WotLK Healing Discussion v3.3: Icecrown Citadel awaits! - Page 17

sock · 03/21/10, 6:27 PM

Hard mode Saurfang is proving to be a brick wall for us. We 2 heal it with myself (holy or dpriest) and a resto shammy and it's enormously frustrating. 70+ runic power with 2 Marks out and someone falls over - we cannot keep them up. I'd appreciate some suggestions as to how to make the most of our comp (discussion thus far has been related to priest/druid or priest/pally combinations). Any experienced priests who could weigh in on whether holy or disc is preferable would be valuable - I seem equally unable to keep up marked targets with either.

We went in tonight with a DK substitute instead of our regular Pally tank, but otherwise, our comp is as follows: rshammy, h/dpriest, fury warr, ret pally, mut rogue, feral druid, arcane mage, destro lock. We have the two ranged focus firing the first beast, while the feral druid keeps the second one rooted until they can switch onto it and burn. This results in a lot of lost DPS from the feral druid, but we were unable to get the beasts down any other way. The DPS loss is largely moot anyway if we can't get over the 70RP/2 Mark hump anyway.

Any suggestions on what we should be doing, or any advice from any priests who ran with a resto shammy? We made 25+ attempts tonight - they're viewable here, but I'd suggest taking a look at either of these two attempts - they were the ones that felt most controlled (until a marked target gibbed).

In terms of changing our group roles, we could have the pally go holy, and the shammy go enhance - the pally is not an enormously strong healer compared to the shammy, but he carried us through Marrowgar and Deathwhisper, and it seems that Bacon might just be worth it.

tasha · 03/21/10, 8:50 PM

Beacon is that good for this particular fight. Period. If you read between the lines of the previous posts, ^^

I did it with a resto shaman, and we downed saurfang somewhere around 60 bp on the second mark. (The shadow priest used his own his divine hymn, and a hybrid started helping on the second mark).
Sadly, no one recorded the run (our logs are on private anyway).
On ideal groups, we've downed him right after or before the second mark.

Your raid needs to push up the dps as much they can of course, because sustaining 2 marks at high bp is barely doable with 2 healers: Pre-poting and all kind of tricks dps have.

I'm not proficient here, but our dps prefer BL at the start, to get more damage on saurfang rather saving it for the healers at the end. This worked for us in 25 men as well.

Also, you need to reduce bp gains to the strict minimum. This include using Blessings of Protection early on a dotted target, and perfect tank switching.
It also helps if you get lucky with who gets the mark (you, with binding heal for example, or a hp-stacked melee with defensive cooldowns).

I'd advise sticking with discipline if you have the spec. In 10-man the damage is low enough to be fully absorbed by a shield and avoid bp.
I noticed you were using renew, GH, CH a lot.
My personal experience here is that you need to single heal quickly, so flash heal. Prayer of mending on cooldown since it's so good on this fight (2-T9 helps). Your shaman should handle most raid healing while you focus more on mark/tanks. Of course he will have to help you.
Not so sure about shamans, but a crit and LHW approach might be safer.

If your pally can keep alive the current tank and one mark (beacon), this would give you ample time to handle the second mark and extra damage on the raid and helping him during high bp.
If your shaman goes elemental, you'll have a knockback for the beasts by the way. But you'll miss replenishement unless your lock goes destro.

On a side notes, your holy talents are rather weird. You pick up improved healing and not empowered healing?
I'd suggest this if you want to stay holy in 10-man. Use the remaining two points in either surge of light, emp renew, or Body n Soul. You can also take the two points away from Healing Prayer.
If you really want improved healing, take the points from Healing Prayers. But with a feral druid and a resto shaman you have plenty mana cooldowns.
Glyph for GS, CoH, FH, renew depending on your preference. (for Saurfang, renew, GS, FH).

If you go disc in 10 man, take the divine fury and try using GH with power infusion on you for hard-healing times. Also don't forget renew is still better than FH to heal a raidmember who will not take more damage, especialy with BT up.

