So last night my guild's main 10 man group got our first General Vezax kill (attendance issues for so long, got hardmode XT and Thorim this week too) and although we got through the fight with little consequence and we basically 2 shot it, (3 shot, but 2nd attempt wiped because the tank charged in out of healing ranged and got gibbed hard before we got any real heals on him), me(as disc) and the holy paladin I was with were struggling for mana. She lasted a very long time and we both ran ourselves to probably 40% before calling for a puddle. By this time Vezax was probably at 50%. From there though it got a little more frantic and we each had to call for 2 more puddles each before the end of the fight. Considering hardmode, I'm wondering what we might be able to do to improve? I know that theres apparently some amazing power of disc priests for this fight, but I'm not quite understanding it. Standing in the shadowcrash puddle reduces the mana cost of PW:S by 75% and has no negative affects on its absorbs or it's glyphed heal, but I figure that alone is only 7k heals per 15 seconds(5k Absorb, 2k Heal, being generous) and only for 200 some mana. While I find this fantastic and made use of it whenever I could, I couldn't help but wonder how other priests (Namely a statement I saw from Constantius in one of the compendiums) are saying they manage 80% of their heals from PW:S. Am I doing something wrong that I can do better to clean up our mana and improve for the hard mode?
There is really no special trick to this fight other than that PWS in shadow crash. There are really only three things you guys can do: increase your raids DPS, limit your overhealing, and limit the damage your raid takes from Mark of the Faceless and Shadowcrash. The biggest improvement in DPS comes from having your range learn how to really maximize shadow crashes so they can DPS from them constantly. Limiting damage from Mark of the Faceless and Shadowcrash just requires your ranged to have good reactions. Limiting overhealing is pretty self explanatory, but one thing you might want to try is taking turns healing the tank. For instance, have the paladin solo heal the tank until he reaches 50% mana, then you take over and solo heal it until you hit 50%, and then keep alternating. That way you can be sure you are not sniping each others heals.
Casting a PWS every 15 seconds from a shadow crash is very helpful, but it's during hard mode that this really shines because there is a lot of raid damage from the Animus so you can spam shields on everyone for very little mana.
You could also try having a third healer. I two heal 10 man Ulduar with a holy paladin as well but we always have a DPS switch to healing for hard mode General.
No the real trick is to stand in the shadowcrash and ALWAYS have shields on your ranged group. You see the mark of the faceless damage only heals Vezax if it actually does damage, so an absorb will result in 0 healing on Vezax, which in turn will make the fight alot shorter (which ultimately saves you mana).
Hmm I had not thought of that, is the mana cost of recasting that many PWS every 30 seconds (even with shadow crash) really worth the decreased healing from Mark of the Faceless?
For 10 man, you will have at least 3 people at range so Shadow Crash does not target the melee, so lets say 3 people need a PWS every 30 seconds. At 200 mana each that is 600 mana every 30 seconds. It takes 4 minutes for the Animus to spawn, so that's almost 4800 mana used during P1 shielding the ranged, 6400 if you have 4 people at ranged. For that much mana I can solo heal the tank after the Animus is dead for at least a minute. So I guess it depends on if the healing that would have been done by Mark of the Faceless is equivalent to one minute of my raid's DPS. I'll have to try this next week.
You're assuming that a MotF goes off every 15 seconds. It can be longer between casts, so you don't have to refresh the PWS as often.
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 3 healer 10 man hard mode Vezax, we have me ( disc priest) solo heal tank for phase 1, shaman/ paladin/other healer heal phase 2 and we bring a resto druid for overall hax( our guild has also done it with 2 paladins and a resto druid though). The resto melees for clearcast and heals on tank or raid as needed, basically a crutch. Weeks ago on Vezax ( assuming it hasn't been changed)I found that Hymn of Hope still grants you max mana for a short period of time even though it doesn't restore mana, so you can get a couple free heals while its up/ shields. I use inner focus basically off cd, the sooner I use it the sooner its up again( more free shields / heals).
After sucessfully healing this I've found that casting Prayer of Mending in the shadow crash also benefits from no negative effects on the tank; I could be mistaken however I do notice it critting for ~6-7k constantly. We had 3 healers, me as disc, resto shaman and resto druid.
During phase 1 before the animus the shaman would typically heal solo with cheap earth sheilds moving out for LHW spam or whatever else, with myself sheilding / PoM in crashes and stepping out occasionally for pennance. By the time the animus spawns in phase 2 inner focus should be off cooldown and I combine that and divine hymn to smooth out raid damage while the tank picks up and the dps burn down the animus, towards the end we have a ret paladin DS/Sac to again reduce the raid damage occuring as the debuff grows. If you have a resto druid, in phase 2 have him move into melee range and auto attack the boss for clearcasting procs rejuving or lifeblooming which should help quite a lot, otherwise just lifebloom in the crash as required.
