What would you say is the best method then? I'm one of those speccing 2/5 Naturalist (oh how I wish I could put those points into something useful instead), but in general terms I'd rather have Subtlety* - if theres an alternative method you'd like to suggest, I want to hear it!

*I passed our third tank's threat on Steelbreaker the other week, which did not end well for me

At least it's a method that works for most of the top raid guilds in 10 men. I think especially in 10 men it's the best method since letting your ranged dps deal with the constellations will cause some serious problems with the enrage.
In our guild me and the second tank deal with one or two constellations between each Big Bang and it work fine.

I was mostly questioning making a druid kite the Constellations, not the 0/3 Subtlety to get aggro (which DEFINITELY helps get aggro on Consts).

If you are having trouble keeping aggro, even with 0/3 Sub, you need to also make sure your Holy Priests are spec'd into their threat reduce talent.

I haven't actually killed Algalon yet, so I'm not the best source, but I have watched several videos that show healers basically ignoring Constellations and where they are aggro'd, while the "off" tank taunts one here and there into the holes.

It's also worth noting that the Constellations aggro target is NOT who they hit. Their Arcane Barrage attack is random, so it is in everyone's best interest to keep no more than 2 or so up. Again, I disclaim that I have only recently worked this stuff out and plan to put it to the test this week, Raid Leader permitting.

I only have experience with 10man, but I am going to assume that the princip counts for 25man aswell.

Before mastering this fight I on these forums read that the entire first phase of the fight it should be possible for a Disc priest to keep the tank alive; that wasn't the case for my guild, we had the tank taking a lot more damage than a disc priest could manage alone.

What my guild learned could make this fight easier for healing are the following things:

• Keeping Rejuv up on the tank is really amazing healing, and I would think much better than an unreliable Lifebloom final heal.

• Enh. shamans are very godly for this fight with 4 set bonus spamming heals on the tank, it is a dps loss but we have had a enh shaman close to topping the meters because of this.

• Feral druid aura and paladin debuff on the boss helps a bit with the healing. We however are not using the paladin instant heal because it doesn't seem worth it.

• Make an agreement with the other healers when who heals. Fx Disc priest will use Penance when the tank is at 50% and you(resto druid) use swiftmend below that.

• At times I haven't gotten any Clearcast procs for a very long time, keeping Rejuv up none the less seems very importent, and we usually still manage to finish off the boss with me on 10-20% mana.

You should of cause find tactics for how to avoid the raid taking any damage etc.

Hope this can help.

You could just have your OT dealing with the Constellations after he switched from tanking as he doesn't really have anything else to do for a while. I guess it depends on how you manage the Collapsing Stars but honestly it's not like you need to have someone specific to do the job with Constellations. If they all happen to have agro on you and there are no holes close you can move closer to one to help but you don't always need to close them all yourself or have a specific person (or two) to "tank" them.

Granted I haven't killed Algalon 25 yet but the basis of our method seems fine with letting the OT manage it all (for the most part) as generally DPS is what is holding us back from the kill not tactics on Stars/Constellations.

I spec 0/3 subtlety for Algalon, and I put the 2 points in Furor. I bet the 2 points in Naturalist make for some SICK Vezax dps though. It really doesn't matter where you put the points as long as it's not in Subtlety. Tanks can handle the Constellations and it works great - the advantage to also having a druid with no threat reduction is that they tend to glue to me. This means when a Big Bang is imminent, there are no bouncing constellations (or at least only 1), This means less RNG closure of holes you might not want closed at that time.

Edit: I do not find the loss of Subtlety to be an issue on any fight. I may occasionally ask for a preemptive HoP as we pull Auriaya if I'm stacking HoTs, but it feels largely unnecessary. The only time I've gotten punched in the face is Yogg with 1 Keeper up during a silence. But that was still somewhat my fault as I could have put some distance between myself and the mob so that the tanks could more easily pick it up when the silence ended.

Hi, first sorry for my english, i'm french, and french schools suxx :x
How do you think to set glyph innervate at 3.2 ? You can gain a full mana bar every three minuts, so give the second to another healer instead of which glyph ? I still don't know.
What's within you the mains changes about stuff and template at the 3.2 ? I think to pve it's better to get a heal raid template and a heal one target template.

When you need burst healing there's no second to NG (plasma blast, solo healing thorim tunnel, too many to list..). Some people can drop it, I tried for a couple weeks, its just too good in certain situations. I don't plan on picking up t9 until the 258 pieces, so here's my spec:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

After that I'd drop revitalize and NS for the crit.

11/0/60. Nourish will be so good in 3.2, you can't NOT get it. Having Empowered Touch in your build will be nice for the 20/40% increase. In my current build, I'm probably going to remove the points in Nature's Grace into Subtlety granted I won't use Healing Touch anymore.

Well, you can get 1 point into Empowered Touch "for free," since there is a floater point in 3.1 specs. The question is where to get the second point. In my opinion you don't want to cannibalize this point from NG or Living Seed. This is because the whole point of Empowered Touch is to buff Nourish and NG and Living Seed are both there to buff Nourish as well, making it a kind of robbing Peter to feed Paul thing. I would either drop 1 point from Revitalize or drop Nature's Swiftness. Possibly drop 1 point from GotEM if you get a lot of haste in 3.2.

When you consider maybe 10% of your healing done on a typical fight is done by Nourish (and this is a very generous estimate for Ulduar) an additional 8-10% of that results in a rough 1% healing boost from 2 talent points - not exactly an outstanding investment and I doubt we are fully aware of what our primary spell usage is going to be in 3.2 either which clouds some of the results.

You have to think how you use Nourish too because if during times of emergency you tend to spam Nourish (or Regrowth) for a couple of casts then NG will no doubt result in higher/faster healing output whereas if you use it as a spot heal (...) occasionally then ET might be a slightly better use but at that level I doubt it matters much if you have points here or not.


Being roughly 8-10% better is not going to make the majority of problems regarding Nourish vanish although this talent incorporation was one of the things I did mention quite a while ago as a means to enhance Nourish to be more useful, however this was before the numerous other changes they have done to the spell since.

You can see how their initial intention of "give them a Flash heal with a Druidic twist" has sort of lost its way as they passed through beta into live and even now they are still uncertain of how to turn this spell from something we tend to mock frequently into a solid tool we can all appreciate like Swiftmend for example.

Personally I would have had the base "target has hot" boost being an additional 20-25% critical strike chance as for the most part that incorporates better with it being a "target is a tank" than a "you must have a hot for this spell to be worth casting" of which I believe the former is closer to intended than the latter. Balance the initial heal to be the intended level for being cast on a random raid member who took damage so that the base purpose is on solid foundations.

One trap they need to stop falling for is that nothing they can do with Nourish will make critical strike rating useful for us and to stop trying to concoct some perverse design to try and accomplish this. I guess we will see from Blizzcon if they are going to reveal any snaps of information from 4.0 where more grand designs and balances are able to be established or just stick to 3.3 information which might at least have some critical strike changes finally but who knows.