Well, hope it helps.

ludi · 03/21/10, 10:02 PM

Tasha has already covered most of the bases, but here is our latest Saurfang 10HM parse, 2 healed by myself as Disc and a resto shaman, in case you wanted to see some concrete numbers. I am on raid "healing" duty with liberal PW:S spam, while healing/bouncing PoM off tanks. On average we seem to get our first and only Mark close to the 30% point through the use of our 2 BoPs and immunities on Boiling Blood.

As for DPS, we have a rotation of stuns going out every wave and a Deadly Brew-specced mut rog FoKing Crippling Psn on to both before the stun wears off. Your group could either run with this or a Piercing Howl application upon spawning. The rogue can and should help out with killing Beasts, as the faster they're down, the faster you can go back to burning the boss. We usually run with only one Misdirection/TotT so our rogue and mage duo a Beast while the rest of our dps go on the other.

snoozypanda · 03/22/10, 2:03 PM

Whatever you go with, Disc shields tend to be stronger than holy--it will buy your other healer just a bit more time to keep their targets up.

Be flexible with who you're healing Marked Targets with--With a resto shaman, if you get lucky with a melee Mark, have your shaman chain heal melee + tanks. If you're Marked, you can just Binding heal yourself. Otherwise, consider having the shaman heal marks while you cover tanks. I've found that as disc, I'm not really able to keep up with two Mark targets as easily as I don't have enough fast, high HPS spells once my core spells are on cd.

There isn't that much raid damage, so I would focus your healing assignments on the 2 tanks, and (up to) 2 Mark targets. If you're disc, all you need is to toss Blood Boil targets a quick shield (and renew if you have the gcd) and go back to shielding Marks/Tanks and direct healing whatever you're assigned to. Be ready to Pain Suppress any Mark Target that also gets Bloodboil. We got that poor rng combo 3 times last night, and only barely got by that in our kill with a PS and Iceblock during frenzy. -_-

SuperRik · 03/23/10, 9:57 AM

Originally Posted by aribeth

Looking at WMO dreamwalker HPS numbers:

pal HPS is about 70-80k
shm HPS is about 30-40k
druid & priest HPS is about 20k

And a question, any priest try to solo heal 10H Saurfang mark of champion? 8k every 0.8s, is it possible for disc priest? which spell should be used if penance is on cd?

I've had no issue with this, but it definitely requires my full (or nearly full) attention. PW Shield, Renew, Penance, FH is my priority. Make sure those renews get the haste bonus every time.

Havoc12 · 03/23/10, 10:20 PM

Originally Posted by tasha

If you go disc in 10 man, take the divine fury and try using GH with power infusion on you for hard-healing times. Also don't forget renew is still better than FH to heal a raidmember who will not take more damage, especialy with BT up.

Well, hope it helps.

Eh? Why is renew better than FH for disc? I dont see how that is possible. Care to explain that? The haste bonus from BT and losing the grace stack does not justify using renew instead of FH, unless its your main target and he is full health.

For disc there is not much difference between the healing from renew and the healing from FH.

tasha · 03/24/10, 12:04 PM

I typed this post a bit hastily, but in that case I was thinking about healing the damage from blood nova on raid members who have no dot/mark. As you said yourself, you don't lose grace and benefit from BT for the next spell. The renew will do ~9k while the FH will do 6k, or 9k if it crits.

I merely mentioned this because FH is a no brainer almost all the time, but if you want to really optimize your healing (saurfang 10 hm with 2 healers), renew gives a little advantage.

Kimano · 03/24/10, 12:08 PM

I believe he means that as far as healing per execution time, renew is still one of the most time-efficient heals we have (especially during Borrowed Time.) After you shield someone, you can drop a renew on them and, with a 1s gcd, start FHealing someone else while keeping the Borrowed Time buff for your second target's FHeal. The key to that though is that the target you put the renew on needs to not be taking any additional damage like he said. If you're in charge of healing a Marked person, it's much more efficient to toss a renew on a blood nova target, then use that BT buff to get a heal onto your mark target faster than it is to FHeal the first target and then have to cast a slower heal on your Mark.