I'd love to ask what specc and what healing setup you guys did Iron council (25) HM, as we had major healing issues during p3, running definitely oom and consequentially letting people dying, thus losing the dps race against boss' oneshotting tanks.
We were currently running with 1 disc priest and 1 holy, 2 shamans and 2 palas, but we just couldn't keep up with mana managment, and i'd love to know how it has been done by guilds with way less gear than us at the moment.
I'm usually running with this holy spec http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?prie...0&version=9947
and a stacking int gear as much as possible.... would it be a smart choice to drop a couple t8.5 to get t7 2 piece setbonus?
You are seriously gimping yourselves if you're not using a single resto druid for that fight. Get a resto druid instead of a resto shaman and you should be fine. The druid stabilizes the raid and the holy priest tops it off.
About Council HM: I've seen a lot of logs from this encounter where there were multiple holypriests assigned to raidheal, with PoH being their primary spell by a large margin with over 40% overheal. I found this quite inefficient and would like to share how I do it - to put an end to the madness ^^
I use a prioritized spell order which I stick to (if it doesn't produce overheal):
pom > sol procc > coh > poh if serendipity is at 3 and there are at least 3 potential targets > renew
This is also much more mana efficient afaik - I had no innervate, no tide and didnt have to use a mana potion.
Usually we have 2 healers on the mt, 1 one the 3 targets outside the camp and 2 for raidheal which consist of a holypriest and either a restodruid or a restoshaman.
The healing was pretty tough towards the end of p3 even though it was a kill with only 2 tank switches - a result of the poor healing performance of the raidhealing restodruid. But it's usually fine even with 3 switches (with a restoshaman as 2nd raidhealer).
So the message I'm trying to get across is: Use all your available spells - don't bruteforce it with poh. Especially with the poh nerf on the horizon.
So last night my guild's main 10 man group got our first General Vezax kill (attendance issues for so long, got hardmode XT and Thorim this week too) and although we got through the fight with little consequence and we basically 2 shot it, (3 shot, but 2nd attempt wiped because the tank charged in out of healing ranged and got gibbed hard before we got any real heals on him), me(as disc) and the holy paladin I was with were struggling for mana. She lasted a very long time and we both ran ourselves to probably 40% before calling for a puddle. By this time Vezax was probably at 50%. From there though it got a little more frantic and we each had to call for 2 more puddles each before the end of the fight. Considering hardmode, I'm wondering what we might be able to do to improve? I know that theres apparently some amazing power of disc priests for this fight, but I'm not quite understanding it. Standing in the shadowcrash puddle reduces the mana cost of PW:S by 75% and has no negative affects on its absorbs or it's glyphed heal, but I figure that alone is only 7k heals per 15 seconds(5k Absorb, 2k Heal, being generous) and only for 200 some mana. While I find this fantastic and made use of it whenever I could, I couldn't help but wonder how other priests (Namely a statement I saw from Constantius in one of the compendiums) are saying they manage 80% of their heals from PW:S. Am I doing something wrong that I can do better to clean up our mana and improve for the hard mode?
10 man vezax is not going to kill your tank in two, or even three hits (or if he is the problem might be that you arewn't geared enough for the fight). Let Judgement of Light, Imp. Leader of the Pack, Seal of Light, Death Strike, or whatever other free healing your raid has do it's job. It's hard to get used to letting the tank sit there missing 15k health, but its how to do that fight. I don't cast heals on my tank unless he's down more than 20k health, and last night when the animus spawned, I had used less than 15% of my mana (while the other healer had cast one healing wave).
An idiot is someone who would rather be treated like an idiot than called an idiot
When you're solo healing the first phase of Vezax hard 10 man, are you still kiting every surge? My guild usualy uses a warrior tank, but we also have a prot paly we use too. Our three healers usualy consist of myself (disc for this fight), resto druid, and usualy a holy priest. We also usualy have a ret paly and shadow priest in the raid for a little extra raid healing via Judgement of Light and Vamperic Embrace. Do you think our raid comp can provide enough heals to keep the tank up during the surge while still remaining mana efficient? Specifically, can a disc priest solo heal through the surge?
When you're solo healing the first phase of Vezax hard 10 man, are you still kiting every surge? My guild usualy uses a warrior tank, but we also have a prot paly we use too. Our three healers usualy consist of myself (disc for this fight), resto druid, and usualy a holy priest. We also usualy have a ret paly and shadow priest in the raid for a little extra raid healing via Judgement of Light and Vamperic Embrace. Do you think our raid comp can provide enough heals to keep the tank up during the surge while still remaining mana efficient? Specifically, can a disc priest solo heal through the surge?
