Leieb

We had 3 tanks. Druid as MT, DK and Warrior as OTs. We stood around the pillar to LoS the pounce (they only pounce if they are out of melee range). DK dropped DnD on the ground when she got to the end of her pat, pulling them around the pillar to us. Popped fade, GS, spammed greater heal, and profit.

Simple!

 

meddle

I finally gave in and picked up Lightwell for Vezax. It's nice to drop in (or click before you enter) a vapor cloud to heal up the damage you take. I was able to withstand 6 stacks of the (de)buff, regenerating myself almost back to full mana. We used a "vapor rotation," subbing the healers into clouds while others healed the tank. I'd advise shielding yourself beforehand, though, if you're going to stay in for that long. Problem is of course when you get targeted for Shadow Crash while you're scrambling to get your mana back up.

Unrelated, but I have fallen in love with Glyph of Guardian Spirit. It was worth getting gouged by the 3.1 AH glyph prices!

 

Hobson

I must say i'm really happy with Disc healing so far. I tend to switch specs a lot between fights and wipes to try them out.
Thi is my experience so far: we ran 6 healers, 2 priests of different specs, 1 druid, 2 shamans, 1 paladin.

Leviathan: uuuh. choppa! (hey i can heal, can't it?)
XT: Holy just felt much more useful here. we had 2 holy priests laying down lightwells for melee. i was also healing the offtank - body and soul to get him in range for akward spawns was great.

Razor: again, i was holy to begin with but i tried disc the other time around and it felt a lot smoother. shielding + grounding totems took care of almost all random damage during the fight.

Ignis: This was a close one but i felt holy was a little more on the ball here. stacking serendipity before jets and then popping a fast poh + coh after, SoL flash heal + another poh resulted in a huge throughput.

Assembly of iron: I went with holy here since we killed stormcaller last. BaS shield for a slow melee saved a few lives (well one but multiple times) and coh + lightwell was just great on tendrils.

Kologarn: again i felt like holy had the uppe hand with lightwell and CoH. BaS shield on the one getting chased by eye beam made things a lot easier.

Auriaya: started as holy and it was by no means bad but coh just wasnt cutting it so i switched to Disc. I kept shielding everyone that took damage from the defenders pounce, never getting interrupted. i didnt heal anyone to full during this time but people stopped dying due to interrupted healers!

more to come

 

Sjonkel

Disc or Holy really depends on your other healers. Our raidcore has a lack of paladins, but we've had 4 healing priests on many kills. I'm dual-specced disc/holy, so I try both until I find what works best on each encounter. On fights like XT-002 and Hodir, I've found Holy superior, just because of the massive healing you can dish out with PoH and CoH. On Ignis I was disc, and I found it amazing how I could shield all 3 tanks while in mid-air, Penance whichever needed healing the most after landing, and then healing another with a hastet GH. On Kologarn I was disc again, and it really, really helps keeping both tanks up when people start dying.

I see here that some people prefer disc on all AOE fights, basically shielding everyone pre-emptivly. I've prefered Holy on the fights where we have enough tank healing, but I can really see this working. Will have to try it.

Like the above poster said, on Auriaya disc really shines. You won't be interrupted, and will save pretty much everyone. You can even save people that are being feared into void zones.

I felt the Iron Council was too easy to really make any difference, but I'm sure hardmode will change this. Same with Freya, not really healing intensive and maybe the easiest boss so far.

On Thorim I'm not really sure what I prefer. Druids are obviously the healer of choice in the arena, and Holy have CoH which is pretty good. I can really see a disc priest being very useful though. I was in the gauntlet on our kill, so I didn't get to test it out.

Divine Hymn and Hymn of Hope are pretty sweet also, I forgot to test a hasted DH on Hodir, but I assume it works. Also, GH glyph is so amazingly good it's hard to pass it no matter what. With two Holy priests, you can set up GH rotations on the MT during tough phases, like Hodirs Frozen Blows or Ignis' Flame Jet.

I'm very happy with 3.1 from a priest pov so far. With a Holy/Disc dualspec, I really feel we've become a jack-of-all-trades class, except the master-of-none part is removed. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some nerfs coming in, GC has already said that PW:S will be looked into. Will be interesting to hear about what spec other people prefer.

 

Armida

We tried the 3 tank pull initially and random raid members melted almost instantly. That pull scenario makes complete sense, and is something that we will most likely revert to once everybody is more familiar with the encounter. I think of it as training wheels until we get it down to a science.

