Personally i prefer that there's no spikes, or if there are then their impact is minimised. That means max hp possible and then work on extra dodge/parry/whatever it is you Tank people use.

The main problem with a spike i've found is the lack of heals incoming on the tank. I remember every time our tank dropped on Maulgar our lovely Canadian MT (God Bless) would read out his combat log so everyone knew that there wasn't a heal hitting him between those 3 or so hits which dropped him.

Clearly there's a certain degree of human error here, which i think has been addressed sufficiently in this topic already. You need to keep the tank topped off as best you can so if there is a spike then you've got heals incoming to match it.

What you want to remove first and foremost, as a tank, is the possibility that there will be a bigarse spike coming in which healers, even if there's a little human error, can handle. Get that HP high.

Now more HP means less mitigation which means more mana spent over the same amount of time. I'm fine with that. I will chug pots. Stick Shadowpriests in healer groups. Don't have many Shadowpriests? Bummer, they're awesome. If it can be managed with consumables/grouping then it shall be done. A lack of HP however cannot be managed in the same way - bad luck or human error will kill you, and that's not a chance i want to take.

Now admittedly our tank was poorly geared. He had good blues, but no KZ loot to speak of. As gear improves i would guess you can shift the balance more toward mitigation, since you should have already hit that sweet spot for your HP. But as a healer i'd rather heal something with 20k than 16k even if it's taking less damage. It's just that much easier to react to.

Sidenote to the OP: Was your tank all there when he stuck a Solid Star into the Goggles with a 6 stam socket bonus instead of an Enduring Talasite?
12 stam + 4 defense > 12 stam.
So if you're willing to spend a lot of extra gold resocketing, then that's the firs thing i'd do. Replace the hat Star with a Talasite, and then get more Stars in the other pieces of gear. You do want that extra stamina to make spikes less deadly.

Then I'll be waiting for your WWS parse.

As has been said, the organizing is key. Make sure everyone is on the same page about what they should be doing. Our raids benefit a lot when a certian officer is around because he has some organizational voodo that he can do that seems to help us over humps. Once you start hitting the serious growth range, it may be worth your mt's time to keep an eye on silences. I know we wiped a couple times where the tank just went from full to nothing in a silence. Getting more confortable with a given fight, so that it's not full of suprises, usually helps us a great deal as well.

Sure, a feral druid is great in that role. Our guild co-MT is a druid and we generally use him to do so.

I say it because of Chain Heal and honestly, for no other reason. CH is really potent though if used intelligently and that's reason enough.

Yes a Druid HS tank is definitely the way to go. They should find it ridiculously easy to shadow the MT threat in KTM (I'm pretty well geared in comparison to our raid and have to actively hold back for the first minute or so while the MT builds up). Ferals should have the HP/mitigation to soak up back-to-back HS's up to growth 13 or so, on top of dodging a good proportion of them. Moroes' trinket is awesome for this fight as a Druid "oh shit" button.
Allow your OT to use voice comms and get him to shout when the HS exceed the 50% of his available HP so that the healing team know they need to up their game.

If you have two Ferals then for learning the fight in fact make both of them off-tank as it gives you a little room for error in the final stages of the fight - if your MT dies you can usually use the 2 Ferals to get down that last chunk of his HP, in fact I think one of our early kills used a single Feral being spam-healed for the last 10%. Obviously all the DPS Warrs died fast along with the Rogues once evasion ran out

As a raidleader and MT for my guild I will give a few tips, I hope it helps.

First of all, about your MT. Armor is rather low, while Defence/Dodge is too high. I understand he wasn't particularly lucky with drops from Karazhan, so he might want to change a few of the gems to get higher Stamina to compensate for the lack of Armor. For this reason, make sure Priests spam him with lower rank Flash heals to get Inspiration often, even consider moving the balance druid in their group for this reason. Make sure his has Devotion Aura and an Imp around him. I also use a Shaman in my group and ask him to keep a WF totem until 8th growth and replace it with Agility one at that point.
MT group usually consists of Warlock-Shaman-Paladin-MT-OT.

