My guild just killed Sapphiron, took us a good 6 hours, this was the strat I came up with inbetween the two nights it took us and I wanted to share it and get the opinions of other priests on the fight.

My spec for Sapphiron:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000

The notable talents I have are improved prayer of healing and improved renew, these are critical to my healing strategy.

I decided upon having 660 healing and 200 FrR unbuffed with the gear I use in this fight.

I then broke down each of our healing spells to determine which exactly are the best to use for maximizing mana efficiency. I assumed all group heals would heal all 5 people and all renews would tick for their full amount each time. The tests were also done wearing 3pc trans and 2pc faith.



(The smaller graph is measurements I took using different levels of FrR. I wish I could've gotten more samples but I'm sure the curve would've been similar).

Interpretation:
Renew Rank3 is a magnificiently efficient spell as it is only 81 mana but halves the damage taken by sapphiron. PoH doesn't scale the same way that most healing spells do, and PoH Rank 5 is only a little less efficient than PoH1, but is more than twice as powerful.

In the end my strat for sapphiron is to spam Renew Rank 3 on my party and keep it as much as possible, and to use PoH R5 anytime my party is renewed and would all observe full healing. In the event that a player needs healing I will use GH1 as my mainstay heal assuming he would recieve full benefit.

I was curious for those priests who have beaten this fight what they use on it and what their strat is.

Also, here's the DM of our winning fight. I was in the only group with no backup healer. I used 3 mana potions, flask and a dark rune, no other consumables.




I'd also like to see what other people's DMs are for the fight(especially healing).

Grats on the kill.

PoH is really powerful on this fight, those two PoH points are well spent.


Impressive graphs, the SW stats show that you are a great healer and really care about being the best. The only problem is using imageshack on EJ forums it is not the best host for the large number of browsers here, photobucket seems to work well.

Why did you get spiritual guidance instead of spiritual healing? It because you gain more healing on rank 3 rewnew with guidance? Also why do you have holy nova? Why don't you spend that point in spiritual healing? Or if you are really speccing for the fight I assume you don't need inspiration to heal your group so drop that and get 5/5 Spiritual Guidance and 4/5 Spiritual healing?

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000 might be a bit more efficient. ALTHOUGH, I'm talking out of my ass because I haven't done the fight- (only on Gothik) and can only go on the healing style you have mentioned.

Inspiration is for other fights, it's useless on Sapphiron.

Holy Nova is so I can do top DPS on skitterer packs on spider wings (It was that or 1% to crit)

Guidance is better healing for renew rank 3 unless they changed the way spiritual healing works. I don't believe spiritual healing is affected by +healing, making it really nasty for Renew, but somewhat useful still for PoH5.

I always found that the power I got from just max rank poh'ing with an occasional h2 to even up someone gave me a ton more regen time. Is there anyway you could consider regen time into your analysis?

I came without any experience beforehand to the night of our first and so far only Sapphiron kill, so I have not been able to test much in different types of healing, first I tried using POH5 exclusively with occassional renews and rank2 heal for topping someone off who's been hit by a Blizzard or so, and letting the group far enough down(about 2k damage taken) to be able to do 2 POHs in a row without much overhealing, while making sure everyone is topped off for the flight phases. The idea was to optimize the amount of spirit regen gotten.

This did not quite work as planned since it meant letting the group so far down on HP they died almost instantly to anything unexpected, such as a Blizzard. So I instead just switched to trying to land a POH5 whenever my group had taken 1.4k or so average damage, which kept them alive well enough but I did use a fair deal of consumables, although I felt I had plentiful mana with them and ended up spamming flash heals and whatnot in the last 25% and just disregarding mana optimization since I had so much mana to spare in the end. Ended up with the most effective healing and 5% overhealing.

I did in fact consider using R3, but is it actually worth it? It may seem very efficient if looked at as such, but if you consider the fact that you need to spend 5 global CDs renewing your group and redo it as soon as the first one has run out, it seems like it's a waste of regen time - the HP/S is really pretty low compared to the amount of damage taken, unless your group has very high FrR(mine had around 200 average I think, no shaman). It's one thing to look at a spell's theoretical efficiency, when the actual efficiency might be completely different - how efficient would R3 look if you added a tick of lost regen to its mana cost compared to if you would use POH5 exclusively?

Edit: Great post btw, it amuses me slightly that there are people sneering at this post, such as

when on these very same boards can be found tens of pages of discussion on basically discussing how to best optimize one's sinister strike / SnD cycles. Everyone likes theorycraft, even if the conclusion formed would not differ much from one made based on pure experience.

