Blackhorn, Spine, and 5% nerfs

Darkfall killed Spine of Deathwing for the first time on normal mode last night. And, like an idiot, I forgot to take a screen shot. Then again there isn't a whole lot to take a screen shot of, sadly. You get some pretty machinanima, but there is no body for the quite obvious reason that you didn't actually kill Deathwing. All you did was pop a few armor plates off his back so that Thrall could peg him with the Dragon Soul. (How does Thrall do that without frying those of us who just popped the armor off?)

It's a interesting fight. Everyone has to keep on their toes with positioning and damage target. And you had better be ready to get tied down when he rolls. We did it with a single tank and 3 heals. I don't think that one tank would work for 25man, too much damage from corrupted blood, but it did for 10man. I'm not usually a fan of heavy add fights, the adds can be a pain to pickup as the tank. However, since this was *only* adds it wasn't too bad. Though there are a couple of times I wanted to beat the hunters for not warning me that an extra tentacle was about to go down, because my camera was no where near where I could see the Hideous Amalgamation until after it had eaten a healer.

But once you get the hang of things Spine is not a hard fight. It was a whole lot easier then Blackhorn, which we had a lot of trouble with last night. The vast majority of the trouble was due to only having 2 ranged dps in the group. That made it quite difficult to get the drakes down before the boat exploded. But we made a few changes and got the melee to help with the first drake, and it eventually came together.

I'm a little sad that the nerfs are out this early. Because of the holidays I don't feel like we got enough time to work on the raid before it started getting nerfed. We were still making forward progress and I truly think that we could have gotten Spine down with no nerfs. We'd made some great progress the other weekend, and I am pretty sure that even without the nerfs we'd have gotten him this week. But at least the Dragon Soul nerfs are being rolled out a bit at a time. The nerfs to Firelands were horribly discouraging happening in one fell swoop as they did.

It's clear that the DS nerfs are supposed to be comparable to the ICC nerfs of two years ago. (Wow, that was already two years ago...) But I much prefer the way the DS nerfs are being done. It has roughly the same effect, but it's psychologically different to have the bosses nerfed rather than yourself buffed. And oddly I think it might be more of a buff to actually killing the bosses the way the DS buff is going. And for sure it'll keep players from being (as) lazy. You've still got to work at it to put out the damage you expect from yourself, no ICC crazy buff to boost you when you may or may not actually be geared for the instance.