I am, currently, the raid leader of my guild and am working to prepare us for AQ40. We've stepped in once, after a full BWL clear, and in two tries were able to bring Skeram to 23%. While we must refine that strategy, and still have several bosses to kill before we reach Huhuran, I have started working to try and get our raiders prepared for when we get to her. While we get our Warriors and Rogues to farm for NR, I've come across an interesting decision.

I'm not sure whether or not we ought to have our Shaman or our Hunters act as Nature Damage soaks at the Huhuran fight.

As far as melee groups are concerned, I believe I will try to design 4 groups to act as soak wall groups. Additionally, I am motivated to place a priest in each for PoH and a shaman for totems.

I feel that to provide that added DPS boost for the last 30%, the shaman's totems should come in handy. At the same time, however, my friend and Shaman CL has been arguing that it would totally gimp our shaman in terms of healing in that fight. This is also true. I tried out a CT-Profile today, and noticed that I lost around 2k mana unbuffed. I then proceeded to spam a few heals, trying to simulate different scenarios. It seems like it would be a challenge to not go OOM prematurely in the fight, and with such little regen, I'm confused as to how the shaman would act during the first 70% of the fight.

With Hunters, there are a couple different pros and cons. As a Hunter, one could Feign Death and then proceed to equip the NR gear at around 32%. This would be ideal. But then, I'm concerned, that their DPS would be gimped for the most important part of the encounter. Additionally, range becomes an issue, since they would have to be part of the close 15, but at the same time, provide room for the priests to PoH without endangering them to silence. Finally, I'm concerned that if one of the 15 wall members dies, who will pick up the Poison Volley Soaking. With a raid setup of 6 warriors, 5 rogues, and 5 hunters, we would have 16 people in NR. Not 17 or 18. Hunters could serve as better backup, I believe.

And then there's the added loss of Windfury Totems and such to help out DPS. But then again, if I tried to fit both shaman and hunters (Aspect of the Wild) in with melee groups, we would end up having an additional group, which would only strain the raid further.

I have diligently read the WoW Raids and Dungeons forums, and before I posted, I made sure to check the older posts here on these forums. There are a few more, but none that provided me with the kind of answers I was looking for (Though they did educate me about the healing situation on this fight. That leads me to believe that Hunters are a better alternative, though I was under the impression that you had shaman act as soaks in this fight.)
(http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...hp?id=6734&p=1)
(http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewt...hp?id=7111&p=1)


Now, we haven't yet encountered Huhuran. And while I'm motivated to just say, "Screw it, we'll try and figure it out when we get there", I'm also aware that we're several months behind in content, and not everyone is as keen to wipe endlessly on things that aren't... "brand new". I would also not want to put guildies through additional repair bills in AQ40, that could otherwise be avoided.


Thank you very much in advance.

Hunters for easier grouping, at least for us. Hunter + 3 melee + PoH Priest -- three of those groups and most of your frontline is sorted while taking minimal healer resources.

We use hunters, for a few reasons. First, huhuran has a very small hitbox, which lets you shoot at the close range required to soak bolts. Plus, a hunter is just about the worse form of "burst dps" you have at 30%. We have our one cooldown, which basically adds two autoshots. sweet. lastly, you can wear your normal gear up to 40% so you dont miss tranq, then FD in to NR gear.

This is probably a much better choice compared to using paladins/shaman with gimped healing power.

Hunters are the best but definetly not because of FD / swap gear - we had a hunter get FD resists 3 times in a row but we had to go zerk or the second tank was gonna stack up dots, needless to say this hunter died and thanks to an iceblock the kill went fairly smooth.

As has been said, four soak groups of melee/melee/melee/hunter/poh priest. Can even go with 5 and put a pally in the tank groups and such. Lots of room to move.

Its no problem at all to provide totems to a soak group without yourself beeing part of the wall, you just stand a bit futher back and put the totems between those in the wall and yourself.

Easiest is 4x OT groups setup something like 2 rogue, 1 warrior, 1 hunter, 1 priest

MT which are 2x warrior, hunter, warlock, paladin, and the only soakers in this group are the 2 MT warriors (they get direct heals, the 4x OT groups get prayer + spot heals from spare healers in case of silence on their priest etc).

This gets you 18 total soakers, which are 3 spare, and the hunter in the MT group can become one if one of the warriors dies as well.

We went from PoH to single heal recently and found that better.

Our raids usually looks like this;
6 Warriors
6 Rogues
4 Hunters
6 Priests
5 Shamans
4 Druids

We make the groups like this;
MT - Soaker
MT - Soaker
Hunter - Soaker
Warlock
Shaman

Warrior - Soaker
Warrior - Soaker
Rogue - Soaker
Shaman
Hunter - Soaker

Warrior - Soaker
Rogue - Soaker
Rogue - Soaker
Shaman
Hunter - Soaker

Warrior - Soaker
Rogue - Soaker
Rogue - Soaker
Rogue - Soaker
Shaman

We give each priest 2-3 Soakers to keep up.
One druid on each MT to keep hots up and cleanse sleep. (Make sure to only cleanse when the MT is on ~100%HP)
2 druids & 4 shamans to keep the MT up.

Seems to work well for us.

Realistically, your hunters in gimp gear aren't going to be *that* detrimental to your raid. Sure she might be up for 5 seconds longer, but if you're gimping your Shaman gear to make them soak, they'll be OOM at 20% and useless thereafter. Hunters in NR gear can still autoshot (and multi1/aimed1 for mana conservation) for decent damage.

To put it bluntly, Shaman in NR are more gimped than Hunters in NR.

PS: What's the proper plural of Shaman? Shamen? Shamans? Gah. (Being as I'm alliance, it's not a problem I run into every day.)

We always use hunters as Sess said. It really works well and last kill we downed her first try with zero deaths. Our hunters don't do anthing fancy like swaping gear, they just tranq and make sure they are at minimum range when we near the 30% mark.

If you are just starting this encounter then it's a must for all of the soakers to have Health Stones from the warlocks as well as Major Nature Resistance potions. Start out by using the stone if your HP goes below 40%, then use the pot next time it goes below 40%. The rest is up to the healers. Another thing is that all our soakers have upwards of 250 buffed nature resistance, so you'll want to encourage your members to reach that target.

Edit: As a hunter you'll want to use arcane and multi shots at the 30% mark since you get major interrupts from the constant poison damage.

We used warlocks rogues and warriors
The first 5 groups look like this:
Warrior, Rogue, Warlock, Hunter, Priest.