 

Sharajat

Hopefully this will help people a bit, but here's what my strategy was on every fight.

Razorscale (Disc) - Shield spam. Since we had 2 holy pallies, I didn't think that Flash Heal would do anything useful. My strategy was very simple - I don't give a flying fart if anyone gets hit once. I only care if people get hit 2-3 times. I just bubbled anyone who got hit, and then if I saw my bubble fall off, flashed or penanced em. Penance was great because people rarely got hit too often (and the Realm was short a glyph when we did this, so it's only gotten better).

Ignis (Holy) - Pretty conventional Prayer of Healing spam. CoHed in the air, float a PoM before, renew and shield the tank. Flashed people in the pot. Prayer of Healing spam is full of win.

XT Deconstructor - Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing.

Iron Council - irrelevant, I could have been shadow for all the healing there (I vaguely recall being holy because I think the tank got wings for a few falcon punches, but it might have been PS, it was quite, quite late)

Kologarn - Holy, because CoH on the gripped people is made of win, and PoH gets the raid up fast. Messy fight. Keep Prayer of mending off the GCD. It's mostly just about getting the raid up and using PoM to keep tanks higher than they should be. I almost want to be disc for this, even with CoH, bubbling the Gripped people is just as good, and Penance could be nice for when the debuff gets high.

Aureya - Yiyiyi, that pull. I lost a bear with PS on him. Disc, I bubbled all the tanks and we used cooldowns A neat trick I found when I did this on normal mode was that spamming Holy Nova on the cat adds can quickly get rid of many of them. Holy Nova is hasted with Borrowed Time and doesn't consume it, so feel free to shield the tank and then spam 3 quick novas. Other than that, I think I Mass dispelled once for a fear, it didn't do as much as I wanted it to, and after that my ward was kinda dead.

Hodir - Holy. So much outgoing raid damage. PoH regularly, CoH regularly, PoM all the time, etc.

Thorim - Disc, went gauntlet. It was late and we kept losing people to stupid (example - I died to left right, we lost two people to a mob going untanked, we lost a tank in the gauntlet because 3 healers failed to react to the tank walking around the corner and pulling, we lost the middle because of, well... someone said 'oh *#!@' in vent and then a big lightning bolt ate us). Once we got it down, it's just a tank and spank. Disc was huge because bubbling the tank lets you push unbalanced blows a bit past where you could otherwise go (our last blow left the tank at 4k health - with my bubble gone, next one we were going to blow cooldowns but the DPS was good (even with a few dead) and we got him.

Freya - This fight isn't Sarth+0 easy, but it's still easy. We're definitely doing it with an add next week (well, maybe not, coin flip if we want the badge of conquest that we're not going to get). CoH is its usual pile of win here, but Body and Soul really proved itself on the kiting (I think it saved a hunter at least once). I was a bit panicky about trees after the tank got one shotted and he tended to develop wings at odd moments, but nothing ever came of it (after that the dps blew the hell out of them, and GS never got consumed). I could see disc being useful (Detonating lashers, I PREDICT RAID DAMAGE) but I think the hard mode mechanics are going to make or break the fight. We got to see at least one of them after she had zero stacks of the debuff (she did a little move that wiped the raid. Since it wasn't in any of the strategy guides or videos, and didn't happen again, we're guessing it was a hard mode mechanic that we got to see. We're not supposed to discuss hard modes on this board, but I think it's safe to say that the fight will get a LOT more movement and positioning intensive.).

Mimiron - GS was win on phase 1. Our phase 2/4 strategy was highly unconventional (most people say spread about the room), but lets just say Prayer of Healing. A LOT of Prayer of healing. Tons of Prayer of Healing. I think it was about 50% of my healing, and that's with me never using it in phase 1/3 (I didn't do much phase 3 besides follow the add tank around for B&S and wings if the add got too close though, phase 3 is a mana regen phase for healers).

 

Mercurylight

So I have some questions on how everyone does a fight. My guild just got to Mimiron last night and everyone was dreading it. I thought Iron Council was going to be a hard fight to heal and I was topping out at 5.6k hps in phase 1. But Mimiron is a whole different story. As it is the first phase is pretty easy saying we have 3 holy priests in our raid we just pop wings on the main tank every cd (two of our priests have glyphed GS which is very nice) and just heal through the dmg of Plasma Blast. The second phase is where it gets very hard to heal. Pretty much the entire raid is taking 2-3k dmg each it seems and its hard to keep order on who to heal. I would like to try and get some advice on how you guys heal this and what way we should go about this. Our usual raid make up for healers is 2-3 Holy priests 1 disc priest 2 holy palidians 1-2 shams and 1 resto druid (changing from 7 to 8 healers sometimes but not often).

