Healing Heroic Spine (video guide)

When I sat down to do the voice over for this guide, I thought to myself “there is no way I’m going to have twelve minutes worth of things to say about this horrible fight”. Boy was I wrong! Not only did I have twelve minutes of things to talk about, I had a whole list of things that I forget to mention, or ran out of time to discuss! As such, the moral of this is that Beru can talk about anything…a lot. Needless to say, there will be a fair bit of additional information in the notes below, and I do recommend taking the time to read through them, as there are a few “non-druid” related tips!

This video will be best viewed at one of the higher resolutions.

Tips and Tricks!

• Dispels. Uh, Beru, didn’t you kind of forget something? Well, it seems I sure did! You will need an assigned dispeller for this encounter, we’ve used both a disc priest and a druid for the chore, but any healer can handle the job. The key early in the encounter is the get the earth buff/debuff to your tanks. The debuff will jump across Deathwing’s spine each time it is removed from a member, so the easiest way to get it to the tanks early is to have the raid stand to the right of the spine, and the tanks to the left. After the tanks each have two stacks of earth, you want to get earth to as many raid members as possible in the time that the debuff is active.
• Trinket Talk. I know that I mentioned you should use your Jaws of Defeat if you have it for this encounter, but if you don’t or you don’t want to loose the extra intellect from your other trinkets, I can’t urge you enough to make sure you are using at least one regen trinket for the encounter. It really will make a large difference over the course of the fight!
• What gear set up did you run? I run this fight in 4 piece T13, with around 2600 spirit and just under 20 mastery. Mastery really helps so much in this encounter that if you aren’t already running a strong mastery build, I’d strongly encourage you to consider one. If you find that you just can’t sustain your mana with the 4 piece T13, don’t hesitate to utilize a 2 T12/2 T13 combination.
• Love your Barkskin. Barkskin will be a lifesaver for this encounter. Use it for rolls and when you are gripped. But it should be kept almost on cooldown for the duration of the fight.
• Nature’s Swiftness. Use it with a HT on a newly selected searing plasma target. Don’t wait for the “perfect time” to utilize it, unless you are on the third plate and worried about tank deaths, keep that sucker on cooldown.
• You are your number one best friend. Clear the debuff from yourself (or other healers) first. I always focus on removing my own debuff as quickly as I can without neglecting the raid too much. The reason for this is that I always get blood aggro by the end of the fight, and it’s much less panic inducing if I’m able to be healed up a bit. I always try to make sure that the healers are more actively cleared towards the end of the encounter, as a dead healer is just as likely to wipe your raid as a dead DPS.
• CLICK THE FUCKING LIGHTWELL!Holy priests can be very strong for this encounter, but it is important to make sure that your raid is clicking on the lightwell to assist with removing searing plasma. Divine hymn can be used the same as druid tranqs to help clear debuffs as well.
• Use your offspec tranqs and hymns. While you will only get one use out of them for the encounter, utilizing Moonkin and Shadow Priests tranqs/hymns can help alleviate some of the burden if your healers start to fall behind or if things start to get hairy. We like to use ours after the second and third rolls to help smooth out the healing and clear some of those extra debuffs from the raid.
• Mana Hymns. Don’t discount your priests mana hymns as a solid source of mana regen for your healers. We have our priests hymn after the first roll, and then on cooldown. Each priest should be able to hymn twice during the encounter.
• Killing Blood. First, I strongly suggest downloading the version of DBM (it might be the alpha or beta) that tells you how many blood you have dead on the ground. Otherwise much of your raid will be filled with “how many blood do we have?”, and believe me it can be heartbreaking to wipe at 11:30 because you miscounted and didn’t get that final plate lifted. As for killing them, we assign one person along with a “backup” for the job. We use a ret paladin, but really any DPS would probably do fine. If he needs help, we throw a rogue or a warrior in his direction. The key to killing the blood is to remember to do it over the course of the almag’s life so that there is 9 dead when the amalg is ready, but you aren’t doing immense amounts of damage to your raid by killing many of them all at once. Also keep in mind that your tank will do a fair bit of damage to them as well. Additionally, be careful where you kill them, so that they are not too close to a hole and creep back into one before it can be absorbed, and kill them in a position that a new amalg isn’t going to run over them on the way to the amalg tank. Sometimes your tank will have to move a fair bit when absorbing the blood, so don’t kill your amalg early! Wait for it to be in position to lift the proper side of the plate before bringing it down.
• Dealing with Corruptions and Grips. I mentioned that we use 4-5 DPS to break the corruptions, but regardless of how many you utilize the most important thing is to do just enough damage to break the grip without over damaging the corruption, so that you can time killing it while the tendon is exposed in such a fashion that it has a somewhat negligible loss to your tendon DPS. The best grip breaker are arcane mages, followed by hunters, and then shadow priests. That being said, your arcane mages will do some of your highest damage on the tendons, so you may want to assign different DPS to break the grip that comes during the tendon exposure (we usually have Hunters/Shadow priests do it). We never use more than 3 DPS on the corruption during the tendon, but if it’s timed properly no one should be gripped, or will only be gripped momentarily during this phase. That being said, if  one or more of our grip breakers is gripped during the tendon on the third plate, we assign a back up who will swap to the corruption so we don’t lose people to that grip.
• Timing the Rolls. While it seems so simple, it can be very deadly. Rolls need to happen as soon as the corruptions are down. Everyone needs to be in position to roll and get locked down as soon as it’s called for. Even one person being slow on moving can wipe the raid in the second or third roll. For the second and third roll, there will always be a grip that come right before you need to roll. Have everyone be in position such that they are just a few steps away from the designated roll point, and have all of your range get on that grip ASAP and knock that corruption down. As soon as that grip has been cleared, Deathwing should roll.
• The Kite Tank. By the end of the encounter the kite tank will have so much blood on them that one mistake has the potential to one shot them. We utilize lifegrips to help keep him ahead on the kite, and all healers focus on his life so that if he takes a hit he is topped back up immediately. Our tank places a marker down for the grippers to stand and will call out for when he wants grips in his kite rotation. He will give them a head’s up that they are on deck to grip so that they know to move out of the pack and get to the “grip location”.

Whew! That is a lot! If I missed anything, or you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to ask! Good Luck and Have Fun!