Spine Help (please) + logs

[Varna]

Hey All

My guild has been on Spine HC for a couple weeks now (120th+ wipe), we've been getting to the 3rd plate without issue - 9-10 min mark each time but we soon wipe after that. On the latest attempt we had a Druid(me), Priest & Shaman. However we also have a paladin available we could rota into the raid and swap another healer out. In terms of tanks, we have DK on the amalg and druid on the bloods.

We generally follow same tactics as most, we roll, kill bloods, nuke tendon, rinse repeat.

In terms of healing CD's, we use them early on in the fight to burst through miscellaneous damage and then use them on rolls, or just after rolls to clear remaining debuffs on the raid.

The issues i'm noticing are that our healers get aggro towards the end of the fight and tend to die (generally just after a roll when tanks are trying to hold aggro), is there anything healers can do to reduce this happening? They can't stop healing as the damage is really high, so I'm at a bit of a loss? The damage our dps does is very good and our tanks seems todo well, it's just that annoying 5-10s sometimes where someone gets aggro and theres no coming back from it, the debuffs and damage at that point is also fairly overwhelming.

Our latest logs; http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/g1iyfe4szhotu0jh/

If you need more information, please let me know - we really want to get this done next week as people are now getting fairly demoralized by the beast

[Mohammed]

When do you blow the amalgamation? Do you blow it up as soon as you can or do you hold off to time it with a fiery grip?

With the nerfs, we found we could pull someone off tendon duty to break grips and still have enough tendon DPS. This shaved a good 1.5 minutes off our time and we had a lot less blood flying around.

[Milkyz]

From our runs:

. Bear (myself) on Bloods, tanking them near plate.
. Prot Pally on Amalg, tanking it near the plate as well, just far enough to not absorb bloods.
. All healers and ranged stacked on Bear, so it's easier for him to grab aggro from incoming bloods.
. We use a Tank CD + a Healing CD whenever an Amalg reaches 9 stacks.
. Make sure raid is not stacking on fire puddle right away when roll is called. As long as you stack 1-2 seconds before roll, you're safe and it will greatly reduce the amount of damage during rolls. Also make sure to have everyone stacking on the same puddle so it's easier for tanks to grab aggro. Hand of Protection / Salvation on Healers also help.
. Only time we actually have a call to kill bloods is during first plate as by the time Amalg is low on health there aren't enough bloods down. Apart from that, just let your Blood tank grab everything. As a Bear healers barely have to heal due to Dodge/Savage Defense. Maybe you should try not clearing bloods at all as it will reduce the overall raid damage.
. Sometimes we also use a Healing CD during rolls.
. As soon as Amalgamation start casting his Nuclear Blast, all ranged dps burn whatever health is still up on current corruption, so there won't be a grip during Tendon. That Amalgation is picked up by the usual Amalgation tank.
. During Tendon Phases we also have everyone stacked on Bear (blood tank), near the tendon so his Swipes/Trashes also hit tendon.

[Varna]

That sounds like a good shout, we normally hold off on the tendon until the grip disappears, might try blowing the tendon as soon as we can, irrespective of the grip.

[Darkfrosty]

Your heals should really have no problems with aggro. We did this with the 15% nerf and one of the things we found helped a lot was to have someone on blood duty the entire fight. We used a lock because of seed and the ability to drop threat very easy. The only issues we had with aggro was on the 2nd lift of the last plate when we had a ton of bloods and our lock was pulling aggro but we would have a pally ready to bop her when she started to pull.

Other than that after 120 wipes with the 30% nerf not sure what else you can do differently. The fight used to be an execution fight requiring very high dps and healing but now with the nerf its really just an execution fight that you can handle very slowly. No need to rush just take your time and do the fight right but seems like a good part of your problem is your druid tank.

Another tip would be to have your DK drop DND and aoe on the last plate to get runaway bloods on him.

[Bcons]

When do you blow the amalgamation? Do you blow it up as soon as you can or do you hold off to time it with a fiery grip?

With the nerfs, we found we could pull someone off tendon duty to break grips and still have enough tendon DPS. This shaved a good 1.5 minutes off our time and we had a lot less blood flying around.

