The AE damage (You're talking about Noxious Fumes, yes?) doesn't cause pushback. Read what giansm said. MD is a 1.5s cast, and the first tick of GN takes two seconds. Priests who claimed they failed due to pushback are wrong.

If I had to guess what's going on here, it's that you're (unnecessarily) casting PW:S, and the GCD is causing your MD to be late.

In other words, the "suggestion" is: start casting MD while she's casting Gas Nova.

Im not having any problems with my MD. I'm just adding a bit of extra security to my dispel.

Hmm did seem like I was getting pushback from the fumes. Obviously not then. But I'll stick to my PWS as I have no knockback when casting.
And any damage reduction is a good thing that way I see it, as we learn the fight.
Only had one evening on her, so maybe I'll drop the shield at some stage, but as it is, I'll stick to what's working for me.

It is quite amusing to read these comments about read this and that, when I have already read them, maybe read again what I posted. It's a suggestion, and obviously some people are getting a 2nd tick even if they are doing their best to get their MD off. They can't all be completely useless at clicking a button, which is the way they are being made to sound, when they say that they are getting more damage than they want and are asking for suggestions. Now as this was just suppose to be a simple 'suggestion' and can be used or just past over for those that choose.
Lets end it here and move on.

Wait - let me make sure I understand - your claims is this:
A 100% chance of a 1.5 second (less with haste) effective delay in your mass dispell from a GCD by power word shielding yourself is better than mass dispelling your group of people?

With 0 haste if you power word shield right as gas nova starts to cast (a 1 second cast for felmyst) you're 0.5 seconds into the gas nova when you start to cast mass dispel (realistically you're 0.6 seconds into the gas nova.) 1.5 seconds later your mass dispel cast goes off and your targets all suffer 1 tick of gas nova because you cast power word shield. Of course this also has another fatal assumption - that you never ever cast anything else, Obviously if you just started a global cooldown when the gas nova starts to cast you've now got 1.5 seconds for that to finish, leaving you 0.5 seconds into the gas nova debuff, then when you cast power word shield you're at 2 seconds in from the global cooldown before you can cast another spell, the first gas nove tick hits, then 1.5 seconds later you mass dispell your targets.

If instead you started to cast mass dispell right at the start it would go off in the 0.5-0.6 second timeframe normally leaving you with 1.4 seconds of buffer time for the cast to finish if you somehow ate some source of magical pushback faerie. More important, with a realistic level of spell haste you actually have plenty of time to clean up anyone with an unlucky resist on mass dispell (where in your power word shield self model, with haste and almost no lag if you don't get a resist you probably clean everyone before it ticks, but with a resist you've really not got any time to clean them before it ticks.)

Here's the key point you seem to be missing - you don't need to wait for the debuff to land to start casting mass dispell. Felmyst's cast time on gas nova is 1 second, if you start to cast mass dispel the moment you see gas nova start to cast you cannot finish your mass dispell before the gas nova finishes casting (well that is, with any realistic level of spell haste you would have at 70, excepting heroism.)

Or you could not cast PW:S and just Mass dispell, it really isn't needed at all.

What about the other point of view on this: Dealing with the damage instead of avoiding it. While every care should be taken to minimize the gas nova damage at all times, it's a fact that no matter how awesome your MD'ers are, there are going to be times when (a) group(s) are going to take two ticks for some reason. Obviously when this happens you don't want it to be a wipe by default, so you have to be ready to deal with that if necessary.

Basically, even two gas nova ticks should generally not be able to kill people. Sure, there are combinations of specials that make it really hard to keep people alive, like encaps and gas novas going off disastrously close together, but usually you will get enough time to get your act together after a fuckup, especially if healers help eachother out a bit.

Are your healers making sure people are topped off at all times? Ask your shamans and priests to not wait until a group can benefit from the full healing of that CoH/chain, ask them to heal them up as soon as they lose a k or two. They should be able to take the efficiency loss, especially the priests who are probably full mana after every air phase anyway. Druids should have it even easier, with rejuv and lifebloom you can very efficiently keep people full health all the time in between Encap/Gas damage. The only time they could dip would be if the enterprising druid puts some serious time/energy into helping out other healers for some reason, but even in that case they have the tools to refill their group's hp really quick (tranquility if all else fails). It's all about knowing when Felmyst's specials could happen and as such knowing when you can do what.