What no pie chart?

Are you guys seriously making fun of one of the best-written/thought out posts on this forum in a long time? Why do you read these forums, exactly, if not for posts like this?

Sorry parses and charts are only allowed for DPS classes, maybe tanks if you're trying to decide on resist gear or physical mitigation.

Perhaps not the most diplomatic responses there, but if you need that level of analysis to figure out what heals to use on this fight I am not sure what to tell you.

One thing which is pertinent is the balance of gear / set bonuses one may choose depending on your role/class.

Also, your spec is a little confusing, and did you consider regen issues at all?

This fight revolves around mana management and avoiding spike damage.
Spike damages only comes in 2 forms, curse and blizzard. Blizzard takes practice and awareness to avoid, the curse just takes mages/druids push buton.

As for the mana management, find out how to spend as much time in the 5 sec rule as possible. I do 2 PoH's back to back then wait till the party loses around 3000 health then I repeat. Around 15 seconds of spiriting up. When we did our consumables attempt, I never had mana problems (thanks in part to tide), and I wasn't wearing 3 piece trans and I didn't spec PoH. Ended the fight with about 70% mana. I only used 1 or 2 major manas, if I didn't have tide I probably would have used a 3rd.

Renew doesn't top people off, it only stabalizes damage taken. I really don't expect people to have more than 200 FrR. 300+ is just silly. They'll take 400 damage every 2 seconds and your renew will heal them 400 every 3 seconds. The only way people die is from spike damage they shouldn't be taking, or from positioning issues when the nuke hits.


edit: No, people use this forum to pool for answers or confirmation to tell their guild that they are wrong.

To clarify, I think the reason I was a little confused by the post was because while some of the analysis is interesting from a theoretical perspective, there are a lot of things that aren't terribly helpful if you are trying to execute the fight yourself. Spiritual Guidance still seems a very strange choice, but maybe that's just me.

In addition, where you stand on the heal-meters in relation to the outlined strategy is vague at best (in terms of usefulness) because as mentioned we don't know who you were healing in your party or what your specific healing duties are.

The strategy as a whole for healers in this fight isn't terribly complex outside of a few difficult choices you may need to make in gearing for it -- as Mhedic mentioned, in addition to coming up with a baseline strategy for keeping your group up given how damage is thrown around on paper is one thing, but adapting to people taking more damage than they should and then that in turn affecting your regen and so forth is another. I am however interested to see what various healers (on both factions) use as far as consumables go in a typical Sapphiron kill, as well as how long a typical kill takes from week to week (for those who have been killing him repeatedly -- crazy world buffs and so forth not withstanding).

This is probably not typical since it was our first kill, but I used Nigthfin soup, +25 spi booze, monster omelette, Brilliant Mana Oil, Mageblood and 4 dark runes and 5 Major Manas + a Flask of Distilled Wisdom. The kill took 10½ minutes from the pull, and I was at full mana after consumables at 30% or so. My group did not have a shaman so we had an average resistance of about 200 and no mana tide, and I believe that I could easily do it with significantly less consumables.

Mhedic, most of our DPS have close to 300 FrR buffed. If you had a group full of 200 FrR people, trust me, you'd have problems. What works for healers does not work for everyone.

Also, regarding the OP, very nice analysis, but it seems like you're missing a key dimension of mana efficiency, as has been noted by a couple of people already -- regen. Ultimately, what matters is not necessarily raw hp/mana, but rather total hp over time including regen. If you spend more mana to heal the same HP, but also get full spirit ticks that regen back an amount greater than the difference, then a less efficient spell may be superior. Not to play the old faction imbalance card, but in a situation where people are stripping off some of their best epics to wear FrR, and favoring +healing on those remaining slots by necessity, mana/5 can be very hard to come by. BoW/JoW is a huge advantage, conferring a much greater marginal benefit than on an ordinary fight (going from 50 mana/5 to 90 mana/5 is a much bigger deal than going from 110 mana/5 to 150 mana/5). If you're spamming renew, then you aren't getting any spirit ticks. We found that spirit ticks were pretty much necessary to keep going for the whole fight, which is also part of why people taking unnecessary damage from Blizzard/Curse is so bad, even it isn't fatal -- it forces people to break their spirit regen in order to toss a quick heal or two to top off the person who took the spike.

