We do; it's our main tank actually But we of course used a disc priest. We did have a few tries with 5 healers and all was fine till a healer got either a spark or voidzone right before tantrum - then it all went downhill usually. In the end we went back to six and killed him after an hour or so. I'd say 5 is probably optimal but 6 makes the healing a bit more stable.

Ok let me preface this by saying my guild is doing 2 ten man Ulduar groups and one 25 man. We are making steady progress and having blast learning the boss fights in 10 man, and have not gotten very far yet into 25 man. We have found the online strategies for some boss fights to be very sketchy in many cases, so we are reading, watching videos, but relying on our own experience to change our strategy rather then sticking with what someone else had success with.

Guardian Spirit
I am surprised nobody here is suggesting that priests pop Guardian Spirit on the pull if you expect the MT to take a ton of burst damage early in a fight. It not only prevents him from going down and brings him back to 50% health, but it also gives a 40% healing bonus to any other healers hitting the tank during its 10 second duration. I have completely changed my mindset on Guardian Spirit from it being a "Oh crap save the tank, or myself" button to where and I pop it early on fights I know tanks will take a huge amount of burst damage on (25 Man XT-002 for example). When the cooldown comes back up I use it as an insurance policy to keep myself or the MT up if I want to break from healing to do some mana regeneration for myself and the raid.

Mana regeneration: What is the best way to take advantage of our talents to get the most out of mana regen? A Guild mate who is a Disc/shadow priest pointed out a great combo to me. Pop your shadowfiend just before you pop your hymn of hope your base mana pool is increased by 20% temporarily. Since your shadowfiend regenerates mana based on on your total mana pool you are not only getting mana back from your Hymn (Cast this when you are very low on Mana to assure it hit you), you are getting a 20% bonus to your shadowfiend mana regeneration for up to 8 seconds AND getting a ton of mana regen back to 3 other casters in the raid to boot. If you are having problems with going OOM as someone early in this string was indicating, this is a winning combo. If you are in a fight where you are in danger from getting taken out by burst damage or losing a tank to burst damage then after you top yourself or the MT off take a break from healing for 10 seconds by popping your guardian spirit on yourself or your MT send your shadowfiend then start channeling Hymn of hope for uber mana regen and insurance policy to make sure you or your MT don't go down while you are not healing. Essentially its a nice 10 second break (Duration of guardian spirit) from healing to get mana back so you can kick back and take a sip from your cold beer while you wait 8 seconds for your hymn of hope to end without worrying about yourself or the MT dying. If no other healers are healing you or the MT during this process and you take 150% of your health in damage and die in an 8 second timeframe, then chances are you probably would have died even if you were healing..heheh

Essentially i have found that guardian Spirit is a really amazing tool to use as a healer as anything BUT an "oh crap" button. Mainly because I have found that often times when i see a tank going down, and I try and hit the button well before i see his health hit zero I find that lag from either the server or client has the tank dead and me cussing and whining that "#%@#^ I hit guardian spirit before you went down, WTF". Then to further add insult to injury my guardian spirit wings pop on my toon to just show everyone that I not only failed to save our MT, but I have also just wasted my guardian spirit spell (Because I use spell self targeting if I am not targeting someone/something).

It doesn't happen 100% of the time obviously, but I'd say about 25% of the time I have used Guardian Spirit as an "oh crap" button to save a tank while I could still see a health bar, the delay from my button push to it registering and going off the tank dies, 75% is not a good success rate in my book. In using guardian spirit the way I do now i help the raid with mana regen and prevent a tank from going down early in the fight so i am using it just like any other cooldown, and rarely as an "Oh crap" button.