I think it's important to note that there is a huge disparity between different tanks on Vezax hard. DKs not only have IBF on a 1 minute cooldown (so they have it up every surge meaning surges are only a very small amount more damage than non-surges) and they also have death strike. On my Vezax kill last night the tank had 94 death strike heals for an average of 7274 per death strike (4946 effective healing per death strike). A friend of mine from a 25-man guild who run 10-mans on the weekend noted, looking at our log that his paladin tank takes *less than half* the damage that our tank takes on the Vezax fight but requires *more* healing.
Paladins can use seal of light to heal themselves, but warriors are kind of left out in the cold, unless you try something like this:
When you're solo healing the first phase of Vezax hard 10 man, are you still kiting every surge? My guild usualy uses a warrior tank, but we also have a prot paly we use too. Our three healers usualy consist of myself (disc for this fight), resto druid, and usualy a holy priest. We also usualy have a ret paly and shadow priest in the raid for a little extra raid healing via Judgement of Light and Vamperic Embrace. Do you think our raid comp can provide enough heals to keep the tank up during the surge while still remaining mana efficient? Specifically, can a disc priest solo heal through the surge?
Key: don't use a warrior or a paladin. Barkskin and/or IBF are what allow you to *not* kite. If you are using a warrior, either you're going to heal through stupid damage, or you're kiting.
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
Key: don't use a warrior or a paladin. Barkskin and/or IBF are what allow you to *not* kite. If you are using a warrior, either you're going to heal through stupid damage, or you're kiting.
Not really, our warrior stands and does not kite, even on hard mode, using different timers :
- first is Shield Wall (glyphed, so only 40%) + Shield Block (he has very high block value)
- second is Hand of Sacrifice (from the RetPal) + Shield Block
- third is Shield Wall (it's back up with the glyph) + Shield Block
- fourth happens during the animus, and he gets my Pain Suppression (we use DPriest + RDruid on Vezax10Hard) + Shield Block
It's true it is way easier with a DK (never tried with a Bear), and tankadins have to run... but works for warriors, even with only 2 healers (and most of the time no Bloodlust). Only issue with 2 healers is that range really have to be careful for Shadow Crash as the only heals they get come from JoL and Bandages.
My point was more that a DK or a feral is completely self-contained in terms of cooldowns. Requiring cooldowns for a warrior tank means you're automatically limiting the raid composition you can bring. On top of that, druids and DKs heal themselves, which is rather huge for this fight.
I mean, sure, you can do it, but it's like killing Hodir with 6 healers in the raid: you're doing it with 2 hands tied behind your back. Path of least resistance!
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
My point was more that a DK or a feral is completely self-contained in terms of cooldowns. Requiring cooldowns for a warrior tank means you're automatically limiting the raid composition you can bring. On top of that, druids and DKs heal themselves, which is rather huge for this fight.
In that self healing helps a lot on this fight you are obviously correct. As for being self-contained in terms of cooldowns, this may be an issue in 25 man. In 10 man, it is not. As the discussion has started from 10 man Vezax, I will elaborate.
The sequence posted by Lhylee can be done by the warrior alone, and it can be further improved by the warrior. We run a protection warrior equipped only in 10 man stuff. On Vezax, she wears full mitigation equipment instead of HP stuff, including two on-use trinkets (armor+avoidance). The non-shield walled cooldowns are done by Last Stand+Shield Block+Trinket. With reasonable Ulduar.10 equipment, this leads to being healable without outside cooldowns. For Vezax hard, this can be improved by using two armor potions (one immediately before the fight, the next before first surge after the first potion is gone).
Also keep in mind, that 10 man raids typically do not have real freedom in raid composition. If you run 10 man as a side track to 25 man, you can build your 10 man any way you want by choosing from your fellow raiders. In pure 10 man raids, you have two tanking classes that you stick with. You choose, but then you stick for months (or far longer), so the choice you mention isn't really there in the first place.
The buffs you bring may also change the equation. In 25 man, you will always have almost all buffs and debuffs. In 10 man, a warrior can be (talented) self-contained in terms of mitigation debuffs on the boss.
So, while I agree with your recommendation for a DK or druid tank, the issue is more complex in 10 man.
On a different note: remember that in patch 3.2, the DKs cooldown for IBF is going up to 2 minutes, so just popping IBF every surge won't stay for long.
P.S.: For Vezax hard, at least one external cooldown will probably be needed for the Animus phase to be safe, else the tank will have to kite after shield wall is gone. PS looks perfect for it.
Originally Posted by Pewsey
Many of our snakes are 3m+ in size. They'll just take the lawnmower off you and beat the shit out of you with it to make you tender, then bite you and eat you.