Like I said before, cross-healing can be a very good things on this fight, but your healers have to understand they can't help on a corroded MT if they just let their group down to 5khp (for whatever reason) and a gas nova, or worse an encap, might happen at any second. If such a thing happens to a druid healer, they will also have to put up some serious hot stacking to get these people up again asap, they can't wait for the difference between a rejuv and noxious aura to heal people to full again. I still fail at this myself sometimes when I feel that as the raidleader I should be saving the entire raid by myself. That kind of thing is just stupid though and healers should take care to not lose sight of their responsibility.

Basically, try and take some time to talk about this with all the healers, have a discussion about it on trash, get people involved. You would be surprised how often healers that seem to be doing just fine on statistics don't even understand half of the healing aspect of a given encounter and when guided to see the light suddenly become twice as effective.

And to just dab my finger into some other lines of discussion in this thread for a moment:

Airphase: Yes, reliable dustfield running depends in my experience almost solely on people moving back to the edge of the last dustfield after they've ran across. I hate doing this kind of micro management, as I think it's generally bad to train people to not to have to take responsibility for their own actions, but a single person using an '/rw >> EDGE <<' macro that checks if everyone is in a good spot for the next run-over and uses the macro if they are not, can do wonders for this. Usually when someone is properly standing at the edge of the old dustfield, even a treeform druid can make it across in time during the next one.
And this doesn't mean hugging the dustfield for all it's worth: you don't want people claim they got 'randomly MC'd'. We all know wow's spell graphics aren't always as reliable for determining the limits of spell operational areas as we'd like them to be, so take a good 2 feet distance from the outermost cloud sprite and you should be fine.

Threat issues: Put your MT in the melee group. If need be, just take a melee dps less, they are the least useful archetype on this encounter anyway.

Encapsulate: I know that theres various good ways to deal with this, but I would personally recommend using some AR on the raid and letting everyone just take the encap head-on. 100-150 AR will take the edge of most encap damage, making it healable (as per last night) just fine. Train people to use AR potions, healthstones, the works. Keeping one CoH priest off grouphealing duty and letting him freestyle on the raid (should be one of your more clever healers obviously) can help enormously as an insurance policy (make him MD though). In general: Know your raid, know the fight, and don't take fewer healers than you can afford. Beating Felmyst during the last ground phase is awesome and cool, but very useless. You want maximum repeatability on farm encounters, wipes make people more unhappy than killing a boss 5 seconds quicker than last time makes them happy in my experience.

Alright, this post got a lot more ramblish than I intended, sorry for that.

Er you realize that was entirely the point I was making? I tried to spell it out for him as to why power word shield is only wasting time for him, because he obviously wasn't getting it.

That seems pretty silly thinking.

This is what I do..timer comes to an end I have the shield up, and then waiting with my MD targeted to MD.
She casts, I MD.

One night of attempts does not make me an expert on this, and I am in no way claiming this is 'the be all and end all' tactic to use. I said it was a suggestion that worked for me. Seems pretty strange so much discussion on such a simple matter. If what I have written is not intelligible then I apologize.
Like I have said, I noticed pushback happening on first tries so put the shield on to help, it did. So I use it.

As I get used to the fight, I will probably change things, but as is it is, it is giving me less to worry about and I feel comfortable using this method. I have 1.3 MD cast using the haste items I have. Going to get the Haste battlemaster trinket to get it a bit lower.

Edited. Our priests claim the pushback is a very minor effect. Using the shield doesn't accomplish hardly anything as long as you start casting your MD when she starts casting gas nova. You'll take a pushback tick, but your group won't take ticks unless they resist, which you still have time to clean up. We've found the most common cause for deaths in our raid were groups not being topped off before gas nova and encap. If they aren't topped off into gas nova, you spend time catching up, and it is very, very possible encap will come before you're caught up and completely wreck someone.

If you're shielding in anticipation of Nova, it's not a guarantee that it will be up when Felmyst actually uses Gas Nova. The only thing that causes spell pushback during phase 1 or gound phase is the initial aoe damage from a Gas Nova cast. The DoT from Gas Nova and the aura damage do not cause spell pushback. If it did, it would make healing the fight a lot more interesting.

It's fine if you feel more comfortable with what you do, just that your method is very much atypical as starting a Mass Dispel as soon as you see Gas Nova being cast by Felmyst is all you need to do remove debuffs and prevent the first DoT tick.

Personally, I'd rather not have a debuff on me in case I need the shield to survive an Encapsulate.

