Hand of Sacrifice is what it's called.

Why would you not kite the boss, except maybe for the 1st surge when the tank is trying to get a good hold on aggro? Kiting reduces immensely the damage you take since every minute you can spend 15s not getting hit at all. Kiting surges offers 25% less damage taken when compared to a strategy that uses a DK tanking with IBF all the fight. Healer positioning is not an issue because you can safely kite between two predefined positions, with healers standing in the middle.

Having only done this with a fixed-position tank, the answer I'd say is that healing is very light anyway, especially if your ranged is avoiding the shadow crashes and you are interrupting the flames. So this just lets everyone more or less get into position and stay in position.

Basically it's the same with Emalon. You just heal your tank through the nova instead of letting him run out and in again (at least on our server).
Of course you're right that kiting should reduce damage taken. But your tank, your healers or your interrupts could mess the kiting phase up ending probably in a wipe.
In my opinion a static fight is always easier and hey, cooldowns are there to be used.

It's fairly safe to say that kiting or standing still are both perfectly acceptable methods when doing this boss on normal mode. There is no urgency to conserve mana, positioning is easier and the fight is far simplified if you stand in one position.

The hard mode is another beast all together, as ~15 seconds where the tank isn't taking damage would be absolutely necessary to save as much mana as possible. Using this method a DK for example would be free to keep his defensive abilities on CD during normal phases, which would thus lower the amount of healing needed.

Can the discussion please move on from kiting and or standing still?

It is not absolutely necessary when it has been beaten on hard mode without the use of kiting. Both methods are viable for both modes of the fight.

Furthermore, I'm a little curious what else about the fight is worth discussing. Strategically, you want your ranged dps to be spread out some distance from the boss so that no one gets hit by shadow crash and yet people can quickly get to the residue to dps from it. That much seems obvious.

I suppose one can argue about where to put the healers, altho it seems fairly obvious that melee range is safer with no discernable downside other than a guarantee they have to move in order to pick up the cloud residues.

This fight reminds me a lot of Void Reaver, of all things: There is a core mechanic that has a lot of people running around, but the fewer people you can get by with running around, the better off you are.

Death grip the clouds to Vezax.

Has anyone tried the [Darkmoon Card: Illusion] on Vezax? Would be nice to know if the triggered mana effect works on this fight.

I really, really doubt it works. No other trinkets of any kind work unless they somehow forgot that one.

According to a posting in *this* thread in the German R&D forum it doesn't work.

So far in 10 man, we have tried the following mana regen tricks

[Dark Rune] - Functional 15 min CD
[Lei of Lilies] - Functional shared CD with healthstones

Water Shield - Spell - World of Warcraft - Orbs functional, passive MP5 none functional

[Darkmoon Card: Illusion] - None functional
[Runic Mana Injector] - None functional
Life Tap - Spell - World of Warcraft - None functional

Lifebloom - Functional

I think it's pretty clear that things that discount mana do work and things that create some kind of mana gain don't.

Lifebloom's return is basically a delayed discount; the Darkmoon Card is a "mana return effect". I'm pretty sure the Soul Preserver works as well (it seemed to for me, but I was focused on healing).

As for why Dark Runes and Leis work? My guess is oversight since they are such old items. They also have gigantic cooldowns and together would restore less than 2000 mana over the entire fight.

Your theory doesn't explain shamanistic rage and judged wisdom, however. My best theory is simply that things were set to return mana if they would otherwise completely bork certain raiders. As you say, though, they probably forgot about Runes and Leis, as they're old relatively forgettable.

The nice thing about Lifebloom is that it's the cheapest heal aside from judged light. On the downside, it's not something I use frequently - I might bloom a ranged who had a bad crash experience, but that's not supposed to normally happen. I could bloom the tank (may as well), but only the HoT is what I would call reliable, and it's eclipsed by the other healing coming in.

Obviously enhancement shaman and ret paladins were meant to function in the same way other melee do on this fight, ie not having to worry about their power bar. It'd be a bit messed up if we were having to run around worrying about taking vapour ticks without having any sort of damage benefit to offset the lost time (and it'd just result in people bringing other classes). This discussion seems a bit pointless anyway, obviously it's intended that healers have to deal with mana in a different way in this fight and looking for ways to circumvent that seems to be against the intent of the fight.

@ Juli

I might have missunderstood shadow crash completly for our last 3-4 kills, but i was under assumption that, healers standing in shadow crash and healing the tank will have their healing output reduced by 70%?

Shields aren't heals so they're not affected, however they're spells so they get the mana reduction, which combined with the priest talents(Rapture I think it's called?) makes shielding pretty much free/giving back mana. Can step out to Penance and step back in for shields.

Rapture's self mana return does not work on this fight (yay Immune!). I can't speak to the "energize" effect on the person being shielded though.

That said, running into the Shadow Crashes for PW: Shield is still really really nice. Doing that shifted the fight from painful to simply unfun.

delete please, unsure of my data, I'll have to do more testing for improved soul leech since my recount is deceiving, I'll have to run a wws our next hard mode kill.

In 25 man Ulduar, how many players must be outside the 15 yard range from General Vezax before he can cast Shadow Crashes on those closer than 15 yards?

3 in 10 man
10 in 25 man