regardless, we went with the normal 2 lift per plate tactic tonight and we got a bit lucky and stole a kill with our revised healing setup. Got onto the third plate clean, got to just under 30% on the bloodlust burn and then as we slowly died off, the survivors managed to kill the final tendon on the final burn - so job done.... till next week :|

[Deleted]

Make sure everyone is stacked on the blood tank so bloods are killing healers or dps. Not really a need to kite anymore.

We are running into around 25-30 bloods on the first pop of last plate
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/e0aq4greszookp3m/ <- today's raid

This translates into about 20x5k hits on the blood tank every 2.5 second, 100k going to 150k with 30 bloods and that's only first pop... is it really healable with not kiting?
I do have about 245k before all the debuffs kick in but that makes me scared a bit tbh...

[gruxxar]

We are running into around 25-30 bloods on the first pop of last plate
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/e0aq4greszookp3m/ <- today's raid

This translates into about 20x5k hits on the blood tank every 2.5 second, 100k going to 150k with 30 bloods and that's only first pop... is it really healable with not kiting?
I do have about 245k before all the debuffs kick in but that makes me scared a bit tbh...

perhaps with 15% nerf and a full Block set (STACKING MASTERY AWWWW YEAH) to cap crit block for prot warriors or sth :P then yea... maybee...

[Deleted]

I am CTC capped for boss mobs and actually lowered my CTC for this fight for about 1% due to bloods being level 87 instead of the usual ??
The 5% should not make much of a difference... does it matter if I get hit for ~75k damage a second (30 bloods, every hit blocked, 10% nerf) or for ~71k dps (30 bloods, every hit blocked, 15% nerf)? ;/

I pretty much think we have to step up on mopping the bloods on the 2nd roll to start the 3rd plate with 5-7 alive tops...