That's true, however, it's easy to add up what PwS starting with Frozen Blows could at best do. Preshielding doesn't count, as a disc priest can do this in addition to PoH during blows.

We have Uld25 on farm now so we've started playing around with some hard modes.

Heartbreaker on 25man is a killer on the healing as far as I can tell. We ran with 6 healers (paladin, 2 priests, rDruid, 2 rShamans). I'm allocating the paladin and the druid to the MT, 1 of the rShaman to the OT and the rest of us on raid duty.

This was our first real attempt and after a few tries hit the enrage timer with 7% left...we had lost 3 dps by this point tho.

We were getting to the stage of having a rotation to use CD's on the tantrums following breaking the heart being: Paladin DS, DH, DH, DS from the Paladin again. The DS makes the tantrums easy to deal with, but without using a CD we're finding we're losing 1 dps'er per time. It just feels a bit of a naff way to beat the encounter using CD's per tantrum.

My questions are: How are people dealing with the tantrums? Is using a CD rotation a viable method (and furthermore is getting the Ret Paladins to respec into DS worthwhile)? Do I need to get cuter on assigning a specific healer to the people that get Lightbomb / Gravitybomb?

Both myself and the other priests are Holy as our main spec - although my second spec is Disc PvE which I know well but felt that the raid healing needed would warrant me being Holy. Would me going Disc and pre-shielding for the Tantrum on the entire raid be a better option?

Thanks in advance.

This is a mistake. Druids absolutely wreck the raid healing on this fight: why would you waste them on tank healing? They're the worst possible class to be assigning to that. Put shaman+paladin on MT duty (with shaman covering melee CHeals), and the 2nd shaman on the OT (spark tank). 2 priests + resto druid on the raid.

When it comes to Tantrum, it's been nerfed hard, so you should have very little issue keeping the raid up through it. Save your Bubble+Sacs (with Divine Guardian) for the harder ones where the raid is down a bit, and if you get desperate, burn a Divine Hymn. With 2 priests, a druid, and possible Cheals from the 2 resto shamans, it shouldn't be that hard to keep the raid alive.

We mostly FFA heal the people with Gravity / Light Bomb: if you send a Gravity Bomb person off with PWS+PoM, they're at 100% after the bomb anyway, so they can be healed just like a normal person. Just make sure you split up the raid healers so they start on different groups (1 priest starts on grp 2, the other on grp 5, druid starts on grp 3, and the shamans cover 1 & 4 -- whatever works for you).

We have two regular rDruids, and it was a shame the other one wasn't available last night as he is an awesome raid healer...needless to say the one we had isn't - he's a great tank healer but lacks the aoe skills. F.ex with the same setup I was Disc for Ignis on the tank with the pally and 1xrShaman on the OT...we wiped 'cos the aoe healing was so poor. I went back to holy and moved the rDruid from the raid onto the MT and it was a clean kill.

We're giving it another crack tonight and i'll be sure to take on board about assigning groups as, in hindsight, that's where we were lacking. I appreciate the tip with the Light / Grav bomb PW:S and PoM - i'm guessing the PoM will bounce to the OT if it's a Lightbomb which means it's not wasted. Thanks again.

I can only speak from 10-man where damage is lighter (but still a challenge when 2-healing), so I can only give advice on the aspects that translate to 25 man:

- When healing as holy, consider using B&S to expedite light bomb victims out of the raid to ease healing burden.
- Tanks can help by using cooldowns during tantrums so the tank healers can help out a bit on the raid.
- CoH and PoH glyphs are very good for holy priests on this fight.
- Personally, I prefer PoH over glyphed Holy Nova at XT, since PoH covers bomb victims in my group where Holy Nova does not - one thing less to worry. But it may be different for you.
- Try if you can assign the shaman on the spark tank to heal light bomb victims as they come near the spark tank.
- Check if a player that dies has taken this/her healthstone. Heartbreaker does have some RNG elements, and players need to pay attention during tantrums.

All that said, healer communication is important during this fight as RNG can change everything (like gravity bomb hitting the spark tank healer in your setup). Fixed assignments only work to some extent.

Yar, the 10man was a cakewalk in comparison, but that's because it was so much easier to heal the groups (we did it with two holy priests). I think the assingments is key for us, as we have capable healers, dps'ers and tanks...which leaves coordination and assignments.

