If the mechanics haven't changed since the PTR testing, then the answer is yes, paladins can beacon Valithria. They are obviously the strongest healers for this fight, since they can beacon her and continue to heal the tanks with full-powered Holy Lights, but trees are still very useful because they can cover the raid and keep full hots/cast nourish on her.

EDIT: as a note, make sure that you buff your raid in the room before the boss, as it was possible on the PTR to hit her with raid-wide buffs like Prayer of Fortitude and Gift of the Wild. These buffs would increase her total health pool without increasing her current health (as usual), making it just a little more difficult for you to heal her to full health. It's obviously a tiny health difference, but since it's so easy to prevent, I figured I'd mention it.

I've been using RR in 25 mans since it's appearance even with 4t9 and liked it, the only occasion i took it out was twins. I believe, it will be even better with 4t10. Another question i still have unsolved is WG glyph, it seems like i'm never able to hit 6 players with it, so may be i could replace that with NG or even Innervate. Any suggestions?
PS: may be i'm so pleased with RR cause our healing group is pretty strong, and we have spike damage covered quickly.

It's probably hitting pets, which you don't have visible in your raid bars.

On Valithria..

First I'm not sure if it even matters if I'm raid healing and throwing random heals or on her full time. In my guilds attempts(closest was ~83-85%), I was raid healing when needed and on her I would guess 75% of the time. We had 1 dedicated raid healer and I honestly thought that might have been too much. We tried to 6 heal it. Did 1 attempt with 7 heals and next time will probably try 8. More than that and I think dps would suffer too much.


My main comment is on how to heal. It seems like we want to maximize heal per cast time. These are my HPCT numbers off rawr. My single target HPS is 12168 if anyone wants a comparison(RJ+RG+LBroll+N).

Rejuv - 19603
Regrowth - 15756
Nourish(at least 1 hot) - 10582
Nourish(w/glyph 2 hot) - 11640
Nourish(w/glyph 3 hot) - 12169
Lifebloom - fast 3 stack w/bloom - 10649
Lifebloom - slow 3 stack w/bloom - 15067
Lifebloom - rolling - Once it is rolling, 1 cast is worth 7 ticks of 1893 or 13251. 8 would be higher obviously. 9 would be impossible.

Healing Touch doesn't come close to any of those.



So rejuv and regrowth should always go up. Lifebloom almost seems like a tossup. I would love to roll LB on the boss. If I were only tank healing I would have zero issues with this as I do it all the time on regular fights. But being on random raid heals it just seems like the healing might lean more towards the 3 fast stack bloom number, which is worse than a 2 hot nourish.


Nourish glyph seems like a huge winner for this fight. For the moment I replaced swiftmend with it. I wanted to keep wild growth since I still do a fair amount of raid healing. I also believe rapid rejuv is a great glyph for this fight.

Twins was actually the one fight where I wanted this glyph. With 4pT9 it heals nearly all of the aura. Obviously I can't cover 3 groups, but I can handle 2 groups by myself.

It also seems near perfect for Blood Queen. Again I can't do 3 groups, but I also don't need to.

Did the fight today. We killed it on the second pull, so there wasn't too much experimentation, and raid healing is easy so I was taking portals and mostly just healing the boss. Still hard to say what will wind up being the best overall healing plan, but we're not terrible at pumping HPS into the boss. Having UI that lets you track hots reasonably well on the boss helps.

Unglyphed HT with Naturalist as around as good as Nourish. But it requires you to take Naturalist. You have the right idea--best DPET are spells are Rejuv, Regrowth, slowrolled Lifebloom and Nourish. A Rejuv Swiftmend is technically better than Nourish, but that's kind of a pain to try to work in. I'd at least Glyph Nourish and RR for the boss, and then WG or Swiftmend for the raid healing.

With Pitbull you can choose to show your particular auras with a bigger icon and/or with a border. You can apply this to a focus frame for example.

Completed Valithria10 last night. It took us three attempts, so like Hamlet, we did not have much time for experimentation. On our successful go, we had a shaman healing the raid with myself and a paladin going in the portals. I tried stack hots up on her before spamming Nourish, but with ended up falling back to simply slapping a Rejuv on her and spamming Nourish (speced, glyphed, and put 2T9 back on). I found it easier to maintain with the miscellaneous raid healing I was also doing. However, stacking up as many hots as possible just before going into the portal would allow the healing stream to continue during that time.

The big key was being able to maintain the buff from the dream through multiple trips into the dream and getting the stack way up. I was able to get 4-5 per trip and got up to a maximum of 22.

Edit:
Here's a log: WoW Meters Online - Combatlog Replay

Looks like it was actually four tries, and the success shows up as a failure. The good one is #13.

This is what I did yesterday (with Shadowed), but an ordinary raid frame for the boss could also be made. There's a "boss#" unit ID now (akin to "player," "target," "raid#," "raidpet#," etc.) that you can build frames off of.

Dropping back to 4T9 if you're just healing the boss might be a good idea, will have to check the sheet.

