• Playered

Our healers managed (one heavily undergeared Paladin too :/) when we did a Feral/Warrior 2Tank(eating stomp...) rotation with 4 tank healers(3x Pal/1x Priest) - the Palas get a fair bit of mana back from being raid healed and the Priest got IV from the Feral tank - there was no need for them to get a SP.

Are they just undergeared (both tanks and healers)?

 

Vihermaali

There is always a more expensive healing spell to spend mana on. To be able to spam max rank Greater Heal for 6 minutes straight, I would need a restoration shaman and shadowpriest in my group, and in addition one innervate. Thats with all consumables and chainpotting with alch. stone. Maybe it's just me not having optimal gear for this kind of encounter.

I doubt your healers are going to keep tanks (relatively) safely alive with zero group synergy. They need *something*. Not everything, but enough bonuses to not run out of mana. Rest can go to dps. I think your raid knows who needs the spriest most.

 

◊ Praetorian

Why in the world would you be spamming max rank Greater Heal for 6 minutes? That's insane. When Stomp is not involved, Brutallus does not do a particularly overwhelming amount of damage. You need to work out a coherent healing strategy among all tank healers, mixing HoTs, quick heals, big heals, and ranking up for burst healing when spikes are anticipated. And every class can do that job without a shadow priest on this fight. We bring one, and he goes into a group with an elemental shaman, two mages, and a destro lock.

 

Vihermaali

I'm not. Usually it's r5-6. I only do max rank spells just before, and during, stomp. But the point was, in theory your healers are able to suck all the mana you can give them and still run out of it, thus making it seem from outside point of view that they have mana problems.

 

• Playered

Unless by doing that you are able to drop a healer for a dpser then what is the point?
The most stressful period is healing during stomp - if they are all max ranking there and 'enduring' it without it being a breeze then you cannot afford to drop a healer either way and it remains pointless.

 

Vihermaali

"If you give us X, Y and Z, it's nice. If you don't give anything, it's ok too. We'll just tighten our belts a bit and go on. We run out of mana either way." -Healers

So, your healers run out of mana. Your healers always run out of mana. Need more information in order to give advice on who benefits from shadow priest most.

 

Jarlyn

We run with 2 shadow priests and our experience with it has been that although it's quite possible to heal it without a shadow priest, having the extra mana allowed our MT healers to heal a lot more freely - ie, foregoing efficiency at times in the name of guaranteeing the tank is going to live.

 

Admera

we've been running with just myself as the only shadow priest. From what we have seen it's been much more efficient to give the mana back to the healers over the ranged dps group. Even popping destro pots on cooldowns, our mages and destro locks haven't been complaining as much as our healers about mana issues.

 

Trouble

This has been my thought as well. While I know I could ask my healers to do it without a shadow priest...I don't really want to. Yeah a smart healer will manage consumables correctly and downrank when risk is minimal, but giving them extra mana gives them more options that may be the difference between the tank living and dying. Unless I'm misreading it, Ghando is saying he's running on fumes by the end. Running on fumes means corners are probably being cut along the way and risks are being taken to make it to the end.

 

• Snowy

I think I mentioned it earlier in this thread but shadow priests are actually DPS-neutral if you're giving them to destro locks. The loss in DPS you suffer from having the shadow priest is balanced almost exactly by the DPS gained by the destro locks not having to lifetap as much. We could easily have a 2nd group of 2x destro lock, spriest, resto shaman + another healer, so 2 healers benefit from the spriest as well.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Shha

Well to be honest Spriests are not a waste of dps slot. For us they simply go into a HEALER spot. Its usually 8 healers 1 spriest, 7 healers /2 spriests. In fact with 2 spriests its probably easily doable with 6 healers.

We basically run only 5 soaker group + tank . That means 3333/5830/8330 slashes. 1 spriests HEALS their group basically. Our Spriests were at 2nd and 4th place in healing - one in warlock group was 2nd, one in paladin group was 4th (no fel armor ftl). We had 3 paladins in one spriest group with our lonely mage as well , and with spriest they could just spam rank 8/11 non stop depending on stomps. Then we had 2 resto druids on burns which also supplemented the soak groups if people had to leave them, and 2 shamans spamming LHW/Chain heal on tanks (used bouncing off chain heals at first, but later we switched to LHW simply to get ancestral fort faster, and only after it was up go to chain heals. Spriests needed SOMETIMES a hand towards the 3rd slash, but those 2 chain heals was all really needed. With this strat i would see no problem with dropping one paladin and doing brutallus with 6 healers. Basically every spriest is a full time healer for us. VE seems pretty crazy for meteor slashes. Our priests maintained around 1400 dps, which turns out to 1750 healing/sec for the entire fight. And it actually wasnt overhealing much. It also means between 2nd and 3rd slash when it gets most dicey on group healing, a spriest could pull off 4200 healing (over 5k on warlocks), to counter 5800 dmg. That means that people over 10k hp could live without any outside heals (as i said we had shamans occasionally chainheal bounce later on to fix any deficits.

Bottom line is, every spriests lets you drop a healer in my opinion, so any dps he does is pure gain on brutallus. If we had 3 Id definitely go down to 2 paladins holy light spamming + spriests doing ALL the raid healing (more soakers), 1 druid keeping burn victims, 2 shamans for AF and full time on tank. Then 6 healer of some kind (preferably a shaman but our 3rd is absent for few weeks) to fill in on tank, help on "burn end".

