Depending on your healer composition, 7 may be mandatory. Priests absolutely destroy the healing here; if you don't have more than 2, and you have a balanced comp (2 paladin, 2 priest, 2 shaman, 1 druid, for example), you may find you need 7 to keep up. This is especially true if you don't use a DK MT with tons of cooldowns to blow for Plasma Blast.
Having priests really is a boon for this encounter. We've 6 healed it easily, but probably only because we had four holy specced priests.
Combine the aoe healing strength along with using hoh during the rping between phases, and ifdh during p2/4, and it was one of our cleanest kills.
1,615 PW:S cast. ~ 11 million damage absorbed. Freya hard-mode: down. Disc is incredible for raid stabilization on this fight. I wasn't even Disc for the entire evening, so those shields are concentrated in about 80% of the Freya attempts. Very very amusing meters.
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
Depending on your healer composition, 7 may be mandatory. Priests absolutely destroy the healing here; if you don't have more than 2, and you have a balanced comp (2 paladin, 2 priest, 2 shaman, 1 druid, for example), you may find you need 7 to keep up. This is especially true if you don't use a DK MT with tons of cooldowns to blow for Plasma Blast.
This was our first kill. We were not really stacking priests by any means, we had 2holy paladins, 3 resto shamans, 1 holy priest. I think we did kill him another time with 7 healers, but that was because one of our paladins forgot to go back to ret after going holy when one of healers DC'd.
We probably relied more on cooldown chains (fire aura + aura mastery then bubble + divine sac) to just get through p2 quickly, since the damage in the other phases is quite low.
We just run with 7 all the time, and I think we're planning on keeping 7 as we work on hard mode, since the damage scales that much higher. There's no way you'd pull off a kill with 5 healers on Hard Mode, given my experiences on 10-man. It's ridiculous. Everything hits harder: machine guns, Heat Wave, Napalm Shell, Mines, Plasma Blast; you name it, and it hits harder. That makes quick top-ups even *more* important.
Sure, but this is for the easy mode. For the hardmode I don't really feel qualified since I haven't tried it yet. We found that for most easy modes, 5 healers is optimal, plus or minus one.
My big question though is what is the best time to go Disc given your particular raid comp?
I think this is a great question, and I would love to go back to it. The healer comp for our raids looks like this 95% of the time: 2 pallies, 2 druids, 1 holy priest (me), 1 disc priest (100% of the time), 1 shammy. If any one of those 7 step out (usually the shammy), a druid (80% of the time) or a pally steps in, as we are druid/pally heavy atm. I know a lot of posts in this thread are talking about flopping between holy and disc in various encounters, but my question is whether that's something that would actually be useful to do in my setup, where I am the only holy priest. Would the loss in raid burst healing be worth it, particularly since on occasion we lose the shammy?
In case its helpful, here are the combat logs from our 2 raid nights this week:
Comps were a little bit unusual this week, because a couple people were out doing final exams. Wednesday was: 3 druids, 1 pally, 1 disc priest, 1 holy priest, 1 shammy. Thursday was: 4 druids, 1 holy priest, 1 pally, 1 shammy.
I think its worth it on fights like Razorscale. The damage is easy to heal through with holy, but easier to prevent with disc. I also find it wonderful being able to switch in 10 mans. In my 10 man Ulduar I'll be holy usually if we have a paladin, but otherwise I'm disc. If we do have a paladin, I still go Disc for Razorscale and Mimiron(makes P1 Burst easier and on 10 man P2 doesn't seem too bad, but I also have a melee heavy group).
We've been doing him with two Holy Priests, two Paladins, a Shaman and a Druid.
In Phase 1 we spread out in the two thirds to the right and left of the entrance. We have each Pally take a side and put Beacon on the tank and heal Napalm Victims. The Shaman goes in the middle and helps with Napalm and tank healing. The Priests and Druid heal the tank.
In Phase 2 the whole raid clumps up 360 degrees around the boss, all within the circle in the center of the room to put us all within range of group heals. I use PoM and CoH whenever they're not on cd. When they are, I use Surge of Light Flash Heals, Renew or PoH if I'm stacked on Serendipity.