Atheldane - Ravenholdt lvl 80 Holy priest - Dark Guard


P.S. Our guild is taking down 10 man kologarn easily at this point but I am nervous that we may not fair as well this week due to the 30% reduction as of todays patch to the heals for divine hymn. I used Divine Hymn to get through one of the early oblivions or to help keep people in grip and group up, but with the nerf to that spell as of todays patch I am curious to see any suggestions for that fight now that we will be doing 30% less healing? Does anyone get through oblivion and grip with anything but PoH and CoH spam plus a shield to whomever is gripped??

If I am not mistaken, that 30% reduction was hotfixed in a while back.

Keep a Serendipity stack primed for Oblivion and enjoy the fast PoH in 10 man. Shockwave I heal with CoH and for Grips (which I think both myself and the MT healer help with) I use PW:S, PoM, and either a FH or a Renew, but usually the person gets dropped pretty quickly so they only take damage from at most three ticks of grip. I've never actually seen a time on Kologarn that Divine Hymn seemed like anything but overkill, as there is usually enough of a lull in damage after an Oblivion to easily get everyone filled up again. And, yeah, as the poster above said, Divine Hymn was nerfed a patch ago, so if you haven't noticed, it must still be doing well by you.

QFT. Body and Soul will generally allow you (or a caster) one more spell before they have to run off with gravity bomb. And keep them relatively stabalized when it ticks.

It's actually almost critical to ensure a gravity bomb person has PWS at a *bare* minimum on hard-mode XT. It's a 15k+ tick from Gravity Bomb when it goes off, and if it happens (as it should) out of range of the healer clump due to dropping void zones, you really don't want to leave someone at ~ 20% life for long on that fight. Inevitably, that'll be during Tantrum as well ...

It has been tossed around these forums that *potentially* it is possible to single heal hodir as a disc priest if you have the gear for it. Thus even if you shaman is under-performing ideally you could carry the group. The problem here is that you guys are both essentially really good at single target healing and aren't optimized for aoe healing (ie go oom). The ideal solution would be for you to go holy and you'd get the raid and he would MT heal. However if that isn't viable I would say you would last longer aoe healing (PW:S-->PoH) than the shaman.
For Hodir I would recommend for you to shield the group you're not in and then cast a hasted PoH on yourself during frozen blows followed by Penance on the tank if he seems low. Then just switch where you shield your group and then PoH the other group. If you're feeling very lazy you could always glyph for holy nova and just nova your own group and PoH the other one. You will go oom if your dps is slow but that's what hymn+sf+pot+mana tide is for :P
For Ignis if your shaman is potted he should be able to keep himself up with riptide+lhw+chain healing off himself (since it now targets lowest hp member) you can also toss a renew on him to help+shield. I don't see how he can die in a pot as a healer, i mean as a last resort he could always pop a health potion.
But ya if you go holy it will make a much better synergy. My two cents ofcourse

As it happens I also did a ulduar 10 last night with me being disc spec and a resto shaman. I can tell you now it is a lot harder with me holy in combination with a holy pally which I did last week. We basicly one-shot everything last week while this week we were struggling a bit aswell. A pally's BoL is really overpowered in 10man when used smartly while we get 'punished' for crosshealing with grace

Ignis
Our tactic of the tank standing in the water and just offtanking the adds and the raid nuking the boss worked fine last week with the pally but now the 2 tanks were taking to much damage to keep up and either we lost the offtank or to much raid members we had to switch back to the old tactic of kiting + blowing up brittle adds. we did loose a raid member due to slag pot right before flame jets.

Council
Last week we told the 2 tanks to keep 40yards within each other and had a spriest do the dispelling on the steelbreaker tank.
This week I placed myself between the 2 tanks (we had a pally tanking SB dispelling herself) and kept PW:S and penance ready for the fusion punch and kept weakened soul debuff on the OT. I was basicly FH'ing between the 2 and sometimes use one or 2 penance after the fusion punch if either of them got low. Other then that every free GCD I had I casted PoM either on myself or on the OT and the occasional PW:S on a raid member. The shaman did most of the raid healing and I asked him to keep his ES on the OT. We did have a rogue dedicated on the small one kicking and stunning the chain lightning and whirls to lower the raiddamage. Once SB is down the fight becomes pretty trivial if the raid spreads out enough for the runes of death (which ofc they don't and all wanna stand in a rune of power)
While last week with the holy pally and me holy the fight was trivial and we would have probably done it hardmode if we had BL for the final phase, this week I was kinda glad we did it easy mode.