The good thing is, we're not finding we're failing due to going oom...we're just healing the wrong folks...hence assignments will assist that.

Cheers folks.

That's what we do as well. What I meant was: if the spark tank healer is the target of a gravity bomb, he will need to move and thus be unable to fulfill his role as spark tank healer, so healers being vocal on Vent/TS is a necessity as others need to take over.

We use 5 healers on Heartbreakers: Disc Priest, Holy Priest, 2 shamans (or one shaman/one paladin), 1 resto druid. We don't use a spark tank and have a hunter kite it and the ranged kill the sparks. I shield all light bomb/gravity bomb people and heal the MT. During tantrum I POH the tank group and the druid/shaman/holy priest heal the rest of the raid. The ranged is clumped up and I bounce POM off myself since it will quickly heal up people as Light Bomb people are running from the group.

Get your resto druid to learn how to raid heal. They are VERY effective for a good number of fights. If your resto druid can not learn to raid heal effectively, then bounce him from the raid for hard modes.

Assigning groups to start, especially taking advantage of PoH, is a good thing. I believe most strats run the ranged in a single group, so as long as you don't assign a group of mixed ranged and melee to a priest, you can easily have a priest cover 1 group apiece. That, plus PoM bouncing should help a ton.

Alternatively, here's what we use on XT HM 25 (5-6 healers total):

MT: 1 disc priest, and shaman or druid HoTs
OT: pally beacon on the OT & heals the player with light bomb
Raid: holy priest, 1-2 shamans, 1-2 resto druids

The disc and holy priests trade off who throws out shields. The disc priest gets light bomb, the holy priest with B&S gets gravity bomb. The pally with beacon works out really well for tantrums when light bomb is out and frees up the other healers to just aoe to their hearts content. The disc priest is always on PoH of the tank group so we don't overlap and he doesn't actually pull off MT healing. (He is sneaky sometimes with PI and PoH's melee too.) The holy priest names one of the three ranged groups she's going to PoH & communicates this to the shamans to reduce the overlap in healing as much as possible.

When we have 2 holy pallies, the other beacons the tank and heals the raid. He hasn't complained about the range, but he is usually on the tank with the disc priest so any of his healing that is lost to range is most likely picked up by penance spam.

So, if you're losing people to light bombs often and your MT is getting enough healing, this setup may work better.

Thanks for all the advice folks. Here's what we did (and downed him on the 3rd try).

We always had a ranged group and a melee group with Lightbombs going left and Gravity right. The healing setup was:

1 Paladin (MT)
1 Shaman (MT)
1 Shaman (OT)
1 Shaman (Raid)
1 hPriest - me (Raid)
1 Druid (Raid)

I assigned raid groups for myself and the druid and melee / ranged for the Shamans during tantrums. The pally was 100% on the MT.

This worked really well, but the rDruid was having issues with his group and it was all a bit close with him healing - so I need to work on that with him.

What I found invaluable was putting a Lightwell up on the left side (Near the OT) for the folks that had the Lightbomb. This worked twofold; they had a fixed point to run toward and they could self heal. This really smoothed out the healing needed with Lightbomb and kinda made it a breeze to deal with. Using Constantius's advice and PW:S and PoM'ing the Gravity guy worked (although I switched to using Renew instead of PoM and kept PoM for the ranged group).

I re-glyphed for Holy Nova too and put myself in the flimsy caster group and on tantrum would pre-PoM, CoH, HN, HN and PoH on another ranged group. If I got a SoL proc from CoH or HN I would use an instant Flash on anyone that was low (usually a Lightbomb victim or recent Gravity victim) then continue on.

My one tip is the Lightwell for the Lightbomb folks - really worked a treat.

As soon as the logs are uploaded i'll link 'em.

[e: Here's the logs: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis]

I raid exclusively Disc for 10 & 25 man content. There should be no reason that Disc doesn't have enough throughput for any of the fights. Have both 2 & 3 healed it as Disc... As you point out dps will need to be fairly strong to 3 heal it. I should note that the 2 heal compositions that I participated in are D.Priest/H.Priest and D.Priest/R.Druid only.

What portions of the fight is your healing lacking? I assume the struggle is in P2.. Maintain PW:S on everyone best you can, keep PoM on CD, PoH the melee group, and use Penance on people in trouble. Should make sure that the range are not grouped up to reduce the healing requirement.