In Phase 3 we have one healer assigned to each tank. Not much to say. It's an easy phase from a healing perspective.
In Phase 4 we have a couple healers assigned to the MT, one assigned to the ranged tank and the rest cross-healing.
For Mimiron phase 2 and 4 abuse Prayer of Healing. We put all ranged in 3 groups and position each group on 1 of the "slices" on the floor, so PoH always hits everyone. We don't stand as close as Anike, so all WG anc CoH simply go to the melee. Even as disc I end up quite high on the meters here.
Originally Posted by Constantius
If you go 100% -> 0% mana in P2, that's ok. Take the 20 seconds of RP to regen, then burn Hymn of Hope and Fiend in P3.
If all priests use Hymn at the same time you regen much more mana. I've gone from 0 to full once.
Having seen a few hardmodes now, I was wondering if anyone was thinking of using [Flask of Stoneblood] on some? Because for ex. on Freya and Mimiron, the raid damage is insane and people will often be dropping nearly to zero. Perhaps having an additional 1300 HP buffer would help more than other flasks?
We had a huge argument in healer chat about that on Freya. I was of the opinion that it was useless; a druid was of the opinion that it would help drastically. Basically, look at the incoming damage. IF people are dying by only a tiny bit of overkill, it might help, but most of our deaths were a minimum of 3-4k overkill; 1300 HP isn't going to save them. You're better off making sure everyone is wearing ilvl 213/226+ gear (for the extra stam there), and that your raid has Improved Commanding Shout.
Then focus on removing sources of damage. Have a priest go Disc and spam PW:S on people who've taken any damage whatsoever. Get people out of Unstable Energy faster. Don't stand next to exploding Detonators. Focus on no-one, ever, getting interrupted by the Tremor. Etc., etc..
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
I've only healed this fight as holy once and it was a bit of a pain, but as disc, it's a breeze - just nonstop PWS the tanks and if you're really quick (not drunk...) and with decent UI, before Razorscale spits fire balls at people they should momentarily "gain" aggro (Pitbull flashes up red for me) so just keep shielding the people that gain aggro.
Your shields on the tanks are guaranteed to get eaten and the people who get hit by the fire bombs will use up the shield as well... it really makes the fight pretty trivial
Wow Web Stats - i'm the priest at the bottom of the healing charts (yay!) but if you conisder the ~300k of raid damage that PWS eats up (39*7500) you can see quite how incredible Disc becomes on this fight, I know it's doable being Holy on this fight but if you've duel specc'd into a Holy spec and a Disc - then rock Disc on Razorscale....it's also fun - a bit like the PrOM madness on Sapph....
We had a huge argument in healer chat about that on Freya. I was of the opinion that it was useless; a druid was of the opinion that it would help drastically. Basically, look at the incoming damage. IF people are dying by only a tiny bit of overkill, it might help, but most of our deaths were a minimum of 3-4k overkill; 1300 HP isn't going to save them. You're better off making sure everyone is wearing ilvl 213/226+ gear (for the extra stam there), and that your raid has Improved Commanding Shout.
Then focus on removing sources of damage. Have a priest go Disc and spam PW:S on people who've taken any damage whatsoever. Get people out of Unstable Energy faster. Don't stand next to exploding Detonators. Focus on no-one, ever, getting interrupted by the Tremor. Etc., etc..
By itself,1300 HP is not much. But we've used full hp gear for our kill. And 1300 in addition to what you already have by wearing high stamina items and using hp gear is good. Having 26k+ HP on each member raid buffed is making difference.
You may discover that Knock, Knock, Knock on Wood is more tightly tuned than you're giving it credit for. Dropping dps flasks across the raid can easily end up being the difference between stability (keeping up with each wave, for 6 total, and then beating the enrage timer), and smashing face-first into a Detonator + Guardian combo.
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
We're currently working on Yogg-Saron but Mimiron still seems to give us healing issues (Phase 2) from time to time. As far as I can tell, the healing assignments are OK with ample healing spread across the raid. I run Holy on Mimiron and my strategy is simple: I spam PoH as much as possible and keep a PoM bouncing at every opportunity. I drop a CoH when able as well. The strategy works sometimes but not always. I don't seem to have an issue keeping other groups within my range alive; it's when the Rapid Fire is directed in my vicinity that I occasionally end up dying. I actually have Healing Focus 2/2 talented as well.
