For 10 man it was pretty trivial with 2 healers.

Good morning to all,

I'm sorry to interrupt your discussion a bit but I have a little question here that has been bothering me for a while already, and I'm dying to ask it. It's my first post here, so I hope I didn't look over the answer somewhere in the topic, tried to read as much as possible.

In Ulduar25, at XX-Deconstructor, or whatever his name is, you have the tantrums right.
I'm on maintank healing with my discipline spec, but at the tantrums, and with people that got the bombs, I always try to shield around a bit.
Now my problem is, after shielding quite a few people when the tantrum is coming, the shields get fully absorbed, but still I end up with less mana than before shielding, a lot less mana, although according to the calculations I read here it should be more like a manaregeneration idea.

Am I missing something? Or what am I doing wrong?

You're missing 12 seconds cooldown on Rapture returns.
You can get simultaneous returns from several shields if they all drop at once. Unfortunately, due to the nature of tantrum, it's almost impossible to get it.
If the mana is an issue for you, try to keep in mind that there are other healers to heal the raid. Drop your shields on those who are close to death to give other healers time to heal but don't go crazy in shielding. Or try to find a way to regen mana between tantrums if you feel you must spam-shield everyone.

If you applied all the shields before tantrum and they all bursted at the same time you'd get a very hefty chunk of mana back. However they nerfed soul warding to not make shields so terribly cheap so nowadays you can shield the whole raid but you'll actually go oom. I have to read the patch notes again, but I think they nerfed it from 30% reduction to 15% reduction of mana.

Yes Lambi, I read about the nerf too.
And Garantio, thank you for your answer. You're right, I missed the cooldown on Rapture. How stupid.
But thank you both for your answer. I stopped shielding already most of the time, but I was wondering how come it didn't work. Thank you very much both

iirc, tantrum does percentage of total health as damage instead fixed damage on everyone. It reduces the chance for all shields to be fully used at once.
I still use shield spamming during (and before) tantrum but try to regen mana in between. With shadowfiend, potion and HoH it's quite possible.
Anyway, you need to buff your regen to allow more shield spamming before you come to Mimiron.

You should probably just shield those that get either Lightbomb or Gravity Well during Tantrums, since those are most likely to die. Especially if not all the healers have debuffs enabled and see it. Healing Tantrums can be quite frantic at first, so helping out on those that get debuffs will help quite a bit.

In our healing set up we have 1 Paladin, 1 Disc (me), 2 Holy, 2 Shaman and 1 Druid. My normal raid assignments had been to prioritize myself and the paladin on MT healing and then add the druid as necessary. However I have been moving toward a Shaman and Paladin on MT healing and have myself filling in and shielding incoming damage.

Is this too unconventional for healing assignments? Am I really giving up too much by removing one of our chain healers? We haven't tried any hard modes, so sometimes I feel like I could randomly pick healers and assigned them to spots and we would still end up with a dead boss. My question I am trying to determine is am I handicapping our healing by taking a stereotypical raid healer and moving them more toward single target healing?

We did it with 3, that included me being holy. It's an amazing fight for a holy priest. I've heard of some groups doing with 2 -- I think we *could* have done it, but it's pretty tight and some outlier situations can/will wipe you. By the way, Body and Soul is amazing for increasing DPS uptime on this fight.

[e] I should add that this was pre-nerf. I bet we could do 2 now, but with the reduced health, might as well stick with 3 for stability reasons.

We did it two weeks ago (pre-nerf) with two healers: a disc priest and holy priest (I've been disc for 10-mans, mostly). It was a lot of fun because keeping up with that kind of damage for nearly 10 minutes required every ounce of patience and mana recovery tricks I could pull off (used PI on cooldown for myself). My healing strategy was to penance the tank (DK) when needed, PoM off the tank and during tantrums, shield every GCD I didn't need to use it for something else. Occasionally flashes scattered on the tank and PoH on my group during tantrums. Lots of fun to heal as disc. The reduced health made the fight trivial for us when we did it again this week (but it will certainly be more accessible to others now, which is good). But before this week, it was an intense 10-minute slugfest. Now it's just a routine no-pressure fight.

My guild has had trouble finding time to really try hard modes the last few weeks (a lot of finals/testing/scheduling issues), but hopefully I'll be able to report on my experiences with some other hard mode fights later this week.

The new Heartbreaker is almost jokingly easy, I wouldn't be surprised to see a re-buff of the encounter.

We have only done very few hard modes in my guild, and we never even attempted Heartbreaker. Last night we decided to try it though, without a shaman (got the heart in the last second). We used 2 healers, myself as discipline and a resto druid. We didn't know if the adds from the heart phase would despawn when we killed the heart, so the first minute or so was just chaos.

We killed him on the first try. Might I add that the healing was at no point difficult, except for when the slack ranged DPS forgot to kill the last spark which went on to melee me for ~8k a hit.

It quite frankly made me sad to see how easy it was. If anyone hasn't tried a hard mode yet, this would be a good one to start with. In my opinion it's even easier than Thorim's hard mode.

Thorim doesn't require special tanks (aside from "don't bring a warrior") as much as good positioning. Are you standing in a circle around the inner circle, so no-one ever eats Blizzard? Are your healers in good spots so they rarely if ever have to move? Are you bringing the right number of healers?

