Yeah.. I haven't had the issue of tailwhips in our last 2 kills, but when I was learning it I always ran to the right side, when we would tank him on the left, and because of that I would miss a GS and he would drop. So, I just decided to take it and stay near him so that I had less chances to miss him. I have since found a way to not get tailwhipped and still be able to dodge the waves.

Secondly, we do use a DK to pick up adds. Our first kill we had a feral druid tank sarth, warrior did drakes, and dk did adds. We have since picked up another warrior who is, simply put, amazing in all aspects, and he does Sarth tanking, with the other 2 setups the same. But, the majority of the time when I get killed is when I'm having to run from a wave and can't run to his D&D. That + Fade is on CD or something. Not to mention I cast PW:S on myself every 30 seconds just to help with it.

This actually got me thinking about how much of Naxx.10 is solo healable. Can't see how you could solo heal Thaddius p1, Gothik or Four horsemen. I suppose Patchwerk is doable, as is Loatheb. Sapphiron might be pushing it but it could be possible. For Kel'thuzad you really need someone to heal you through an ice blast. Anyone attempted it yet?

With some creative management, I can see how Four horseman might be possible with 1 healer. You'd need to have enough dps to burn down the first horseman so that the tank on that doesn't need any heals, then find a way, through pots, Lightwell, huge HP pools, and maybe some DK/Warlock self-heal tanking to handle the back two while you burn down the second horseman. (EDIT: Just realized, of course, that you could easily toss a shadow priest back there and tank the back two easily. No creative management needed)

The horseman have like 400K Hp, right? So with the 2 people in the back and 1 healer, plus the one actual tank in the front (the other won't need to be tank spec'd or in tank gear), you have 6 DPS on the fight. If each did 5K DPS and the tank did 2.5K, then you'd be able to burn down the first horseman in 14.5 seconds, then travel ~5 seconds to the other front horseman and burn that down, leaving the back two people ~40 seconds before help arrives.

Alternatively, you could go the long way and have some sort of rotation of tanks for the back two so that people came back to the front and the one healer stationed there for heals before relieving a person in the back.

Edit: Also, for KT couldn't you have prot/ret paladins (LoH?), shadow priests, or enhance shamans toss the ice blocked healer a quick one? The same goes for Gothik, and Thaddius P1 might be burnable enough with DPS and off-spec heals to take only one "real" healer. You'd need some serious DPS for Sapphiron to be possible for one healer, but it doesn't seem entirely undoable.

I'm pretty sure Nidaba means one on-spec, dedicated healer. You'd have an offspec throw some heals for the mechanically complicated situations like Thaddius p1 or 4H, just like with tanks.

Exactly. We could just go over the fights too:

Plague wing - All solo healable (especially as a priest)
Abom wing - All solo healable (minus Thaddius phase 1, but you would need 1 person who 'can' heal to do so)
DK wing - Gothik would require again an off healer, and horsemen would require two off healers. (in addition to the main)
Spider wing - Fine with one healer
Sapphiron - Fine with one healer, just have the entire group to the one side
KT - Only part rough here would be if the main spec healer was tombed, but would require a heal or two from the others.

Exactly. I'm actually leaning toward paladin being the optimal choice, simply because Beacon actually lets you do things like solo heal Patchwerk. I'm not sure I could solo heal Patch as a priest. Maybe, but it'd come fairly close to GCD-lock.

With paladins and shamans getting instant-cast heals that actually do meaningful amounts of healing (I refer to ret/enh esp.) there is off-healing in the raid. Obviously you'd want JoL up to help as well, and creative use of consumables.

delete

We've done Sarth3D a few times, but last night we were still suffering from the holiday attendance boss, and we were running with a bit different group than we have before. Specifically, we had a different MT and a different drake tank than we've used in weeks past. Our basic strategy (which has been successful before) is to use a CD rotation (GS/BoSac+DS/Tank CDs) to mitigate the empowered breaths.

Last night, I was healing the drake tank and covering the first CD and I was having a lot of difficulty. Specifically, if the flame waves were "odds", the MT would run to position 1 (southern most non-lava) while my drake tank would move from position 4 to position 5 (northern most non-lava) point and either I was missing my GS (wipe), having the drake tank die (wipe) or trying to split the difference and getting clipped by a flame wave (not a wipe, but embarassing) or just making it. As I said, these tanks were different than our usual crew, and so where they were running was just enough different than what I was used to that I was having trouble and if both drakes were up, it was sufficiently difficult to heal the drake tank that a few seconds of being out of position were enough to cause issues. This wasn't every attempt (since "even" waves were easy) but there were 4 wipes directly attributable to me not being able to do my job, which is much more than I wanted to see, especially since I'm relatively new to the guild.