Like he says, the key is getting the hang of maintaining your buff between portal phases (which I certainly didn't in one pull). The timing is weird, sometimes I'd fly around and they wouldn't pop. Not sure if I was missing something. Depth perception on them is terrible too.

I had just gone from 2T9 + 2T10 to 1T9 + 3T10 that night, so the switch back was easy. I was casting 0.987s Nourishes, criting almost 50% of the time. We blew heroism when both Val healers were in the high teens for stacks. I wasn't expecting to be as close to our paladin in healing as I was (See log in previous post), but in the end I was pleasantly surprised.

You're right about the timing, it can be sort of wonky. The time it the buff dropped, I failed to pop a last ball to reset the buff timer and I went back into the dream with only ~2s left - clearly not enough time to get a new ball. I'm thinking the best practice might be to not get any new balls starting around ~8 seconds left in the dream and try to wait until just before you go back out - maybe less than 3 seconds left - to refresh the stack. In the end, coming out with one less stack on a single dream phase is better than losing a big stack of buffs.

Getting them to actually pop is a little tricky. Because you're working up in the air, you have that 3rd dimention to deal with while positioning. We found is was best to briefly pause at each ball.

Healing Touch might be best during Heroism, will have to check. You basically have to think of this like a DPS cycle. That reminds me, Swiftmend is probably worth casting during Guardian Spirit, which should be pretty frequent.

Has anyone checked whether Living Seed does anything on her?

We finished Valithria in 3 attempts with 3 healers. We started with all healers focusing the boss, but we tunneled and let the raid die while we were in the portals. Then we set up a rotation where one shaman would take every portal and try to build as large of a buff stack as possible, and the holy priest and I would rotate portals, burning our buff with balls out spam on the boss (rejuv > regrowth > lifebloom slow-stack > nourish spam.), then covering the raid while waiting for the next portal.

The worst part I ran into was trying to bust the clouds. It seems they were busting from swimming through them, but it was hit or miss either due to my imprecision or some unknown factor. From the 2nd attempt on, we had 2 caster dps rotating the unused portal, so I had an arcane exploding mage to hug through the portal phase which seemed to help. Did anyone find a reliable way to get in and get a good number of buff stacks given our limited non-targeted damage abilities?

Sindragosa took more finesse. After seeing how weak her aura was, I pulled my rapid rejuvenation glyph out during the first Ice phase. After a few attempts with 2 healers, we went back to 3 for better phase 3 control, and extra coverage during unfortunate Unchained Magic chains. On 1 attempt, I had it every cast but 1. I found a 5 stack of the debuff to be easily manageable, and I would rejuv 1 group, wait for the damage, then rejuv the other. Overall, the damage was very low and manageable, nothing was singularly deadly during the first 2 phases. We got the kill once we worked out a fluid way to keep our buffet stacks low in phase 3.

I plugged my stats into TreeCalcs. Using Swiftmend, Noursh and RR glyphs, no CF and 2T9, I got the following for HPET with heroism active:

Regrowth: 20612
Rejuv: 16784
Rolling LB: 14236
Swiftmend: 12764
Noursh 3: 11553
HT: 10960

WG(Single): 6540
Nourish 4: 12054

Based on that it looks like (for me) it is still best to maintain Regrowth, Rejuv and a LB3 stack while hitting SW on cooldown and spamming Nourish. HT moved up from non-competitive to somwhere between Noursh1 and Nourish2 with herism active..

Dropping 2T9 bonus, HT moves up to between Nourish2 and marginally less than Nourish3: 10960 vs 11183

Yeah, I guess HT doesn't really work without Naturalist.

Hitting SM on cooldown is weird, since a Rejuv Swiftmend is better than a Regrowth Swiftmend. You can control which one you get (easiest way to always SM right after casting RG, as long as Rejuv hasn't dropped), but it's a pain. And like I said above, it's probably best to just make sure SM is up for Guardian Spirits, which should be coming twice per minute with two Priests.

Everyone is glyphing Nourish and Rapid Rejuvenation for Valithria, but has anyone considered Regrowth? The bonus boosts the healing per cast time to about 18000, based on Numeno's numbers, factoring in the lost tick at the end.

If Swiftmend is used intelligently, then the Glyph may not be mandatory. This of course means that it can't be used as soon as it gets of cooldown, though I'm unsure how to correctly model the trade-off.

Living Seed came in at ~4% for me - I'd treat it as a nice little bonus, but not a huge deal. But I had no problem fitting it into my spec anyway.

I use Grid for my raid frames, so after our first attempt and me realising (in a panic) that I had no way of tracking my HoTs properly, I grabbed Dotimer. It was quick & dirty, it wasn't what I was used to, but it was adequate. I've tweaked it for next week and I'm fairly happy with it. I also added a bell sound to Swiftmend in Power Auras, and after the sound, I would hit Swiftmend after my next Regrowth cast.

My HPS was competitive with the pallies and priests, but I am annoyed that I had the UI handicap and that I flailed around in the clouds and barely got a handful of them. Pretty poor. I also missed a portal or two because of tunnel vision (mostly struggling with timers that I wasn't used to). I did OK on paper, but I know I could have pushed out much higher numbers. I won't be happy until the ID resets and I can go back in to tighten things up. Looking forward to a bit of practice on 10s, too.