That is exactly the problem. The ranged tend to clump up together or don't notice they are migrating together and just get annihilated. I broached the concept of 2 healing this the other night because the other healer is a strong resto druid and our paladin can go ret as good DPS. I think we just need more practice on the positioning as we just started attempts so either people are in range killing either other with Napalm shell OR they are OOR and I'm running to get them. Thanks for the advice though.

Huzzah! Finally mustered up the courage to post.

For 10 Mim hard mode, if your DPS is high, it is usually better for a starter disc priest to heal it with 2 other healers until the disc priest is comfortable with phase 2 damage and is confident in handling it without the whole raid keeling over the moment a bad pew-pew/ground fire combo hits.

Admittedly from my experience, 2 healing it as disc means you have to have a very strong (class and skillwise) raid healer as support. More often than not I found times where everyone (or nearly) has the weakened soul debuff, Penance is on CD, I have to move from fire (so no POH) and nova won't hit the melee. Those were the times where I just felt like curling up in a corner and crying as I watch the whole raid slowly whittle down to nothing. To say a disc priest can carry the majority of the output for P2 would be...straight out lying. Either way, you'll be leaning heavily on your raid healing buddy to carry you through P2 (with you providing strong support).

3 healing it gives you a bit of a buffer in case both of you are running/panicking and a few people gets real low. The trio I run with would be a tree, a healadin and me (disc or holy, more holy than disc since the tree is a bit undergeared.) My raid uses the 'ranged clump up and kite fire around as a whole' strategy to prevent massive fires everywhere for P3. It more or less demands all healers to 'suck it up and hamfist through the damage'. I've healed a few attempts as disc, and found it was very useful for p1 napalm, and p3 spike-esque single target damage, but come P2 and P4 the relatively high raid damage made me want go cry in a corner again (sigh).

So in the end like most priests I ended up speccing holy, taking up the Holy Nova glyph and POH glyph (third glyph being COH). Since our raid has more ranged than melee, the paladin usually handles the 'odd man out' of the ranged camp while the tree and me take care of the bulk of the damage. Between the two raid healers and a 3rd 'Oh shit' buffer (when he has the chance to stand still and cast), P2 went a lot smoother.

For P1 napalm shell at -most- you should have 2 targets napalmed at the same time, three probably means you're clumping too much. As Holy I usually keep a surge of light 'in reserve' for napalm. When two gets hit my first reaction is POM one - which should bounce between the two, use surge on one, bubble on the other, and flash heal the lower one (or surge if you're lucky and got a proc off POM bounces). By that time the other healers should have tossed 1-2 heals in to help out.

When in doubt, you can also use COH on the two and hope you get a surge proc (which if you're geared with a high crit, should happen).

I hope that helps.

Two healing Mimiron HM flat out requires both healers to be geared, skilled, and comfortable with healing from their spec be it Holy or Disc. P2 is the only hurdle as two healers honestly, P4 is more about the raid not taking unnecessary damage more than being a high healing requirement by default.

I very much disagree on the concept that a Disc priest can't carry the majority of the output for P2. It is quite possible. The average Disc priest isn't going to out "heal" a Holy priest but it is well within the potential. The situation is what you consider a "heal" if you don't consider mitigation then obviously Disc will have a significant disadvantage.

Because of the reduced raid damage there is a reduced healing requirement which may well be within the bounds of what you can recoup between yourself and a second healer. Disc priests that struggle usually rely far to heavily on one side of the spec either mitigation or healing, and usually at the wrong times. For myself in P2 Mimiron the only time everyone flat out has WS up is the start of the phase. During the phase you should be rotating between HN/PoM/PoH/Flash/Penance and PW:S on targets... If you just PW:S everyone and then go to healing spells, then you aren't effectively keeping the 4pc bonus up or using BT to your advantage. PW:S is best used naturally woven into your other casts so you might do something like:
PW:S, PW:S, PoM, HN, PoH(BT'd), PW:S, PW:S

If you roll through the raid that way you always have someone you could shield so you can always get BT when you want it and keep up the 4pc. Just as important you have a constant stream of reduced raid damage from PW:S... If you are using HN/PoH effectively you should have DA reducing the damage income as well.

Holy & Disc are both highly effective if played properly.

