This is our first kill of HEROIC Spine of Deathwing *post-nerf* (10-man) as a guild.

Guild: The Machine of Sylvanas-EU (Horde).

Kill date: 2nd of February, 2012.

PoV: Zumzar - Zumzar. Armory at [ Ссылка ]

Mid-fight chat drama: From 01:12 to 02:20. Funny shit when looking back on it! Not so funny whilst it was going on. :)

We used 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 dps for this.

After loosing a majority of our players throughout DS (including a legendary staff), we didn't manage to kill HEROIC: Spine pre-nerf, even though we were really close. Nevertheless, on our first night after the 5 % + 15 % nerf, we managed to kill him after a total of 100 attempts.

This is a very interessting fight, and by far - in my opinion - the most challenging fight this tier. It requires heavy damage on the Tendons.. or wait, it REQUIRED heavy damage on the Tendons pre-nerf, and now bringing down the Tendons doesn't really require an effort. Nevertheless, the fight is still quite the challenge, and we were very relieved when we finally killed it.

The fight is tactically very complex, but listening to the Ventrilo conversation throughout the video will help you a lot. If we start from the beginning our goal is to get 2 Blood spawns before we get a roll. This ensures we don't need to hold back much on Steve - which is what we call Amalgamations, due to their hard-to-pronounce-mid-raid-for-a-danish-raidleader name - before we have 9 Bloods available.

We have 2 dps assigned to breaking the Grips (Mage and Boomkin), and we also choose to kill the Corruptions prior to every tendon-phase, rather than timing it and leaving them alive. I was personally asigned to making sure these Corruptions were killed not too early, and not too late. This is why you see my single-target prioritizing Corruptions over Steves at certain points throughout.

When an armor plate flies off our goal is to:
1. Kill all alive Corruptions
2. AoE Bloods
3. Let Steves soak as many Bloods as possible, and then force a roll, whilst using defensives cooldowns to stay alive

When forcing rolls, remember to NOT step into the Fire before you actually have to. There's no reason to stand in there taking damage, when you don't have to, so help the healers out as I do @ 05:04

When the 2nd armor plate falls off, our Paladin tank is killing off a few Bloods close to the 3rd armor plate, to make sure we have enough Bloods for Steve. After that point, he starts kiting the Bloods, whilst the raid kills Steve as fast as possible. When Steve dies, we nuke the Tendon as always. We choose to not use Bloodlust for thise Tendon, due to the nerf of the Tendon's HP, and instead used Bloodlust to help healing and dps on the very last Steve of the fight.

From a Mage stand point this fight is really challenging, as there's so many things you can do to optimize your Tendon damage. I did the following, apart from the obvious reforge etc.:

1. Making sure I have 4x AB
2. Switching to Molten Armor prior to every Tendon phase (switched to Molten Armor glyph as well instead of AM). I switch back to Mage Armor when the nuke phase is over.
3. Using Mana Shield + Mage Ward for the last tick of Steve's explosion for a spellpower increase through Incanter's Absorption.
4. Using Presence of Mind prior to Tendon popping up, so the first Arcane Blast I cast is instant and so I get 15 % increased chance to Crit on my 2 first ABs.
5. Using Fire Blast on the very last 0.5 sec of the Tendon's uptime. If there's not enough time to cast an AB, I'll use FB.
6. Using the following macro for quickly targeting the Tendon, as you can actually target it before its nameplate shows up. This macro only works if you have NOTHING targeted, hence why I press esc prior to Tendon popping up:

/tar boss2
/stopmacro [noexists]
/use Bottled Wishes
/cast Mana Gem
/cast Arcane Power
/cast Berserking
/cast Arcane Blast

You can probably tell from the video, but I use an Arcane Power (w/o gem) as the very first Steve spawns. The rest of my APs are pretty obvious.

Also, for those of you interessted I used Will of Unbinding and Bottled Wishes for this, and I do NOT *cry* have the Legendary staff!

Ventrilo: Yes, for the entire fight.

WoL from the kill: [ Ссылка ]

DPS on Tendons: [ Ссылка ]

My UI in 1920x1080 (Updated 10th of January, 2012): [ Ссылка ]

Songs: The songs are listed at the end credits, in order of appearance.

www.the-machine.wowstead.com

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Zumzar

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