There are currently only two scenarios that favor mitigation over EH, in my opinion. The first is a situation like Vezax where mana is an issue. The second is a fight where there is so *little* tank damage that your healer can swap off to the raid (think Mim P4's bottom, although obviously due to P1/3 Stam is still preferred). In any other case, tank healers will be spamming you anyway, and all the non-EH gear will do is increase overhealing at the cost of worst-case survival.

Aura of despair's tooltip says it reduces "melee attack speed" by 20%, but I was wondering if there's any chance that this may affect hunter auto-shot attack speed as well?

What other classes are in the raid? You can use external cooldowns on the 3rd/6th surges.

Rotating paladin bubble-sacrifices along with barkskin should be enough, though you can fudge it with a pain suppression, trinkets and/or backup guardian spirits "just in case".

A few tips to manage things from a healing perspective:

1) Resto shaman can provide healing stream totem to the tank. Stoneskin totem works as well.
2) Spriest can provide VE
3) Ret can provide JoL- for us, this fight was totally undoable without a ret paladin. JoL means that you will never have to heal the raid, even during the Animus phase if your dps is good enough.

Ret pallies can use Art of War procs to FoL the tank as well. And all Ret pallies should have access to Divine Sacrifice which is invaluable at later stacks. It's important to highlight, while Holy and Prot pallies can do JoL, Ret pallies do the biggest/best JoL by a noticeable margin.

If you consider 300 hp heals worth anything, sure. Besides jol/disac/hosalv, ret's biggest strenght is Sacred Shield. The downside of all this is that it is one of the lowest dps classes on vezax (ifnot rock bottom usually).

Paladins who use Judgments of the Wise get the Corrupted Wisdom - Spell - World of Warcraft debuff on General Vezax. It's a 90% debuff on healing.

Corrupted Wisdom lowers direct healing from ret paladins by 90% in the Vezax encounter; while they're certainly able to cast fol during the fight, it will hit for negligible amounts.

JoL, however, still heals it's normal amount and is useful during the animus phase.

Edit: Looks like Copernicus beat me to posting while I grammar checked myself. :<

No, it doesn't. World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
It still is very welcome added healing, but really, JoL ticking for 1k there would be insane.

It is actually ticking for ~1k if you check deeper. In it's normal display World of Logs doesn't count overhealing, hence the lower number. It should also be noted that the way Judgement of Light is affected by Shadow Crash also does not work quite as you'd expect, instead of reducing the healing done by Judgement of Light when the judging Paladin is standing in a Shadow Crash, it actually depends on the person proccing it standing in a Shadow Crash.

Yeah, JoL definitely ticks for the full amount on Vezax. Our Ret pally is always, without fail, our main "overhealer" by literally 4 or 5 times our next highest (usually me as Blood spec tank). His JoLs heal for ~800-900.

My guild has been doing Vezax on 10 with a disc priest and a shaman healing, but in looking ahead to hard mode, I don't see that combination being viable. We'll probably have our feral OT switch to tree for that, and I'm looking for a little clarification on the lifebloom mechanic in this fight.

As Jurik said above, you can game lifebloom by casting it from the crash and getting the full bloom on the tank, but what about the mana return? If cast from a crash, it would cost 25% of its normal cost, but does it return 50% of what it actually cost you, or the normal amount (50% of the untalented mana cost)? I'm assuming the former, as the latter would mean druids could spam lifebloom from a crash when they're not doing anything else to have near infinite mana on the fight, but I wanted confirmation.

I'm pretty sure shaman+disc is well qualified to heal that fight. Both classes have a mechanic they can abuse in Shadow Crashes.

During the fight, each bloom that pops returns 285 mana regardless of what the spell cost to cast. So, clearcasted lifeblooms net you 285 mana. Shadow-crashed lifeblooms end up costing almost zero mana with Spark of Life equipped. With Tier 7 set bonus, I think they may even return some mana.

I believe you're somewhat mistaken; Druids, not Shaman, have lifebloom.

That said, shaman can spec 0/44/27 and abuse the mana return mechanics that *do* work (shamanistic rage + improved stormstrike) in order to cope with the fight reasonably well. Two-healing the fight in general is fairly challenging, so adding a third healer would be beneficial anyway. A disc priest should be able to just about solo heal the main tank if s/he has cooldowns every surge.

It may be that we simply don't have the gear for it yet. Two of our caster DPS (maybe only one these days, a destro 'lock) are pretty close to OOM when Vezax dies as is, and dropping a DPS for a 3rd healer would stretch them even more, not even counting the additional 2M health on the Animus. We also have to kite every fourth Surge, because our only CDs are Divine Protection and Pain Suppression, and PS has an obnoxious 2.4 min CD. If we kite on the 3rd Surge instead of the 4th, it would prevent having to kite while the Animus is up, though, which would be fine.

With a 3 healer scenario, my biggest concern would be DPS mana. I guess we might as well do it with 3 healers without trying hard mode and evaluating mana based on that. Thanks for the responses, though!

[edit] Also, regarding the first comment, he wasn't saying that Shaman have Lifebloom, but that we have a mechanic that can be abused in crashes: Earth Shield. ES is obnoxiously efficient even without crashes, and can only be cast around every 30 seconds or so (depending on tank avoidance streaks) anyway, so it's not as huge of a savings as LB.

Melee and hunters should be able to "bring it home". In 25 man, many of our caster are OoM as the Animus dies so melee finishes vezax off (we run caster heavy).

Even with some mark healing on vezax he should be below 20% after the animus dies, and three healers should mean that there should be enough healer mana remaining to finish the fight.

Are you planning on using two tanks or one? One tank should be able to handle both, although the MT being a death knight would certainly helps the situation.

What about following idea. Retri spec for holy. Solo healing MT with combination of SS/FoL/HL, then at the end of mana, starting to judge JotW to get full mana. At this time other healer heals. When having full mana, other pally casts DI on me, and being ressed by a druid. Will DI remove Corrupted Wisdom?

You gain corrupted wisdom when you have more than 0 talent points in JotW, even if you never judge.
So no, that would not work.

Question about the Hard Mode encounter that I'm not sure has been answered yet: Do you have to kill the Animus or can you zerg General down before he spawns?

You can do it as Prot Spec with some ridiculously overpowered FoL. Our normally holy pally was doing something like 12k FoL crits as Prot.

With a decent tank, especially with a DK though, a Disc Priest should be enough for the MT. I'd suggest running an unconventional Disc spec though (assuming standard is 57/14+1, go with 54/18 and get Imp. Healing). Then have fun dancing in and out of Shadow Crashes. Go in to cast PoM and PWS, go out to cast Penance.

[e] It has been answered. The achievement is to kill the Animus.

Can anyone confirm that increased absorb from Sacred Shield/PW:S casted from crash still works?

PWS, PoM, Sacred Shield and Earth Shield all gain their full benefit.