 

Clandestine

There is a reason you haven't killed Brutallus yet, and this is it.

 

Elerion

If one shadowpriest in the healer group allows you to drop one healer, your healers aren't doing their job properly. Outside of Stomp, the raw damage Brutallus puts out is easily healable with less than max rank spells, the issue is getting heals to land often enough. Adding a shadowpriest allows healers to rank up thus healing more raw damage (largely irrelevant unless they are horribly geared), but the frequency of heals goes down. This does not help you.

Have your healers downrank instead. I thought we learned this on Twin Emps 2 years ago, when the same problem first arose.


EDIT: Gah, reread your post Shha, and realised you dropped healers because spriests performed as healers, not because of mana savings. That's perfectly viable assuming your spriests are specced for it and the whole group has enough HP.

 

Zaran

I won't even comment on other healing classes as it has been quite some time since I've healed on anything but a Paladin.

Any of you paladins having mana issues or taking the shadow priest from other healers (or more importantly other DPS) may find something useful here.

Consumables you should be using. *Should* be common sense at this point but I'll say it anyways.

Mana Oil
3 Mana Potions
3 Darkrunes (would suggest not using them while your group is taking slashes)
Food buff (I prefer 8 mp5 20 stam to 44 healing for this fight. HP is nice for burns/slashes and if your having mana issues the mp5 >)
Flask or better yet 50 healing and 16 mp5 elixer.

Also the timing of your abilities is key for this fight. Us Divine Illumination and Divine Favor and any trinket proc's you may have early and every CD. Why save them? The damage in this fight doesn't really spike, its always high so you should always be using high rank heals.

Alternate heal ranks. Not during stomp there is little reason to spam max rank as long as the other MT healers aren't being lazy or bad. Downrank slightly to conserve a bit of mana, spamming a 6k+ heal when stomp isn't up is usually unnecessary. I have been burn healing this fight so I can't comment on strictly MT heal ranks but I would think a mid-high rank HL would be fine for non stomp. During stomp it should be max rank, no reason not to, even if most of the cast are overhealing, that 1 you land may save the tanks life.

The other thing you can do to greatly improve mana regen during the fight as a paladin is to be in a soaker group. The mana gained from SA adds up significantly over the coarse of the fight.

I know most of this post is very common sense and everyone raiding at this level of content should know all of this but I for the life of me can't figure out where all the complains of healers and healer mana is coming from. If you are having issues with mana paladins, maybe something in here will help.

 

Flamingcloud

Thats abit of an exaggeration. 2 Destro locks getting a spriest isn't going to raise the shadowpriest to warlock levels. According to the spreadsheet I gain between 100-150dps (from like 2350dps base) depending on various settings and the spriests dps level, where as I gain about 25-30 dps from him not eating my shadowbolt charges if he is just not in the raid at all. Not to say there isn't other advantages to adding an spriest (mana back for those 2 healers, and heals for the group) so obviously they hold their weight overall, but it would probably need to be like spriest + 4 destro locks for the spriest to bring 2000+ dps to the raid.

 

• Jamor

Zaran,

How did you find the burn healing as a Pally? We currently have a resto druid on the job, with a shaman helping on the last 10%. But being able to bring in a holy paladin to do the job would give me a lot of flexibility on DPS classes. It just seems like a resto druid is going to have a much easier time than a Paladin.

 

Derketo

Why do people heal through stomp?

I'll be alright when we get to pass out time.

 

• Snowy

Why do people not heal through stomp? What's so hard about it?

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Clandestine

Because with proper cooldown usage and healers who aren't asleep the tank doesn't die, and it requires you to bring only two tanks instead of three.

 

Eury

What worked for us was using 8 healers and give a shadow priest to tank healers and dps gets a ret paladin.
With a shadow priest, a shaman and drums healers can sustain max rank healing spam easily which solved our dead tank issues.
It might not look like a pretty solution on paper but making dps pretty much the only issue of the fight, it is just a matter of time until dps have learned how to maximize their dps to kill him before the enrage.

 

◊ Vectivus

Because otherwise, the tank tends to die.

It is possible, albeit very difficult, to execute a system of taunt rotations to try and avoid tanks getting Stomp - in reality, all that target switching for your healers could just as easily result in a tank gib as Stomp itself.

There is no better answer here - either is entirely viable.

 

Derketo

I don't know why you would open yourself to that damage when you don't have to. Generally from what I've seen you have to bring an extra healer when you use two tanks anyways. Seems very counter intuitive to me.

I'll be alright when we get to pass out time.

 

Clandestine

We've been bringing 8 healers, but on our kill this week one of the priests was smiting for almost three minutes of the fight and did less healing than our shadow priest, so we're only going to bring 7 next week. I don't anticipate any tankdeath problems.

My point is, there's not really any reason to go to the difficulty of having a third tank taunt off when he stomps. It's superfluous, as Stomps are entirely survivable if the healers uprank for it.

 

Derketo

I don't see the difficulty I guess. I see it as just better if you don't have to heal through that much incoming damage, it allows your healers a lot of flexibility.

I'll be alright when we get to pass out time.

 

Clandestine

And I don't see the difficulty in simply healing through the stomp. Either way can work.