We're beginning work on Vezax HM (Heroic) this week. We've always split into 4 groups. Half casters on one side of Vezax, half on the other. Healers clump up half way in between 25-30 yards in front of Vezax and the melee. This works fine for our easy mode kills, but its just so RNG based it drives me crazy.

I brought up the notion of just having everyone clump together 30 yards in front of Vezax and have everyone get the crashes. We were running late last night onn route to Yogg and I tried to implement this and we wiped on the first attempt because a Mage pulled aggro and we abandoned it and moved on.

I just feel like this strategy removes RNG from the fight completely and is a very repeatable process. When there is a crash, everyone moves. When there is Life Leech, just that one person runs to the back wall.

Based on y'alls experiences with this fight, what HM strat do you recommend for 25man?

And if you guys think this 1 ranged group strat is a good idea, should there be any healer other than our DiscPriest standing in the crash?

Put as many healers in melee range as possible; shaman and druids especially due to the way they should be doing the fight. A disc priest in the crashes is nice, but not necessary.

Using one ranged group is a significant dps increase from splitting the raid, but it requires all ranged dps to play well, watch aggro and not annihilate the raid with mark damage. Using aspect of the pack can help quite a bit as it punishes players who are performing poorly, but aids anyone who's moving from crashes/mark. It also helps minimize mark damage.

If casters are pulling aggro, tell them not to cast until the second or third crash. They'll probably need the mana to get through animus phase anyway.

We found that one range group is by far the best option, with one catch. The range group of the raid is split into two mini-groups that hug the left or right side of a crash puddle. They do this to spread the crash out in a line where possible. After 2-3 crashes spread out in this manner, only one group will have to move to avoid them. This helps your caster DPS uptime on the animus and stem the amount of Mark of the Faceless healing. This seemingly simple change to our previous 'just group up' strat was readily embraced by all the casters, because of how much more manageable the fight became. I'll explain it more clearly:

If you aren't already doing it, try having your Disc priest throw out mass pre-emptive shields on the entire range camp.

Vezax only heals via Mark of the Faceless if people actually take damage from it. If your Disc Priest shields everyone, they might display the green-beam animation when a nearby person gets Mark of the Faceless, but Vezax will get NO healing from it while the Power Word: Shield holds. (It can absorb one tick, which should be enough time to allow most people to escape).

Doing this, you can improve your P1 DPS significantly - albeit indirectly, by minimising the self healing Vezax does. Our best result from using this mass-shield mechanic, has seen Vezax at 50% health with 0 self healing done once. Realistically he's always going to heal a little, but doing this will greatly reduce the amount.

One side does not have to move after only one crash. If a new crash is going to land on the edge of an old one that means it will reach only half way across the old crash. So a group on the other edge is fine.

My guild recently started general and so far we have gotten in about 2-3 hours of attempts. I was wondering what healing assignments do the majority of guilds use on this fight? including spell usage. I am simply boggling at people describing being able to keep a tank up with just 3 healers with no mana returns, as we are having issues keeping the MT up with FIVE! dedicated healers. Last night we had 2 holy paladins, 3 resto druids, 2 disc(sorta) priests, and not only were my priests going oom, they were doing it at about 50%, and generally the same with the rest of the healers. The assignments i was using was as follows:

druids: rejuv, swiftmend when health spikes, nourish stopcast otherwise, lifebloom on clearcasting proc
priests: shield ranged and MT from within crashes, pennance tank when health spikes from outside shadow crash
paladins: 1 paladin would stop cast holy lights waiting for 50% tank health, other would shock at 70% then flash till shock was up again.

What we do is split up the healing as follows:

Druids - melee for clearcasting procs. On a clearcast cast Rejuv. If you get another clearcast before Rejuv falls off cast Regrowth or Lifebloom (if you need the mana). Typically the druids try to conserve their mana for P2 with the Animus up. SM burst only if really needed.

Paladins - Sacred Shield from a crash and then Flash of Light whenever the tank isn't at full. [Edit: If you have no ret Judgement of Light is very cheap to keep up and adds a fair amount of healing.]

Priests - Sit in crash and spam PW:S. Use PoM from inside the crash. Use penance out of crash for burst healing.

Shaman - Healing stream totem. Earth Shield inside the crash. I'm unsure of what heals he uses outside the crash though.

Basically we go for mana efficiency and trust tank CDs and periodic heals to keep the tank stable enough for a healer to respond to sudden spikes.

