• constantius

Healing Discussion

This thread is for healing priests, both Disc and Holy, to come and ask moderately detailed questions about healing in Ulduar and the new 3.2 Coliseum. If you're still struggling through Naxx and other 3.0 content, so long as you ask politely, I'm sure people will also be willing to help you out, although our focus is clearly going to be on the new content.

Things to possibly include when you post:

• WWS or similar report if possible
• Information on total number of healers being used
• A note about what spec you were using (remember that Armory shows both specs, do NOT link a random spec if it's also your Dual Spec; just mention it's Dual, and on Armory
• What problem you're encountering, or what facet of the job you're curious about
• A specific fight or group of fights you're currently interested in
• Your role on the fight(s) in question
• If relevant, the healer composition. For example, saying you're raid healing Ignis and struggling has a lot more context if you say you're running 3 druids, 2 paladins, 1 priest, 1 shaman.

If it's truly a Priest: Simple Questions/Simple Answers, then place it in the proper thread. This is for detailed discussion of WWS reports and raiding issues in Ulduar. Theorycraft does not belong in this thread, nor, to the most extent, does spec advice. Obviously if you're struggling with a fight, someone might suggest picking up an alternative talent, but if this thread starts to devolve into spec discussions and argument,s I'll just start removing posts to the other thread and slapping infractions on the people responsible. Keep it focused, keep it helpful, and keep it accurate.

We have some amazing theorycrafters and incredibly experienced priest healers on these forums. Pick their brains -- in the appropriate threads.

To kick it off, I'm quite curious what sort of healing style everyone has used on Razorscale. It's a nice, easy fight, and there's a million different ways to heal it, but I chose to go Discipline and use lots of Flash Heal. In the down time, I switched to PW:S and spammed it across the raid to absorb incoming damage. I found it worked quite well, although it showed up very badly in the meters (since PW:S still isn't really 'supported', aside from certain versions of Recount). So -- what did everyone do? Did anyone notice any neat things about the fight that you can use to predict incoming fireball damage?

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Andrek

I used my disc spec for Razorscale and spent most of the fight chasing fireball damage with PW:S. I don't think that any other healer is capable of consistently preventing deaths to back to back fireballs in the way that a disc priest can. The numbers do look terrible, but I think the death prevention abilities of disc justify its use though some lobbying to raid leaders may be required until people can get past the numbers.

 

Squeakster

Yeah I went disc for Razorscale and thought it was great. Our raid splits up into three groups (right, left and middle) and I found I was able to keep my side of 8 people alive by myself by just casting PWS on everyone every 15 seconds, PoMing the tank and flash healing anyone who actually took damage.

*Edit* - I also hear that Razorscale will target the person he is casting Fireball on so we can assist him or I guess a boss mod could announce it.

I am curious about how people are healing Kologarn. My initial reaction is to want to assign healers for the specific jobs like MT healers, Rubble tank healer, Stone Grip healers, etc., but I don't think it will work because what if the Stone Grip healers and the ones that get Stone Gripped? Or what if the OT healer is being chased by the eyebeam? It seems like all we can do is have every healer do what he/she thinks is best and try to adapt, but that leaves things up to chance. Anyone have any better ideas?

Also, are you asking your raiders to wear frost resist gear for Hodir to help with the Frozen Blows? At least until we all get geared up.

 

Falim

I also went disc for razor. I did mostly flash and penance spam on those who took raid damage. When there was no one to heal I spammed PW:S across the raid. Healing in general wasn't that difficult or intensive and I think 5-6 healers should be more than enough.

With regards to the fireballs, the blue ones that leave a patch on the ground seem to almost always target people closer to the center of the circle.

Here's our parse:

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

 

TheDoctor

For Razorscale recently we did two healing compositions, in both I was Discipline (primary spec).

Comp 1: 4 Healers.. 2 Priests (1 Disc & 1 Holy), 1 Druid, and 1 Shaman. We were gunning for one landing phase to see if it triggers hard mode, so we stacked dps. This was fairly rough on the healing. Though if people don't stand in fire it is possible. We couldn't quite do one landing phase just yet so we went to 5 healers, below.

