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This was a world 54, US 16.
Against seemingly impossible odds, we somehow killed a dragon. It wasn't actually a dragon, though - it was more like small pieces of a dragon that were each individualized versions of the original Patchwerk DPS check if the Patchwerk DPS check needed to be met in greens and was a scan of your raid makeup that wiped you immediately if you didn't have a certain color quota of yellow and blue in your raid window.
Now that the tier is essentially over, I can finally say how much I didn't like it, and I think I speak for many of us here. Spine is a good example of a boss fight that shows a disconnect between how a fight is designed and the community that wants to do something crazy like try to kill it. The fact that the DPS window only lasted 23 seconds and came up every 90-120 seconds somehow got past QC strongly suggests that they were killed by their coworkers for bravely standing up against the notion that this fight concept might make it to live.
If the purpose of Spine was intentionally to present a hopeless brick wall to every guild that reached it without poaching (or crafting, from their own tears) mages and rogues in obscene numbers, then it accomplished its purpose admirably. But if it was intended to provide a difficult but passable challenge to all guilds that required them to bring their best players - not their best alts - then it's the greatest failure of encounter design since Pac-Man.
I also really appreciated, on a personal level, needing to make sure I brought the same raid stacked to hell with mages and rogues night after night, hoping that one critical absence of an alt that previously nobody wanted to play did not completely halt our progress for the week. It was only at the borderline-insane persistence of our raiding core with near-100% attendance that we managed to bring this thing down. It's always a great feeling to have a raiding core of 35 people and sit a third of them on the bench for three weeks in favor of alts in Raid Finder gear.
But hey, at least we're getting Pandas.
