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?

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

Even if Coliseum is out now, my guild wants to go for that Ironbound Protodrake. So we wanted to start doing Vezax HM this week.
On the stratfu Forums I read about a change of shadow crash firing rate (now every 5secs). Can anyone confirm this?
If he fires Crashes now that ferquently, is the strategy Xieon posted above still the way to go?

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

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?