About healing, 7 healers is a very good number. I ask generally to maximize the HoT on me, to reduce the spike damage. Pro-active or re-active healing? I vote for a mix, Paladins usually have great mana pool even after Illumination nerf so couple of them should keep spamming heals on MT. Check if your MT moves accordingly to prevent Cave-In damage and ask him to use an add-on of some kind with Sound alarm when he drops below 30% lets say, (13,5k Unbuffed means ~18k full buffed, below 30% he is definately going to get 1shotted) so he can use instantly Pot/HS/TrinketCDs.
Beyond 10th Shatter Healers should really focus on MT/OT healing, the rest should Bandage/use consumables.

50% on 7-8th growth is so-so for a raid with 7 healers, you should try to minimize Shatter deaths, or push a bit more on DPS, depending what is causing trouble. 14-15th Shatter is about the maximum you will be able to deal with, with the current gear. On 13th Growth Last Stand should be used, or even a bit earlier, followed by Shield Wall. LoH is a great way to increase MT armor for the few crucial seconds of the fight as well.

You might as well ask your MT change the spec a bit, if he is the one that is going to MT for your guild. Improved Revenge 3/3 is a rather poor choice, ask him to drop it and take Shield Mastery 3/3 instead. Even consider Improved Bloodrage/Improved Shield Wall if he drops ImpThunderClap (OT or DPS Warriors could have it instead)

Our Gruul wipes are usually caused by the following:

Dps being to slow, normally caused by poor threat generation from the off tank, if we don't have the right off tank, we try very hard to earthshield/pom the off tank and maybe even give them totems. You can tell this is your problem if multiple rogues/fury warriors are dying early or if they are putting up much worse numbers than usual.

On a reverb or ground slam people are too slow, they either get drawn into healing raid or cast a slow heal, try to call for hots just before a silence on vent and make sure you have at least 1 off tank healer and 3 main tank healers who never heal anyone else.

If healing is still your big problem try reducing healing on the raid to 1 healer only, this means when your dps is on their game and doesn't get hit for lots of uneeded rockfall or slam damage you should be keeping tanks up long enough for a kill. This healer will run out of mana(if you're are in a guild that hasn't killed gruul) so make sure they have an innervate lined up.

Don't do this. You will see far better results having the priests heal normally, instead of gimping their output and efficiency trying to keep inspiration up.

I think I see one of these "help me make my guild's healers better" threads once a month, usually posted by a non-healer. I sincerely hope you get some good Gruul-killing advice in this thread. But I think there's a systematic bias among certain groups that healers are the default ones to blame for unsuccessful raids, and this bothers me.

Agreed - there are two things to this though:
- Very few wipes are caused by lack of DPS, expecially when learning the encounter. Usually when you have the encounter under complete control, but DPS is falling short it is rather easy to fix, but stabilizing the encounter and getting healing sorted is the hardest part of most fights, so healing is responsible for more wipes because they bear a lot more responsability on raid success than DPS does. A healer missing a heal often wipe the raid, a DPS missing a backstab won't wipe the raid, unless it happens repeatedly.
- Very often people don't take any responsability for staying alive and just expect the healers to keep them up - with the logic of 'healers can do it fine' . This includes things like not wearing resist gear for tanking hydross adds 'since they are gimp anyway' or continuing to DPS when low on health and healers are busy, yelling for a heal instead of stepping away and bandaging, tanks being poorly geared out, stretching healing insanely thin, etc etc...

It is really easy to burn out your healers, so treat them nicely and make sure they start organizing themselves.

Little tricks to add to ease healing on gruul (don't see them mentioned often but they do help):

- Improved Lay on Hands (Paladin): This talent is about as popular as mages spec'ing into amplify magic. Noone does it unless specifically asked to. However it does help here tremendously, unless your tank is def-capped. It gives when fully specced (2 points) 30% increased armor for 2 minutes. This effectively negates about 2 growth levels of gruul for your healers - giving them more time and breathing room in later stages. Downtime of this is, that due to cooldown, you can't use it any fight, only in those that look like they will be successful iff you can last longer. Also the paladin loses all mana and must drink immediately after, though he shouldn't be on a mana pot timer in the first place. Use this strategically. You can also have more than 1 paladin do this after the first effect wears off.

- Speaking of amplify magic... all damage at gruul is physical. The whole raid (or at least MT and OT) should have amplify magic on them, increasing incoming heal. Having a mage specced it further helps.

Earthshield is yet another hot on top of renews/rejuvs/regrowths that will keep a warrior alive during a silence.