First post here, but seem like you know what you are talking about. We attempted Felmyst for the first time today 57% was our best attempt(we still fail at running out fast), anyway on our last attempt our rogue put on the 45 arcane resist trinket on and he said the dmg from the encapsulate was cut down drastically, so our raid leader told us all to bring atleast 80-100 arcane resist on the next night of attempts. Now what i'm worried about is gimping our dps so much we cannot kill him till the enrage timer, ooh and we bring 10 healers, is it possible to kill him with less DPS then normal and wearing the arcane resist gear?

10 healers is quite alot oO, Unless you have some serious dps you will have issues. I usually bring 8 healers and we dont wear any arcane ress. Although when everyone survives its a pretty fast kill. If the boss has more than 5-6% hp left when it lands after enraging you will prolly wipe, it all depends on when she decides to use the first gas nova :P

Try using macros with healthstone+arcane ress pot, it really does wonders for surviving those encapsulates.

Ten healers is gimping your DPS more than a couple pieces of AR gear on your DPS is. Seriously.

We run 3 CoH priest, 3 Resto Shaman and 2 Holy Palys (or 1 Holy Paly/1 Resto Druid) and don't run from encaps or use AR gear or pots. We just heal through them. We do use careful positioning to minimize the number of people it hits though.

Ten healers should generally only be necessary if people stay in during encap and then mostly when learning that tactic.

However, I think most guilds are not always going to have "3 CoH priest, 3 Resto Shaman" at all times either, so you need to be ready to improvise/bend your tactic a bit to fit the occasion. If you use a non-run tactic for encap, cranking up the AR in this case can be a good idea, but you might also want to take extra healers in addition to that if your remaining CoH priest has to MD as well, making him heal a group could end up in tragedy. I think that expecting only the best from your raiders is a good sentiment, but you also have to be realistic about these things and use what works.

I know of a guild that slammed their heads into the Twins encounter every night for weeks, using 9 healers because they were convinced that was the only proper (honorable? who knows) way to do it, but when they finally killed Sacrolash with enough people alive, they ended the whole thing with minutes to spare on the enrage timer. This is just madness if you ask me. The same applies to balancing your raid for Felmyst: Use what works. Find that balance.

Well i see Felmyst as a good exercice for a raid leader, as the choices you make have a significant impact on your progress.

Basically, you have to choice :
->Avoid or eat encapsulate
->AR or not
->8-9-10 heals

Also keep in mind that :
->enrage timer IS short. Your first kills will probably come while Felmyst enraged in the air on the 4th P2, with 1,2, 3%... left, hitting the ground and one shotting everybody until a dead boss or a wipe. Anything more than 5% will be very hard as Encapsulate/Gas Nova is affectated by Enraged, wiping the raid very fast. It is not Brutallus pressure, but be aware that you will hardly manage to have your first kill with more than 1 dps died early.
->There is no/few dps requirement to learn the fight. Felmyst air phase is scheduled/timed (on the contrary to Nightbane for exemple with flight phase at 75/50/25%). As soon as you have the AoE requirement to kill skeletons which is quite easy with 5 aoe alive, it seems ok.
->when making your choices you have to be aware that if your goal is to get a first kill, you do not want to suffer that much to have that boss on farm status. Be realistic about your 'staff' attendance.

Anyway if you know what you want, you also know what you don't want and I personnally think you can't afford a second gaz nova tick. Gaz nova is i something like 2s cast and 2s each tick, a second tick means a 2.5s delay at best. Don't make your strat harder by dealing with people suxxing that much.

So what we do in my guild :
->We eat the encapsulate, the best choice imo if you can afford it as it makes P1 quite easy for dps (just dps and do not have to pay attention to run away). It also makes the fight much easier for a person which do not know it which will happen (apply, guild casual, etc...) sooner and later and you do not want him to take 5 tries to undestand it.
->So we use AR, say 140 to 220 buffed, sometimes mages use 0 (33 ie druid buff). But it is very dependant on what we have in raid. If you have the dps to get the boss down the more AR (220 max) you have the less risks you take. But for exemple if we bring 9 healers and lacking some of our best dps players, i will rather tell the members to be a bit low on AR. But even if you chose to avoid the encapsulate, there is no reason not to use AR when learning the fight as soon as you have the dps requirement to kill the skeletons.
->We bring either 8-9 healers. 10 seems a bit high to me in kill situations as your ranged dps will be aggro cap on the first part of the fight (because of the MT not making any aggro when Felmyst in flight) and i think you will have better result with 9 healers and a bit more of AR than with 10 healers. As the dps requirement is ok as soon as all your dps are alive, the extra/9th healer for us is usually a druid for combat rez as there is lot of ways to die early in this fight (encapsulate, gaz nova, vapor, skeletons, taking aggro when Felmyst land,...) . For that reason i will also consider replacing a dps warrior for a feral druid or even a hunter for a moonkin if you have.

