But keep in mind that immunities do not have any useful effect - when you don't "soak" the damage, the ship takes full blast as if there was no one standing there.

IMO, the best use of cloak on that fight goes as follows: feint the melee adds as soon as you see a small pool that no one else is probably going to get, solo-soak it, cloak the debuff. After that, you can solo-soak another with feint. It's completely fine to stand in the big pool with one stack of the debuff as long as you have feint up.

I've seen a lot of rogues doing this swap with trinkets, personally I do this as well using Sub and Dance to burst on demand and giving generally better survivability.

Sub will be better for a single reason, and it's hefty. With 2/3 enveloping (and probably less, it just gets riskier) you can simply feint and soak the waves. You'll take ~85-100k damage, which would never oneshot you even if you weren't topped. This gives you around triple the dps time of any other melee in the group, and better dps time than any ranged. My guild had everything down pat and was just struggling with nabbing the third and fourth pillars before we had any deaths when I discovered this nice little feature, and everything got miles easier. Normally melee uptime during that phase is abysmal, even if you loop through the bubble to skip waves. If you'd rather not stress your healers (but trust me, they have nothing else to do during this phase) you can shadowstep one, feint the second, then shadowstep a third wave rather than soak all of them.

Currently my guild kills the first two crystals - melee on the nearest, ranged on the next in line - around when ice waves reach the edge and start to rotate, then they get as much damage as they can on the third crystal as we move past it. Then I (and a healer and our enh sham) hang back and do the remaining ~50% while they go kill the fourth crystal. You can use cloak, vanish, and prep-vanish to break the snowflake yourself if you ever get into a dangerous situation.

The ability to reduce lightning phase damage through longer feint and enveloping shadows is also a boon. As is the ability to shadowstep the boss immediately as phase transitions end, and shadow dance every stun phase. Cleaving down ice tombs will have very little effect on your overall dps, and even less effect on your guild's ability to complete the fight for the first time.

On heroic madness is keeping up a stack of deadly poison on hemorage adds. blade flurry off main target, or just FoK spam the best way to max spellweave proc damage and effective damage to the corruption and deathwing as combat or mut?

We're starting on Spine HC atm, and wondered if there is anyone in here that has taken Spine pre nerf and after that could say anything about the necessarity of beeing sub vs combat? I see there is plenty of challenges when it comes to sub-rotation at spine. Not to mention the special specc and reforing. So is it possible to just stay combat for this fight after nerf and still be contributing enough to the fight or is sub still the only viable specc?

Sub is better for tendon damage, but depending on your guild's strategy and raid composition Combat can make sense. You give up around 200k damage per tendon relative to the ideal Sub spec, but in exchange you do better Amalgamation damage. For the typical strategy on the fight, the tendon damage is more important, but - particularly since the nerf - there do exist strategies and raid makeups where the extra tendon damage is less essential, and thus killing the amalgamations faster is useful.

Note also that even if you're running Combat, you don't necessarily want to run the usual cookie-cutter Combat, as it is optimized for maximal damage over the long term, and not optimal damage in short bursts.

Speaking of "cookie-cutter" builds, I'm almost certian that the conventional spine subtlety spec is notably suboptimal. During shadow dance, you will be performing many many eviscerates that are 4 combo points if you don't have Ruthlessness. You want ruthlessness, period. Puncturing wounds is simply not worth it. IMO, you want a build that looks more like this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft . With this build, you would substitute Hemo for Backstab. It also provides more rupture uptime on the Amalgamations, since you'll be eviscerating more often, and will thus generate more Serrated Blade procs.

It's honestly not that much less compared to other classes. In my H Spine Sub setup I do 1.2-1.4 million damage per expose phase in a 10man, with no bleeds or bleed debuffs provided by the raid.

As combat, even with 26 expertise (which is useless for tendons), and no 5% crit buff, I did over 1.1 million per expose just using Adren rush and 5pt Eviscerates. And the amalg damage was much higher, along with corruption damage (which helps the healers since less debuffs go out.

So if your group isnt having trouble getting the tendons down, combat ends up being viable, although keep in mind you also lose the constant healing from Recuperate. (Unless you keep it up at a dps loss). You'll still out-burst most any class except sub rogue, arcane mage, and ret pally.

Combat is definitely viable and from my experience might be even better than subtlety.

1) On tendons as combat you will be doing at least 2kk damage per tendon (AR+trinket every exposure) and if your group still cannot make it after the nerf then other people are most likely underperforming.

2) Blade Flurry provides very stable blood handling on plates 1 and 2, that allows other classes to almost entirely focus on single target amalgamation when it's up.

3) Combat does more damage on amalgamation what will help towards the end as after huge tendon HP nerf, dps check on amalgamations seems to be tighter than the one on tendons (as bloods can still overwhelm you very quickly at the end).

4) You can always pop recup if needed for small heal and 6% reduction (definitely useful before rolling / clearing bloods)

If your raid comp is light on AE, Combat is very much a viable option, and is the way I have been doing the fight.

