[DRAGON SOUL] Spine of Deathwing

[Moolly]

This is quite a straightforward fight. It takes place on Deathwing's back while he's flying through the air. The objective is to remove three of his protective armour plates, thereby exposing his flesh. We can't actually attack Deathwing himself, but will instead be dealing with several kinds of adds. As we start, we will face four stationary tentacles. When killed, they spawn two other kinds of adds. By clever use of the adds' abilities against them, we can make the big add explode next to an armour plate, revealing a tendril. We then kill the tendril before it seals the wound, and the armour plate falls off. Rinse and repeat.

There's more to it than that of course, but this fight is very predictable, and all about repetition. Learn when to use your cooldowns, where to stand, and what order mobs should die in, and then practice makes perfect.

Both Icy Veins and Learn2raid basically present the same strategy, and due to the nature of the fight, there should be little need to deviate from it.



http://www.icy-veins.com/spine-of-death ... d-strategy



Strategy in a nutshell:

Start by killing three of the four Corruptions. One Hideous Amalgamation and one Corrupted blood will spawn from each hole.

Everyone stack on one side of Deathwing in an empty hole to force him into a barrel roll, which makes the Hideous Amalgamations ("big adds") fall off.

Kill the remaining Corruption.

Tank the new Hideous Amalgamation next to an armour plate, kill nine Corrupted Bloods ("small adds") next to it, finish off the big add, and run from the resulting explosion.

Kill the exposed Burning Tendon within 23 seconds, or it seals the wound.

The armour plate will fall off, revealing two new Corruptions, so we start over by killing all but one of them, and so on.



Things to note:

There will always be at least one Corruption alive. If we kill the last one, it will respawn.

Corruptions can't be tanked and don't melee. Instead they place the debuff Searing Plasma on random players which does a DoT and absorbs healing, but is removed once it has absorbed enough. They also channel Fiery Grip which stuns a random player. Break it by damaging the Corruptor. Be careful not to break it during a barrel roll though, since the stun prevents falling off.

Each hole left by a Corruption will spawn one Hideous Amalgamation and one Corrupted Blood. The big adds fall off during Barrel Rolls, but the small ones don't.

One tank should take the big add, and tank it next to the next armour plate. The other tank should take the small ones, and tank them next to the big one. There is no cleave damage from the mobs to worry about, so we can safely cleave them instead.

The small adds also respawn when killed, so we will have more of them as the fight goes on. They don't hit very hard individually, but it all adds up, and their tank should be ready with cooldowns towards the end of the fight, and the big add tank may need to help out by taking a few. When they die, the small adds leave behind a puddle that can be absorbed by the big add.

For each puddle absorbed, the big add gets a damage and attack speed buff, Absorbed Blood, so damage to its tank will increase as the phase goes on. Once it reaches nine stacks of the buff, it will start pulsing a raid wide AoE, Superheated Nucleus, until it dies, so DPS needs to be divided between both add types. We then have five seconds to run at least 10 yards away from the Nuclear Blast.

Also, when the small adds die, they explode, dealing damage to the whole raid. Only kill as many of them as is necessary to get nine stacks of the buff onto the big add.

Make sure not to stand too far to either side of Deathwing unless we're doing a Barrel Roll, as that is what triggers it.

AoE heals are and survival cooldowns are advised when stacking for the Barrel Roll, as we will be taking damage from Grasping Tendrils while standing in the hole, and some players may still have the healing absorption debuff.

DPS players should save their cooldowns for the Burning Tendon, since we only have 23 seconds to kill it, and for five of those we will be unable to hit it. A targeting macro so that you can get to it quickly is advised.

A few DPS players need to be ready to attack the remaining Corruption to break its stun while we fight the other adds, but don't kill it, since it respawns anyway, and we'd get more adds. We only ever want to fight one Hideous Amalgamation at a time.

Heroism is probably best saved for the third armour plate, as the damage will be higher as the fight goes on, due to the increasing number of small adds.