Impressive statistics although your spec confuses me a bit. My strategy is more similiar to Mhedic's, however ignoring that the 3pc trans bonus still reigns supreme to this day gearwise, i couldn't imagine giving it up for a fight like sapph. Gear wise i go with this http://ctprofiles.net/4361037 - with pally aura my FrR is up to normal, when i'm pallyless i cope without much trouble. I much rather have 3pc and the impact pieces than swap it with a stat-lacking FrR cape or trinket.

Also to add on to what Praet mentioned, I much rather spend the big numbers and have a 10-15 second grace period of wanding (mmm JoW), then go back to where i started.

I don't give it up by choice....

I have 218-230. Add a totem I guess that makes an easy 300ish FrR and does make life a lot easier.

As for handling spike damage, if they're at least 2000+ health. I'll pop renew and the persons health will match the rest of the group before long. If they're low, fheal or downrank heal.

It's important to remember than when saph is on the ground, you're pretty safe to let your groups health drop to 2k-2.5k health. When he's in the air, keep your group topped off so they don't die to the ice block, if they die to ice block that's 1 less object to hide behind when he drops the bomb.

Would be interesting to hear if any Horde Priests have success with a renew based healing strategy. I'm not sure they could pull it off without JoW or BoW. The faction imbalance really shows on Sapphiron. Alliance priests can really get away with doing absolutely anything on that fight. This thread has me thinking about how much of a challenging fight Sapphiron must be for Horde.

You'll find that even more than regen and all that - the most important thing to mana efficacy is burst potential and dealing with it - read: Hitpoints.

Having more hitpoints makes dealing with crisis and issues of that nature trivial. Having more HP basically makes it so healers have almost no mana concerns - sure BoK to some extent, but when we came back our 2nd and 3rd times to drop this guy, we went for some HP buffs, and the fight was bascially trivial. Healers didn't need major manas, and no one needed gfrpps. This is truly a healer's fight.

But yeah - this entire review above ignores the regen aspect - timing heals is critical for priests!

First, congratulations on both the kill and dominating the meter :)

Disclaimer: I haven't seen Sapphiron yet, I have no clue what kind of "burst" damage is possible, or how long the fight is, this is pure theorycrafting with a spreadsheet.

On the assumption that you and your group are taking 145 DPS:
You're casting 1 PoH5 and 5 R3 every 15 seconds, costing you 1261 mana. That's 5044 mana every minute, 25220 over 5 min. Your FSR is 100% though, and you really don't have time to cast other spells.

If you were to respec into Spiritual Healing (out of Mental Strength) you could cast PoH once every 10 seconds (6 times in a minute) for 5136 mana. Your party will also drop an average of 348 health every minute if PoH heals for it's average (1392 after Spiritual Healing) since I figured you wouldn't want to waste potential crits on overhealing. So every 3 minutes you'd need to cast a 2nd PoH.

However, you will have 27 seconds (13.5 tics) of mana regen outside the FSR. These 13.5 tics only have to compensate for 92 more mana, and I'll be willing to bet that they're more than 92/15 higher, thus PoH5 is technically more mana efficient. While other spells are able to be cast, their effective mana cost becomes (Cost + (Time/2*(OFSR-IFSR)))

On second though, a slightly more difficult to perform, but slightly better method would be Casting PoH5 after 10 seconds, then 10, then 9, and repeat. You'll end up with 2 more casts in 12 minutes (resulting in a better healed party), and spend 11 more tics outside the FSR (though that won't make up for the 2 extra casts, it will prevent you from having to waste mana on other healing). The lowest health with this method is -2059 at 11:55 into the fight.

Interesting. I do things a little bit differently. This is my spec: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...00000000000000. The most noticable difference between my spec and yours is that you've taken Spell Warding instead of Spiritual Healing. Personally, I think that Spiritual Healing is a must-have - it's pretty spectacular for the point investment. Spell Warding, on the other hand . . . in the past, I have specced in and out of this talent multiple times. Eventually, I observed that the only times that Spell Warding ended up doing anything meaningful was when there was a lot of unavoidable spell damage (sapph, 4h, kt, etc). Sounds good, right? Not really. The thing is, in all of these situations, my party is taking equivalent damage. In sapph and kt, for example, I have to POH constantly anyway. Even if I took 20% less spell damage, or 30%, neither my healing pattern nor my survivability would be affected. Anyway . . .

