Dragon Soul Notepod

I always prepot but missed a couple the other night because some of the countdowns were wonky. I'm not sure when I should be using my second potion, as I generally save it for the phase 2 burn. I don't know how feasible that is with the 16%/11%/6% heroic strategy though.

I had a target macro malfunction on the first couple heroic attempts on Sunday, and after that experimented on how to deal with blood AOE, so my damage wasn't the best. Most guilds do not even compare to our AOE burst, which means I have to change my tactics a bit. I found that before I got even halfway through my AOE "rotation", everything was dead.

My single target could be tad higher, because I'm still lacking my 4pc bonus. I have the LFR helm, my problem is the chest and pants. I can't actually use the balance tier chest, and would be picking up the restoration one because it's my best in slot (which is why I would be passing until others get it first). So my 4pc pretty much hinges on the pants token at this point, which is balls. My spreadsheet shows a ~726 DPS increase with the 4pc, which isn't SUPER important. Obviously, it should be used elsewhere if someone else still needs it.

I had a mild thought this morning while tinkering around on my shaman, Spirit Link may not be a good option for the Blue Platform when we are currently using it (during bolt explosion). If we Spirit Link and it evens the raid out at 75%-80% the randomness of the next crush mechanic, target specific, is more than likely going to be one shot. And of course it has the potential to hit as many people stacked up as possible. It may be better to hold off on it until we are stable or after a crush. Or just save it for tendrils as usual.

Strangely enough I was noticing the same thing. That while it was mitigating the damage for a bit it was putting everyone at a range to be one shot tentacle raped. If we save for the last tendrils however, I'm not sure if we will have it again for the last platform. It may not be necessary but we don't know yet as we haven't quite made it to the last blood aoe explosion...

More note-times with Heroic: Madness of Deathwing!

As far as I'm concerned, although we aren't seeing the final phase frequently, we have a very clear understanding of why a death/wipe is happening when it occurs on one of the first four platforms. Our overall DPS and time through the fight has been slowly improving with tweaks we're making here and there, so therefore, I consider our "sticking point" to the win to 100% be our ability to efficiently kill Congealing Bloods. There are of course two big factors in dealing with bloods:

Snares

First and foremost, we absolutely must get Bloods snares immediately and just as important, keep them snared their entire duration until they die. Looking through our footage, our biggest issue continues to be snare consistency: We will land snares on a few bloods (or even most bloods) early on, but as they travel they will move out of our snare effects or basically "split off" from the rest of the blood pack, which is dramatically lowering our AoE damage and not allowing Spellweave to shine.

As best as I was able to research, it does appear that slows above 50% do affect the Bloods: many videos have a Rogue with Crippling and you can clearly see just from visual movement compared to our own footage that they are much slower. There's also a number of confirmations from Warlocks I ran across in this thread. Therefore, as Harkle already mentioned, he can try to Shadowflame 70% snare most of the bloods (specifically the front-loaded spawns rather than the later ones), which should bunch them up more with the back spawns and increase AE efficiency.

That said, the other factor is that we should simply take full advantage of all snares we have, which means in addition to what we're doing already (Mushrooms, Chilblains, Earthbind), everyone with a good AE snare should help out (including Taka with Piercing Howl). Just maybe two globals right as they are spawning to help get that snare going is all it takes and if it means the difference between Deathwing soaking it or not, it's well worth it.

The key here is we want to try to control this phase as much as possible, and since it's a clockwork pattern we repeat, the blood snares are the only factor we haven't mastered.

AoE Damage

The second component to dealing with Bloods is of course our AE damage on them to kill them off as soon as possible. How well you deal AE damage on these is almost entirely dependent on how well you proc Spellweave, and you can see the discrepancy here. I looked into the logs a bit and from this snippet, found that pretty clearly, for some reason Hellfire just does not play nicely with Spellweave and almost refuses to proc it. Hard to say why exactly it works this way, but I do know from personal experience that it has something to do with effects the game deems "instantaneous" versus those that are not.