Comp 2: 5 Healers.. Above comp + 1 more Shaman.

In both cases I was healing an add tank which was really easy and could help on the raid healing for P1, and then on the MT for P2. I maintained PW:S on about 10 people most of the fight, kept starting PoM on my tank, penance on occasion and a running renew. Rather than using flash I used BT'd PoH, trying to keep my grace stack on my tank so that renew took care of most of the healing. Renew actually wasn't that great because Penance on CD was enough on its own until the second set of adds.

For tracking absorbs until Blizzard updates the combat log... Using Elisa's GuessedRecountAbsorbs is proving to be reasonably accurate. I have modified it for my personal use to track all mitigation applied and the guessed amount to show a running "used" amount.

I was looking at around ~3k mitigation + healing. The breakdown was heavily mitigation. Picking the right people for PW:S really impacts the mitigation number.

Cleared my recount last night so I don't have the exacts from the mod but should be able to get wws/wowmeter numbers in a bit.

 

RootBreaker

You should definitely assign healers for the Main Tank. Everyone else can help with grip healing and general raid healing. Assuming you're killing the right arm, (the one that grips) there will never be a rubble tank and grip damage to heal at the same time, so raid healers can heal him. If MT healers get gripped, that's the tank's cue to use cooldowns. The damage he deals to the entire raid is significant, but it isn't immediately lethal like XT-002's, Ignus' or P2 Mimiron's, so there's not a huge rush to get everyone topped off that would prevent people from keeping rubble tanks or gripped people alive.

 

cruunchie

Squeekster-

Just downed Kologarn last night using pretty much your initial strategy. Had: 2 Paladins healing the Tanks, 2 Shammies assigned to grip duty/rumble tank (As you should never have grips going and rumbles up), and then 2 druids and myself (14/57 Holy build) on raid healing. Personally I would CoH, PoH, PoH vs his Oblivion ability. I also found PoM to be good for healing gripped targets as it tended to bounce between them.

 

Sinndir

Woo glad to see this finally here. Starting with Razorscale is great!

In my mind, a very easy encounter. However, from a healing stand point it is pretty lame. Large burst damage to random people, not only that but you have multiple healers attempting to get their heals off on the same targets.

We did it pretty sloppy our first go, but for next time I'm going to section off healers to prioritize certain groups. Our disc priest (Cahrin) was shielding anyone who was below half health to prevent the gibbs. As for holy, I really like how I would flash x3 then greater heal someone at the same speed for even more healing. Lightwell worked ok during that fight if people were quick to heal it. HoT's we largely wasted due to everyone spamming, however as a priest I felt best suited to heal the ranged and healers and let shaman chain off the tanks or melee to each other (while tanking/dpsing the adds).

One thing to be sure of, stand away from the adds. Chain lightning + fireball = dead priest.

 

Jhynnifer

Due to our small roster, and only have 1 raiding Shadow priest, I raid dual spec holy/shadow. Therefore the switch to disc for this fight wasn't one I could make. Our raid configuration consisted of 2 Holy priest, 2 resto shaman, 1 holy paladins and a disc priest. (basically our entire healing core)

I'll post WWS but its really wonky for us and isn't splitting anything up atm. (I'm Vanyah)
Wow Web Stats

We broke the raid up into two groups and a third tank for the big guys. Third tank had a single paladin healer.

Side one had Disc Priest, Resto shaman, Holy Priest.
Side 2 had myself(holy) and a resto shaman.

Anyway... I used mostly shielding/pom for healing fireball and a mix of pom/flash but mostly CoH and PoH for healing the idiots who would stand in fire for more than a few seconds. As there were only two healers on my side (myself and a resto shaman) I would also flash heal/shield/pom the MT but his dmg wasn't nearly bad enough to force me into spamming on him. We had one death on our kill fight and that was our raid leader standing in 3 ticks of fire while yelling at someone else for taking 2. LAWL.

