Altar of Fangs

The clock read 29:44 against a 30:00 par - 16 seconds of daylight, the thinnest timed key in the archive.

Deaths in Mythic+ add time to the clock rather than taking it away from you directly, and at +13 each one is worth 15 seconds. Three deaths, 45 seconds. That is nearly three times the margin the key finished with.

The arithmetic is worth sitting with:

  0 deaths -> 28:59, a minute of room
  3 deaths -> 29:44, what actually happened
  4 deaths -> 29:59, one second
  5 deaths -> depleted

Everything else that could be criticised in this run - the leaked casts, the overcapped resource, the damage percentiles - moves the clock by a few seconds at most. The deaths moved it by 45. If only one number from this key survives, make it that one.

The measured half says no defensive was pressed on this death. That is true and it is misleading, in both directions.

At 19:27 into the key, Hyporock pressed Divine Shield. That is a real defensive and it worked. But Divine Shield leaves Forbearance behind - a 30-second debuff that blocks Divine Shield, Lay on Hands and Blessing of Protection from being used again. Twenty-seven seconds later, with Forbearance still on him, he died. The log shows it fading at the same instant he did.

So three of his four survival buttons were genuinely unavailable. He was not ignoring them; the game would not have let him press them. Arbiter cannot see this and reported it as a bare absence.

Divine Protection is the fourth, and Forbearance does not touch it. Through this key he was pressing it roughly every ninety seconds - eight times between 2:09 and 15:34. Then there is a gap of four minutes and forty-one seconds, and his death sits in the middle of it. He pressed it again forty-one seconds after the corpse hit the floor.

That is the finding. Not that you pressed nothing - you pressed the wrong one first and then held the only one you had left. A Divine Shield spent on a survivable moment costs you the next thirty seconds of Lay on Hands and Blessing of Protection, and this key is what that bill looks like.

The report names Envenom three separate times - as a leaked interrupt, as a dispellable debuff left up, and as the thing that killed Hyporock. Those are not all the same spell.

Spell 1289416 is the High Evolutionist's Envenom: a three-second cast, direct damage, interruptible. It was started 70 times and completed 33. The group stopped 26 of them - Veng DH 9, Arcane Mage 6, Hyporock 6, Shadow Priest 5. That is the one everyone was kicking.

Spell 1307571 is also called Envenom. It is a stacking poison that ticks. It landed 29 times, stacked up 9 more, and ticked 140 times over the key. Holy Paladin cleansed it 15 times and Hyporock cleansed 2 more.

Hyporock's killing blow was a tick of 1307571, five milliseconds before he died. In his final twelve seconds he took 18 ticks of the poison and 7 hits from the cast. The poison did the work.

This matters because the two have different fixes. More interrupts do not reduce the poison. Faster cleanses do not reduce the cast. Anybody reading that Envenom leaked 21 of 56 and resolving to kick harder next time is optimising the half that did not kill anyone.

Zul'jan's Axegrinder hit Arcane Mage for 1,319,972 against a health pool of 762,500 - the log records 557,472 of overkill, which is exactly the excess, so she was at full health when it landed.

There is no healing answer to a hit worth 173% of somebody's health. The report notes no healing landed in the window and no defensive was pressed, and both are true, but neither is the point: the point is that no amount of either would have mattered. Only not being there, or an immunity, changes this.

The telegraph was generous. The cast started at 26:06, completed at 26:09, and the damage did not land until 26:15 - just over nine seconds from the first warning to impact.

The same ability hit Hyporock ninety seconds later for 252,079, 299,126 and 281,179, with no overkill at all. So it is not uniformly lethal; something about where Arcane Mage was standing made her hit roughly four and a half times harder than the three that Hyporock ate and shrugged off.

Arcane Mage also did not press Ice Block at any point in the key. That is the button for exactly this, and with a nine-second telegraph it is a reaction there is time to make.

This key was uploaded to Warcraft Logs, which most are not, so for once the run can be compared against strangers doing the same dungeon at the same key level.

As a whole run the clear sits at the 91st percentile of 835,931 logged Altar of Fangs clears. That is a genuinely strong result and it is the number to be pleased about.

The per-player damage against other +13s is the opposite shape, and it is worth reading honestly rather than defensively. Veng DH, the tank, is at the 93rd percentile for his spec at this key level. The three damage dealers are at the 26th, 17th and 11th. Hyporock did 109% of the group's own median damage - which is why the graded damage axis reads 80 - but against other Retribution Paladins in +13s specifically, that same number is a 26th percentile.

Both are true and they are measuring different things. Within this party, the damage was fine. Against the wider population running this key level, this party is carried by its tank. Neither number is a verdict on its own; together they say the group is timing keys slightly above the level its damage would predict, which is a compliment to the routing and the survival and a standing invitation to press harder.

One caution on those percentiles: Warcraft Logs does not publish how many runs sit behind a same-key-level figure, so the sample under each is unknown and, for less common specs, can be small.