OK so. What's up forums.

My guild (And its excellent name) are currently attempting to make the transition from 2 karazhan groups to 1 coherent 25 man raid. Starting with gruul of course. After aggressive recruiting we pulled together enough healing to run the 25 man, killed high king, and stepped up to Gruul, who is not serious business but is in fact, serious business.

Our last raid with:

3 holy paladins
2 Resto Druids
2 holy priests
1 Prot paladin
1 Balance Druid
2 Feral Druids

As a cap of all available people who could heal. This -felt-like enough potential healing but we didn't have these people healing at the same time. It worked very well for high king, who went down well on our guild's first kill last week but we had trouble keeping Gruul up through his increasing growths.

This is our MT. I -think- his level of gear is approrpiate for Gruul-level antics.
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...=Ursin&n=Acute

However, we had trouble sustaining him for a long time and he went down at about 50%, I want to say like 7-8 growths in.

My instincts as a raid leader say that there is some kind of issue with the healing there. Our guild's healers gearwise range to excellent- similar or better to our MT and range down to a mix of blues and scattered epics. Our problems are sustainability. So I ask you, yesiknowthatgruulisezmode:

How do you get people better at synergistic healing? (Other than, obviously, doing it)
A lot of our healers have little to no experience with super-high, super spiked DPS on the MT because of our progression in legacy raiding. I would love to experience it for myself but I do not have a 70 healing.

What is the role of healing rotations in the modern raiding environment? I personally am familiar with the idea but I'm not aware of how to transfer it to a 25 man, or if the concept is even used. I see a lot of priest theorycraft assuming a lot more time in the FSR than i notice our priests and other healers sustaining and I feel like our guild's healers as a whole are missing something.

This may or may not be of importance for Gruul (Who I expect to kill tommorow :D) but I want to get some information rolling for my healers as we move into 25 man content with a greater degree of difficulty.

What do your healers do to coordinate?

50% and you are at 7 growth?

I think you also need to improve your DPSes.

If they can kill him in 14, who cares. He's still dead. Their DPS isn't going to keep their tank alive at 7 growths though - seems like you need to make people buckle down on healing assignments as I said above, and make sure that your DPS are not taking stupid amounts of shatter damage. 1k-3k dmg from a shatter is acceptable, but anything over that and people are just running on top of each other.

For people just getting to Gruul, that's on pace for a 14 growth 1st kill - very appropriate in my opinion.

Nice profile, btw. Neither Lazercanon nor iazercanon exist in NA or Europe.

anyway

I consider myself a good player and I found (As our token MS warrior) that shatter was pretty trivial to not dodge but at least keep from shitcanning 5 people with. I am just interested from healers what kinds of strategies are used outside of normal 5 man healing to do with this crap. Specifics and what-not. What kinds of healing classes work well together?

Malan, do you ever find there are fights where you use an EQ-style rotation? I just want to know what i'm going up against later on.

Agreed, I would not expect guilds to be doing it faster than than on their first kill. TDA just got our first Gruul kill, and it was after 15 grows - a messy affair, with the Hurtful tank being splattered just before the end, but we got the loot.

Our healer lineup was 6 paladins (what can I say? they all turned up that day) and 2 druids. We'd been running with 7 healers for most of the attempts that day, but then one DPS'er had to leave and the only sub available was another (!) pallie.

Idealy have your holy paladins on MT full time (be careful of silences though when exceed 10 growths especially if your MT is not that well geared)

I've noticed you don't have any shaman at all in your setup.
Shamans are gods when it comes to healing multiple people (Melee that take collasping roof damage, chain heal will help heal the OT/MT too depending on the situation)

As far as a solid setup goes for your make up
3 Holy Paladins on the MT
2 Holy Priests Prayer Of Mending OT/Heal OT
2 Resto Druids Spot HoT'ing/ Healing OT

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As far as further content goes we usually have all of our pallies on MT roles, rarely bring resto druids (Most active left, other is positioned in South Korea), our shaman usually heal Melee, and Priests sort of watch everyone while keeping Prayer of Mendings/Shields going.

Earth shield is also very nice, Get some shaman :P

EDIT: Regarding EQ-Style Rotations, 4/6 SSC 1/4 TK and have yet to have really seen the need for any kind of healing rotations, bring Shadow priests

I would consider an ideal Gruul healing breakdown for a guild starting on Gruul to be two paladins and one priest on the main tank with a druid splitting time HoTing the main and offtank. While the damage is certainly containable with 2-3 healers, the vast majority of learning wipes for us used to be sudden tank deaths and I don't imagine it's really much different now. It's a shame you don't have a shaman in there for raid healing though, they are simply excellent at topping off shatter and the occasional cave-in.

These days for learning you might as well go fairly healer heavy with your available people and stick the hybrids in actual hybrid gear or have them dps until eight grows or so and then patch heal with whatever they have. That's a ton of available healing power you have there though, it seems mostly that you just need to work on the logistics of who is responsible for what. Plus, it does take a bit for people to get used to the slowly ramping yet spiky damage and not get lulled to sleep during the first half-dozen grows.

Our first non-bugged Gruul kill was done with five healers, and an MT with similar gear to yours. Two paladins and a priest were on the MT, a priest was on the OT, and a tree druid was on the raid. Damage dealers were instructed not to waste time bandaging if they were lag free, since they would have enough time to move out of cave ins without taking damage and could be topped off by the druid before the next ground slam. This was to keep DPS high since we knew we had trouble keeping the MT alive past 12 grows or so.

If you want to look at our WWS's "who heals whom" page the kill is posted at the following URL. Healers were Ward (OT priest), Wicklepeasel (MT priest), Gian (me, tree druid), Marinated (MT paladin), and Sansul (MT paladin). MT was Prayes and OT was Rideingbeard. Slimjimm was on intervene duty so Prayes didn't die during the silences. You'll notice that Prayes did die at the end, and this was because Slimjimm thought it would be funny to keep executing instead of intervening on the last silence (and it was kind of funny but only because we killed the boss). You can see that people are mostly staying on their healing assignments and this helps a lot. As I am always the only healer assigned to the raid, I can tell when other healers are starting to spot heal excessively and it usually does not end well for the MT.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~gian/STA...20070329-1846/

As an aside, your tank can begin to drink ironshield potions at later stages of growth (assuming he isn't already).

Is having a feral druid eat HS a good idea? it seemed intuitively obvious to me.

This is all really helpful.

It really depends (sort of)

If your druid has more hit points and pretty high armor (25k+) then hands down yeah.

When we were first doing Gruul I was mainly OT'ing because I could generate a hell of a lot more threat than another warrior could in the OT position, Melee was having to hold back (Hell I was having to hold back with Salv on in cat).

If there is no threat issue with the OT then whatever really