This fight was fun and easy to heal, I didn't find it required me to be discipline. All in all, I am loving the versatility of PoH now even if it is a mana hog. I'm also much happier with my mana regen than I was on test, though my gear has improved as well.

 

Jhynnifer

Kolgarn was intense until we finally got Stone Grip to show up on Healbot/Grid.

We used 2 paladins healing tanks but he was dipping so I put a disc priest on it too, then 2 shamans and 2 holy priests on the raid. One of the priests was put on the rumble tank while he was tanking. All raid healing was focused on the stone gripped people, though in hindsight I could probably just put a priest and a shaman on it and be fine. I found if I CoH'd, PoM'd, shielded one and then flash healed the stone gripped people were fine.

On oblivion I would CoH, PoH, PoH as well and very rarely did people die from it. The gibb I hate is the stone grip followed by oblivion when someone would die coming out of the grip.

 

Illuminationn

The best way we found to deal with Kolgarn is to assign healers to specific parts of the fight and to raid heal as they saw fit. Main tank was me (disc) and a pally. We had a holy priest watching grips ( though I was shielding them when it was possible), and a paladin and shaman watching the add tank, the other shamans were directly on raid duties making sure griped people did not die. Whenever your healing assignment was topped you raid healed / helped on other tank / grips ect. I've found so far in Uld disc to be a huge life saver. I don't show up on meters very well but I know that PW:S has really saved some people from Eyebeams/Fireballs on Razor/ Slag Pot + Jets on Ignis long enough for another healer to react with a heal.

On Razorscale disc was a great way to save people from getting gibbed by the fireballs. I found that shielding and penancing off cooldown worked really well to prevent 2 fireballs or chain light / fire ect. I also noticed that the fire liked to stay in the middle of the circle for some reason, I'm not sure if that is just how the RNG worked or if its a range thing.

Last note- for some hard hitting pulls ( read Auriaya's initial pull) I found that stacking aegis / inspiration prior to the pulled seemed to help with mitigation a bit. If you get lucky with crits can absorb 6k+ hit with just aegis.

Edit: Forgot to mention Divine Hymn, so far on most fights can be a great raid saver. Xt-002 easily a full 100k effective healing, also helped on Kologarn for some of those messy eyebeams / Obliv hits.

 

EmeraldArcana

Hi, I'm very new to Holy healing in general because I come from a background of Paladin healing, and so a lot of the new changes have me struggling in Ulduar. The fight I've been doing a lot of recently is Mimiron on 10-man, which as you know is a pretty high-damage fight.

I found myself pretty much out-of-mana by Phase 2, and was pretty much unable to keep up with damage in Phase 4.

Does anyone have some suggestions on what kinds of spells are used frequently on this fight (esp. Phases 2 and 4)? As we might do more attempts tonight I want to brush up. I see that there's a lot of praise for the new POH (which I didn't cast at all). Instead of winding up Greater Heals, are people winding up PoHs now by default on these fights with unpredictable raid damage?

Here's the WWS but the parse is broken and only shows aggregated healing/damage over approximately 10 attempts instead of splitting them up. It's not exactly a good analysis per say, but it gives you an idea of what my spell usage pattern was. As you can see, I was healing with a Paladin and a Disc Priest.
Wow Web Stats

As you can see, I flash heal a lot - blame it on my Paladin healing background.

Also, would anyone here ever consider using Holy Nova? Its mana cost has been reduced and there's a glyph that will increase its output by 40%.

Finally, I've noticed that Renew has a number of (6!) talents that boost its effectiveness. However, it's an expensive spell, and it's a slow DOT - Empowered Renew helps a bit with putting some of its healing up front but that's still only about 1K. In the other thread, I noticed that someone else said that Empowered Renew was a godsend, but he lost approximately 100 ticks of Renew over the fight.