The feedback I'm getting so far is "Keep yourself alive". So my question is, when I'm taking big Rapid Burst damage and those around me are as well should I not continue to spam PoH? Should I possibly spam binding heals and flashes to get my health at a comfortable level while everyone else takes damage and THEN start spamming PoH? I have even died after using a desperate prayer (in between PoH) during bursts. I just can't escape the feeling that there's not enough heals coming from other in-range healers.
We're currently working on Yogg-Saron but Mimiron still seems to give us healing issues (Phase 2) from time to time. As far as I can tell, the healing assignments are OK with ample healing spread across the raid. I run Holy on Mimiron and my strategy is simple: I spam PoH as much as possible and keep a PoM bouncing at every opportunity. I drop a CoH when able as well. The strategy works sometimes but not always. I don't seem to have an issue keeping other groups within my range alive; it's when the Rapid Fire is directed in my vicinity that I occasionally end up dying. I actually have Healing Focus 2/2 talented as well.
The feedback I'm getting so far is "Keep yourself alive". So my question is, when I'm taking big Rapid Burst damage and those around me are as well should I not continue to spam PoH? Should I possibly spam binding heals and flashes to get my health at a comfortable level while everyone else takes damage and THEN start spamming PoH? I have even died after using a desperate prayer (in between PoH) during bursts. I just can't escape the feeling that there's not enough heals coming from other in-range healers.
We use a different strategy that may work for you depending on your other healers. When we were learning the fight we had a similar issue (dying while focused) so we've switched to a strategy where each healer is responsible for groups on either side of his little area. For us, this ensures that no healer is required to heal themselves or their group while being focused. It's less Free-for-all and a bit easier to hold people accountable for their healing responsibilities.
We're currently working on Yogg-Saron but Mimiron still seems to give us healing issues (Phase 2) from time to time. As far as I can tell, the healing assignments are OK with ample healing spread across the raid. I run Holy on Mimiron and my strategy is simple: I spam PoH as much as possible and keep a PoM bouncing at every opportunity. I drop a CoH when able as well. The strategy works sometimes but not always. I don't seem to have an issue keeping other groups within my range alive; it's when the Rapid Fire is directed in my vicinity that I occasionally end up dying. I actually have Healing Focus 2/2 talented as well.
The feedback I'm getting so far is "Keep yourself alive". So my question is, when I'm taking big Rapid Burst damage and those around me are as well should I not continue to spam PoH? Should I possibly spam binding heals and flashes to get my health at a comfortable level while everyone else takes damage and THEN start spamming PoH? I have even died after using a desperate prayer (in between PoH) during bursts. I just can't escape the feeling that there's not enough heals coming from other in-range healers.
Like for me, if Rapid Burst focus on You just for one "serie", toss PoM on You, often it tick on You, jump to friend and go back to You and again heal You, so You're saving mana, and 'most important' time, for toss PoH. If it focus on You more a bit longer a binding heal is a good choice by a serendipity reason. Like for me im trying to using PoH only when got 3x serendipity on me, mainwhile im CoHing, SoLing and renewing, and with empowered renew 1/3 and SoL 2/2 time to get serendipity is really low
And question here:
Anyone done Thorim Hard mode? if yes in what build, im not sure what's on top, it's holy due alot of raid healing there or it's disci due a raid stabilisation what is really needed there like for us, it's often that someone got 2 frostbolts in a row and survive, but then got "1st" chain of chain lighting damage and a pw;s on him would save his life. Additionaly a -1 sec cast on mass dispel and Spell Wardering is really good stuff there.
We're currently working on Yogg-Saron but Mimiron still seems to give us healing issues (Phase 2) from time to time. As far as I can tell, the healing assignments are OK with ample healing spread across the raid. I run Holy on Mimiron and my strategy is simple: I spam PoH as much as possible and keep a PoM bouncing at every opportunity. I drop a CoH when able as well. The strategy works sometimes but not always. I don't seem to have an issue keeping other groups within my range alive; it's when the Rapid Fire is directed in my vicinity that I occasionally end up dying. I actually have Healing Focus 2/2 talented as well.
