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As befits the final heroic boss of an expansion, our first kill of the Heroic Madness of Deathwing happened in a frenzied blur of massive damage, both incoming and outgoing. At the end of it though, the cheers on Mumble were evidence that Vortex had, yet again, completed the heroic mode of an expansion-ending boss.


In terms of the fight, our strategy wasn't far different than most, although we eschewed soaking the second impales on each platform and instead relied on a combination of Hunter and Rogue mechanics to avoid taking unnecessary damage. We also opted for a highly controlled strategy to handle the elements of Phase 2 and relied on clean execution instead of brute force to handle the 15% and 10% Congealing Blood spawns. Once we handled the 10% Blood Spawn though, we hit Bloodlust and burned him down with only a brief moment taken to destroy the 5% Congealing Blood spawn...

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So:


In actuality, it looked like this after our first kill, but we'll talk more about that later.


The Heroic Spine of Deathwing encounter is an complex and exciting fight that also had the potential to be the fight that could have provided the epic (near) ending to the Cataclysm expansion. The concept of parachuting off of a gunship to fight on the back of a flying dragon is an amazing idea, but sadly the fight ended up being a highly tuned encounter in a rectangular room that slowly expanded as the fight went on.

Still, Blizzard's concept to execution issues aside though, it's a lot of fun - ramping up in difficulty quite quickly as you move through it and placing extreme demands on tanks, healers and DPS. The fight lasts roughly 11:30 and by the end you'll wonder whe...

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Given that Heroic Ultraxion was a bit of a disappointment, we were looking forward to the next set of bosses in Heroic Dragon Soul. By all accounts, Heroic Blackhorn, Spine and Madness are far and away the toughest fights in the instance (as they should be) and so we were ready for the solid challenge we got in Heroic Warmaster Blackhorn.


In the normal version of the encounter, the ship health really isn't an issue. As long as everyone stands in Twilight Onslaughts, you're not going to have any real problems with the health of the ship. In the Heroic, however, these things *hurt* and it's very easy to see the ship destroyed and you sent spinning to your death. There's also a new mechanic that spawns deck fires relative to the amount of damage that the ship has taken. These fires compound the problem because the more damage you take, the more fire there is and the harder it is to ...