My guild started working on Heroic Spine recently. At first I kinda liked it. Now I’m beginning to understand the levels of frustration and boredom that many people have expressed for this fight.
I was pretty excited about the concept of Spine of Deathwing when it was first announced. The idea of fighting on the back of a dragon seemed pretty cool. In practice however, it wasn’t that cool. The mechanics were okay (at least for the first couple normal kills until the fight became a faceroll and more time was spent standing around doing nothing than anything else). But the worst part was the environment. This is a fight that could have felt really epic. You’re fighting on a dragon’s back! It could have had a sense of movement, a sense of danger that you’d fall off and it could have looked really good. But instead, we get clumped up in a tiny area where most of the time I can’t even tell which way his head is.
This is what I see for most of the fight:
Getting a close up of my priesty friends isn’t the worst thing in the world, but I don’t feel like I’m actively seeing or participating in a boss fight with this view.
What if I zoom out?
Those are some nice tentacles you’ve got there, Deathwing. But I still don’t know which way is up, down, front or back from this view.
Let’s try positioning the camera overhead…
Bleh. This is the worst view of all. 12 minutes of seeing this? No thank you.
Then, after 3 months of killing Spine, I finally found out the secret to making this fight look as epic as it should.
Much better! I can tell I’m in the air, I can tell that we’re moving and I can actually see Deathwing and appreciate how huge he is. He keeps looking back and he looks pissed that we’re hanging out on his back. Turns out, all I have to do to make this fight look good is fall off when he’s doing a barrel roll. I feel silly that it took me 3 months to figure this out.
Disclaimer: I am in no way condoning falling off the dragon…at least not if this is still a progression fight for you. 