The feedback I'm getting so far is "Keep yourself alive". So my question is, when I'm taking big Rapid Burst damage and those around me are as well should I not continue to spam PoH? Should I possibly spam binding heals and flashes to get my health at a comfortable level while everyone else takes damage and THEN start spamming PoH? I have even died after using a desperate prayer (in between PoH) during bursts. I just can't escape the feeling that there's not enough heals coming from other in-range healers.
The way we have it set up is spreading out by groups in each of the 3 sectors and assigning 2 healers per sector. And when our area gets Rapid Fire, I just PoM myself then cast PoH then quickly following with a CoH on myself that should hit everyone in my area/group. Anyone that seems low after that, I'll just shield them.
But for the most part, it's this:
I just can't escape the feeling that there's not enough heals coming from other in-range healers.
Having seen a few hardmodes now, I was wondering if anyone was thinking of using [Flask of Stoneblood] on some? Because for ex. on Freya and Mimiron, the raid damage is insane and people will often be dropping nearly to zero. Perhaps having an additional 1300 HP buffer would help more than other flasks?
We use [Flask of Stoneblood] on Freya and Mimiron, just for that reason. Breaking 25k raid buffed with CS is not just preferred, it's vital.
Having seen a few hardmodes now, I was wondering if anyone was thinking of using [Flask of Stoneblood] on some? Because for ex. on Freya and Mimiron, the raid damage is insane and people will often be dropping nearly to zero. Perhaps having an additional 1300 HP buffer would help more than other flasks?
I've killed a couple of hardmodes & seen a few more, and as far as I'm concerned, [Flask of Pure Mojo] or [Flask of the Frost Wyrm] both give significantly higher benefit that the [Flask of Stoneblood]. Trust me, you can always spam faster, harder and longer. Even though I'm not running on fumes, I have to limit my healing (can't spam as much as I could) or I will run out of mana. I have 24,3k hp raidbuffed, so extra 1,3k won't make any real difference when the lethal damage is is often 10k in a single hit, or more. Granted, haven't seen Mimiron/YS-0K/XT-hardmodes, but have others.
When in doubt, drink a Frost Wyrm. Use stoneblood when you die without a chance to heal.
I've killed a couple of hardmodes & seen a few more, and as far as I'm concerned, [Flask of Pure Mojo] or [Flask of the Frost Wyrm] both give significantly higher benefit that the [Flask of Stoneblood]. Trust me, you can always spam faster, harder and longer. Even though I'm not running on fumes, I have to limit my healing (can't spam as much as I could) or I will run out of mana. I have 24,3k hp raidbuffed, so extra 1,3k won't make any real difference when the lethal damage is is often 10k in a single hit, or more.
When in doubt, drink a Frost Wyrm. Use stoneblood when you die without a chance to heal.
I've killed a couple of hardmodes & seen a few more, and as far as I'm concerned, [Flask of Pure Mojo] or [Flask of the Frost Wyrm] both give significantly higher benefit that the [Flask of Stoneblood]. Trust me, you can always spam faster, harder and longer. Even though I'm not running on fumes, I have to limit my healing (can't spam as much as I could) or I will run out of mana. I have 24,3k hp raidbuffed, so extra 1,3k won't make any real difference when the lethal damage is is often 10k in a single hit, or more. Granted, haven't seen Mimiron/YS-0K/XT-hardmodes, but have others.
When in doubt, drink a Frost Wyrm. Use stoneblood when you die without a chance to heal.
I don't know how many Freya 3D attempts you've done, but being well over 25k health helps prevent a 'rooted outside of mushroom with sunbeam on me and ground tremor going off' death.
May just be my personal opinion, but from my experience lately, having that extra 1300hp did save my life in just that situation.