So, that leads to my question: For other priests that use some sort of CD rotation to handle empowered breaths, what are your healing responsibilities and how do you handle tank positioning? If I were building the fight around my needs, I would have the tanks focus on staying closer together (i.e. 1 and 3, 2 and 4) and I would have one of the raid healers cover my tank assignment for a few seconds until that first empowered breath, at which point I could get back into position to cover my tank. The fight isn't built around my needs, however, so I'm trying to figure out what the correct strategy is.

Also, I realize the simple answer is to communicate better, and I did ask for some help and we re-did things a bit and got him down, but it was frustrating/embarrassing to have to admit that I couldn't handle my job especially after I'd been fine in the weeks previous. I'm trying to see if others have had a similar issue and what they did to solve it, or if I was just being stretched too thin and I should have said so earlier rather than wipe us 4 times before I figured that out.

First suggestion: use a DK for your Sarth tank. They can cover effectively the first 3 (sorta the first 4) breaths themselves, which is just longer than Shadron should be up. As soon as Shadron dies, the breaths drop by half, and it's no longer an issue.

Second suggestion: you shouldn't be the person doing the first cooldown, ever. The two healers on the Sarth tank should. That's the whole point. You're the backup-of-the-backup-of-the-backup; i.e. third breath, or never. Use a priest+paladin on the Sarth tank, and cover it with GS/PS + DP/BoSac combo.

It's nine shields per targett. PW:S is 4s cd on cast, and 15s cd on target.
With 2 tanks. you can go till 18 shields in 2min30s.

I have not seen this mentioned anywhere else...

During a 25-man Naxx run, while fighting Loatheb, I found that all healing procced talents work. Even though no healing is being done, Rapture, DA, and Grace will still work correctly. Initially I thought this might be a bug, however, after reading what Necrotic Aura does, it makes sense that heals can still proc certain talents.

This is more or less a bug that I discovered while PvP'ing, but I'm sure that many disc priests will find this to come in handy for their healing.

I was spec'd pvp disc the other night and during many of the battles I noticed that after casting a shield, if I used Pennance directly after it, that I would not lose the Borrowed Time buff and that it would also be hasted. What I mean by this is that you can get a Pennance and any other spell off afterwards and still keep the haste buff for the second spell. I tested this out on many occasions and even discussed it with my guild's PVE Disc Priest and he noticed the same thing.

I'm sure that this will get fixed in the near future once the dev's find out, but I figured I'd share the love and let everyone take advantage of this while they can. Ya know.. kinda like how the CoH spamming priests are taking advantage of 98% CoH casts in any given raid.

Pretty sure that I've read about this before and even have seen a Blue Post confirming that this is working as intended.

Edit: Can't find a Blue Post but from the 3.0.3 Patch Notes:
"Borrowed Time: Charge no longer consumed by spells with a base cast time that is instant."

Source

Which means that, since Penance is an instant cast, it doesn't consume Borrowed Time no matter when you cast it after shielding. You can even cast another instant before a cast-time Heal before losing BT (PoM comes to mind, or even Renew) so yes, it's pretty sweet HPS.

That make sense to me. If it didn't proc 0 then it would undoubtedly be a bug. However, Grace and Rapture are still working, so that 3% damage reduction on the MT and the mana returns can really help out in that particular fight.

Yeah definitely- and as a disc priest all your shields and damage prevention abilities are still working under necrotic aura. Disc is probably the healer spec that is most effective during Necrotic Aura phase.

Yes that. It still doesn't show up on any "healing meter" I know, but there you are.

Part of it is working as intended, and part of it isn't. It shouldn't consume the BT charge, but at the same time it shouldn't benefit from the haste, although it currently does. The blue post may have been referring to the former, which IS working as intended. I'm pretty sure they'll fix the latter.

Ah I honestly didn't realize that or read anything of that sort. But I figured that since Pennance is channeled, that it would count as a "spell", thus consuming the BT charge. Then again I never really knew that a channeled spell is counted as an instant cast.

Learn something new everyday.

Makes a lot more sense now. Thanks.

Wouldn't Rapture return zero mana if it did zero healing due to the aura?

And even if it did work, how would it be helpful since it's not going to return as much mana as you spent casting the heal anyway?

I think he is referring to rapture mana returns from absorption

But again, surely there wouldn't be any since zero effective healing equals zero Divine Aegis shielding?

Rapture also returns mana from PW:Shield absorption and Divine Aegis buffs provided during the window would still be absorbing damage during the aura.

Mana is hardly a concern on that fight anyway though, so I don't know why this discussion is continuing so long.