You need 2 tank healers, 1 raid healer. The raid damage on 10s (esp. with a Disc priest in the raid for -3% and tossing out PWS when s/he can) is entirely manageable with a single rSham or rDruid. Our best luck has been paladin/dPriest/rDruid as a comp, with ele shaman providing totem buffs.

And ya, Algalon hits like a train loaded with tiny trucks, each of which has little missile packs. The only thing in the game that hits harder is 3-stack Steelbreaker, as far as I know.

To reiterate re: Algalon (because someone reported this as against the posting guidelines), read this before posting.

Not sure if Algalon strats are allowed to be discussed in detail yet, but here goes.

We've been doing the 10-man version for 3 weeks now. Algalon does hit like a truck but we manage to keep the tank alive (most of the time) with me switching to disc, a pally, and resto druid on the raid. The raid healer used to have issues with the constellations beating on him but I resolved that by having the holy pally put on RF and tanking them with beacon on himself while heal bombing the tank. The tank that isn't on Algalon would taunt a constellation and put it into a black hole. The 2nd constellation would die when the pally runs into a black hole before big bang popped.

This is where we start to fail. We don't have a shadow priest nor a holy priest. Thus we have the tank blow cooldowns for big bang. The tank does survive the big bang. But not for long since he starts with about 5% hps. I had him position himself as far away as possible from Algalon so the healers coming out of the black holes have time to bring him back up. However, inevitably the tank dies and we wipe.

Other than some other healer setup with me going holy, and bringing a shadow priest, I'm looking for suggestions. If the three healers come out in a perfect place where all three are in range, then we have a healthstone, holy shock, swiftmend, and a penance but still the tank is too far behind in hps to prevent a death from a double melee by Algalon.

One thing I can think of is to switch the tanks immediately after Big Bang and we get back from the black hole. I tried that and we've been having problems having taunt work. Seems it fails sometimes according to the tanks. I need to look into that more but that seems like the most likely solution.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Here are some tips so that I feel better about myself giving info as well as asking for it:

1. Always have an inspiration/ancestral fort on the tank. Tried pally/druid and tank healing with me holy raid healing. Raid healing was fine but tank would die sometimes.
2. Especially if you have melee, you need to be careful about smashes on tanks. Communicate. Tanks should sidestep away from them, while keeping in range of healers. Less dmg = less chance of random ganking.
3. Pally healer with RF attracting constellations works out great. See above.
4. Put someone who pays attention on collapsing star killer. He'll have to watch the position of people and also the health of the tank, though I usually try to save shield on tank for when he says "killing a star".

Thanks for any help!

The constellations don't actually do anything when they're aggro'd on you; it's all RSTS magic attacks that have nothing to do with threat. Leaving them on the rDruid is far better, because he can actually run over and close black holes. If you're not doing this after the first Big Bang, your raid damage is far higher than it needs to be. Dump the constellations, close the holes, reduce the gib factor.

You have to figure out a better way to deal with this. Not having a hPriest isn't that big of a deal, even though GS is overpowered for this. First, bring a shadow priest (it's not really optional) for the first and third Big Bang, and then combine PS and IBF (or Shield Wall, Barkskin, BubbleWall) for the second Big Bang. Proper cooldowns reduce the worry here, and they really aren't optional. Algalon is not a fight you can just zerg with whatever raid composition you want.

You have to do this anyway. The tank that eats the Big Bang should take only a couple of hits before actually handing off tanking. You should be setting up the timing so the tank who eats BB has a 4-stack of Phase just after the BB, so you hand it off to a fresh tank for tank swaps. It also makes sense because your second tank can taunt into cooldowns (i.e. pop IBF, taunt Algalon), reducing healing on transition so you can top up the raid before the next star dies.

Good luck; it's a fun fight to beat when you finally get it.

I am curious as to how other disc priests heal Hodir hard mode. Here is the WMO parse of that encounter from last night. It was the first time I do Hodir hard mode. When I was raiding with my previous guild, I use shield on everybody during Frozen Blow and let PoM bounce off everyone. Then I saw Nibida's Hodir hard mode parse which showed a significant amount of more healing done than I had because Nibida used a lot of Prayer of Healing and I did not.

I don't use Prayer of Healing because it is too slow, even with BT, it is abot 1.6 seconds of cast. When doing easy mode, that is too long for other healers to top people off. That's why I used to just shield everybody and PoM and Penance the MT. Now it seems that in hard mode encounter, due to the reduced number of healers, Prayer of Healing becomes a viable skill to use. I would like to hear the comment from other more experienced disc priests on this issue because, like I said, that was my first time doing Hodir hard mode.

