Heroic Spine of Deathwing down!

I'm actually quite terrible at keeping up on this, as it turns out. Been busy with work, playing a couple betas (Diablo 3 and Tera), and continuing our heroic progression.

As of last Thursday night, my guild has hit 7/8H progression. Spine of Deathwing, which had been completely destroying us for the better part of 5 weeks, has finally been completed. After the first few weeks, we could consistently get to the third plate, but would just get completely overrun with Corrupted Bloods. Our disc/shadow priest, Zindaria, got an addon to monitor the number of active bloods. Let me tell you how ridiculous having 60-70 up at one time is. When our blood tank would die from just far too much damage, I'd gain aggro on them all and die in about 2 seconds. But after wiping over and over in basically the same part of the fight, we realized something had to be done. Too many bloods were obviously up. So either we aren't killing enough or we aren't getting through the fight fast enough.

When I compared the total damage we did to bloods and divided it by the health of one, we'd end up around 120-130 bloods killed on our longest attempts. This ended up being on par with other guilds on our server. But we still hadn't finished the fight. We'd only have gotten through the first Hideous Amalgamation on the last plate. So more bloods would likely be dying. Probably a lot of them. When comparing our fight length versus other guilds, we were on par with their kills, but hadn't gotten the kill yet. So it was pretty obvious we weren't getting through the fight fast enough.

Despite only having 2 amalgamations per plate, we were still behind. We would try to synch the timing of the amalgamation death up with Fiery Grip to make sure no one would be gripped while the Burning Tendons were exposed. This seemed to work well enough in that we achieved our goal of having no one gripped. But still, we were behind. We'd manage to get the tendons to sub 40% from the first time it was exposed on each plate. So, back to the drawing board?

After a few weeks of a bunch of us looking up different guides and watching videos of first kills, we found something that at least I feel was the key. Don't worry about synching up the death of the amalgamations and the fiery grip being cast. Instead, when the amalgamation is channeling Superheated Nucleus, kill the remaining Corruption. This will reset the timer on fiery grip since a new corruption spawns. It also adds a new amalgamation and thus another Blood Corruption: Death debuff. But if planned for, it's easy to manage and gives another stack of Blood of Neltharion. You end up losing some tank dps on the tendons, but as long as your dps is fairly strong, it shouldn't be a problem.

Once we made this change, the number of active bloods during the third plate went down tremendously. I think on our kill, we had around 50 up instead of 60-70.