The Blinding Vale

Both of Hyporock's deaths were Belch Spores from a Sporeblight Belcher — at 7:14 and again at 13:08. The obvious read is a missed kick, and it is wrong.

Belch Spores is a 1.5-second hard cast, so it looks kickable, but it has no `SpellCategories` row in the client data at all and therefore no silence-prevention type. Across the whole 75-key archive it has been cast eight times and stopped zero times. So has Spouting Floret, the Belcher's other ability — and Spouting Floret was Hyporock's single largest damage source in the key at 5,410,797 over 35 hits, 13% of everything he took. Add Belch Spores' 2,097,814 and one mob type accounts for 18% of his intake.

The shape of the ability matters for what to do instead. The 3-second aura sits on the Belcher, not on you: it belches around itself for roughly 500k a hit, and it hit one or two people at a time rather than the party. Four of its eight casts did no damage to anyone. This is a positional ability answered by not being there, or by having something up when you are.

At 7:08, five seconds before the belch landed, Hyporock cast Blessing of Protection on himself — and then took 535,871 twice straight through it, because Belch Spores is Nature damage and Blessing of Protection is physical immunity only.

That reads like the wrong button, and it is not. All four Blessings of Protection in the key land 8 to 14 seconds into a pull (0:19 into a pull starting 0:11; 7:08 into 6:54; 12:33 into 12:25; 19:58 into 19:48). It is a pull-opener against picking up early aggro, cast on a timer rather than in reaction, and the belch landing five seconds later is coincidence. It cost nothing either: the Forbearance it applies never blocked anything, because Divine Shield was independently on cooldown at both deaths and Lay on Hands with it.

What was available was Divine Protection — 20% against all schools including Nature, on a measured 64-second cooldown. It was up for roughly 50 seconds before the first death and 2 minutes 16 before the second, and was pressed at neither. The second death is the softer one and makes the point: 2,570,124 over 13.6 seconds with no defensive at all. That is a long ramp, not a one-shot.

There is a mechanical reason Divine Protection went unpressed, and it is worth more than the advice.

Divine Protection is spell 498 in Holy and 403876 in Retribution — verified from Hyporock's own casts, 42 and 46 casts of 498 across two Holy keys against 11 casts of 403876 here, with no overlap. His TollPips panic board named only 498. The addon resolves a spec-specific spell id upward to its base, but never from a base down to this spec's override, so in Retribution the entry resolved to nothing and was hidden with "spell not known".

So the on-screen prompt for the exact button this analysis is about has never once appeared in a Retribution key. It has been fixed, along with the threshold it fires at: 65% health fired 25 separate times in this key with a median visible time of 1.1 seconds, which is a strobe rather than a warning. 55% fires 14 times, stays up longest of any threshold tested, and would have appeared 5.3 and 13.4 seconds before the two deaths.

Pull 7 at 12:25 is the expensive one: 3:56 of fighting, 18 enemies, four deaths, 46,316,847 taken, and a wipe. It also held 34 of the key's 119 reachable interrupt opportunities and stopped 10 of them.

Group-wide the corrected conversion is 63 of 119 reachable stops, 53%, and the leaks are concentrated in two genuinely kickable spells: Light Bolt at 38 of 76 leaked and Seed Shot at 27 of 35. Those are where coverage went, not the Belcher. Frost Mage contributed 2 stops against 8 expected; Hyporock 24, Guardian Druid 19, Havoc DH 18.

On dispels, 33 of 60 damaging debuffs were removed and 13,032,795 came through the ones left up — Toxic Spew twelve times for 6,240,373, Spore Spines seven times for 3,504,566, Bloodthorn Roots eight times for 3,287,856. Holy Priest's dispel axis still scores 87, because it is measured against what one dispeller could physically reach rather than the raw count; the damage is real even where the grade says nobody could have got to it.

One thing that looks alarming and is not: 23,404,157 of the party's damage was eaten by shields on the enemies. That is 2.5% of what they swung for, which is the archive's norm.

This record's interrupt figures were recomputed on 2026-09-07 and do not match what the same key said earlier the same night.

The tool had been treating `SpellInterrupts.InterruptFlags & 0x1` as the bit that says a cast can be kicked. It is the movement bit, and it is set on nearly every mob cast in the game, so it separated nothing — 257 casts went into the denominator where 143 belong. The party line read 65 of 262 stopped, 25%. It now reads 63 of 119 reachable, 53%, and the leaked-cast board went from 35 spells to 5.

Individual letters barely moved, because the per-player axis scores a share of the credit rather than the conversion — Hyporock is B 79 either way. What moved is every party-level interrupt statement, and the identity of the mob the tool blamed.

The error was caught because the player said the mob was not kickable and was right. Other records on this site graded before 2026-09-07 still carry the inflated denominator; a column read down this archive is partly a trend in the tool.