My guild actually does vezax 10 hard with a dk or prot warrior tanking (both 25 men equipped as well as the rest of the raid).
me and a holy paladin are the only healers (i obviously do it discipline specced), we don't kite him during surges and i save
my PS for phase2 when the tank have both vezax and the animus.. and it works fine.
raid healing is done by a Spriest with VE and with an inner focused divine hymn by me in the advanced phase 2.
P.S. I use all my Power Infusions on the holy paladin, i just keep up PW:S and use Penance to refull the tank after hard hits.
We did Runemaster>Stormcaller, kept Stormcaller locked down. Had a dps dk (healed by general raid heals) tank Stormcaller while the warrior (healed by the shaman) tanked Runemaster. Once Runemaster died, the warrior took Stormcaller off the dps dk's hands, and the shaman kept healing the warrior. The pally healed the DK. Disc priest (me) assisted on both tanks during Runemaster, and focused more on the Steelbreaker tank/raid as Stormcaller was going down (I started bouncing ProMs off the DK to the pally and myself to keep us healed up, instead of throwing them at the raid group as I did during Runemaster).
Shaman shifted to the soak group once the warrior was done tanking, which had a spriest; and the holy priest/druid focused on the rest of the raid piled on Steelbreaker. Pally and disc priest were FT on MTs.
We went Dk-Warrior-Dk, chaining CD's through the 3rd tank transition. Our kill was a bit long, at 5:40, but we got it done. Mana seemed fine. Resto druid blew innervate on himself, we had 1 other druid (kitty) in the raid toss an innervate to another healer on the transition to Steelbreaker... and other than that, tide/fiend/pot got us through it no problem.
When you're solo healing the first phase of Vezax hard 10 man, are you still kiting every surge? My guild usualy uses a warrior tank, but we also have a prot paly we use too. Our three healers usualy consist of myself (disc for this fight), resto druid, and usualy a holy priest. We also usualy have a ret paly and shadow priest in the raid for a little extra raid healing via Judgement of Light and Vamperic Embrace. Do you think our raid comp can provide enough heals to keep the tank up during the surge while still remaining mana efficient? Specifically, can a disc priest solo heal through the surge?
On 10m we use a disc priest and holy paladin, and have the disc priest solo healing through phase 1 with the exception of the paladin keeping sacred shield up and throwing out an emergency heal if the tank gets low while the priest need to move (shadow crash or mark). We do not kite during surge, instead we rotate cooldowns on the tank (for us, we have pain suppression, divine sacrifice/hand of sacrifice, and shield wall). Without cooldown rotations, we found it to be impossible. It's still rather annoying to have to deal with pain suppression not lasting the full duration of the surge, but it can be dealt with (assuming your tank is topped off when surge begins, it's much safer to wait until 2 seconds into it to cast it). Mana is very tight at the end for the healers, but I pop out of shadowform and use divine hymn right before the animus dies, followed by hymn of hope (then the disc priest uses his), and Vezax is pretty much dead by the time the second hymn wears off.
Last night we were understaffed and running with a friend who doesn't normally raid with us, so we decided to try to pick up a few achievements. We worked on Crazy Cat Lady and found it shockingly difficult. Our strategy was to have a tank take the two cats away with a healer so they wouldn't pounce on the raid, then have the raid burn down Auriaya while I healed her damage myself. The Rip Flesh dot stacked up to about 30k a tick and the tank died before we could get Auriaya dead. We ended up having our ret paladin respec to holy and sending two tanks down to trade the cats and let the dot fall off, but every fear was still a potential disaster. The fact that the feral defender would run the 70 yards or so to go over and interrupt the paladin wasn't making it any easier. We did finally win but it was after both tanks died in a frenzied burn down before the sanctum sentries got back to us. I was able to keep up with Auriaya's damage fine, but the sanctum sentries are crazy. Given that this doesn't even award better loot, I feel like we must have been missing something about the fight, it seemed much harder than the majority of the hard mode encounters. What strategies are people using for this, do people not really worry about it since you don't need to be able to repeat it.
An idiot is someone who would rather be treated like an idiot than called an idiot
We used three tanks and two-shot it (we're a casual raid with 2 raid evenings per id). The third tank can be almost any tanking class, an offspec dps or healer is fine. Just make sure the sentries are always tanked more than 20 feet apart (increased damage done - I believe by 50%). Tanking them at opposite sides of the raid helps so they don't get too close if a tank is feared.
The sentry tanks and healers should reserve cooldowns (including avoidance trinkets) until higher bleed stacks. Healing can become quite frantic towards the end, depending on raid dps.
Originally Posted by Pewsey
Many of our snakes are 3m+ in size. They'll just take the lawnmower off you and beat the shit out of you with it to make you tender, then bite you and eat you.
06/20/09, 12:59 AM
