REVISED: Heroic Madness of Deathwing Hunter Tips for 5.0.4

With one raiding week left, Blizzard has made Heroic Madness much easier.  Previous to 5.0.4 it wasn't a cake-walk but it was one of the easiest fights.  Immediately after 5.0.4 it was almost impossible for some 10man raid makeups because of bugs.

It's not clear if they fixed all the bugs or if they just nerfed around the edges.  The bloods start out as normal moving mobs and appear to be slow-able still; It isn't clear if they made everyone's slows work again.  Pet pathing issues are fixed as far as I'm concerned; I didn't have my pet run out of range and dismiss himself on almost every platform.

There are many bugged issues with the current Heroic Madness of Deathwing encounter.  Slowing the bloods still may or may not be a bugged encounter issue.  There were always reports of some slows still working.  We used everything that we could.  Because nobody ever got failure messages in previous bugged attempts we have no idea which -- possibly all -- worked.  We can hope that it gets fixed soon if it isn't already.

I used a completely new talent and glyph setup just for this fight.  I expect that phrase will become cliche in MoP.  We had way more DPS than we needed for the fight, so pulling back on some was an easy choice.  Everything about the spec is to defeat the bloods that heal Deathwing ASAP:

1. Glyph of No Escape and Ice Trap - not sure if the traps slowed them but it's the obvious choice.
2. Binding Shot Talent - also not sure if it worked or not, but I always shot it.  I finally got an immune message on this.
3. Thrill of the Hunt Talent - totally can change your rotation but excellent for more multi-shots.
4. Lynx Rush Talent - great for bloods if you don't have focus available.

EDITED TO ADD: At this point it's not worth really taking #3 and #4.  It can help, but with #3, SV is contending with the 5.0.4 bug that has the instantaneous damage from multishot's serpent spread serpent stings not being applied.  Lynx Rush can help with a little bit and really aMoCs isn't really useful on this fight.  But now the bloods move reasonably slow so you can steady/cobra between multi-shots anyway.

Add to that list these standards:

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera Talent - I disengage on this fight a surprising amount.  I don't recommend it -- and I probably could argue myself out of doing it.  Except I'd still do it.  But you don't take this talent for the disengage.  Use it for deterrence when you get infected with a blood or when you get targeted with shrapnel - the Dream was bugged last Thursday.
2. Aspect of the Iron Hawk Talent - The standard PvE talent if there was one.
3. Glyph of Deterrence - 50% damage reduction is a nice thing when you're infected with the blood.  You have to pop deterrence on the last platform if you get infected and if you've got your cancel aura set up then you should pop it every time you get infected.  It's only a couple seconds of downtime and takes a lot of sweat off the healers.

You do a surprising amount of standing around doing nothing on Deathwing's platform between each 5% round.

It feels quite rewarding to have finished a tier - albeit terribly nerfed - within that tier.  I suppose not being able to use Dream for Corruption tanking and Shrapnel -- and having incredibly difficult to slow bloods -- compensated for that nerf.  We never had DPS or healing issues.  It would have been more interesting to have those challenges. ;-)

EDITED TO ADD: It still feels rewarding to kill heroic madness.  Some of it is that I've only done it four times so far.  Some of it is that we're cycling in more and more new people for the kills.  And we're challenging ourselves to do it in different rainbow orders to help some other people get more achievements.