A friend of mine who healed in BC said that Renew generally sucks because of its high mana cost and the fact that it gets sniped a lot - I believe the front-end healing from Empowered Renew is supposed to help prevent this but I wonder if I should instead use COH+Glyph instead, so I get people topped off in 2.5 seconds rather than spending 2-3 GCDs dumping Renew on people for approximately 1K instant and then 1.5-2K ticks over time. I found that it was dangerous to "let Renew tick" so to speak and wonder what the rest of you have to say about it.

EDIT: My armory page spec is not reflective of what I had when I did the fight yesterday. What I had yesterday was Imp Renew, Emp. Renew, and no points in Healing Prayers or the increased range spell.

 

Illuminationn

I'll try to help as best I can, I primarily play disc now since grace looked tasty for sarth 3D.

I can't find it in WWS ( although I'm not too good with it) but you were using shadowfiend right? I see that you had replenish and were using hymn for mana. I did mimiron 10 as disc and I never went oom completely, can't say how holy mana looks that fight though. You could always use a mana regen flask of something over spellpower. I also don't see you using inner focus anywhere.

Some people find the need to socket for regen, maybe you'll be one of them( int, int mp5, spirit int ect). There is always Je'tze's Bell ( if you can afford it).

I find that I cast PoM a lot. Off cooldown, into lots of AoE damage ( phase 2). Also Divine Hymn IS and always will be your best friend for lots of AoE damage. I'm very happy with the change and Inner Focus + Hymn ( after you shield yourself to prevent interrupts as much as possible OR call for one from the disc priest so you get mana back too!) can be a huge raider saver for those tight moments. As a holy priest with a disc priest in the raid you should be the raid healer. So PoH a group ( I assume you spread a circle around in phase 2 or are at least close enough for CoH / PoH) bounce some mendings, don't forget hymn. Remember that Serendipity can get a gheal down to a flash heal and does more too, also can make an inner focus'd PoH pretty sexy.

I don't use renew aside form tanks/ after phase transitions, a holy will have to comment better on that for you ( sorry).

Phase 4, make sure overhealing isn't a big problem, If you have to assign healing and trust them to heal, do it. Disc should be rolling shields to the caster tank / melee tank. Make sure stupid damage isn't the problem ( mines, stacking up), and again remember that a hasted gheal is as fast as a flash with more output.

Remember that although spirit was nerfed it isn't useless ( think Holy Concentration), that you have innervates/tides/other hymns(great to be used WITH a tide or WITH replenish to get more bang for your buck and even shadowfiend if you're really hurting for mana).Overall though, the art of a priest is learned from practice, you have a lot to use and never enough time to calculate the best possible actions. Hopefully something helps you, and feel free to ask me anything you need too, love to help in anyway I can.

 

Erzz

Ehh. Razorscale is so easy don't think healing style matters that much. I was holy and the usual PoM/flash heal (not too much PoH/CoH -- too spread out in this fight). The only thing that I used a LOT of in this fight was PW:S for B&S, because that shit is too awesome NOT to use in this fight to help the poor ranged that can't seem to stand away from the fire move away quickly.

I have a question, though. Our guild is heading to Mimiron/Thorim/General on Sunday in 25 man; Any tips? I've been pretty good on mana/hps so far (so much healing on Hodir ahhhh. Circle of Win (haste)™ + PoH is god, though. Especially when he actives Frozen Blows. FB + PoH Glyph = lol.)

We did it so that we had 2-3 MT healers (for our 3 tanks [incase one gets stonegripped]), and everyone else was on raid. If anyone was getting gripped the raid healers kept them up quite well. You don't need to assign specifics for the grip really if your raid healers are on tha ball. It's kind of like Illidan p2 with the shadow barrage; keep the raid healing going but spam the shit out of the person taking massive damage. If you have 2-3 healers on the tanks and one gets beamed, it should still be perfectly healable (if not, can call it out and have a raid healer step up to take over until they get back).

How are you pulling Auriaya? We had the tanks LoS on the pull and the incomming damage was very, very to heal through. Not that much burst. But yeah, stacking up those shields on the pull will help a bit.