Hodir
Last night we called the raid after auriaya. Tonight is 25man normally so maybe tuesday night we do him on 10man and I can give you some feedback on it how it went with us.

Just a little piece of information: shamans can consume one orb of water when they crit with a (lesser) healing wave. That's one of their main regen mechanism, since the water shield is mana free to recast.
So, if you had less regen buff than what you have in 25-man raids, I can understand his point about gearing for haste not viable with this composition in 10-man.

Thanks for the replies.

I know speccing Holy is an option but I haven't played it since Wrath and really don't want to be respeccing for these runs if I can help it, I don't think it should be needed anyway, unless the other healer is a Paladin.

For Ignis we didn't try all-out nuking it, we simply didn't have the DPS for that. Put it this wawy: we nearly ran out of Golems! My concern here was that the Shaman died in the pot, I don't see any justification for it, and it made me wodner about his effectiveness in the rest of the raid.

Based on what you said about Council, one mistake we made was not having the Shadow Priest dispelling which meant I had to do it, that lost me GCDs and put the off-tank at risk so the Shaman had to focus on him more than the raid. But whether this alone would cover it, I don't know.

Thanks, this would be really appreciated.

I've been doing Ulduar 10 w/hard modes as Disc Priest + Holy Paladin. So far, only Freya 3 keeper has required our ShadowPriest to go Holy (And it made a huge difference).

XT-002: Priest heals Spark Tank and Preshields entire raid, keeps people up. Pally on Tank.
Council: Priest heals Runeshaper, Shadowpriest helps dispels, Pally Steelbreaker. I Use PI on myself every cd to spam out PWS and make sure raid is topped off, before taking a minor pause. Prayer of Mending should be near 30% of your total healing. Put it out on CD.
Hodir: PWS Spam, Prayer of Mending, Prayer of Healing while in light during frozen blows. Pally on Tank.
Thorim: PWS Spam, dispel from time to time, Heal tank + raid. Pally tank / raid. Pally does gauntlet.
Freya: PWS Spam for quakes, holy nova can be quite good with all the exploding adds, keeping up raid at full hp is essential here, really helps with a holy priest. Paladin on tanks.
Mimiron: Not yet tried.
Vezax: Ditto.
Yogg: TBA.

Regarding Ignis, this is a complete mystery to me. We run with 10 man gear almost exclusively, and no healer so far had any problems whatsoever keeping himself alive in the pot. LHW should be enough - especially if he's carrying lots of haste as you say. We don't even need to heal our elemental shaman when potted. Maybe he didn't take Healing Focus? 25 man raiders can sometimes be surprised by not having paladin support in 10 man. No pushback reduction in the pot can be nasty if you don't have strong instants.

The following is not meant to sound patronizing, please just take it to reflect whether that applies to your healing team: I have seen quite a few experienced and well reputed 25 man healers getting problems in 10 man. In many situations, there just is no backup, and you need to adapt your healing patterns. The slag potted shaman sounds just like it. He will probably even be able to save himself by casting a CH through himself to the tank - range should be plenty. As you will be able to toss him a shield.

Regarding Hodir: the key to doing this with your healing composition will be positioning. As disc, you will probably barely be able to heal the raid alone. So you need the shaman to help out with a few CHs during frozen blows. He cannot do that if people are not in range of each other. Reserve tank and priest cooldowns for that phase so the shaman can indeed help without risking the tank. Use the PoH glyph, if you don't already. Go all-out on spellpower or haste consumables on that fight. Also make sure the tank carries frost resist gear if you want the shaman to help you.

