Temple of Sethraliss

Reconstructed from this log, not from a guide.

Merektha's burrow phase opens by stamping a debuff called Burrowquake on everybody standing in the area. At 11:25 that was all five players; at 12:47 all five again; at 13:12 it was Hyporock alone, because he was the only one who had just been resurrected into it. Burrowquake itself is minor. It ticked on him for four seconds while he sat between 91% and 99% health.

Burrowquake is not the damage. It is the timer. Roughly four seconds after it lands, the boss erupts under one player, and that eruption is Burrow:

  11:25   Burrowquake on all 5      ->  Burrow hit nobody
  12:47   Burrowquake on all 5      ->  Burrow hit Hyporock, 735,053, dead
  13:12   Burrowquake on Hyporock   ->  Burrow hit Hyporock, 671,768, dead

Two Burrow hits in the entire key. Both on the same player. The base damage was identical both times, 775,082, so the second was smaller on the meter only because Arcane Mage's Protective Toadstools absorbed 41,234 of it.

One detail decides which button is the answer: Burrow is Nature damage (school 8). Blessing of Protection only stops physical damage, so it does nothing here. Divine Shield does, and it was available for both deaths. The last time it was pressed in this key was 0:26, twelve minutes before the first death, against a measured 206-second recharge.

• Throughput 100. What that means: of the 138,125,765 damage that actually needed an outside heal (the party's intake, minus what they self-healed, minus overkill), he covered 88%. The scale expects 73%. That is the top of the band and the only 100 he has posted on that axis in six keys.
• Dispel 95: 24 of the 25 debuffs one dispeller could physically have reached. Cleanse recharges in 7.7 seconds, so "reachable" already allows for two debuffs landing at once.
• Mechanics 94, the only sub-100 of his night. The single charge is Spark Step, which he took 5 times where the comparable player took 1, worth 584,434. Real, but it is 1.5% of what he took.

He took 38,427,279 damage, more than any damage dealer in the group including the melee. That reads alarming and mostly is not. Blessing of Dawn deliberately redirects a share of the party's damage onto him, and a mechanics score of 94 says almost none of his intake was damage a comparable player avoided. Do not chase this number.

Hyporock's utility axis was his lowest in all four keys tonight (67 here, 58 in Blinding Vale, 75 and 78 in the two Nalorakk keys) and it should not be acted on. Here is what the denominator is made of.

The axis divides utility used by "presses the kit offered", and it prices every button by how often its cooldown came back. Over roughly 27 minutes alive that gives:

  Hammer of Justice       34.2s recharge   ~48 presses "offered"
  Blinding Light          87.2s            ~19
  Blessing of Sacrifice  136.9s            ~12
  Aura Mastery           186.9s             ~9
  Blessing of Protection 304.1s             ~5

Crowd control is in the numerator at all only because Holy Paladin has no interrupt, which is a fair rule. But it means about 70% of the presses "offered" are a single-target stun and a short-range blind, priced as though they should be pressed on cooldown for a whole dungeon. They should not be.

This is the same failure the project already caught and reverted once, with Blessing of Freedom: a situational button cannot be priced by availability. Worth noting alongside it, Lay on Hands is not in the externals list at all, so the three times he pressed it counted for nothing.

Read the dispel line and the externals he actually used. Do not read the number.

A- (86.0), no deaths, mechanics full.

The one axis with something in it is interrupts, at 69, his lowest of the night. He landed 21 kicks and 6 other stops, 27 in total, against the 34 that his position and uptime predict for a tank who is in every pack from the first second. The group stopped 85 of 107, or 79%, and leaked Lightning Bolt 11 times of 59 and Venom Bolt 11 of 26.

Two caveats before anyone acts on the rest of his sheet. His mitigation score of 100 is not information: with the aura-parse bug fixed, every tank in this corpus now scores at or near 100 and the axis no longer separates anybody. And his utility score of 93 comes from one press out of about five offered, because for a Vengeance DH that axis prices exactly two buttons while all three sigils sit outside it as crowd control.

