Spine of Deathwing

That, and yes it is worth interrupting. We had our mages do it on PTR however I can sadly sayI don't know who we have doing it now... I just spam Holy Radiance =O

How we do it is on the first plate we do the normal roll until there is only one left and start dpsing it down, some cleaving from the dps allowed since the blood only spawns 3 at a time. When he reaches 20-10ish percent we start just focusing on the bloods. The last two plates only the tank can cleave until we reach 20-10% again then kill the bloods.

You need to break firey grip. There's no "is it woth it?". They do too much damage to the victim and take too much healing/dps away from the raid. You need to do 100,000 damge on 10-man to it for it to break so a quick burst from a hunter can easily break it. This in comparison to the 90k damage every 3 seconds and the fact it takes a dps/healer out of the fight for up to 30 seconds. When you get one when you need to burn down a tendon all the ranged dps can go and break it since by the time you get the plate pried up it would have low enough health that it would die anyway.

Also a tip for tanks: It's not the end of the world when you fail to kill a tendon the first time (that's for the next boss) you can try again on the same tendon by kiting the amalgamation to the same side.

Thanks for the ideas. The holidays (and ToR) may have us low on chances to stab at this until January. There are times when I need to remember to be patient as the guild gets better at target acquisition... I generally start to doubt the strategy when what we need is to give everybody time to learn it.

A quick question for any tanks out there. At the very start of the fight while we burn down the first 3 corruptions I've noticed I get Searing Plasma occasionally which leads to near death experiences. Is Searing Plasma truly random or is it avoidable in the opening of the fight? I haven't seen an instance where I get Searing Plasma after tanking an Amalgamations however we haven't had that many attempts yet.

It should be random, or as random as the programing allows, that should be healed off you, and it shouldn't be any worse than the Searing Plasma anywhere else, I would recommend that that be brought up with your healers. I can't think of a reason why that would be "near death" there. unless your healers aren't actively healing the debuff until you need healing. (i.e. they're waiting till you are at half health to start healing you so by the time they're through the absorb you're about dead. Anywho,

Best of luck.

BTW, I should mention... thanks folks for the responses. I think I was overthinking weird workarounds when a lot of what we needed was just to give folks some practice.

Due to the nature of this fight, I typically use my big healing cooldown after the first roll. At the start of the fight is where the highest amount of Searing Plasma go out, since there are 4 Corruptions up. As a priest I use Divine Hymn and it clears all but the most recently applied stacks. Cooldowns aren't really that necessary on any other part of this fight from a healing perspective, so if 1 of the healers burns one, you should be fine.

If anyone needs a more step by step idea of the fight, this may be helpful. This is what we do and it seems to have a high success rate with lower risk when first encountering this fight.
After you land.

1.As soon as you land pick one tentacle to NOT dps down. Dps the other three down making sure your tanks pick the Amalgamations up as the tentacles are killed.
2. You're going to want to barrel roll with these three Amalgamations up, but a word of caution: the remaining tentacle will be using fiery grip soon. I've found that if we barrel roll immediately, we may get a person stuck in the middle of the spine due to fiery grip. When breaking fiery grips, I'd suggest using one or two dps to break it. You don't want too many more on it because you may risk killing the tentacle and releasing an extra Amalgamation. This may not wipe your raid, but it can be annoying. An arcane mage or a hunter are awesome for this job. As an arcane mage it's my job to break the fiery grips and it's our hunter's job to break the grip if I get gripped. If you're a mage and in a bind you can Ice Block to instantly free yourself!!! We break the fiery grip and all run to the same side to initiate the barrel roll.
3. After that we kill the tentacle and commence dpsing that Amalgumation down. When doing the first round of this you may need to casually dps the Amalgamaton while waiting for enough Corrupted Bloods to accrue.
4. Have a raid member monitoring the amount of Corrupted Blood pools on the spine at any given time. When there are 9 and the boss is around 1 million health or lower, go on ahead and pick up the stacks by having the tank drag the Amalgamation over the pools.
5. Don't let the Amalg's "head asplode" in your face. Take him to the plate closest to DW's head and Move.
6. Kill tendon. Fast. Make sure you've saved your cooldowns for this tendon. If you're having trouble after the first one I suggest popping a potion with the second tendon and Bloodlust/Heroism/Timewarp with the third.
7.Repeat steps 1-6 two more times. Obviously there will be more Corrupted Bloods and whatnot, but that's why the fight gets increasingly difficult as it goes along. It might be easier when starting each new phase to pick a constant tentacle to NOT dps. e.g. - we leave the right tentacle closest to DW's head alive each time for our Amalgamation source. Your team may find another one that they want to leave up, but you get the idea.