While many paladins still swear by holy light, and the WWS earlier in this thread showed paladins that did this (perhaps pre-illumination nerf wws?), I think it's a mistake to do anything but Flash of light except immediatly after a shatter and the last 40% or so of the fight. Conserve mana during the beginning easy stages.

In our gruul kill this week 80% of my casts were flash of light and only 20% were Holy Lights. It's absolutely vital that the tank gets to 100% life after each and every hit. And the only way that you can possibly hope to sustain a heal after each hit/possible hit is with flash of light spam.

With a late stage shatter, running 2 paladins on the MT, your paladins need to be able to switch to spamming max rank Holy Light until the raid is topped off or the tank is just going to go down. And the only way you're going to have mana to do this is if you've conserved earlier in the fight.

Getting Gruul to 50% isn't that far off from being able to kill him, you only need 20% more till the MT will use shield wall and just before the shield wall fades one of your paladins should have been spamming max rank holy lights to force himself out of mana, where he'll blow improved Lay on Hands just before chugging his 3rd super mana pot or so and being able to sustain high heals off that.

While we normally run with 6-7 healers, but we did this weeks Gruul with 1 Paladin 1 priest 1 Shaman on the MT. Myself on the OT, and 2 trees raid healing and keeping hots on the tanks.

Healing the OT is definatly a Flash of Light spam affair, there is virtually no reason at all to use Holy Light except immediately after shatter (where you can help top people off 1 holy light on the tank, 2 flash heal on the raid, 1 holy light on the tank, 2 heal on the raid...)

Only fight I've seen anything remotely resembling this was Loatheb. I think the WoW devs intentionally designed the mana regen and damage output to not really need this type of tactic.

Also about your question for feral druid OT - best way to do it on Gruul. Warriors have a hell of a hard time generating enough threat to stay above the DPS on that fight, the HS itself doesn't give them enough rage. Our druid OT has to really watch himself on Gruul as he's shot past the MT in threat numerous times.

As stated above, Amplify Magic your entire raid. Nobody is taking magic damage on that fight.

One of the things probably getting your MT killed is poorly timed silences. If the tank isn't topped off near higher growth, he can definitely die before a heal can be cast. The way we got past this was to have a third tank Intervene to the MT every silence past growth 10 or so. He could start doing it earlier as well, but for us it wasn't necessary. This saved our MT from death a few times and allowed our healers plenty of breathing room to get the fight done. Another thing is to make sure your tank has Iron Shields for higher growths and an Improved Lay on Hands is always a good thing for 11 or 12+ growths.

Intervene is hot and I suspect highly underused as a mitigation method on the MT. Any warrior you have in the raid that isn't full out DPS spec should macro his shield and intervene constantly between shatters to help absorb some of the damage. Its amazing how easy much damage it will slough off the MT by doing this.

A lot of people underestimate the power of Amplify Magic. It's +240 healing, or +360 with talents. An upgrade of 360 healing is the benefit of upgrading from Aurastone Hammer to Light's Justice. And every healer in the raid gets that "upgrade", as long as they're healing someone with Amplify Magic on them.

I'd just like to reiterate that Amp magic is one of the least used but most useful raid buffs that anyone can have. With amp magic, most healers will be pushing 2k healing (and the best geared will be pushing over 2.3k with raid buffs). That's pretty significant.

There shouldn't be any reason not to see every single non MT warrior flying towards the MT during reverbs. It's a real lifesaver and probably the limiter to your Gruul progression.

If the warrior isn't in tank gear, he most likely will die from a higher level growth intervene.

As a side note, does intervene work like misdirection, in that a new intervene will overwrite the previous one if it's not used up?

One thing you need to explicitly tell your healers is this:

After a shatter, heal the MT. Forget everyone else for just a second or two, because that's when your MT is most vulnerable.

This is probably some of the best advice in this thread. It's like people's brains go stupid after shatter, all your healers are healing themselves because some moronic [insert class here] walked right up to you during shatter, and no one is healing the MT.

If we wipe on Gruul (and it still happens, I wouldn't quite say we have him on farm yet) it's usually because of something stupid like this, and it's irritating. If your tank is dying at 50% I'd wager it's either during silences or right after shatter.

We also have a paladin with the improved aura that reduces the duration of silence effects group with two MT healers if we have enough paladin to go around. I have never actually had the presence of mind during reverberation to see if it's actually effective, however.