My second question is that, as a disc priest, am I where I should be on the meter? I do realize that, as many people said, healers work together to keep the raid alive and as long as nobody died, then healers are doing their job. I have also heard that healers work as a team rather than individually as DPS do. However, I am Trial in my current guild, as a result, I worry about my performance very much. This became a great concern of mine after seeing the huge discrepancy between Recount + GuessedAbsorb and WMO parse on Thorim hard mode. I always check Recount after each boss encounter last night and I usually end up on top with Healing + GuessedAbsorb and I thought I was doing fine. Then on WMO, which supposedly includes absorb, my healing done is far below the number I got from Recount + GuessAbsorb.

So please, if anybody know whether or not WMO is reliable or if Recount + GuessAbsorb is more trustworthy. I would love to hear your comment and any input to help me become a better healer would be greatly appreciated.

A borrowed time prayer of healing is certainly more HPS than shield spamming. You may want to coordinate with the holy priest and each take two groups to do prayer of healing on so you don't snipe each other's heals.

That WMO parse says 66% of your power word shields were overhealing. That seems somewhat unlikely on Thorim hard mode to me.

Hey Constantius, a quick question as we've started working on 10 man Algalon ourselves.

Does the one to eat it have to be a shadow priest? At the moment I can go either shadow or disc and it just seems more helpful to be disc to smooth out that damage, but if I need to be shadow, I can do that. Is there any alternative eaters of the Big Bang?

Also, we've been trying to kite the constellations directly into the black holes right when they spawn. Should we wait until after the first Big Bang before starting that?

Here's a Hodir hard-mode with me on PWS spam duty.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

It depends on the raid makeup. With a Resto Druid + Holy Priest, it makes sense for me to be on shield spam / dispel duty since they have more than enough HPS to heal through the Frozen Blows damage without me. I just play triiage.

There's plenty of different ways to handle Hodir HM. If what you're doing is working, cool.

If you look at the way Big Bang works, you can easily figure out what options you have for dealing with them. The damage is not something you can live through, and the best -dmg% cooldown in the game (that doesn't act as an immunity) is Dispersion. You can use other options, but it's the best.

As far as the constellations / black holes, that's strategy, and I basically suggest you play with it. Everyone does something slightly different. Just think about how black holes work, and that the pros and cons are of closing them quickly. Remember that occasionally a hole can be closed accidentally by a healer aggro switch causing random pathing on constellations.

I strongly suggest you to change your setup by bringing in another priest to get through big bangs. But if that's not possible the best suggestion I can give is have your tank run as far away as possible from Algalon and your healers (actually the whole raid) go into the middle of Algalon's platform during black hole. That way every healer will be in range to heal the tank immediately when possible.

For what comes to your tactic with constellations I don't have any suggestions. Our raid healer (hpriest/rdruid) and free tank haven't had too much problems kiting the constellations and healing their damage.

Btw, I've been reading these forums for quite some time but this is actually my first post

Xenoverse, I'd advise you to go holy on that fight. I'm specced disc/holy and carry around two different gearsets to be able to play what's best for every encounter. I'd not do Hodir hard as disc if I had a choice. I started out in WotLK as mainly playing disc, so it's a spec I feel comfortable with, but for raid-damage heavy encounters, holy still seems the obvious choice to me.

Parse of Hodir 10 hard, me healing as holy: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

And as an aside:

That's the silliest thing I ever heard, why would the not be allowed to be discussed??

A priest should have zero problems healing Hodir no matter his spec. Haste beam and prayer of healing spam is all you need. It doesn't get any easier than that.

We just got our first Vezax hard mode kill, but ended up having to bring in a 7th healer which trivialized the encounter to a degree.

2 disc priests (one strictly on the MT, the other shield spamming and using penance from shadow crash to keep inspiration up)
2 holy priests (wanding in p1, raid in p2 w/ lightwell rotations throughout the fight)
2 druids (ooc procs in p1, 1 on the OT in p2, the other raid)
1 paladin (MT, beacon OT)

At this point we out-gear the encounter, but between life leech & the cruel reality of movement fights the added healing was necessary for us. I'm fairly certain that this is overkill. I'm very interested to see how others do it; what healing compositions and how many healers do you end up bringing?

How do you distribute the two disc priests for the animus phase?

When there's one disc priest it is clearly best to shield spam from shadow crashes, but with 2 we were running into overlapping weakened soul debuffs at times. When this happened I was mini PoHing groups, which is better than doing nothing, but it didn't seem like a great use of time. Currently we're hurting from lack of HPS rather than lack of mana.

