@Jagiya, you only used a single tank for both the animus and Vezax? We've been playing with the encounter on hard mode 10 man a bit and aren't having much luck once the animus spawns. If we use 2 tanks, typically a Prot warrior on Vezax, and a feral on the animus so the feral can dps all of "phase 1", then it's fairly stable, but i can't imagine the dps being all that great. If we use 1 tank, well, I don't see the tank living more then a few seconds.

Both the animus and Vezax are hitting for 10k+, not to mention the need to continue kiting vezax. Do you just blow CDs during the kite phase and lean heavily on your healers or what? Judgement of light probably does an insane amount of healing for all the melee you have, so raid healing should be somewhat easier for awhile.

Also, I'd be interested in compiling a list of abilities that shadow crash affects that aren't, erm, immediately obvious. I hear priest shields, shaman earth shield and you mentioned lifebloom, are affected by the -50% crash mana conservation, but not from the -healing component. Anything else I'm missing?

Correct, I solo tanked both on my Paladin. The incoming damage really wasn't that bad. About half way through P2, our Disc Priest (oom) intentionally dies to a Shadow Crash in order to use Rebirth as a regen mechanic, which is when I use Divine Protection. For the rest of the phase, solid healing keeps me alive comfortably, and during the Surge we use Pain Suppression/Hand of Sacrifice. (It's the only Surge I don't kite throughout the entire encounter)

My Paladin isn't tremendously geared by any means. I've got a decent kit of Ulduar10 stuff, but that's all. I'm sure some 25's tanks would find the damage pretty trivial.

EDIT: Armory says I'm in Holy Gear at the moment, sorry.

Killed him hardmode with Jagiya`s tactic. Solo healing P1 as a disc priest and still having 11k mana left when P2 started made this fight alot easier for us then our previous strategy. Had 2 paladins chaining cooldowns every other surge, along with the druids owns cooldowns made it trivial. used a retri paladin for JoL and had a shaman healer just helping with earthshields from shadowcrash was all the help i needed. Didn`t have SS on the kill so i stayed alive until the end of the fight and used Hymn of Hope(increasing max mana by 20% gives me another 5-6k mana me and the dps can burn away in the end of the fight).

had a feral druid tank the boss and the add. only problems we had were with threat. most of our dps had to hold back to not overaggro, especially the add(i belive our paladins set up hand of salvation rotations for our lock even).

We never kited any surges btw, using our cooldowns was more then enough to keep the tank alive through them. Used heroism on the add to down it as fast as possible.

My priest, average geared i`d say. Our druid tank is mostly 25man geared.

Does anyone have a parse of a hard mode kill, preferably from World of Logs? I was looking at World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis and it's only 32M damage done in total, 12.5M to the add and 20M to the boss. But the boss has itself 30M HP. Is this some fight mechanic I'm not aware of (we haven't tried it yet, but I don't really see how it could be anyway), or just an error in the parse?

We finally got Vezax hard mode in Normal raid.

I have the feeling that the dps requirement was quite heavy, especially to kill the Animus before the next Surge.

The lineup was :
Feral Tank
Enhancement Shaman with interrutpion duty
Hunter
Lock
Moonkin
Moonkin
Mage
Holy Paladin
Holy Paladin
me as a Disc Priest

basically I was chain shielding the tank and all the range dps for 2 purpose "prevention healing" of the damage taken by the dps (essentially the Mark of the Faceless) and avoiding to much healing from Vezax (absorbed damages don't heal him and we manage a kill with "only" 2100 hps for Vezax).

So we reach P2 with 3.5% percent of life for Vezax but we hardly manage to beat down the Animus before the second surge, principally for aggro reasons.

With multiple wipes during P2 because of a lack of shadowcrash, is there something we can improve in order to manage to kill the animus with 10 to 15s without shadowcrash available ?

During the second surge + animus it is almost impossible to keep the MT alive without consuming the last parts of mana pool of the healers

So, this is probably obvious, but.. Wild Magic potions/Speed potions for the casters during that phase + bloodlust. You have 3 magic-button cooldowns for your tank: pain suppression and 2 x hand of sacrifice. Maybe you double them up at that point (yours + one of the paladins) to avoid having to heal him at all -- he barkskins + survival instincts + frenzied regen at that point. He should take absolutely no damage. Also, I don't know when you are hitting your hymn, but if you haven't used it by then, you can use it, people will have 5k mana or so to dump before it wears off.

Here is a parse of our Hardmode kill from last night: World of Logs

Shows that we did around 49 million damage, which sounds about right with a few heals here and there

Can anyone confirm whether marksman hunter's Silencing Shot can interrupt General's casting of Searing Flames?

Yes, I can confirm that, but it has no lockout duration, so I wouldn't recommend it.

I just want to give a tip for healing in case somebody hasn't thought of this, or maybe doesn't use a resto druid normally.

You can use a resto druid(s) for all of P1 just using free life blooms from Omen of Clarity. Not only do they get to stack LB for free but the bloom actually returns mana. Meaning they can toss a non-free heal here and there then get mana back from the bloom.

Doing this can give you a very nice buffer during P1 to ease up on other healer mana. Then when P2 rolls around the druid(s) will be at or near full mana to WG/Rejuv the raid, or if you have that covered nourish spam the tanks.

Mouse over macros are pretty much required for a druid healer on this, so they can never de-target Vezax/Animus and always be getting a chance at omen of clarity when not casting.

We normally have a resto druid, but we spec a boomkin over to resto for this.

(No, I do not have a hard mode kill yet but healing has not been our failing point sadly)

Just a general question about tanking on 25 man version of this fight....

I know there will be various opinions, but is there a general consensus on which tanking class makes learning this encounter easier. We usually run with a druid MT but I am curious if that is our best option and why or why not?

Thanks for the help in advance.