Also learn the fight with your MT in avoidance/solid stuff (nothing worst than guildies doing right and sudently a dead MT), but in kill situations i think aggro stuff is better as the more aggro the MT generates the more room it gives you for mistakes/not being familiar enough with the fight (people dieing early or not doing that much dps at the beginning of an flight phase because focused on potential vapor).

From a druid POV, I have had a really hard time on this fight, trying to keep people up. Although I admit we are in the learning stages, I feel that my problems may persist, although not to such a great extent.

Rejuv will be my heal of choice on this fight, ticks for me at about 987/3s (slightly behind aura damage, but its the best I can roll with)

Mana pool of roughly 10.7k raid buffed with around 340 mp5 while casting, again fully buffed.

The mana cost of my rejuv is 332 in tree form.

So doing the math behind it from a perfect POV (casting exact times, potting exact time, innervate exact times, never taking mana hit from gas nova, so not super likely)

A theoretical max I can heal is 8 people. 12s rejuv/1.5 gcd = 8 casts per cycle, again not super likely.

At 8 people, theoretically of course, I can heal for 114s before going oom.

At different people rates.

8 people 114s
7 people 156s
6 people 206s
5 people 320s
4 people (technically forever)

A more likely scenario is me healing at 70% of my max throughput. aka taking the odd mana hit from gas nova, moving, not casting EXACTLY every 1.5s, having to leave tree form blah blah. I still think this is optimistic however.

8 people 82s
7 people 118s
6 people 153s
5 people 240s
4 people 672s

600s being the happy number for the fight meaning more than 10 mins.

I'm not trying to make excuses or anything, just mainly trying to see if anyone has anything to offer, I'm posting this here and EJ to try and get some feedback, and since it was being prepared for EJ, I thought I would offer it to you all.

I have considered gemming for regen, however this would make my heals drop lower than the 1k/tick I am going after here in order to keep up.

I am honestly at a loss on how to proceed on this. Healing 4 people underheals the raid, and that is assuming that ALL I heal is the aura damage, whereas it's likely my assignment will take the odd tick of gas nova, or encap, which hurts things more.

Is raid healing not for druids, or should I be looking at a different strategy on this?

You seem to forget in your calculations that this is a two phase fight. Phase 2 allows for a lot of regeneration time once the initial skeleton chaos is dealt with. There's really no need for you to keep healing for 10 minutes straight.

While I don't know the strategy you are running with, there are a few roles Druids are rather nice for on Felmyst. For phase one, while rejuv is lovely for aura (especially once your rejuv breaks the 1k barrier), priests and shaman are superior for post-Nova topping and for Encapsulate related pan. What a tree is good for in that context is topping up people who ate a Mass Dispell resist on Gas Nova, or who are getting generally low on health, and watching out for the Mass Dispelling priests. Trees are good for healing on the encapsulate target and can work on tank healing. A tree support HoTing the tank and focusing extra support on Corrosion can work.

Phase 2 start is 'interesting times' for healers generally. Where possible I like to try support on the Beam target and toss rejuvs about to stabilse people still eating the aura damage. Travel form is a godsend for the phase and NS is superb (as is SM) at this point for your paladin tank if you need to move due to breath. One the skeletons are gathered however healing stabilses rather rapidly there. For priests and druids this is the ideal phase for regen.

We use 8 healers for this, with 3 shadow priests prefered. Of those, 3 healers are assigned to the ground phase tank, the 3rd specifically there to support on Corrosion. That 3rd tank healer as tree works nicely for us, though we have had 2/3 tank healers on ground phase being druids. Also combat ressing can't be discounted here, though there are some tricks and timings for that you will learn soon enough. (A tip: don't res a person near the breath cloud even if you feel they should 'pop' at you well out of it...)