We split our ranged camp into 2. Left and Right. One Disc priest covers left, the other Disc priest covers right. We Prayer of Mending the main tank if he doesn't already have one on a first-come-first serve basis.

We've killed the Animus in 65 stacks and mana hasn't been a problem for me (but I have about 29k mana). Also, don't forget about using Divine Hymn, it's particularly amazing for this fight since you can use it with Inner Focus.

Actually, on our first kill due to some interesting circumstances, we did the fight with 4 Disc priests (1 R Shaman, 1 R Druid).

We assigned groups to cover (g1-2 [melee], g3-5 [healers & ranged]) for shields. I should note that because of the lag we've been experiencing in our raids lately, we only had 2 healers standing in shadow crash (myself in g4 & a holy priest in g5) to minimize potential deaths.

The nice thing about having 2 holy priests during Hodir is that you can have guardian spirit available/on the MT during each frozen blow period. That and ProM is godly in this fight, and holy ProM > disc ProM by a fair margin. However, shield spamming is very viable as well and PoH is a good spell from either spec during this fight.

Just keep in mind that during Frozen Blows, shield spamming only makes sense if you already have more than enough raid healing. In that case, it's a good idea for the disc priest to deal with individual targets low on health.

Otherwise, PoM/PoH far exceeds shield spamming in terms of HPS during Frozen Blows - especially taking light beams into account. Watch the HPS curve in Sletznikova's log. While overall healing output is very respectable for a disc priest, it's not during Frozen Blows. Even without going holy, PoM/PoH is far superior in that phase if overall raid healing is what one wants.

Here's a WoL from our 10 man Hodir hard first kill: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis.

Note it's from a very casual (2 evenings) guild doing 10 man stuff only. The HPS in 25 man during Frozen Blows will be even higher given 25 man buffs and equipment as well as more possible CoH usage (cannot get it to work reliably at Hodir, our coordination sucks). Note also that I didn't even use Divine Hymn in that kill.

It's hard to compare strategy for healing as discipline between 10- and 25- man. In 25-man you could literally cast nothing but shield, whereas in 10-man you have to do other things because you run into Weakened Soul. The other thing to keep in mind is that on 25-man it's not necessarily your job to give anyone health back. Obviously you should heal intelligently and not let people die, but generally when you are playing a fight in a big open arena without raid separation or line of sight issues, other people are just going to heal your targets up by the time the GCD from shield expires, so you just go ahead and shield again.

That being said, Hodir is a weird fight. Once you are standing in a light beam I think you are crippling your hps by casting anything other than PoH. I solo heal the 10-man version as discipline putting up as many shields as possible before frozen blows starts and then just alternating PoH on the two groups until it ends and firing a penance at anyone who takes a damage spike from a Freeze. The shielding is nice but unnecessary. On occasion he does Frozen Blows before the first Flash Freeze (the time when I am normally shielding) and we deal with it just fine.

This is exactly what happened to my guild on our first night of Vezax HM attempts.

We bring 6 healers: 2 x Priests (both Disc for this encounter), 2 x Resto Druids, and 2 x Holy Paladins. The Druids and Paladins were assigned to tank-healing for the entire course of the fight; the Priests stood in Shadow Crashes and casted PW:S on the ranged group to minimize healing done to Vezax through Mark of the Faceless. However, during Animus phase, we simply did not have the HPS to heal through the damage.

We fixed the problem by simply adding a 3rd raid healer for Animus phase; I believe this was the most crucial factor. We also swapped the other Disc Priest to tank healing and moved both Druids to raid healing. On the ranged group, I spammed PW:S and spot-healed with FH/Penance, while a Druid spammed Rejuv + WG. 1 raid healer was sufficient for the melee group because they're not taking MotF damage and are less susceptible to dying.

I realize that every guild does this a bit differently. But I hope that my situation applies to you to a certain extent and that this helps!


Edit: After re-reading your post, I guess the simple solution to your problem is to have one of the Priests go Holy.

We got Vezax hard mode last night also.

Setup was 2 disc priests, one holy priest, and one each of the other healing classes. As the second disc priest I switched from shield spamming in phase 2 to tank healing, this allowed our druid to raid heal more rather than watching the tanks. I also put myself into the squishy melee group and holy novaed occasionally (It's actually decent hpm with mental agility).

The shield spamming disc priest was shielding + proming the tank for all of phase 1, and only shielding in phase 2. He had plenty of mana left to "get us home" during a long phase 3 while the other healers were oom.

Note that absorbs currently aren't being shown in the HPS graph on World of Logs. I'd agree though that the bulk of Frozen Blow healing is going to come from PoH.