Altar of Fangs

Three things this key charged nobody for, so you should not read them as mistakes.

• **Paralyzing Shots and Triple Shot picked you.** Twinfang Harrower applied Paralyzing Shots to you at 0:27, 6:03, 6:30, 21:23, 21:46 and 22:10 -- 54 ticks of Triple Shot and 34 of Paralyzing Shots landed on you across the key. Arbiter excuses these under "the enemy chose the targets": a hostile cast that names a player is proof of the enemy's choice, not of your positioning. Your `mechanics` axis is a clean 100 as a result.
• **You take more damage than any DPS in the group, and that is the build working.** 29,077 per second, against 20,735 for Unholy DK, 24,933 for Arcane Mage and 27,186 for Ele Shaman. Blessing of Dawn redirects a share of the party's damage onto you by design. Self-healing is therefore not a leak in general -- see the next section for the narrow case where it was.
• **A third of the party's damage landed on everyone at once.** Unstable Totem (22.9M across all five), Laced Edge (18.3M), Toxic Surge (12.5M), Synchronized Venom (11.1M). Arbiter does not grade these because unavoidable raid damage and a puddle all five stood in look identical in a combat log. They are listed so you know the tool saw them, not because they are anyone's fault.

• **Dispels: 22 of the 24 you could physically reach.** Thirty dispellable debuffs landed. Arbiter scores you against what one dispeller could actually get to, not the raw count -- the other eight overlapped a debuff you were already cleansing, and no single player can be in two cleanses at once. 89 on that axis is close to the ceiling the run allowed.
• **Activity 98.** You were engaged 94% of every second you were alive and in combat. There is no idle time to recover here.
• **You survived a key that was actively hunting you** -- zero deaths while taking more damage per second than every damage dealer in the group.

Both deaths share a pattern, and it is the only actionable thing in this key.

**Ele Shaman, 3:19.** He took 897,493 in 2.4 seconds -- Septic Spatter for 666,130, then Blood Sacrifice and Unstable Totem on top. He received **no healing at all** in that window. What you were doing:

  3:14   Eternal Flame  ->  Ele Shaman          (5 seconds before the burst)
  3:15   Judgment       ->  Primal Serpent  (damage)
  3:18   Holy Shock     ->  yourself
  3:19   Beacon of Virtue -> Arcane Mage     (the instant he died)

You had touched him. Then the burst started and your instant went to your own health bar.

**Unholy DK, 19:24.** 1,546,614 over 4.7 seconds; he received 100,666, almost certainly Light of Dawn splash rather than anything aimed at him.

  19:20  Light of Dawn     ->  (AoE)
  19:21  Beacon of Virtue  ->  yourself
  19:22  Divine Protection ->  yourself
  19:23  Hex Lord's Doom   ->  (trinket)
  19:24  Holy Shock        ->  Doryhunky (the tank)

Four and a half seconds is a long window. Nothing targeted went to the man dying in it.

**The honest version of this finding:** you are the second-most-damaged player in the group, so self-healing is usually correct, and the tank at 90,224 per second is a real claim on your attention. The narrow thing worth changing is **Holy Shock specifically** -- it is your only instant, it is the only tool that answers a 2.4-second burst, and in both deaths it went somewhere that was not going to die. Everything else in those timelines is defensible.

**And it was not only you.** Both players pressed **no personal defensive** in their own death windows. A 897k burst in 2.4 seconds on an Elemental Shaman who used nothing is not a heal that was available to be cast.

You generated 817 Holy Power and lost **165 of it to overcap** -- 20%. Overcap means the resource was generated while you were already at the cap, so it evaporated: the generator was pressed but paid nothing.

This is the largest pure-throughput leak on the sheet and it is not a reaction-time problem, it is a sequencing one. It was 19% in Ruby Life Pools too, so it is a habit rather than a bad key. Roughly forty extra Holy Power spenders were available to you across these two runs and were not cast.

(Refused presses -- the ones the global cooldown ate -- are **not** part of this and are not a fault. They cost nothing. Only the generated-and-lost Holy Power is real.)

Hex Lord's Dooming Idol was pressed **13 times in this key and 12 in Ruby Life Pools**, at a median of **18 stacks**, and the ramp hit its 30-stack cap and wiped unspent **zero times in either key**.

That is the whole game with this trinket. It is throughput-linear -- each stack is worth 39 Intellect for 30 seconds no matter when you cash it, so pressing at 18 stacks and pressing at 30 average out to the same +195 Intellect. Stack count at press is a shape dial, not a throughput dial. The **only** way to actually lose value is to let the ramp touch 30, where the whole pile is destroyed and re-ramps from one.

Zero resets means zero loss. For comparison, the three keys on 2026-08-21 -- same trinket, before the stack bar existed -- captured 38%, 63% and 8% of what was available, and one Altar key reset at cap five times with three of its four presses cashing a single stack.

The TollPips stack bar added on 2026-08-22 is what changed, and these two keys are the evidence that it worked. Nothing to fix here; it is worth knowing because it means the Holy Power overcap in the previous section is now the *only* throughput leak left on the sheet.

A "worst window" is one of the twenty eight-second stretches in which the party took the most damage. `response` asks what share of the damage that landed in those windows you put back as healing.

You put back **46% of the 92,345,692** that landed in them. In Ruby Life Pools the same night you put back 50% and scored 88. The scale is absolute -- it is not a comparison against the other players -- so this is a real difference between the two keys, and the gap is roughly the two deaths: healing that arrives after someone is dead is not counted, and neither is healing aimed at the wrong person.

Fixing the Holy Shock habit in the section above is the same fix as raising this number. They are the same behaviour measured two ways.

For context rather than blame -- none of this is scored against you.

• **Interrupts: 84 of 95 stoppable casts stopped, 88%.** Strong. Envenom got through 8 times of 44 and Mass Envenom twice of 15.
• **Envenom left up seven times, 53 seconds in total.** This is the dispel that mattered; it is a sustained damage debuff and every second of it is damage you then have to heal.
• Both deaths were on trash, not bosses, and 77% of the party's damage was taken on trash. Pull 9 -- the 65-enemy pull at 17:55 -- ran 5:28 and took 97.7M by itself.

The "dispellable debuffs left up" line reads:

  Paralyzing Shots   1x left up,   10s total,   8,181,300 damage

That 8,181,300 is **not** what the ten-second leak cost. It is Paralyzing Shots' total damage across the entire key, to every player who ever had a counted instance of it. Verified by summing the per-player intake: 3,659,553 (you) + 3,213,752 (Ele Shaman) + 1,093,920 (Unholy DK) + 214,075 (Arcane Mage) = 8,181,300 exactly.

The same inflation applies to the summary line "14,698,097 damage came from the ones left up". Both figures come from `derive.py`'s `hurt[name]`, which sums a spell's whole-key damage rather than the damage inside the windows it was actually left up.

The real cost of that one leak is roughly ten seconds of ticks on one player -- on the order of a million, not eight. The dispel *grade* is unaffected; only these two damage figures are wrong.