 

• constantius

Spit your raid into 4 groups. Melee, and 1 per quadrant. Get the groups to stand basically *not* clumped, but close enough for CHeal bounces. Split up your holy priests and resto shamans into different groups, and make sure there are at least two healers per set, not including the melee clump.

Then just spam your face off. If anyone gets hit by Arcane Barrage, they're dead, so don't take responsibility for that. Just heal the machine gun damage, and pray. As an aside, this was the first fight that made me go "holy crap, Healing Focus would be nice right about now".

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

 

Dekkar

I'm having some troubles with XT-002 on 25-man.

Mainly, we have a lot of trouble with the enrage timer because we're losing people during tantrum, and some adds are getting to the boss. Maybe it was bad luck, but almost every tantrum, one of our raid healers (usually me) was standing outside the raid waiting for my Light Bomb or Gravity Bomb to go off, and then tantrum hits and I'm ambling slowly towards the group and only able to cast CoH, PoM, and PW:S. Do you guys think it would be a good idea to not try moving back and just stand there and use IF+Hymn of Hope instead, because of its insane range?

We're also running 7 healers.

1 Holy Priest (me)
1 Resto Druid
1 Disc Priest
2 Holy Paladins
2 Resto Shaman

I was thinking that to beat the enrage timer, either one of the resto shaman or one of the holy paladins could go into a DPS dualspec.

Also, I find myself personally having mana issues by the time the third heart drops. I use my shadowfiend on the second heart because it just does so much damage now, but we heroism on the first heart, and I find that my DPS spells are using up too much mana and leaving me OOM near the end of the fight, after using a potion and HOH even. What are other holy priests using as DPS during that phase? I start with Devouring Plague, then use SW:P, and then Holy Fire followed by Smite spam (SoL sometimes nets me a free instant Smite so I like to spam it for DPS). Is it possible that I'm just using the wrong spells to DPS in a healing spec or am I trying to do too much? Hasted Smites really drain your mana.

 

Sunchips

Just to give you an idea of how it really depends on your raid comp...we had our only priest as disc for that fight. Had him heal slag pot and help bubble OTs and MT, while keeping insp up on the MT. 2 shamans on raid, 1 druid healing ots + raid. 2 pallies on MT beacons on OTs. Since we only had 1 priest we voted for the 3% reduced raid damage over holy spells.

Point is there's no reason both either way won't work. This is a nice time to be a priest. :]

I know that there's a lot of fights where it might not be truly necessary but I really get on my other healers with they skip out on these talents.

 

chase

The only way I have been able to survive a gravity bomb on myself and tantrum is to GS myself and concentrate on my group. Obviously, it only works once. I'm still unsure of how to handle a gravity bomb on a group member and tantrum without using GS. Light bomb + tantrum I can usually handle if the member is not a low health class and they are smart enough to run the minimum distance necessary to prevent damage to the group.

The only reason I got body & soul was because I thought it would be fun for my first 10 man. I expected to swap out of it for 25, but it was so much fun and worked well on learning that I have decided to keep it. I would just caution using it on a tank moving in for a pull, as they will quickly outpace your healers.

 

Mercurylight

Im not supposed to talk about our strats from our guild but as I got helped I feel inclined to help also =]. My guild did XT pre nerf and it was straight up an annoying fight with light bombs and grav bombs going off during tantrum. As it is now thoes have been stopped during tantrum. We split our raid up into 4 group for each one of the piles and had the boss tanked in the middle of the room. We kept and open area towards the stairs where the melee could run when they got light bomb or grav bomb. In each group you should be able to spread out to 10 or more yards each so you don't have to move if you get light bomb or grav bomb. Each group was set up with 4-5 people in it depending and we had a healer assigned to each group. Im pretty sure stratfu has a strat on when to bl we did it right before the first heart dropped so we could brun the boss a little bit and still have bl for the heart. As for tantrum its pretty easy when you split your healers up its 120% dmg to each player so you only have to heal 21% of their health. As me being a holy priest thats a renew and a flash heal and they are good. Heal yourself and 1 other with a binding heal then just flash the rest of the party and youre good. If you start hitting that enrage try to drop a healer (thats what we did) and pick up another dps. Also every heart phase we had all of our healers doing dps on the heart to get it down faster our priests were pulling anywhere from 1.5k - 2k dps with smite spam rotation and dots. Just hope you get lucky with scrap bots and bomb bots hope this helps =].