This is good advice. We usually have our amalg tank break the grip during tendon burn now, works fine.

Also couple other quick notes:

As said before, make sure healers are stacked on bear tank. At this point the fight shouldnt last long enough in 10 man to require the tank to kite so just have him park and tank.

Make sure DPS are AoEing as LITTLE as possible on the 3rd plate. There's buttloads of bloods and each one that explodes is extra raid damage. Just get 10 dead and then call for no AoE.

Usually how my group handles second and third rolls is amalg tank stands opposite side of the roll to prevent roll, everyone else stacks roll side NEAR a fire pit. We stall the roll a few seconds this way to aoe down some bloods. Once weve got a lot of dead blood we call for a roll, everyone jumps in fire pit, amalg tank drags amalgs through dead bloods and into the fire pit. This can help clear a good number of bloods. We found this helps a pretty good amount, reducing damage later on in the fight.

[Clebane]

Overall dmg from all wipes on burning tendons
It would help if the arcane mage did more damage on the tendon, even when I play my mage, 397 w/out legendary, I can manage nearly 1m dmg. Your mage is not even cutting 400k a burn. He's needs to have only one spell on that, and it's Arcane Blast. He's doing quite terrible damage overall too. Shaman could pick up heals to, I am a disc priest that dispels and pull 22k heals.
Here's our kill last night: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...ne/?s=31&e=710
I raid lead too. Here's what we do.
*Kill all 4 corruptions, roll with Barrier and spirit link
*Dps amalg down, pop hymn of hopes early
*Kill bloods, soak them up, burn tendon
*During the burn, healers need to be healing the plasmas off completely
*AoE bloods down after plate flies off
*Kill 2 corruptions, mop up bloods, Barrier+SLT
*etc etc...

The most important thing I would say is to aoe the bloods down right after you pop the plate off before plasmas go out, soak them up and roll with lots of CD's.

[Varna]

Awesome, thanks for the advice guys - really appreciate logs also as they give me a good insight into what areas we can improve on. I've noticed our shaman doesnt use HR enough so ill raise this with him and see what we can do, also our mage probably needs to improve so wil find out why dmg isn't as high as others.

Lastly, really odd question and no idea why - but some rolls for some reason ill have 2 or 3 debuffs to dispel and on other times ill have to dispel upto 7-10 in quick succession, any idea why this is?

[Durgga]

We one tank (DK) and two heal (druid and paladin) and we have our ele shaman and spriest kill the bloods as they come out. Everyone else works on the amalg and I (hunter) and our mage work on the grip when it comes out. We have two priest for the mana cd and to help heal on the turns if needed. As long as your heals can handle the fight it can easily be done this way, with 7 dps the tendon will always go in one lift. We split pots for 1st and 3rd tendon and lust on the 2nd one.

Edit for your last question
The corruptions put our the debuff so if you kill them fast they may not get a lot out, but if the dps is slower and/or split they may put out more.

[Varna]

Ah, thanks

[Deja Thoris]

If your mage is only hitting 400k per burn as arcane you need to bitchslap him. Even without legendaries or fancy gear they should hit a million without breaking a sweat. 1.6 would be a good lift for an arcane mage. Force all your raiders to make a macro if they haven't to target the tendon, pop cd's and VP trink (important trink that!) and then go to town. With a macro and an arcane mages rotation (ab ab ab ab ab ab ab :P) there is no excuse at all not to do superb damage.

Others have said it, this is execution. If the bloods are meleeing the healers then they are positioned wrong or your tank isn't aoe'ing. Put a big raid marker on your tank and that is where they stand, no exceptions, ever. If they still get melee'd then the tank needs to change something. To be honest, if the druid is on bloods get him to pop frenzied just after the roll onto the last plate. The bloods will stick to him like flies on shit if he does. It should solve the aggro problems while people position themselves :P

Best overall advice on this fight is "stop for nothing". Don't stop for grips, don't wait for a roll while the tank chases around for the last residue to mop up, don't hold back on hitting the amalg and so on. When we started doing this it became easy. Early kills we fretted about good cleanups and grip timers and the wait hurt us more than we benefitted.

Good luck, its a shit fight.