Thus I said, "starter", and as you said "The average Disc priest isn't going to out "heal" a Holy priest". The spec revolves around mitigation and damage prevention. I don't really consider mitigation a 'heal'...since if that works, one can very much argue a warrior's mitigation is also a 'heal' ("Shield Wall, healing 50% of damage incoming!"). That may be me having a very narrow view of that healing is the act of casting something that adds green to one's health bar. But I think that's the traditional view of what a 'heal' is.

Being a disc priest myself I am in no way saying discipline is 'weak', but for it to actually to be fully functional for fights like P2 10mim, you can't really say "it is fully capable of pulling the majority of the healing in P2" (unless there are those who two heal it with a holy pally, in that case, I salute those very skilled players). Yes, if you count the invisible healing with absorbs, damage redux, it may very well be on par with your raid healer buddy (maybe).

And in that case, as you said, a disc priest is at a disadvantage. A starter disc priest trying to two heal it may find the sudden surge of massive raid damage panicking and distressing. During the P2 I can easily keep up WS on nearly the whole of the raid while rotating between HN/POM/all that jazz. But then there are still times where I'm running, casting HN on my ranged group, POM is on CD and I'm watching the melee go down while WS is still ticking on them. At those times I go "OK..now what", at those times, I lean heavily on the tree beside me to save the melee while I cycle through my PWS/POM/HN routine until I can stand still and cast something with a little more uphm.

Doing the fight as holy, I find myself less 'stuck' in those sort of situations and a little more capable when it comes to running for my life when Mimiron decides to use me as rocket target practice.

PWS spam is almost 10k HPS if the glyph is fully healing. P2 Mimiron is a perfect example of how disc is can rival holy as raid healing.

Honestly as disc, I feel like more of a raid healer than a tank healer. Our single target HPS is terrible compared to a Holy Paladin.

I've done 10m firefighter as both disc and holy. Both are fine. As disc, pre-bubble everybody in your group between the p1 and p2 transition, and get a prayer of mending up. Once the damage starts, alternate between bubbles and borrowed time'd glyphed prayer of healing. Keep mending bouncing. Penance right after a bubble if someone gets critically low. Once the raid is hurt a bit, power infuse yourself to stay ahead. During laser barrage, remember that he always rotates clockwise 180 degrees, so quickly find somewhere safe and plant yourself, and keep going. (Remember to bubble and prayer of mending while running, too). After your PI wears off and the raid starts hurting a little more, toss up a bubble and inner focus+divine hymn. This should get you through p2.

I was holy when we first started Uld, about the time we got into hardmodes I started using disc more often and by now it's really outshining holy (and everyone else). A lot of that has to do with the 4pc bonus which basically always up, the 3% raid damage reduction, and everything I do being hasted. All it really takes is awareness and setting up grid to let you know who's going to be taking damage and if they have weakened soul on them. I'd strongly suggest every raid bringing at least one disc priest.

It would be a difference in strat that makes disc 'shine' more than holy then. With the current strat my guild is running where the ranged and the melee are in two clumps (because for some reason the RL does not trust the ranged to kite fires), the damage incoming on the ranged is currently nearly impossible to heal off as disc because of mobility issues, since if one guy gets rocket strike, chances are the whole group has to move which means more often than not, you are running and unable to cast anything but nova, bubble, renew and pom. Thus making holy with its 'bigger umph' instants a more viable spec for it.

I would imagine the circle strat would give me a lot more breathing room to steady myself to actually cast something instead of running around screaming bloody murder. But given the disposition of my current RL, a change in strat is unlikely until...well, something happens.

v.v

You can do a single ranged clump as Disc; we do it every week in 25s. Just glyph HN, and use it as your primary heal, rotating PWS on cooldown on the group and occasionally a BT->PoH (Glyphed as well) to add the tiny HoT.

Regarding Algalon, my group just did its first week of attempts on the 10-man version this week. 2 of our healers are a Holy Paladin (on the tank) and a Resto Druid (on the raid). We've done attempts with the 3rd healer being either a Resto Shaman and a Disc Priest (me) as the other healer on the tank.

I found that with a Disc Priest on the tank, tank health was more stable, however I also found it extremely risky to cancel Flash Heals because of the nature of the damage as well as my latency (300 to 400ms). As a result, I find that my mana is depleting faster than usual, and I do not think I can last the entire fight with just a mana potion and shadowfiend. Am I doing it wrong by not cancelling enough (i.e take slightly more risks to conserve mana), or should I be able to sustain healing in my current gear?