 

• mutagen

We were having issues with the enrage timer and solved it by rearranging the raid to allow more time to DPS, more healers in range of everyone, and less time moving. In our case that meant melee swapping legs on Light Bomb and only moving out for Gravity Bomb. Ranged was a loose group that stepped away from Light Bomb victims and ran out for Gravity Bomb.

If you're already losing people to Tantrum 6 healers may make that worse. On the other hand, if XT-002 is healing from scrapbots the additional control that another Elemental Shaman brings may make a difference.

Mana concerns? I did this fight in my full throughput gearset (stacked haste) and was running dry as XT-002 died. SF at second heart and HoH at third. However we had much more AoE healing, changing the dynamics somewhat. I do use the same approach to Holy DPS you are using, there really isn't much choice. If you do switch to 6 healers you may have to DPS less and conserve mana for the increased healing load, the extra DPS should more than make up the difference.

 

Ignayshus

Razorscale - A pain as holy, mostly flash heal spam, prom and hasted gheal. I have Body & Soul so I also made a macro for Devouring Flames:
/stopcasting
/assist Razorscale
/castsequence reset=3 Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Mending

People knew that if they got a shield they needed to move.

XT Deconstructor - Flash, ProM, CoH and hasted Prayer of Healing.

Kologarn - Flash, Prom, hasted PoH. CoH, ProM, Flash for Gripped.

Aureya - Pull: MT would consecrate and run, Shield MT for 60%speed as he runs back to position, GS+ProM the PounceTank. Disc priest Shielded all tanks except for the MT and Prom'd one tank. Shadow Priest ProM'd the third tank. Flash,ProM, hasted Gheal until the pull was under control then it's pretty easy. Everyone saved their pvp trinket or their human racial for IF they got feared into a void zone. MT received a Fearward rotation.

The last digit of Pi is delicious.

 

Dekkar

The main reason we're losing people during Tantrum is because it almost never fails that a healer is the one chosen for a gravity bomb or light bomb seconds before tantrum goes off. The attempts where that didn't happen, the melee DPS were dying to bomb bots (which I think is something they have to work out and not a priest/healing issue, I hope).

 

RootBreaker

Generally, the three people gripped are not going to be in the same group, so prayer of healing is not exactly a good way to heal them.

 

tronqui

If this is the only issue preventing you from progressing, changing your positioning will correct this.

-Melee behind the boss on the north end, 2 healers standing 15 yards behind with them to heal melee and the tanks.
-Directly East, and directly West of the boss position 2 healers standing together. (approx 20 yards off the boss)
-On the East side place a 1 group of ranged dps to the north of the healers and 1 group south of the healers, 15 yards.
-On the West, have 1 group to the south of the healers.
-Melee dps will always more to the North West when they get a debuff. Melee dps will also cover the North West spawns.


Everyone will simply back up (walk away from the boss) 15 yards when they get a debuff. You are never out of range of your healers, and your healers rarely have to move. Shadow Priests VE is very sexy during this fight.

Good Luck.

 

Sharajat

As an aside, Arcane barrage has a laughable range, so it's really easy to split your raid into 3/4 groups (we have a lot of melee) and have everyone be in range of eachother. Standing about 5 yards back from innermost little circle leaves you safe from barrage (theoretically the innermost works fine, we did that on phase 2, but he's mobile on 4, so there's no reason to make your tank go insane).

At that point, every group is in range of every healer - and every healer's Prayer of Healing and circle of healing.

Yeah, that makes the fight a tad easier. Phase 4 is a little more relaxed on the healing compared to phase 2, so you can afford to lose range now and then, but in phase 2, just position so every group is in range of every other group. It's quite intense, and a lot of fun.

 

Sjonkel

We did a tactic on Deconstructor that I haven't seen anyone talk about. The tank is on the stairs, with Deconstructor facing away from the raid. Melee behind the boss, then healers, then ranged. Everyone uses the /range function in DBM, so we are all at least 10 yards apart. If anyone gets Light Bomb or Gravity Well, we simply stand still. Unless it's melee, which have a predetermined spot to run to.

The damage from Gravity Well happens before people get pulled in, so it's not dangerous. The only problem can be if a Light Bombed target gets pulled into a group, but you can run out fast, so a quick CoH does the trick.