To echo this, we generally have 1 tree out of 8 healers in this fight. We use 4 camps (we always have at least 2 CoH and 2 shadow priests) in a diamond formation (the long tips being out to the sides, melee group is the short side at felmyst, then hunter groups is the other short side directly behind melee). Our group setup is such that all of the groups but group 1 (feral druid, prot warr, prot paladin, resto druid, random healer) are set up for CoH. What our resto druid does is roll full LB and a rejuv on the MT, and rolls HoTs on the 2 healers in group 1 to keep them topped off. All of the other groups are topped off through CoH, and each camp has chain heals coming through it, so the biggest danger for us was having a group 1 healer low going into encapsulate or gas nova. The resto druid solves this, and provides solid MT support to smooth out healing.

We use the 3 camp scenario, with two shadowpriests and one CoH priest on dispelling novas. One shaman or druid is assigned to each camp; they're that camp's main healer. The CoH priest in the middle and an additional raid healer in the middle (shaman or druid) helps out on all three camps. (3 healers are on MT - so in total we bring 8 healers.) This works really well for us. Especially if you bring 3 resto druids, you can put one on healing both 'far' sides, ie not melee closest to the dragon, and stick one in the middle, and the encapsulated camp (we run, we don't heal through it) will always have two druids in range to throw hots while everyone's running like mad.

I'm normally feral but was resto last week, and healed one of the camps. I just made sure to keep Rejuv up on everyone in my camp at all times (8 people). If my camp got the Encapsulate, Swiftmend on the person getting targetted and otherwise switching to Lifebloom until it's over and everyone's back into position. It worked really well. And as Sari and KamPa said, you can regen ridiculous amounts of mana in the air phase. As long as you're not casting for a while, you can even give your innervate away. I use the combat mana potions and don't go oom on Felmyst with this strategy.

I'm a raid leader and don't play a priest. Our priests have significant issues with reacting to Nova. It seems the main problem is positioning the mouse arrow over the target area (they had it over their unit frames before, in order to heal.)

My question is, will a makro /cast Mass Dispell actually cast it if you hit it twice, assuming the mouse arrow is in the correct location?

Second, since they are keeping their groups up with CoH, is it possible to avoid mouseuse on CoH by using a makro which always casts CoH on a fixed target (e.g. /tar WarlockJimmy /cast Circle of Healing )

Using the two makros, my priests could position their mouse arrow timely, then use their makros to keep the group up, then, once gas nova is being cast, they start spamming the second makro.

Any answers by Felmyst-experienced priests are greatly welcome!

For your macro question, just use a "/cast [target=focus] CoH" while prealably setting the focus to the desired player. However doing that puts your raid at risk : once the Gas Nova cooldown is up your priests should not engage their GCD by using CoH, they should just wait for start of Gas Nova cast doing nothing. If groups are topped off before end of cooldown there should be no risk for the raid.
This is especially true when learning the fight, later when your priests have their MDing under control (a bit of haste gear does help too) they should be able to continue engage their gcd and still manage to MD on time (except in really really tight situations).
The reasonning behind that is it takes 3 seconds for the first tick to go off (1 sec cast + 2 sec to first tick), using the GCD right at the beginning of Gas Nova cast might mean that you have 1.5 sec to wait for GCD end + 1.5 sec cast time of MD, and this is without factoring reaction time + positionning AE to cover everyone...

We have phase1 mostly under control now, but phase2 is a disaster still. SK Gaming kites beams in a circle to form a nice conscrecratable spot on the ground. (For this to work, the pally tank must somehow cast the consecrate in a circle that cannot be entered without getting the vapor debuff and spawning more skellies. GG?)

Currently we do this on phase 2: half the raid goes west, half goes right. Whoever gets the beam either runs straight south to the fire-wall or does a circle if he's confident enough. The pally tank (who has boar's speed but NOT pursuit of justice) runs to consecrate. The holy pallies have RF on and invariably start tanking at the first heal. The priests take aggro and start tanking as well, as the prot pally runs to the 2nd kiter.

The MT used to AoE taunt off healers, but then other healers got upset at having to worry about two tanks, so instead the healers are tanking (?!!). Invariably we lose a healer or two, and often the beams are so far south the healers and pally tank have trouble getting back to the grp-up spot to prep for breaths.

Anyone have a suggestion on how we can fix this? Where do you kite beams? Do you spin circles or run in a line? Is your pally able to pick up all the adds solo or does he get help? (We don't want to burn an MD on this phase with threat being such a problem in P1).

Thanks in advance.