World of Warcraft®

I understand that frost on paper leads the way for this encounter, and I may swap back to DW for progression on spine, but I am just curious about everyone else's experience with heroic spine.

Maybe you play a DK, or just have one in your group, so whatever details you can share about the fight plz do so, and in reference to the 10 man encounter if possible.

I would prefer to stay as UH for this fight, and considering the nerfs it may be more viable now then in the past as far as tendon dmg goes.

My other dps classmates are rogue, hunter, mage, spriest and me uh dk/frost.

For 10 man spine you are going to want to stick with frost if your comp is fine on buffs. It is possible to do competitive numbers on tendons as unholy, but this is mainly do to gurth tentacle procs more then anything. With the 20% nerf this week unholy should be more then viable, but you still are going to want to be very careful spreading your disease and not getting them on corruptions.

In regards to your class comp (assuming your rogue is sub) then unholy will help your casters quite a bit. So if you are really comfortable with unholy and know how to line up your cool downs and DT then unholy might be the way to go.

I am fairly certain Unholy only wins out in 25m.

The major concern as the fight progresses is bloods, not tendon damage. Frost does hilarious amounts of damage by peeing on bloods, in addition to having strong burst.

Our Frost DK does nearly 20% damage on this fight, and does competitive tendon damage against a legendary arcane mage.

AMZ can be helpful on this fight if you are having trouble with raid defensives on rolls, but otherwise Frost will win out.

unfortunitely unholy has terrible burst, and the uptime is only 25sec to burst that tendon, with the nerf you may be able to stay unholy, but you have to remember your comp wont have the melee haste frost dks bring, which will hurt your rogue and yourself.

i go frost for that and madness, but i am one of the highest for burst dps on the tendon, the corrupting parasite, and congealing bloods, thats where dps actually matters, not the padded numbers.

05/01/2012 12:38 PMPosted by Alicè

I am fairly certain Unholy only wins out in 25m.

not where the dps matters, when we look at logs, we look at tendon damage, congealing blood damage and parasite damage, as these are the most important and if not done in time will certainly cause a wipe. thats why i go frost for those fights, even in a 25man guild

See, here be da thing, mon.

Unholy is balanced around 30 second burst window: frenzy garg DT are all 30 second buffs... except the tendon is only exposed for 20 seconds, so the 20sec PoF seems more tailored to the occasion. Don't forget also that glyphed PoF seems to be able to prevent grips.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think Stars's DK was unholy for this fight, but from what I can see from their video his job was to AoE the bloods at the neck, so that when a low hp amalg needs to blow up, it's taunted straight to the blood pile at the neck and blows up instantly. Incidentally Stars is renowned for their insane 2-3-3 strategy for spine, which suggests that they were actually ditching burst for more control.

I tried doing H spine as UH and did horrible burst dps. I then switched to 2h frost and did much better (#3 dmg on tendon), so you might want to try that. Coupled with valor trink and PoF, you should do plenty of burst.
Edit: minus the spriest, our raid comp is the same (we have another dk that runs DW frost)

I went frost for this. Just make sure you have a Cooldown/pot for each tendon burn phase.

But yes go frost and practice your burst on some dummies first.