I'd be willing to share any tips from encounters pre-the last 4 if anyone would like 'em. I've found most of them pretty simple to heal and quite easy to manage my mana through.

 

Eshen

How exactly do you go about getting Grip to appear on Healbot/Grid?

 

Armida

Grid setup;

Kologarn debuff = Stone Grip
Ignis debuff = Slag Pot
XT002 = Light Bomb

1. Status -> Auras -> Add new Debuff -> Enter debuff name -> Enter

2. Status -> Auras -> Debuff: Whatever you just entered -> Priority -> 99

3. Frame -> Center Icon -> Check the newly created debuff

 

Beans

For Grid:

Type:
/grid config
Go to +Status ---> +Auras ---> on the debuff box type the exact name of the debuff (Stone Grip, Slag Pot, Gravity Bomb, etc), then hit enter
Go to +Frame ---> Center Icon ---> make sure the debuff you just added is checked.

You can add any buff or debuff this way. Also under status/auras, you will see the individual debuffs/buffs and adjust their priority. For example, I have prayer of mending active for center icon with priority 50, and rest of the debuffs priority 90.

edit: Someone was faster, hope we helped though!
edit2: There is also another mod called GridStatusRaidDebuffs that adds them for you (you have to update often right now). I don't use it, but others have told me it's pretty good if you don't want to add it yourself.

 

Illuminationn

We only have one raiding hunter who failed to misdirect anything, so we had a tank shield wall pull, dk dropped his aoe and a rogue tricked an add to our feral, most of the time they'd get pounced and gibbed so everyone was doing a flamegor LoS thing around the wall with healers in LoS of tank. It was pretty fail but it got the job done. Backwater servers are fail for recruitment.

Actually had to pain sup the DK on the pull until we got them into position, really nasty damage with them all stacked up.

 

• constantius

The key seems to be to get the person with threat on the mobs out of pounce range (>30 yards), and somehow kite the pack on top of a big pile of tanks. If you can pull this off without the tanks every doing any threat moves, they can taunt their mobs and then begin pulling them apart. The damage is high, but not unhealable; it's only the pounce + pounce DoT that really tears tanks apart.

We ended up doing some bastardized "every tank blows a cooldown and runs wildly in the direction of the mobs" strat which semi-sorta-kinda worked. Tanks all lived, anyway, even if it was ugly as sin.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Sjonkel

We ended up using 5 tanks, two DKs put on tanking gear. We MD 2 adds on two different tanks, MT used Heroic Throw + taunt to pick up 1 add and Auriaya, and the DKs would grip one each. Took a few tries to get right, and a hunter would sometimes die to Feign Death failing, but I think we can do it pretty perfect next time. After we got the pull right, we only needed a few tries to get him down. Since the tanks won't ever really take much damage, it's not a bad idea for them to blow cooldowns. Assuming you have at least 2 shamans, your healers should never be feared for long, and so tanks will generally not die.

When the adds are tanked apart, a single healer can easily keep each tank up. We had a few tries with 6 healers, but using 7 it got so much easier.

 

EmeraldArcana

tbh, I forgot in the heat of battle to use either and realised it about an hour after raid. It's odd because I always use these abilities when I'm Shadow (I'm main spec shadow) but not as Holy.

I swapped out of Imp Renew/Empowered Renew for now but the jury's still out on whether it's worth it. I am going to wait for some data to come out (and to see if the glyph is also worth stacking) but I am guessing it's going to be very up to personal choice.

Thanks for your help, I will keep your advice in mind.

 

Erzz

The way we did it didn't require any cds (although I threw out a GS purely out of reflex). We had three tanks LoS the adds around each wall (we used the area after the stairs leading down from the teleport to the Antichamber), so one was on the wall to the right of the stairs (between the right banister and the wall), one was on the other side of the banister (the left one), and one was across the pathway los on the other side's banister. We had a hunter run out and MD max range and run back los with the first tank. The cats appeared within 5 yards of the first tank and no pounces were used, after which the other two tanks taunted and we proceeded to burn down the cats.