My gear for the Sapph fight is as follows: Glacial cloak/vest/gloves/wrist/pants (optimally enchanted), Trans helm/belt/shoulders, Wavefront Necklace, Essence Gatherer, exalted Brood ring . . . Benediction, Treads of the Wandering Nomad (look it up), Mar'li's Eye, the DM trinket, and Seal of the Archmagus. I always pot for this fight (if your gear is better, which it probably is, you probably don't have to). I use one Mageblood, one Nightfin Soup, one Kreeg's Stout Beatdown, and one Brilliant Mana Oil.

My healing strategy is pretty simple. During the downstage, when the fight is stabilized and there are no blizzards in the vicinity, I can safely let my group dip pretty low. Basically, I wait until everyone has lost sufficient HP, max-rank prayer twice, and then wand until I'm ready to prayer again. During the upstage, I am far more aggressive, using prayer constantly to keep my party's hp deficit below 1500 or so. As soon as the ice bomb drops, I go back to doing nothing until I can again cast two prayers without overhealing. For spot healing, I append a Renew of the appropriate rank to the end of a prayer bomb. Naturally, I also use PW:S in emergencies. The general idea, though, is to spend as little time in the five second rule as possible. I have somewhere between 350 and 400 spirit fully buffed, and the amount of mana I regenerate sitting around and doing nothing is pretty incredible. On our last kill, which was rather smooth, I used a total of one mana potion. The prayer-wait-prayer strategy works very well for me, and I would certainly recommend that you give it a shot if you haven't already.

Edit regarding JoW: on our last kill, I was positioned in a spot where I couldn't wand. In any case, JoW tends to not be up, so this is all without that extra X mp5.

Like others have mentioned, the Renew strategy looks good in terms of healing per mana until you realize it completely undermines your spirit regen. You have to spend 7.5 seconds to renew your group to only have that Renew not completely top off your group, and only ticking for ~180 depending on what your spirit is in your frost gear and your rank 5 Spiritual Guidance. Then, you only have 7.5 seconds until you need to recast renew on your group again. This means you will only have one tick of full spirit regen until you cast Renew again, and this completley ignores you having top someone off with a heal as well as perfect timing on your renew.

Consistent with what others have posted, I use max rank Prayer of Healing and sustain mana with long spirit breaks. Sometimes if it's before a life drain or depending on other factors, I may top off my group again breaking spirit regen for a rank 2 Prayer of Healing. If I toss a heal on the main-tank, it's a least greater heal rank 1 varying upwards to rank 3 to help with tank healing assuming some main-tank healers move out of necessity to avoid Blizzard and lose time healing the tank.

Other than that, the rest of it relies on my frost resist gear and spec. I don't have a Sapphiron exclusive spec, just my regular weekly raiding spec. I noticed a lot of you alliance players don't use Banshee Finger, but being a horde player without Judgment of Wisdom, I don't need to worry about my wand attacks hitting (Banshee Finger is a frost wand and Sapphiron is immune, of course).

You may also want to search for some Priest healing sites -- it'll save you a lot of time to check out your healing efficiency if you swap gear often. There are a couple useful ones out there. I personally use this one.

i use renew rank 6 sometimse, but i generally try to stay out of 5sr as much as possibly, means poh5. when he goes airborne i use one poh5 and either renew6 or poh1 to keep people topped to make sure ice bolts don't 1 shot them. i'm also one of the 2-3 priests not getting totems so i use a lot more FRR then you guys showed here. unbuffed 273 (full glacial set, green ring, strat baroness wand, 2 ice reflectors, halo with 10 frr), so with mark + juju 315, if i really want to. i toyed around earlier on with less resistance, around 225 with druid buff and the extra healing i had to do on myself whie getting constantly 300 aura ticks and sometimes even 450 means i wasted most of the extra stuff my gear gave me onto healing myself. my group has 300-315 with mark and it feels fairly dumb using less resis and constently renewing/healing myself.
plus with such high aura ticks and bok not avaible, it kinda means you have to flask up or use some kind of world hp buff, cause with 450 aura ticks possible, chances to get 1 shotted by bolt are too high imo. i'd have with normal food buffs/dm drinks maybe 5k hp if i don't use full glacial set. 2 ticks of 300 + 450 + 3.5k ice bolt and then 20s without healing cause i'm the only healer in my group and iceblocked = dead priest = either CR or wipe.
is anyone using less then like 280 frr buffed not using flasks? sounds highly dangerous to me, but well, i've only had less then 280 in our first 3-4 run in and die-attempts, so dunno.
with such high frr gear i'm ofc fairly gimped. using mageblood/brilliant oil + nightdragons when up + 3-4 major mana in a kill roughly. cows don't like me so usualyl no innervate. :(