The Moonkin Repository

Ive been trying to figure out what I should do for Heroic Spine of Deathwing? My guild is currently progressing on the fight, ive had to sit a bit on this fight so they can bring in some mages/rogues/hunters. What can I do to get my damage much higher on the tendons? Here are my thoughts:

Im using the T13 4piece, so.. at first I was dotting the tendon at all, I just ensured that I was in Lunar Eclipse and just spammed Starfire. The reason I didnt apply dots was that you only have 16secs to dps the tendons, 2 dots = 2GCD = 14secs left to spam Starfire. So, I opted to do no dots. Perhaps only apply Insect Swarm? So that I get the set bonus to be in use? Should I maybe reforge to as much mastery as I can since I know ill be in eclipse each time for the Tendons? Theres a few scenarios.. I just want to get thoughts.

OH! Yes, I am using the VP trinket, Bottled Wishes, for this fight.

Take what you will from this, since my guild hasn't even started working on the fight yet, but I've been trying to optimize my tendon DPS on regular to get ready for it.

What I do (and these suggestions come from people who have worked on it/kill it) is you want to plant yourself 1 cast away from solar before the amalgamation dies. You want to have mushrooms pre-planted right at the base of his armor plate (have your tank pick a side to blow up and announce it so you can put your shrooms on that side). As the amalgamation is blowing up, get to solar, pop your trees and whatever trinket/pot/CD/whatever you're going to be using. As soon as the tendon is targetable, detonate and go from there (make sure you tell your trees to attack the tendon, too).

As far as dots go, I think at the very least you want 1 dot up for NG. Because of your 2pc, IS probably wins. But I want to say putting both dots up is actually a good idea -- just not certain on this. But maybe someone else will come along that has killed it and can comment on that.

edit: forgot to say, for mastery reforging, a lot of people will do that for this fight. If you're willing to take the DPS loss on other fights, yes, it is optimal to take your haste down to the last breakpoint you can get to (possibly even lower, though again, not certain about this), and reforge the rest to mastery. I have my BW reforged to mastery for this reason.

For the reforge solution, we take the time for EVERYONE to reforge on this fight. We are 25man guild. So, the melee dont need expertise for this fight, they go reforge. So we all have the chance to.

We've been working on this fight for a couple weeks, it's rough for balance. That said, I've found some nifty tricks that can help a lot.

Firstly, you always want to be one cast away from Solar before the tendon pops. This way you can freely use your DoTs on the Amalg and bloods without worrying about Nature's Grace. Before the tendon pops, trigger Solar Eclipse and use a macro to target it. Apply both DoTs, blow up pre-planted mushrooms, and Wrath/Starsurge until the plate goes down. You'll often hit Lunar before the tendon disappears, I just keep spamming Wrath because I can get another cast or two out whereas I can *maybe* manage a single Starfire. I use Treants whenever they're available for tendons.

I don't reforge, haven't found a reason to.

On the majority of attempts in our 10-mans I'm 2nd total tendon damage at best, middle of the pack at worst. I haven't been last on the meters since I used this strategy.

Herioc Spine for boomkins is not necessarily about the tendon damage you can put out, in my opinion. Other classes (mages/rogues/warriors/pallies) will/should be the top damage on the tendons.

My responsibilities for this fight are the following:
1.) Initial damage on corruption to break grip (try to keep this number to as little beyond 15% as possible)
2.) Innervating healers on CD
3.) Tranqing while amalg has 9 stacks during 1st time of being on the 3rd tendon.
4.) Lastly, damaging the tendon as much as I can.

I do exactly how you suggested, I reforged all of my gear to mastery, got Bottled Wishes, and I stay 1 starfire away from being in a Solar Eclipse. I then use moonfire/insect swarm on the amalgamation and spam wrath. This ensures that I will have a full Solar Eclipse and Nature's Grace for the tendon. Around 5 seconds before each Fiery Grip, I place 3 shrooms under the corruption and denote them as soon as fiery grip occurs (needs 15% damage to break). For our strat, we have all ranged do an initial cast on the corruption, then the spriests/arcane mages make the corruption to as little beyond as 15% as possible. This is crucial because you do not want to have an extra amalg spawning as your initial amalg is approaching 8% hp.

As the bloods start to increase, I have to be careful with using mushrooms on corruption because our kiter sometimes brings all of the bloods over the corruption as fiery grip is happening. In this case, precast a wrath ~1sec before fiery grip is going to happen.