This way, we get to do maximum dps all the time, only interrupted by the occational Gravity Well. We did Deconstructor pre-nerf with this tactic, and it worked great. We did run with 3 holy priests, which obviously makes healing ranged easier, but I can imagine a group clumping up for tantrum and getting chainheal would work just as well, now that you won't get Light Bomb during that phase.

Edit: Sharajat, Are you talking about Laser Barrage? The twin cannon attack? From experience and from Wowhead, it seems to cover the whole room. I really haven't seen anyone survive no matter how far away they are. How exactly does this work?

 

Sanctum

Aureya: Our guild came up with a great way to pull this boss after losing like eight tanks in a row.

If you have two rogues, you can distract two panthers once they start to path away, then refresh it. Then have the first pull tank two distracted addk. The cats do 100% less damage this way and the first tank only takes two pounces.

---

Vezzex: God what a terrible fight. I've only experienced it on ten man, but man was it brutal. By the end when we killed him, the three healers were all out of mana and our MT was dead. What suggestions do you have to prevent the oom? (this is after saronite vapors stopped spawning). I was thinking of making a second gear-set that just stacks int even more than I already stack int. Thoughts? Also, what do you all think is the best way to handle the vapor pools? How high should you let the stack go up? I tried using GS on myself to get more mana, which worked, but you NEED to get out before you tick after the gs triggers (which may be hard with latency/human error), because the next tick will kill you (I died a couple times).

 

Pewpewarrows

Vezax's Mark of the Faceless on 10 man is currently healing him for the same amount as on 25 (100k per person per tick, ticks begin immediately when the debuff is applied). This most certainly must be a bug and will likely be fixed soon. The 25 man version is a joke compared to 10 man. We did manage to do it though, using a Druid, Paly, and Disc Priest (myself) healer.

First off, Discipline just felt much more intuitive for that fight. As soon as I hopped over to it from Holy I and the other healers immediately noticed that we were less stressed. Aside from that, I know all 3 of us stayed in every vapor up to the 7th tick each, and we really didn't have any mana problems. We told our DPS that they were only allowed to damage Vezax when they could comfortably be in a Shadow Crash puddle. We were also very liberal about using vent to call out our heals to maximize our mana pools. If someone in the raid accidentally got hit by a rogue Shadow Crash, one of us would call out that we threw a HoT on them or whatever.

I know I personally just ate the vapor tick damage up until number five, then shielded myself for 6, and tossed a flash or binding heal on 7. The 7th tick really gives you a ton of mana and definitely made the difference for us. As far as only having 8 vapors, we got into a rhythm of dropping one right after a Mark is cast after a kite phase. That way all 3 of us and/or any DPS could safely enter it and use it for full duration. If your DPS are only damaging Vezax while in a Crash puddle, they really shouldn't need to use any vapor time until the last 20% or so.

Again, don't be discouraged. The boss is using an ability scaled for 25 man numbers, so you're just making do with what you can...

God doesn't kill people. People who believe in God kill people.

 

Sanctum

Yeah i figured Disc would be much better for that fight, and I'll spec that next week.

I'm not sure if the Mark or Shadow Crash were huge deals for us though, we ran with 5 melee and a hunter for the fight, which basically removes those two issues from the fight. I guess we'll need to be a lot more vocal about who's healing the tank when and so on. But i guess the random mark heals were hitting him for a lot more which caused the fight to last so long.

 

Lhyssa

In which fights does Healing Focus come into play as helpful pushback resistance? My guild hasn't progressed too far yet (just barely hitting enrage on XT, Razorscale down on 25, Kologarn and Ignis on 10 man), but the raid damage I've seen hasn't been giving me pushback that I've noticed. I just want to know now if I should free up the points for it for later progression, especially as we should have enough time for our 10 man to get close to a full clear this week.

 

mlanewal

I have dropped all the Renew talents and as a result picked up healing focus instead. I have found P2 of Mimiron that it is invaluable. With constant raid damage, even one slight pushback can get people killed. Hell, I died one time on that fight because the pushback prevented me from getting a Binding Heal off.

Speaking of P2, how do you all handle when you have to move for Dark Glare? I find that is the most dangerous part, as if you have healers moving, raid healing drops off significantly. I try to CoH/ProM on the move, but it still can get dicey.

 

Sanctum

Body and Soul is great for dark glare. It basically means you are not going to get hit by it. You get the extra four seconds to cast a serendipitous PoH or Gheal and CoH/PoM combo then shield yourself and run the hell out of there.