10 man hard-mode Iron Council is a serious mana drain, shit.

 

Bekt

We were working on Mimiron.10 today as well (didn't get him down before we ran out of time, but healing wasn't an issue by this point), so I'll try to give some advice. I pretty much would just try to keep PoM on CD, then build 3 stacks of Serendipity with Flash/Binding Heal and cast a hasted PoH on each group when Heat Wave hits (you can get two hasted casts from 1 Serendipity buff if you spam due to latency, use it to your advantage). From our attempts, it looked like P4 is pretty short, and I was mainly casting PoH (mostly without a Serendipity stack).

I found Empowered Renew to be pretty useful this fight as well. In P1 I was healing in napalm damage, and after healing the brunt of the damage on one target you can just drop a Renew on them and move to the next, while keeping it on the tank when you get Plasma Blast warning to smooth out the damage slightly. Used it rarely in P2 or beyond, but it's an instant cast you can spread around the raid when moving from barrage.

Mana wasn't an issue I found, I would dump as much as I could in P2, then Hymn of Hope in the transition and Shadowfiend an Assault Bot if needed.

Hope this helps!

 

Lambi

We have a DK tank put down Death and Decay on the ground just before the boss and her cats go there. I put a BaS shield on the DK so he gets a run speed buff and he LoSes them around a corner. This way the DK has aggro on the boss and all 4 cats. When the boss and cats chase the DK the MT picks up the boss and an OT gets 1 cat misdirected and 1 cat taunted off the pack. Now it's very very aggro sensitive, so we have the paladins bubble and BoS the tanks while solo healing them with overlapping beacons (if you have a disc priest now is a good time to PI the paladins).

After a few seconds the two remaining cats reach the DK with initial Death and Decay aggro and from here it's basically a free kill. Just remember to put up all non aggro sensitive healing like shields and PoMs on the tanks before pull and you'll be fine. Positioning of the tanks is also of utmost importance since you don't want to give the cats a chance to leap.

SNAKE!

 

Hegen

Yes, especially in 10 man with a two-camp strategy, where you are the only healer for 5 persons and have to deal with this kind of thing:

1:47'42.567 Klingenschuppe #5 Feuerball hits Roana for 477 Fire. (986 Resisted) (8134 Absorbed)
1:47'44.582 Klingenschuppe #5 Feuerball hits Roana for 7897 Fire. (2035 Resisted)
1:47'47.962 Klingenschuppe #5 Feuerball hits Roana for 7833 Fire. (2019 Resisted)
1:47'49.976 Klingenschuppe #5 Feuerball hits Roana for 7753 Fire. (1998 Resisted)

Or this kind of thing, which is even more dangerous:

4:12'46.394 Klingenschuppe #19 Feuerball hits Hegen for 382 Fire. (925 Resisted) (7695 Absorbed)
4:12'48.393 Klingenschuppe #19 Feuerball hits Hegen for 8786 Fire. (1006 Resisted)
4:12'50.556 Klingenschuppe #19 Feuerball hits Roana for 7158 Fire. (1845 Resisted)
4:12'52.589 Klingenschuppe #19 Feuerball hits Hegen for 6115 Fire. (902 Resisted) (1757 Absorbed)
4:12'54.699 Klingenschuppe #19 Feuerball hits Hegen for 8885 Fire. (1018 Resisted)

This stuff is not rare, we saw it in every try at least once. It took me only a few tries to realize that holy is utterly inferior here and switched to disc which worked far better - preshielding everyone being the key.

For a single healer, the fireballs are just too quick for GH, do too much damage for FH, and even if you have a bit of luck and can do it with GH, you end up spamming GH, which is no longer sustainable.

Side note: ran without paladin and warlock yesterday, so having no BoK and healthstone made this an even closer shave than normally.

"Ferals are obscenely good at soaking balls." - Nidaba