As for during the actual burning tendon itself, I do not push mushrooms down near the tendon, I place them under the corruption (which should be at ~5% hp) that is about to cast fiery grip. Since denote is off CD, I don't waste a global and this helps with the damage to make sure the fiery grip does not happen during the burning tendon. Since the tendon is only up for 20 secs, I cast trees before I can even target the tendon to maximize that damage. As the tendon pops, I use Bottled Wishes, IS, Sunfire, Starsurge, Wrath spam until starsurge comes off CD (either geting and using an insta-starsurge immediately or the 10 secs (using 4pc)). I would strongly recommend you DoTing the tendon, the 2pc bonus is very nice and DoTs accounted for 26.5% of the damage on the tendon for me (seems too much to lose if you do not DoT). I always use trees on 1st of the 2 passes per tendon and the ONLY time I use starfall is at the very beginning because we kill all 4 corruptions (2 before flip, 2 after).

I am unsure as to your strat for the fight, but I am able to down the tendon in 2 passes all 3 times. First tendon, everyone uses their CDs and we have healers DPS as well. Second tendon, all DPS use their pots on 1st pass (make sure you pot before you can target the tendon to maximize the effectiveness of the potion). Third tendon, heroism is used.

Logs: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/4np6 ... target=229

Video (kiter PoV): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNhCS27A ... B7Tt_JHD1M

For any further questions, you can easily contact on me on Kenny US-Aerie Peak.

Thanks and best of luck

@KFC is that for 10 oe 25man?

also @TreeB i think thats true fro you in 10man.. but 25man Heroic Spine is much harder. The Tendon has ~33mil HP. So.. basically.. I cant keep up with what Mages/Rogues/Dk's/Warriors are doing. The raid lead is absolutely looking at what our Tendon damage is, well, because if we cant get the plate blown off in 2 attempts per.. we cant do the fight efficiently.

Today my best results (using a handheld stopwatch) was reforging all mastery/crit.. all out of haste. Using Bottled Wishes.. saving one cast in Pre Solar, before going into Solar. Also, pre planting shrooms and detonating them upon entering Solar.. also applying DoTS. I have a macro to target the tendon/cast berserking/pop a Volcanic Potion all at once (since they dont share a global CD). For a 16sec duration i did around 695-705k damage. Which, for 2 Amalgs per plate thats about 1.3-1.4m per tendon.

So.. other than doing that I dont know what else to do.. to up my tendon damage. Im typing this now... as im sitting while they are doing attempts because i cant compete with other DPS classes. So.. it totally sucks. I have a 397 equipped iLvL. Armory can be here

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/b ... mee/simple

Just.. keep in mind my reforge and trinket changes.

Thank you all for your assistance

Mine is 25 man, you can see the logs I linked before, Mages/Rogues are carrying, I'm at 5.5mil total

Sorry to say but on a perfect pass I can't see us doing more than 900k damage to the tendon.

In our 10 man group I went resto and the other boomkin went bearcat. Both of us with legendaries :P

Use this macro, if you don't have one yet :

/cleartarget
/target Burning tendons
/stopmacro [noexists]
/use Bottled Wishes
/cast Wild Mushroom: Detonate
/cast Insect swarm

Oo, thanks @shadowking, i can add more things to my macro XD

I don't think that's quite right. Check out this moonkin (no legendary): http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/7erl ... &target=26

He or she is doing well over a million damage on several exposures; averaging over 800k per exposure

Now, if that moonkin happens to see this post, I first apologize for posting a link to your log but second I'd love to hear what he or she is doing!

if i can add something, i was doing some 10 man hc spine as a moonkin and i was avrage 850k-1.08mln (no legendary), preplanting shrooms, detonation with macro and IS'ing tendon, then spamming wrath till leaving solar and then turning to starfire (dunno if someone noticed but if u cast wrath it will deal dmg when it hits, if u cast it right before end, your wrath can be casted but will not hit tendon coz it will hide under plate - starfire hits instantly after cast), i get FM from mage and power infusion from priest, and my RL demands from me 1mln dmg on every exposure so it's always intense for me there xD. casting SuF on tendon maybe efficient if u are lucky and it will proc u SS, but u canend up without ss proc's and one wrath or SF cast less so it's ur decision will do more testing this week.

_Of course_ you should use both DoTs on the tendon, as you get 100% or nearly 100% of the ticks and 2 DoTs (plus their SS procs) do more damage than 2 Wraths (worst case scenario, since the casting time of 2 Wraths is greater than 2 GCDs). Furthermore, those 1-2 extra Wraths are uneclipsed.

FM and PI are 2 huge things.. I dont get either. We dont even have an elemental shaman or a warlock (at least we didnt for the weekend attempts).

Why would you feed the lowest DPS in the raid PI, FM and DI??
hell, the other boomkin that went bearcat does more burstt dps to the tendon in cat form than what he can do as boomkin.

in 25 mans, yeah. Maybe you can get carried. But realistically your dps is below the par numbers of what is required. Maybe after the next round of nerfs it would be ok but for now we cannot do the required damage in the required time.