Of his seven axes, three are not currently measuring what their names suggest. What is left and is real: survival, mechanics, activity and interrupts. He is clean on the first three.

Grades on the night: A- 87.3, A- 86.6, B+ 83.7, A- 86.0. That is about as flat as this tool gets.

The damage axis was 44, 23, 35 and 46 — mean 37, and by a wide margin the lowest thing on his sheet. It is 12% of his grade and it is the only reason his letters are not higher. Here is why it should not be read as a fault.

The axis measures his damage as a share of the party average, on a band where 36% scores zero and 80% scores full marks. His shares tonight were 0.555, 0.461, 0.515, 0.564. That band was cut when this corpus was almost entirely him in +2 to +9 keys, where his own median share was 0.670, and it has not been re-cut since.

What actually changed is the denominator, not him:

                          his dps   share   implied party avg
  18-19 Aug, ilvl ~283     74,507   0.678         112,344
  28 Aug, ilvl ~311       100,415   0.535         193,075

His own output is up 35%. The damage dealers around him are up 72%. A tank's damage scales with his gear; a damage dealer's scales with gear and with bigger pulls and longer fights at higher keys. The share had to fall.

The control that settles it, across all 46 archived keys, at +11 and above:

  Doryhunky      Veng DH         median share 0.552   (n=14)
  A Prot Paladin      Prot Paladin                 0.554
  A Fury Warrior           Prot Warrior                 0.554
  A Blood DK   Blood DK                     0.761
  A Blood DK     Blood DK                     0.760

The two non-Death-Knight tanks land on his number to three decimals. The two Blood DKs are twenty points clear of all three. That is four tank-keys of control, so it is suggestive rather than settled, and each of those keys was a different group — but it points at spec and content, not at effort.

What is real on his sheet is interrupts: 79, 83, 80, 69, mean 78. He is the single largest source of stops in every key of the night (22, 24, 33 and 21 kicks, plus crowd control), and the axis still reads slightly under the share his position and uptime predict, because a tank is in every pack from the first second. Temple of Sethraliss, at 69, is the one to look at.

87.9, 88.9, 87.0, 83.3. Two of those four are in his all-time top six of 46 archived keys, and the fourth is dragged down entirely by two deaths to a mechanic that kills outright.

The healing itself improved through the night:

                        covered   response   Holy Power wasted
  Nalorakk +12            73%        44%       108 of 707  (15%)
  Nalorakk +13            75%        46%        77 of 737  (10%)
  Blinding Vale +13       76%        46%       132 of 1003 (13%)
  Sethraliss +12          88%        47%       143 of 803  (18%)

"Covered" is the share of damage that genuinely needed an outside heal which he put back; the scale expects 73%. "Response" is the share he put back inside the party's worst eight-second windows, on a band running 18% to 54%. Both went up in every key. His response figure is strikingly stable — across all 46 keys it has sat between 36% and 60% regardless of dungeon or level, which says his output rises by a consistent amount when damage lands.

The one item that repeats, and it has been open since 20 August, is Divine Shield at death. Three deaths tonight, and the button was off cooldown for all three:

  Blinding Vale 20:19   1,735,135 over 10.4s   Divine Protection pressed, Divine Shield last used 8:26
  Sethraliss    12:51     735,053 in one hit   Divine Shield last used 0:26
  Sethraliss    13:14     671,768 in one hit   same

Fairness matters here, because the three are not the same shape. The two Sethraliss deaths were single hits larger than his health pool, with a four-second telegraph — surviving those needs the button pressed before the hit, not in reaction to it. The Blinding Vale death was collateral from a cone aimed at somebody else, though it did take 10.4 seconds and he pressed Divine Protection during it, so he knew he was in trouble and reached for the smaller of the two buttons.

So: one clear reactive miss, and two that needed pre-emption off a telegraph. That is a real pattern and it is the single highest-value change available to him, but it is not three of the same mistake.

Holy Power waste averaged 14% across the night and was worst in the last key, which is the ordinary shape of a tired fourth key.