I think this is a great question, and I would love to go back to it. The healer comp for our raids looks like this 95% of the time: 2 pallies, 2 druids, 1 holy priest (me), 1 disc priest (100% of the time), 1 shammy. If any one of those 7 step out (usually the shammy), a druid (80% of the time) or a pally steps in, as we are druid/pally heavy atm. I know a lot of posts in this thread are talking about flopping between holy and disc in various encounters, but my question is whether that's something that would actually be useful to do in my setup, where I am the only holy priest. Would the loss in raid burst healing be worth it, particularly since on occasion we lose the shammy?
In case its helpful, here are the combat logs from our 2 raid nights this week:
Comps were a little bit unusual this week, because a couple people were out doing final exams. Wednesday was: 3 druids, 1 pally, 1 disc priest, 1 holy priest, 1 shammy. Thursday was: 4 druids, 1 holy priest, 1 pally, 1 shammy.
I talk with the other healers in my guild frequently and the one thing that our 2 druid healers keep saying is 'Man, I love it when that Prayer of Healing goes off.' I really think it's mandatory to have at least 1 Holy Priest in your 25 man raids - the incredible burst AoE healing they have makes a world of difference. At the start of Ulduar I was our only healing Priest and I went Holy for every fight except Razorscale and Vezax. We recently recruited another solid Holy Priest so I have found more occasion to be Discipline and feel I've saved a good number of people who would have otherwise died.
In my opinion, if you are the only healing Priest in your 25 man raid, Holy is going to be your go-to spec but if you have the support of another Holy Priest, Discipline really starts to shine.
I would be very interested to see other people's opinions on this, specifically as it pertains to hard modes, given my guild is just starting to get into them this week.
There is one case where you want to be disc., even as only priest. That's when you will be tank healing, with burst.
This is not likely, because that would mean you're without (or nearly without) paladins, and have only 1 priest. But there are fights where I think druids would not be comfortable for tank healing, and adding a disc priest could provide the needed burst (they let their hot do the classical regular heal, priest takes care of damage spikes). And that would be a raid also with lots of shaman and druids, and they should be able to cover the raid healing.
I talk with the other healers in my guild frequently and the one thing that our 2 druid healers keep saying is 'Man, I love it when that Prayer of Healing goes off.' I really think it's mandatory to have at least 1 Holy Priest in your 25 man raids - the incredible burst AoE healing they have makes a world of difference. At the start of Ulduar I was our only healing Priest and I went Holy for every fight except Razorscale and Vezax. We recently recruited another solid Holy Priest so I have found more occasion to be Discipline and feel I've saved a good number of people who would have otherwise died.
In my opinion, if you are the only healing Priest in your 25 man raid, Holy is going to be your go-to spec but if you have the support of another Holy Priest, Discipline really starts to shine.
I would be very interested to see other people's opinions on this, specifically as it pertains to hard modes, given my guild is just starting to get into them this week.
When Ulduar was released, I also loved the enormous amount of burst healing the Holy Priest provides (especially with the bugged Serendipity).
But now that we started to work on hardmodes, I more and more prefer Discipline for most of the encounters.
Sometimes I really feels troublesome for me to re-stack Serendipity, while PWS > POH > PWS > POH… is less “complicated” and also has great throughput.
You also say that the support of another Holy Priest makes Discipline shine, I think it is just the other way around. Discipline especially makes Druides shinny, because the shields buy their HoTs more time to tick without creating overheal.
Holy Priests are great, but not mandatory. I even think that if a setup only contains one Healing Priest, it would be better for him to be Discipline in a lot of cases just because of the “uniqueness” of the tree. Of course this depends on the healer setup, but at the moment I seems like druids and shamans (especially with t8 bonus) can also cover the raid healing pretty well.
Concerning Thorim hard + disc priest. We found that a disc spamming the whole raid with shields greatly increases the survivabilty. So if I had to choose between holy and disc, I'd always choose the disc on this encounter.
I'm new here, so maybe I don't see a bigger or 'better' picture. But a thread like this is full of great information, wasted posts off subject, and almost no organization. I think for Ulduar it is best to have a separate thread for each of the bosses; keeping discussions of glyphs, disc v. holy, specs, off-topics, etc filtered out. This kind of organization would be substantially more useful for offering up the wealth of experience and knowledge the posters have in EJ. This is one of those 'off-topic' posts.
05/06/09, 5:15 PM