If you really want to make it easy on yourself, just force everyone in the raid to wear [Titanium Frostguard Ring]. That + FrR aura = 200 FrR, enough to drastically reduce Sif's damage. From there, it's just a matter of keeping the tanks alive for 10-12 stacks while you kill him.

Optionally, you can MC an add (on 25-man, anyway) for (*new*) raid-wide Aura of Celerity (20% haste). It makes the fight trivial.

Are you sure it's raid-wide? Or was that something recently changed? I mean I know for certain the achievement was only party-wide on Aura of Celerity. (In both 10 and 25 man last week)

Hmm, in fact we were not standing in a circle on the inner ring. We were very worried about the sector-targeted lightning strikes so we were relatively spread out. We also had an issue where the chain lightning would end up killing the last person on the chain (our elemental shaman had poor luck and then even worse luck when he reincarnated) so we were somewhat hesitant on standing very close to one another.

As for healers, we brought 3 for 10 man - a holy priest (who could go disc and did for the downing attempt), a restoration druid, and a holy paladin. The raid damage was manageable, though Sif did do quite a bit in blizzard/nova/volley form. However our biggest issue would be that a tank would go down extremely fast before the heals could get to him due to Unbalancing Strike. Is the only way around this to have our tanks pick up their reflexes and taunt as soon as the debuff hits?

I also tried MCing for the aura once but it was party-only, though if they changed it I will keep that in mind for 25-man for the achievement and making it easier.

The raid-wide buff was made with the patch on Tuesday, and it definitely applied last night. It's fairly hilarious how fast you can spend mana with Bloodlust+Aura: you're basically GCD-capped on every spell you can imagine.

We did this on 10 pre-nerf and found 2 healers was the best way. Our setup involved me as disc and a resto shaman. We tried with 3 healers originally and just didn't have enough DPS to beat the enrage timer.

I have to say, this fight pre-nerf was the most fun I've had healing in Ulduar yet. It's unfortunate that the 10 man version was nerfed so badly.

For Mimiron we started with a healing team consisting of a resto druid, holy paladin and myself as discipline. We never had any problems healing in any of the phases.

In phase 2 we all stand near the inner circle where the boss is, pretty much where the mines would be in phase 1. From there we make a full circle all around the boss. This way the damage will be spread out equally and everyone is within range of everyone.

This week we tried it with 2 healers for the first time, and it was surprisingly easy to heal. I did have to blow my entire mana pool in phase 2 though, so after the first wipe (silly main tank getting disconnected on phase 4) I specced holy for better AoE healing. It worked wonders. We were a resto druid and a holy priest and phase 2 was an absolute joke to heal, we both came out of it with 60%+ mana left, no cooldowns used.

I short; divide the damage equally, make sure everyone is in range of all the healers and don't be afraid to burn your entire mana pool. Phase 3 very relaxing and you have lots of cooldowns you can use to regain mana.

-Edit-

I'm not sure if we are allowed to link videos here, so I will refrain from doing so. PM me if you would like a link to a youtube video of our first kill, it shows the positioning pretty well.

The biggest thing you can do to make your life easy in Phase 2 Mimiron is SPREAD OUT. Every single person should be 10' away from every other person. Make a big line around ~ half the room (or more), with healers centralized. If you look up the abilities he's using, you should see why in short order. Minimizing the damage from his machine gun is the key to getting through P2. Heat Wave really isn't that bad when you minimize the rest of the damage sources.

Of course, if you're losing anyone to things like Spin Up or other random stuff, you have more issues than just healing through damage. People have to play smart.

Are you talking hard mode? Cause we clump very tightly around the inner ring of Mimiron so everyone is in range of everyone, PoM/PoH/CoH rocks out.

That's the brute-force method, and it's a bad habit to learn. You *can* heal through it, but all it takes is a Heat Wave + Rapid Burst for a world of hurt if you have a lot of people in one spot. It can be upwards of 6k dps on everyone in the cone effect.

We've had the best luck assigning all ranged a quadrant, and just basically making sure no-one is every behind/in front of anyone else. So long as people are in a line, it cuts down the Rapid Burst damage a lot; maybe not down to one person (depending on how close you are to him), but at least down to 2-3.

I think we're still talking about something similar: I'm not saying use the whole room by any means. What we use is the middle ring (on regular mode); all ranged stand on that ring, and spread evenly apart. PoH will hit any group of 5, pretty much. CoH might not hit 6 targets, but CHeal still bounces, and PoH/PoM rock the casbah.

I think you misunderstood Sinndir. Rapid Burst is a cone effect, so there's no advantage at all to spreading out in the middle or far circle rather than the inner. You can have the entire raid stacked on the inner circle and still only have Rapid Burst hit 2-3 people at a time.

The tradeoff is tighter healing vs more dangerous rockets (you may have to dodge rockets targetted at 4-5 people rather than just yourself). If everyone in the raid can dodge rockets, stacking on the inner ring can work nicely.

Edit: "Stacking" really isn't the right word. How about "Spread tightly on the inner ring"?

I believe the tight circle thing makes the raid vulnerable to Heat Wave, which is what Constantius is saying. When the heat wave damage adds up with Rapid Barrage, it's a lot of damage that could probably be avoided that the healers will have to heal through. I also encourage Constantius' method - while healers may feel slightly powerless because not everyone is in their range, it will cause healers to heal only those close to them, preventing some overhealing and letting them retain some mana.

I always thought Heat Wave only hit people close to Mimiron but after looking at wowhead the spell tooltip says that it hits all enemies. Is this valid?