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First, saying something like "I can't recall any fight requiring TWO of a single class!" Please. That's ridiculous. If you can't field two or three of a given class reliably (and three Priests, given that Holy and Shadow are both valuable raid specs), your roster is incomplete and that's a "you" problem.
Our first kill came with five Priests because five happened to be available that night and it made sense to bring as many as possible. On subsequent kills we changed our positioning to make our strategy 100% comfortable with three Priests, which is totally reasonable any given night. An important realization to make is that Encapsulate is unlikely to kill anyone quickly provided they're topped off; at 3500 per tick it should take a minimum of three ticks to kill anyone from full health, and honestly who can't get 20ish yards away from an Encapsulated guy by the time it ticks three times? Add onto that Arcane Pots/Health Pots/Healthstones/outside heals, and it should really be impossible barring a disconnect or massive player error to die from an Encapsulate, even if you're stacked right on top of the victim when he's targetted by Felmyst.
Keeping that in mind, our new strategy just stacks the raid up in several clusters positioned to keep everyone in healing range of everyone else at all times, with at least 20 yards of space around every cluster so the Encapsulate damage won't go outside of that group. Stacking up like that absolutely increases the damage you take from Encapsulate over a more spread-out strategy, but with the following two enormous advantages:
1) Chain Heal/CoH are able to be extremely efficient and effective, keeping everyone above 90% health at all times. When learning the fight deaths were very common among people sitting near 50% health, and very rare among people who were about topped off.
2) You will never miss a Mass Dispel for range/positioning concerns. It is possible for a Gas Nova to resist dispel, but this is rare and the victim can be single-dispelled in short order.
Between these two advantages the fight feels a lot more controllable, and three Priests is as many as you'll ever need.
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