I can't speak too overly much for your comments on the other healers but as a druid you should never be casting nourish on this fight. It is just stupidly expensive for what it does. Rejuv and Regrowth are your best bets (especially on a clearcast) as they last for a significant amount of time and are SM fodder.

[Edit2: What tank are you using? We use a blood DK tank who has a non-trivial amount of self-healing. A large reason why we are able to have this easy 'wait and see' approach to healing the MT is because he can take 2 hits in a row without dying even if he receives 0 heals. This normally gives our periodic/small heals enough chance to tick and heal him enough to take a third hit if the healers are really sleeping and are slow to react to this burst. It may be that your tank is poorly geared and your healers are burning through mana at a much faster pace to try and compensate for that.]

Have you thought about having your tank go blood for the fight? With using Deathstrike as part of the regular threat rotation (15% max health back each hit 2x every 10s cycle), along with having Improved Rune tap (20% max health oshi- button for 1B every 30s) and Will of the Necropolis (-15% damage on any hit that would take you below 35% on a 15s CD) it provides a SIGNIFICANT boost to his survivability and lets us handle healing in a much more leisurely fashion. Vampiric Blood and Mark of Blood are also nothing to sneeze at. Although they won't save your life directly by themselves, combining them during a rough spot can truly pull off amazing things. Vampiric Blood + Imp Rune Tap/Death Pact I'm looking at you.

If you are wanting to compare gear you can check out our DK here.

Also remember to use Demoralizing Roar / Shout when using a paladin or DK tank. The debuff is often overlooked since warrior tanks bring it so consistently, but the difference (especially for the improved debuff) is very, very noticeable.

hey everyone, I've looked all over and I can't find the macro for reporting in a percent mana remaining. I used to have it and when I transfered servers, it disappeared. I noticed only the macros I had dedicated for that specific toon did so. I find it highly useful for co-ordinating saronite vapors on Vezax.

Can anyone assist me?

Something like this should do it:

You can replace "RAID" with "PARTY" or "SAY" or "RAID_WARNING" if you like.

Here is my rewrite of Tyrian's strategy. If there are any errors, let me know and I can clean it up. Some folks I know didn't understand the initial post, so I spelled it out a little differently.

VEZAX.pdf

He does fire them off more frequently (thus consistently). He also will spawn the animus much earlier.

This was posted before 3.2 came out, but for those reading it now: paladin tanks now have our own version of demo shout (Vindication), so this is no longer necessary.

Is there any idea of how often he casts after an interrupt? On 10m he would cast exactly in line with my pummel cooldown (10s, 4s lockout), and on 25m it was in line with both mine and the other warrior's, so every 5 secs. Anyone know if shorter lockouts like windshock would make him cast faster than that?

I can't confirm it, but can report a similar observation. We had two rogues rotating it last night and while it was tight on their kick cooldown all along, we managed fine.

However, as soon as someone with a shorter lockout would interrupt one (ie, windshock in this particular case) we had our rogues reporting they were still on cooldown from the previous searing flames.

I can't try this anymore this reset since we killed it yesterday, but since the animus now comes up after 6 clouds I wonder if it's possible to use the first two clouds to gain mana and then spawn the Animus after the 8th. Or has the total number of clouds simply been reduced to 6?

The premise of hard mode is to kill Vezax without any mana regeneration, so I think you only get 6 clouds altogether.

Did you kill a cloud before the Animus spawned to see if he makes a 7th cloud and forms the Animus anyway?

I can confirm from yesterday, that even killing up to 2 clouds before the Animus spawns will result in 6 clouds spawning in total, and the Animus will not spawn.

On 10man he casts every ~10sec or so regardless of who interrupts. A solo enhance shaman can shock every cast and it'll be fine.

On 25man he'll cast as often as his school lockout allows. (And he always COULD, as many interrupters can attest -- it's just that lately it seems like he always WILL.) Two rogues can do it forever, but if a shaman Shocks a Flames, he'll cast another 2 seconds later.

A few things we noticed on our first 10 Vezax hard kill yesterday:

A single DPS deathknight was enough to interrupt all casts. We did not see a single cast to interrupt in the animus phase. The encounter is dead easy now, we two-shot it (first attempt failed, because the tank did not catch the animus quickly, which led to healer dead). Our two healers had about 50% mana when the fight was over.

Just a few things that I noticed earlier that have changed which I don't see mention of yet:

- Paladin LoH does not grant mana on the fight anymore (Glyph of Divinity was insanely good before) so save those LoHs for the tank
- Tree Druids punching the boss to proc clearcasting does not work
- Fel mana pots do not work
- Dark Rune DOES work still.

It was the same way pre-3.2, actually.