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.

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.

Glyph of Regrowth doesn't add that much to your raw HPS; you're not casting the spell that often. Nourish and RR add much more, so you can pick up Regrowth if you want to drop Swiftmend, but I'd probably keep Swiftmend.

Same issue though, I didn't get to play with it too much since I spent our only two pulls trying to figure out how to watch HoT's on the boss and how to manage the orbs right.

Slowrolling Lifebloom and letting it bloom is roughly the same HPET as fully rolling it, and far cheaper.

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.

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.

All of my hot tracking in normal raid/tank healing situations is done via Grid and my UI is optimized for such. Val doesn't show up on Grid so a standard unit frame is necessary -- and particularly one that can help distinguish / highlight my hots from others. Optimizing another unit frame outside of Grid for hot tracking is not something I really had occasion or reason to bother with before. I think others are in the same boat.

Basically this. I use raid frames for all my HoT tracking and not the target frame. It's not to big a deal--you need to do to heal the fight is quickly set up your focus frame to make your HoT's really visible, or grab DotTimers. But it's something many people will need to fix. Raid frame packages will probably handle the new "boss" unitid before long.

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Ok, I played with Valithria possibilties a bit more (spreadsheet attached with some reasonable values in). Best I can tell:
--4T9 is slightly better than 4T10, despite the loss in spellpower.
--Crit is better than haste. Even being haste-capped isn't a big deal due to the high Nature's Grace uptime while you're casting on her. Don't give up any significant amount of spellpower to get more crit though.
--Revitalizing meta is better than Ember.
--Trauma edges out Suffering's End for me. More spellpower, and the proc still affects her.
--Althor's Abacus is very good (not in the sheet yet).
--Definitely Glyph Nourish and RR. Not sure about Swiftmend vs. Regrowth--I haven't put into the sheet some kind of "DPS rotation" that includes Swiftmend on cooldown yet.
--Any ordinary spec that includes Empowered Touch is fine. If you were to try to tune a spec perfectly for this fight, I'd go with:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Will have to look into that more though.

When you're used to HoT timers showing fractions of a second, then you move to simple icons with no text timers, the difference is noticeable. Clipping HoTs will result in a HPS loss, which is something we all try to avoid where possible. And, if you happen to be glyphing Regrowth, refreshing at the wrong time will mean a HPS loss if early (from lost ticks), or the loss of the glyph's bonus (and a waste of a glyph slot) if you refresh too late.

The first attempt, playing without a timer and just watching icons on her frame, felt like I was flailing around. It was horrible. Text timers allow me to time my refreshes much more precisely.

This fight basically turns us into a DoT class, and while I'm sure they can DPS bosses adequately without mods, I can't imagine any DoT player worth his salt fighting without a decent DoT timer.

Can we do this fight without mods? Sure.. it's a big honking dragon in the middle of your screen, just point and shoot. She'll get healed up whether or not we have good timers, or change our spec, or use a different meta gem. But if we're thinking like DPS classes, it's all about squeezing the last tiny bit of HPS out - rather than settling for near enough.

Hi guys. I may be of help.

I noticed you're all talking about getting the perfect way to track your hots for this boss, my way of doing it was with the mod ForteExorcist.

It's not so good for resto druid to use really for healing, I use it on my shadow priest and basically reconfigured it so it could do my hots and huzzah, it did the job really well. Don't have screenshots of it in fight, but I have some screens (idling in IF) to show you how I set it up. It's a tad fiddly to set up, but once you have it going it's great and there's basically no room for error unless you are playing without eyes.


YES, I know my UI is garbage, but it works for me.
ForteExorcist is the hot timers that you can see in the middle between HP bars. I have the cooldown module of this addon turned off because it was just an extra bar that I don't need to see.

and here are the settings to make it look like this : http://wafiks.com/images/fx_forvali/fx_val_settings.jpg - a link because it's a big pic.


In regards to the fight itself, I did it on 10 man and fight is a giant joke on reg, 3 heals 2 tanks rest dps pretty much. I too had problems with the balls though as did my healer friends (none of us got over 8 stacks, and they'd always fall off) , despite this we still won with plenty of time to spare (we weren't overrun with adds).
Our healer setup was Pally / R.druid / Disc priest. We just kept taking turns in the portals as we thought this was best at the time, next time we'll probably just have 1 person stay out and raid heal the whole time, and the other 2 constantly going into portals (or get the raid healers to swap when they reach a certain mana threshold) I'll also bring out my t9 set for this fight from now on as it is really strong for healdumping 1 target.

Am yet to try this on 25 man, so no insight from me on that.