In any case, it turns out Hellfire is proccing Spellweave off one target about every 4 seconds or so, which is just terrible. Yet Reign of Fire is much more normal, and basically procs it every hit on all targets. I already talked to Harkle about this and we determined using Shadowflame right away to apply the snare then chaining RoF with his whirlwind pet should be much, much higher than Hellfire damage, which will be a huge boost.

The other somewhat low Blood damage is Ansum, which is not entirely uncommon for Enhancement across the board, again all related to Spellweave. Still, there is room for improvement, namely by utilizing Fire Nova more often and effectively. As seen from other top Enhancement logs (example 1 & example 2), the big thing seems to be to simply use Flame Shock on the initial target, Lava Lash it to spread Flame Shock to 4 other bloods once enough have spawned, then Fire Nova on CD. Similar to Druid Mushrooms, Fire Nova seems a basically guaranteed Spellweave proc, which is huge damage all around.

All the rest of the DPS seem to be doing fairly strong on the Blood AE damage. Due to the strength of Mushrooms, I also think we'll try to set things up so Kain and Gale can cover healing for the ~5-6 seconds it takes me to drop 3 mushrooms and detonate every time, as even as Resto the burst from those is insanely high, so that should help a bit as well.

We're close!

I was looking at some videos last night and noticed shaman placing their Earthbind totem in between Deathwing and the blood spawn point, rather than near the spawn. I don't recall if that's what Gale or Ansum have been doing, but it definitely seemed to help a lot.

Would it still be worth placing one mushroom in every spawn location, to ensure a slow? Or throw down all three? Even if I caught the spawn point at the first sign of bloods, by the time I spent three globals to place the mushrooms, the first 1-3 bloods snuck past the detonate and gunned it for Deathwing. This seemed to be an issue even when I placed them 5-10 yards ahead of the spawn point, because they almost always space out.

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Originally Posted by Tree

I was looking at some videos last night and noticed shaman placing their Earthbind totem in between Deathwing and the blood spawn point, rather than near the spawn. I don't recall if that's what Gale or Ansum have been doing, but it definitely seemed to help a lot.

Would it still be worth placing one mushroom in every spawn location, to ensure a slow? Or throw down all three? Even if I caught the spawn point at the first sign of bloods, by the time I spent three globals to place the mushrooms, the first 1-3 bloods snuck past the detonate and gunned it for Deathwing. This seemed to be an issue even when I placed them 5-10 yards ahead of the spawn point, because they almost always space out.

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Putting Earthbind back a bit might be a bit better, though the real question is in those videos was there also a Rogue spamming 70% slow and/or a hunter trap? ><

I do think using 1 mushroom at spawn locations is not very efficient, and instead should be utilized for their damage primarily. I think you could easily get two mushrooms down before they start moving, so maybe put two right next to the spawn point and one more slightly toward Deathwing so that timing the explosion they all connect with the majority of bloods, but offer a bit of snare coverage as well. With Harkle snaring the first half of the spawns or so and Taka also throwing a few globals into snaring, full coverage by Mushrooms should be less important than maximizing the burst damage from them.

Of course the issue in all this is we have to spend 12 minutes just getting to the point we can try any of this stuff, which doesn't lend itself very well to experimentation.

Skeleton Crew apparently uploaded their kill video, so I took a look at it. Their raid comp is a lot different than ours (lol rogue/hunter, also 3 healed with a shaman), but I found it interesting how they handle phase 2.



Once they get the first set of Terrors down, they pop BL as soon as all bloods are spawned, killing them in around ~8 seconds (about what we do). They then burn the hell out of DW and get another blood spawn right as the second set of Fragments pop. After the second set of Terrors, they push past 5% with Spirit Link and finish him off.

I just figured I'd point out their BL timing, might be useful to know? The 2 heal strategy we tried on bug day seemed pretty sound, considering we demolished the platforms without damage buffs. I'd anticipate everything in phase 2 dying immediately with the hotfix.