Just checking: if you do not have a paladin to donate a frost aura, let a shaman deploy the totem.

As for the tip regarding standing in the light during Frozen Blows: of course this helps immensely when throwing PoHs. However, at least for me this was not always possible - depending on how quickly Frozen Blows hits after Flash Freeze. Sometimes the old light beam is gone and a new one is not yet available because the NPC is not yet saved from the ice.

Thats when you PWS->Inner Focus->Divine Hymn

Yup, I'm sure this is part of it. I did shield him but then I had to heal the tank and the next thing I see is he's dead, it's like he forgot to heal himself. It was only one small mistake but it was indicative of what was going wrong throughout the raid: in 10-man there's nobody there to pick up the slack. Still we'll see what happens next week.

Don't think I've seen anyone mention it here, however, you can and should cast your PoM on the person in the slag pot, you're likely to see the majority of your bounces go from the person in the pot and your tank before it's cool down is up. This with a renew or shield alone should be able to keep the pot person alive for the duration.

My 10 man group is making our way through Ulduar atm with myself and a Resto Shaman healing. We’ve 2 healed most things ex Council, Thorim and Mimiron (where we stopped). We could probably also 2 heal Council and Thorim except I think she’s got to the point now where she’s been raid healing so long she’s forgotten how to effectively single target heal. Similarly I feel she’s probably more useful in the gauntlet for Thorim, but she tried it once and freaked out preferring the Arena with some assistance. I kinda tricked her into 2 healing Freya after bullying the raid into not being so stupid detonating all the adds at the same time.

Personally I switch specs depending on the fight, but so far I’ve done most of it discipline with only a few holy.

The thing is we didn’t have any problems 2 healing Naxx together. I guess the thing to take out of it is that healing in 5mans is different from healing 10mans is different from healing in 25mans. Unless you are trying hard modes 25man healing is almost definitely the easiest of the 3...

If 25-man is the easiest, maybe you need to take fewer healers.

I subscribe to this method too...and not just on Ignis, it's useful on Kologarn gripped folks too. I raid as holy (mostly) and find that, on Ignis, leading up to a Flame Jets and someone gets potted, i'll use PoM and renew on the potted person - if PoM procs SoL then an insta-FHeal is ready. I generally save CoH for the "way up" on the jets and PoH once landed - i've tried squeezing a SoL Fheal on the "way down" from jets but it's not as good (as in the sense of keeping the fragile dps'ers topped) as waiting to land and then PoH followed by a SoL FHeal.

Kologarn, (pre grip nerf) I found that PoM, CoH then FHeals was a lovely combo - the PoM would frequently ping around the gripped folks (sometimes the tank and back) while keeping CoH on CD also. I'd save a serendipity hasted PoH for the oblivion. As a side note, I found that Kolo pre-nerf was actually a well balanced fight, and now I liken it to Chess in Kara - you need to have your brain on, but it doesn't need to be in any gear.

For both Ignis and Kolo I also found that a well placed Lightwell eased the healing need lots. Ignis right in the middle where all the ranged and healers were stood and for Kolo it was at the threshold in the middle ready for Eyebeam folks to click as they ran past (or those near it to use after Oblivion). The worst thing about Lightwell is that people need to learn to use it - it's pretty nice on Mimiron P2 and P4 right in by the melee'ers. I use it on General too - it's great to slap right next to a vapor cloud when we're regening one side - means we can take 6-7 stacks and get healed, move out and back in and re-heal all from one lightwell...awesome HpM. I've realised i've meandered off the point about using PoM on potted people...