Can someone confirm - is it better to slow stack LB and let the stack drop, or continue rolling? I assume the former, but different people throw around the word "roll", and it left me second guessing.

Thanks Hamlet.

There were times that I misjudged my Lifebloom refreshes - mostly due to the unfamiliar HoT timers. Sometimes they would drop, and other times I would accidentally and prematurely refresh the stack (possibly a throwback to BC habits..). I just wanted to make sure I wasn't horribly crippling my HPS by doing one or the other.

Like you I found it hard to get the hang of the clouds (killing her on the second attempt means limited chances to get used to the fight); once I get better at stacking the buffs, I suppose it won't matter about the mana cost of rolling vs not rolling, anyway. As long as I know that I'm not hurting myself by accidentally rolling rather than allowing the stack to bloom.

For tracking heals on the boss, I put her up as my focus and white-listed my druid hots on an Elk Buff Bar (Focus for tracking) right above the focus frame. Worked great!

As for the discussion of what heals to use... I can't comment in 25man, my guild usually starts new content with ten man to get everyone acquiesced. Yet last night I managed to put out some pretty significant numbers without getting into the portals. I basically watched the controlled chaos of the room and kept the raid alive. Running Regrowth/Rejuv and the occasional Life Bloom when damage intake was slow basically sealed the deal while my other healer went to town in the portal. I did reglyph Nourish to drop some healing bombs on her, but I really didn't find a significant amount of time to actually use Nourish on her.

Did Valithria 10m today. I won't post my log because I had no Glyph (forgot), no ET and no T9 (was going to rejigger my setup if the fight didn't wind up being easy). I'll have all those things next week for hardmodes and can try to benchmark a good HPS number. I don't think I saw anything new that's really helpful--I finally got the hang of keeping my buff stack, which seems like the only tricky thing. The HPS rotation is basically what we expected.

All you need to worry about is:
1) Have a way of tracking HoT's on her. You're basically executing a weird DPS rotation with a bunch of DoT's, and you need a way to see what's going on.
2) Learn to keep your buff between phases. This is kind of annoying. I think the orbs pop pretty predictably when you hit them, but they're small plain spheres and there's no depth perception. Move your camera around a lot so you can tell where they actually are.

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Random thoughts on Sindragosa:
--If you get Unchained Magic, cast a few times (5-6 is perfectly safe, you can realistically go somewhat higher at least on normal), and then Lifebloom yourself. It blooms perfectly to heal off the Instability damage.
--WG on the boss is great because her hitbox is so huge.
--Drop a Lifebloom on people who have Frost Beacon (and a Rejuv if you have time). It will top them off from the Ice Tomb damage. Mostly just a cute trick in P1, but in the later phase you don't want people coming out of tombs at very low HP.
--Before you do the fight, the healing seems really straightforward (Druid blankets the raid, others heal tanks, same as always). But then you realize that 1-2 healers (in 10-man) are frequently incapacitated at once between Ice Tomb and Unchained Magic. So you basically have to keep track of the other healers and cover for them. Probably less of an issue in 25m.
--You can stand behind a block most of the time in P3 while blanketing, and not stack up Mystic Buffet very often. Most people are in LoS if you standing behind a block.

Both Living Seed and Abacus do work on Dreamwalker, but unless you deliberately try to get Dreamwalker hit, Living Seed won't be that good.

Looking at our parse from last night (World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis) Dreamwalker was only damaged by Blistering Zombies exploding too close to her, which would be a net HP loss until a very high number of stacks, and once from a Frostbolt Volley, which ideally you'd also be interrupting. You'd probably have to engineer letting some frostbolt volleys or similar go off near her to make LS worth it.

Did this last night and modified Pitbull4 with Pitbull4 Aura Bar to setup a unit frame for Val that tracked just my hots. It took a bit to work out the kinks (basically set others buffs to icon size 1, mine to a much larger icon size, sorted them so mine show first, etc.). Kind of a kluge in terms of implementation but final product ended up very usable. I fraps'd it but video is currently uploading to Youtube -- I'll scrape a screenshot from it when it's done and maybe put something in UI forum about it as well later today. In the interim, here's a good link that describes the sorts of options available (PlusHeal.com View topic - Configuring Pitbull 4: An example)

In terms of stacks, I was having trouble as well -- we tried to work a strat where healers that entered near each other, would follow each other -- gave a better chance that one of you would burst it and also made it so you weren't fighting for same finite resource. Review of my video shows we weren't perfect on that -- well our shaman was as he had 38 stacks at the end -- but I certainly wasn't. That said, when we were on point, we had a nice pack of healers bursting the same orbs and all of us coming out with 8+ stacks from a single portal phase.

Not sure what's all the discussion about tracking hots on Valithra. You have one target to heal. You target it. You cast your heals. I personally use XPerl which shows your buffs first in large icons, but that solution is useful for basically all tank healing situations and now just here.