DREAMBREATH

Nek'zali the Soulcoiler

The Venomous Abyss. Where the damage lands and what these runs pressed against it, stage by stage.

How to heal it

Three stages that run once each rather than cycling, so every cooldown has exactly one obvious home. The intermission in the middle is the shortest of the three.

The first thing worth planning against lands 35s in, inside Stage One: Soulcoiler Initiation. Empowers and Stasis both want lead time, so a ramp that starts when you see a health bar move is already late. Begin it around 15s, roughly 20 seconds out, and let it land into the spike rather than after it. The heaviest window comes later, in Stage Two: Uncoiling, at 4m 5s. That is where a saved cooldown is worth the most.

Most of what reaches the group here comes from Soulcoil Rite, Possession Barrage and Corpse Blight, and those are totals for everybody who is not the tank, so they are what the raid took rather than a number you have to heal on your own.

All of this comes from 301 logged normal runs, every one of them a kill, because the board these came from holds no wipes. Read the timings as the shape of the fight rather than as settled numbers: they will move as the raid goes on farm.

The stages that spike

Each stage of Nek'zali the Soulcoiler, how long it runs and where its heaviest five seconds fall.
StageRunsMedian lengthWorst momentTaken in those five seconds
Stage One: Soulcoiler Initiation3011m 51s35s13,239,273
Intermission: Ritual of Awakening3001m 13s2m 6s5,518,651
Stage Two: Uncoiling3001m 35s4m 5s13,404,057
Log-verifiedn=301 runs
Nek'zali the Soulcoiler on normal runs 3 stages, and the worst moment of each falls at 35s, 2m 6s, 4m 5s into the fight.
The worst moment is the middle of the heaviest five seconds of damage that did not land on a tank, measured from the pull.
First week of the season, so gear is low and every timing here moves as it rises.Every run is a kill. The leaderboard holds no wipes, so nothing here shows what going wrong looks like.

What the ramp looks like

Taken from what these runs cast in the thirty seconds before the heaviest damage of each stage. Procs are left out, because a proc is not a decision: Twin Flame fires when Essence Burst is consumed, and Merithra's Blessing is a passive that upgrades your next Reversion.

Stage One: Soulcoiler Initiation

Press Echo about 5 times, Emerald Blossom about 5 times, Temporal Anomaly about 3 times, Dream Breath about 2 times and Fire Breath about 2 times inside that window, across 299 runs.

No two runs cast the same full sequence, so there is no single opener to copy. What repeats is which cast follows which:

  • Echo into Echo, in 84% (251 of 299) of the runs
  • Emerald Blossom into Echo, in 79% (236 of 299) of the runs
  • Emerald Blossom into Emerald Blossom, in 75% (225 of 299) of the runs
  • Temporal Anomaly into Echo, in 64% (192 of 299) of the runs
  • Dream Breath into Temporal Anomaly, in 64% (191 of 299) of the runs
  • Fire Breath into Emerald Blossom, in 60% (180 of 299) of the runs

299 runs with ramp casts · a typical ramp is 5 abilities

No ability reliably goes first here. The most common opener was Emerald Blossom, in 79 of 299 runs. Treat this as a set to get out, not an order.

Ramp abilities for Stage One: Soulcoiler Initiation, by how often each appeared and opened.
AbilityAppeared inOpened the rampTypical position
Emerald Blossom98% (294 of 299)79 of 2992
Temporal Anomaly99% (297 of 299)68 of 2993
Echo98% (294 of 299)51 of 2993
Dream Breath94% (282 of 299)33 of 2994

Intermission: Ritual of Awakening

Press Echo about 4 times, Emerald Blossom about 4 times, Temporal Anomaly about 2 times, Fire Breath about 2 times and Dream Breath about 2 times inside that window, across 298 runs.

No two runs cast the same full sequence, so there is no single opener to copy. What repeats is which cast follows which:

  • Echo into Echo, in 81% (241 of 298) of the runs
  • Emerald Blossom into Echo, in 71% (212 of 298) of the runs
  • Emerald Blossom into Emerald Blossom, in 65% (195 of 298) of the runs

298 runs with ramp casts · a typical ramp is 5 abilities

No ability reliably goes first here. The most common opener was Emerald Blossom, in 89 of 298 runs. Treat this as a set to get out, not an order.