You can pretty much control the amount of Bloods up, making sure you don't get overwhelmed as you progress through the Plates.

Pre-nerf, it was pretty easy to align AR with Kiroptyric Sigil, but now it seems to be much harder as phases are shorter and you have much less time to get your AR/Trinket back up unless you purposely wait for it.

I know after the nerf, we can almost 1-phase a Burning Tendon, with the total fight being 44 seconds shorter.

Pre-Nerf, Post-Nerf 1, Post-Nerf 2

Just wanted to share a couple notes on Heroic madness:

• Cloak removes the corrupting parasite; thus, dropping the add where ever you cloak it.
• Deadly brew is useful in P2 to snare the congealing blood however should be paired with a frost trap or blastwave to ensure initial snares on the bloods. You may also want to spec 2/2 deadly brew and use instant or wound poison on your thrown to increase crippling procs.

Just a note, I didn't see it mentioned in the overall compilation at the beginning, but, so far, on the 5 attempts that I've tried it, smoke bomb stops the ice lances from attacking their targets on Hagara normal. Might help your healers if they're struggling!

I think this post might be a little extreme, but I have been wondering if Ruthlessness might have a place in a Spine build. Would taking the last point out of precision and/or a point out of Lethality to put into Ruthlessness be worth it? This could turn a decent amount of those 4 point Eviscerates into 5 point eviscerates, though I don't know how much of a gain that would actually be.

Maybe Naihan is right and it'd be worth it to just take the points out of puncturing wounds and use those for Ruthlessness and just use Hemo instead of Backstab.

To be fair, I'm almost 100% sure the conventional spine build has absolutely no mathematical foundation whatsoever. In order to model it, you'd need to be able to model ~20 seconds of combat, which is much more difficult than modeling sustained damage, and it has much higher variance. About lethality vs. precision: in sustained DPS, the two are very close for hemo builds. However, you'll be hemoing much less often on the tendon, so it loses a lot of its value.

Quick question about Madness hc Impale.

Since we do not have spriest in our 10 man how exactly does rogue soaking work?

I have read some scarce reports that it is viable but would like to confirm some critical info with people who actually tried this:

1) Do you need to vanish-immune moment the impale goes off (finishes casting), vanish-immune moment it starts casting or just vanish during cast timer (sounds too easy, so it is unlikely)?

2) Is 3 min vanish cd without talent reduction ok to use this on every platform or do you have to introduce backup soaking for every second platform?

You don't die by using evasion. When there is three seconds left on the Impale CD, everyone but you runs out of melee range. Pop evasion then. Personally, I have almost exactly 96% CTC with evasion as combat. This leaves 102.4 - 96 = 6.4% chance for me to get meleed by the corruption every swing. I'm not sure if one melee swing is enough to kill you. If you have an extra healer single target CD, it might be advantageous to put it on you just in case.

If you get hit through evasion, it'll virtually always be a crit from which you will definitely die, even with reinforced leather. Still a low(ish) chance of being hit, but it's a gamble. Avoidance pushes hits off the combat table before crits, so that lowlow chance to be hit will all be crit.

The safest way would simply be to mirror the shadowpriest strat. That means that everyone runs out of melee range a few seconds before the impale and just lets the corruption hit an aspect until it casts. Then it casts on the nearest player (you) even though you're not in melee range, and when it starts to cast your tank runs back into melee range to have aggro again before the first melee swing.

You do not need to vanish immune the impale, just vanish as impale is being casted on you and the mutated corruption will lose it's target.

The perfect time to use the vanish trick is the second impale on the fourth platform. It comes at the same time as the elementium bolt and makes the whole elementium bolt plus impale phase a lot easier.

Basically once the elementium bolt flies, have every melee besides the Rogue and the tank leave the corruption. A second before impale, give your tank hand of protection/let him use divine shield. The rogue should already have evasion activated in case there's one melee hit before the impale (it's quite rare with good timing) and can then just cloak the elementium bolt impact and vanish mid impale cast to take damage from none of those while already standing at the impact location. The tank also needs to cancel his hand of protection/divine shield once impale is begun casting or the corruption will hit melees/pets afterwards.

Hey guys,

I have been out of the country and then very busy recently. I will try to get this updated in the next day or two. Thank you for all the suggestions and pms with information for me to use.

I will edit this post to inform you of updates

If you glyph cloak of shadows, you are able to tank a hit or two from the corruption, it also lines up with the meteor landing on 4th platform. And you need 2 min vanish to be able to take all the impales.

I did the following defensive cd order during our progress on madness, it never failed during ~50 tries:
1st platform dream+cloak
2nd platform cloak+evasion
3rd platform cloak+hand of sacrifice
4th platform cloak+evasion

Glyphed cloak also works to reduce shrapnel damage in the final phase.

Also, a note on the 4th platform. After soaking the second impale, the following Crush will ALWAYS target you. If I failed to feint prior to this it was a guaranteed death.