[Moolly]

Vrugdush kindly did this for me due to my work load at the moment.

[Vrugdush]

Hotfix 2011-12-06:

Corruption, Hideous Amalgamation, and Burning Tendons are now level 88, up from 87, and have had their health slightly increased.

Hopefully this shouldn't make too much of a difference, except that now we can't forego stacking Hit Rating.

[Sarri]

I was listening to Kurn and Majik on the Blessing of Frost podcast, and they did an analysis of the last 4 bosses of DS and the strats their guild Apotheosis used to get kills on the bosses. There are a few useful things that we should note:

• - Do NOT AoE corrupted bloods down. They do an aoe pulse when they die that hurts a LOT so they need to be single targetted down.
  - EVERYONE, tanks included, needs to move away from the amalgamation while its casting Nuclear Blast
  - There are 18s to get the Burning Tendon down, or it seals the breach, as we discovered.
  - Searing Plasma - DBM puts up health frames showing the ppl who have this, and how much healing still needs to be absorbed. Healers need to figure some way to see that the folks who need more healing get direct heals, and those who need less to burn through their shields get it topped off with hots.
  - Fiery Grip - We need 3 ppl assigned to knock this off, which is done by doing 20k damage to the corruption tentacle. You dont want to kill it, you need to do just enough damage to knock the ppl out of the grip.
  - Ignore fiery grip when the tendon is up, healers will heal thru it, use saves etc. All dps needs to be on the tendon. Everyone, incl tanks and healers need to help out, with judgements, smite, moonfire, anything to get it down. Blow DPS CDs on the first tendon, use hero on the 2nd one, on the 3rd one DPS CDs again with a booster potion.
  If you have a personal damage reduction CD, use it when we stack in the hole for barrel roll. If you dont, use the HS.

This fight is all about control. We need to kill things at the correct rate so healers dont get overwhelmed by the damage.

[Vrugdush]

That's nice Elu, but most of that is already stated in the opening post.

[Bravebeard]

/tar Burning Tendon
/cast arcane shot (or any other instant usually available ability)

could save a second...

[Sarri]

I was making notes whilst listening to the podcast, sorry if some stuff is repeated...

@Brave: the Tendon is open for 23s but apparently it's only attackable for 18 of those 23... dunno why. Not sure if it's possible to "save" a second. We just need to make full use of those 18s

[Fungi]

Burning tendons is THE dps check in DS.

In 25man mode : 9.3M hitpoints. We usually run with 2T and 6H, which leaves us with 17Ds to burn through 9.3M hitpoints in 16 seconds.

9.3M/17/16 = 34.2k DPS for 16 seconds. This is the reason KIN's recount showed only arcane mages and rogues, cause they have nice burst. We need to pop cooldowns and whatnot to be able to get these numbers from every member atm. This also means that every single players should basicly hit the tendon. If you're a healer, put some dots on it.. if you're a tank, hit it like you mean it etc. etc. The combined dps of all 25 should be:

9.3M/25/16 = 23.2k dps or raiddps 9.3M/25 = 372k dps.

A.

[Fluttermouse]

Just a reminder warning for all those who weren't on the tries last week. I am still using the old 2pc bonus which randomly summons a burning treant. Adjust your target macros to suit or you could land up trying to shoot the wrong thing

Also, on the other issue with target on the tendons for ranged, it seems there's something odd going off with the max distance. Being a 40yrd caster I normally stand out at 35-40yrds and that seems to mean you can't target the tendons. However, something like my thorns spell has a shorter range, so on a normal fight I'd have to move in closer to be able to use it. Seems that standing outside of the thorns range I can't target the tendons though, but I can when I'm inside it, so it might be an idea to set your rangefinders up to be more like 30yrds, rather than whatever distance you normally mill round at.

[Bravebeard]

this one works fine and not only for this fight.

/tar twilight sapper
/tar elementium b
/tar burning ten
/cast arcane shot

Sometimes it even targeted the tendon before I could see it