Ramp abilities for Intermission: Ritual of Awakening, by how often each appeared and opened.
AbilityAppeared inOpened the rampTypical position
Emerald Blossom97% (288 of 298)89 of 2982
Echo96% (287 of 298)87 of 2982
Temporal Anomaly99% (295 of 298)62 of 2983
Dream Breath91% (270 of 298)29 of 2984

Stage Two: Uncoiling

Press Echo about 5 times, Emerald Blossom about 4 times, Temporal Anomaly about 2 times, Dream Breath about 2 times and Fire Breath about 2 times inside that window, across 298 runs.

No two runs cast the same full sequence, so there is no single opener to copy. What repeats is which cast follows which:

  • Echo into Echo, in 81% (241 of 298) of the runs
  • Emerald Blossom into Echo, in 74% (221 of 298) of the runs
  • Emerald Blossom into Emerald Blossom, in 67% (201 of 298) of the runs
  • Temporal Anomaly into Echo, in 61% (181 of 298) of the runs

298 runs with ramp casts · a typical ramp is 6 abilities

No ability reliably goes first here. The most common opener was Emerald Blossom, in 85 of 298 runs. Treat this as a set to get out, not an order.

Ramp abilities for Stage Two: Uncoiling, by how often each appeared and opened.
AbilityAppeared inOpened the rampTypical position
Echo98% (292 of 298)79 of 2982
Emerald Blossom97% (290 of 298)85 of 2982
Temporal Anomaly100% (297 of 298)68 of 2983
Dream Breath97% (289 of 298)31 of 2984

Stasis

Held time is how long the charges sat banked before release. A long hold means Stasis was filled during downtime and spent later; a short one means it was filled and released inside the same window, which is a different tool.

Log-verifiedn=317 runs with Stasis recorded
Into Stage One: Soulcoiler Initiation, Stasis was banked with Dream Breath + Dream Breath + Temporal Anomaly and held 19s.
Log-verifiedn=140 runs with Stasis recorded
Into Intermission: Ritual of Awakening, Stasis was banked with Dream Breath + Temporal Anomaly + Emerald Blossom and held 23s.
Log-verifiedn=244 runs with Stasis recorded
Into Stage Two: Uncoiling, Stasis was banked with Dream Breath + Temporal Anomaly + Emerald Blossom and held 12s.

What they were playing

The loadout most of these runs shared. A real build somebody imported rather than an average: a build assembled from per-talent take rates can overspend the point budget or take both halves of a choice node, which is not a build anybody can play. The full spread by key level lives on the talents page.

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Class

2/22/22/22/22/2

Preservation

2/22/22/22/22/24/4

Hero · Flameshaper

Flameshaper

What is doing the damage

Per stage, the abilities that hit somebody other than a tank hardest, totalled across the whole stage and averaged per run. These are stage totals, so they are much larger than the five second figure in the table above and the two do not compare.

A raid total is not a healing requirement and neither is this. It is what the group took, with most of a tank's share deliberately left out.

Stage One: Soulcoiler Initiation

  • Soulcoil Rite, 45,985,906
  • Possession Barrage, 19,768,005
  • Corpse Blight, 3,238,383
  • Essence Rend, 2,754,366

Intermission: Ritual of Awakening

  • Slithering Flame, 8,999,051
  • Soulcoil Rite, 4,179,471
  • Hungering Pyre, 4,140,758
  • Latent Cultist, 3,060,314

Stage Two: Uncoiling

  • Possession Barrage, 19,694,714
  • Soulcoil Rite, 9,928,843
  • Uncoiling, 8,641,550
  • Corpse Blight, 6,845,645

Other bosses

How these numbers were measured

Runs come from Warcraft Logs. Preservation Evoker only, The Venomous Abyss only.

6242 logged runs across 9 bosses, cut into 22454 phase segments. Every one is a kill, because the ranking board these came from holds nothing else, so nothing here describes a fight going wrong.

Runs whose event stream was cut short are excluded, because their totals would be low by an amount nobody can measure. None have hit that yet.

An ability is called part of the ramp only if it appears in at least 60 percent of the runs with ramp casts for that pull. One player's habit on one key does not reach the page.

Casts are only collected from the 30 seconds before a damage spike. That is a setting, not a finding, so nothing here can tell you whether a ramp starts earlier than that. Where you see a window, it is the window we looked in.

Ramps are worked out one run at a time and then compared, rather than by taking each ability's average timing separately. Doing it the second way produced ramps of six casts inside four seconds, which is faster than the game allows anyone to press buttons.

Damage figures are the whole party added together. Nothing here records who took the damage, and most autoattack damage lands on the tank. Use these numbers to compare one pull against another. They are not an amount you have to heal.