As a 10-man raider who plays a discipline priest and almost always has a shaman as the second healer, a few of the things you said here seems a little odd. As others have pointed out, any healer should be able to heal themselves through slag pot *while* healing other people in the raid at the same time. A few posts back I made an extensive post about how to heal council as a discipline priest, but a shaman should not be having trouble keeping the raid alive while you focus on the tank. Last time we did the Hodir our resto shaman respec'd to enhancement to make the timer easier and just threw some chain heals during frozen blows and I healed the rest of it myself. Our tank wears frost resist gear, I'm not sure if yours does. During frozen blows you will probably have to stay in starlight to keep up.

If your healing was about the same as the shaman's then one or both of you were certainly doing something wrong. Usually my shaman friend comes out nearly double my effective healing on a raid. A shaman *does* have to worry about mana more than other classes, but going oom in half 226 gear on non-hardmode 10-man encounters shouldn't be within the realm of possibility unless he's just indiscriminantly spamming heals on people at full health. But there are things you can look at other than getting a new shaman.

How were your overheal numbers? In a ten man group with a discipline priest you should be able to keep your overheal low (mine is usually around 30% while the shaman typically does about 20%). Also, if your absorbs are only another 30% on top of your heals, you might not be casting PW:S enough. PW:S is generally more mana efficient than your non-AoE, non-Penance heals (even ignoring Rapture) and it can't lead to heal sniping, which is what contributes to low overheal and less wasted mana. On a lot of Ulduar fights it's basically impossible to waste a shield because the AoE damage is so reliable.

Another possibility that comes to mind is that your tanks might not be well enough geared. If you weren't working on council hardmode than pre-shielding fusion punch shouldn't even be necessary.

My guild is working on IC hard, and we're really struggling with the raid healing in Phase 2. We've been trying it with 5 healers (typically a paladin, shaman, resto druid, disc priest, and myself as Holy), and we're just not keeping up. I'm using PoM and CoH on cooldown and spamming the crap out of PoH, but the raid is pretty spread out and I'm spending a lot more mana to heal people than I think I should be.

How many healers do most guilds run with, and how do you arrange your raid?

We used 2 disc priests, 2 resto druids, a resto shaman, and a ret paladin. The ret paladin counts as a healer because a ret paladin's judgement of light scales more than any other spec and heals more than any healer. If you're having trouble keeping up with the raid damage, consider picking up a ret paladin (having your holy paladin spec ret if he has the gear is ideal, then pick up another druid or priest). Ret paladins are also great because they can help take care of fusion punch dispels without taking healer GCDs and attention. If you can't run 2 resto druids, one of your priests should probably be holy.

Our log of our first hard mode kill is here: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis (note: it's probably more useful to restrict the log to the final phase of the fight, since phase 1/2 are easy and don't matter a lot World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis)
It felt very easy and repeatable; our wipes were just to dumb mistakes (using tank cooldowns at the wrong time, someone standing out of position, or broken cleanse macros with fusion punch ticks, generally).

I was on steelbreaker tank healing the whole fight (with raid healing - primarily on ranged - as I saw fit, but never at the expense of the tank) + dispelling in phase 1/2. The other disc priest was on raid healing (primarily on melee, then watching the static disruption soaker group in the final phase) and assigned to quickly shield/top off our druid tank when he got battle ressed. The druids did a mixture of tank and raid healing, and the shaman was mostly on tank healing, with some raid healing as he saw fit.

This fight and our raid composition are an excellent example of how disc priest + resto druid work together to do amazing things.

The biggest thing about IC Hard is: are you setting up the raid properly? You need a min of 3 soaks at range; any more than that, and you're just wasting healer mana.

We have 3 hunters + 1 shadow priest sitting at range, 10' apart. Everyone else sits on Steelbreaker's nuts. It removes Static Disruption from the picture, and makes the P3 (final add) healing almost trivial. If you're not doing this, the healing is ridiculous in P3, and 5 healers will be highly unlikely to keep up.

For what it's worth, we run 6 for stability: 2 paladins, 1 disc priest, and 3 AE healers (usually priest+shaman+druid). The dps check isn't that obscene anymore.