Altar of Fangs

Zul'jan puts a stacking buff on himself called Fang Empowered. It is his own buff, not a debuff on you, and it is the clearest difference between the pull that wiped you and the pull that killed him.

  attempt      Fang Empowered up      peak stacks    deaths
  wipe         7.8s                   3              5
  kill         1.8s                   2              0

On the wipe it went up at 09:09:45, climbed to three stacks by 09:09:51, and was still up when the group died. On the kill it reached two stacks and was gone 1.8 seconds after it landed. Four of the five deaths list Fang Empowered damage, and in three of them it is the single largest thing that hit the player.

What the log does not say is what feeds the stacks or what sheds them — the combat log records the buff going up and coming down and not the mechanic behind it. That is the one thing worth finding out before the next Altar key, because your own second attempt shows the group can hold it to two seconds.

You died first, at 26:41. Three of the four others were dead by 26:45, and the tank held alone for another seventeen seconds before Chop Down finished him at 27:02.

Your death is the one with time in it. You took 1,020,610 across 14.1 seconds — that is a grind, not a spike, and it is long enough to have acted in. Prot Paladin put 375,960 back into you during it. The only defensive on your side of that window was Shield of the Righteous. Once you were gone, the party had 4 seconds of life left.

The three deaths that follow yours are not separable from it. Demo Lock pressed nothing at all; Arms Warrior pressed three things and still took 1,454,479 from Fang Empowered alone. That is what a healerless four seconds looks like, and it is why your death is the expensive one even though the grade only charges you 5.8 points for it.

Outside it: the pull had nothing to interrupt — the tool checked, and no cast on that pull was stoppable, so no amount of kicking changes the wipe. Your first death at 8:35 is close to the same story: Rav'i's Regurgitate took 636,312 of an 819,359 hit inside 1.8 seconds, and no one healed you because you are the one who heals. Three of the four party-wide spells that did the most damage all key — Unstable Totem, Laced Edge, Rattle, 27M, 20M and 19M — landed on all five of you, which the grader deliberately charges to nobody, because a puddle everyone stood in and unavoidable raid damage look identical in a log.

Not outside it: both of your deaths had a defensive left unpressed, and the 26:41 one had fourteen seconds of warning. That is the only thing on this key that was yours and that would have changed the result.

Translating the three that carry most of the grade:

• Throughput 82 — of the 259,011,703 damage that needed a heal from somebody other than the player taking it, you covered 80%. The scale expects about 73% at this level.
• Response 94 — the tool finds the party's worst eight-second windows, the 91,799,689 that landed when the group was under real pressure, and asks how much of it you put back. You put back half. That is the highest response score on any Altar key you have.
• Dispel 100 — 25 dispellable debuffs landed and you removed 21. The other four overlapped something you were already cleansing, so one dispeller could not have reached them; you took everything that was actually gettable.

Against the +12 you timed the same morning, those three read 66, 54 and 81. Same character, same dungeon, ninety minutes apart.