Edit: And it appears I've been beaten to it. =P

littlejim · 03/24/10, 5:04 PM

It should also be noted that the frequency of heals received by the the person with the mark is just as important a factor as the size. For example, a paladin chaining holy lights is doing high hps overall, but the mark player can easily die in between casts when the boss is on high runic power. So in this way, renew ticks (as disc or holy) can be invaluable, assuming that the renew is cast at time when the player has a reduced likelihood of dying before receiving their next direct heal from you or another player (you have procced divine aegis on the player/the player has a PW:S on them that is not fully consumed/etc.).

Noules · 03/25/10, 2:10 AM

Originally Posted by sock

We went in tonight with a DK substitute instead of our regular Pally tank, but otherwise, our comp is as follows: rshammy, h/dpriest, fury warr, ret pally, mut rogue, feral druid, arcane mage, destro lock. We have the two ranged focus firing the first beast, while the feral druid keeps the second one rooted until they can switch onto it and burn. This results in a lot of lost DPS from the feral druid, but we were unable to get the beasts down any other way. The DPS loss is largely moot anyway if we can't get over the 70RP/2 Mark hump anyway.

We run a holy pally and a holy priest for this, so it might not be quite the same parallel, but this doesn't sound like a healing problem. DPS is an enormous factor because faster you kill him, less time you have to spend in the 2+ mark phase. Trying to get through high BP 2 Mark probably isn't the right approach so much as not getting to that point in the first place.

It really sounds like what's really hurting your comp is the lack of ranged DPS more than anything else, requiring you to CC the beasts for a very long time. It's not clear what CCs you are using on the beasts (besides the root), but you might consider having your pallies spec into 40s HoJ to be able to stun on each spawn. If you have the DK, chains can be quite effective. The tanks can also taunt at range from the DPS as the adds get close, and buy more time, though this can be risky to rely on as your tanks must taunt DBS immediately after a Rune of Blood.

The other thing you can do is use immunity cooldowns early to reduce his BP gain. In particular, each pally can BoP/DS a blood boil and the mage can ice block one too. That's 75 BP you can potentially save (though admittedly the Protadin's DS is probably infeasible...) depending on who he ends up putting the blood boil on early in the fight. You can potentially get two BoPs off in the fight with the 3m BoP talent, which can lengthen the time you have until 2 marks even further.

Videl · 03/29/10, 5:47 AM

We would keep losing someone when he would frenzy at 70+ blood power and 1 mark out. We had a holy pally so the issue wasn't that too many people were taking too much damage, but someone would just die very quickly, our pal is stuck using a fair amount of pvp gear so doesn't have the haste and crit that might give him the throughput that would let him keep up.

When the second mark goes out total damage actually goes down on top of getting spread out. I think unless you have really exceptional dps like clemence's group up there you're really looking to hit a window and you can kill him too fast. I think you want to have him cast the second mark just before he frenzies then you need to finish him off before he gets much more than about 50 blood power. Barring that, having a hybrid heal from the point he casts frenzy until that second mark goes out is probably necessary.

Zixx · 04/02/10, 3:28 AM

I've been getting some inconsistent absorb amounts in Icecrown Citadel with the Strength of Wrynn buff active, in 3.3.3.

Inner Fire and Strength of Wrynn were the only buffs I had.

Before I went into ICC, I tested my absorbs on a mob outside the instance, which gave me my absorb amount of 8781.( http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/9531/nosow.jpg )

Inside ICC, I took screenshots of combat logs. If you'd like a WoL/WMO parse let me know and I can make one.

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/6843/none1.jpg
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/1864/none2o.jpg
http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/8707/none3.jpg
http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/270/none4.jpg

On one of my tests however, I got an absorb amount of ~12k.
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/5325/sow12k.jpg

I was wondering if others were having the same problem, or maybe someone can point out an error I'm making.

Zamboozle · 04/03/10, 12:46 PM

Looking at the timestamp...

Were you being attacked by two things at once? Both attacks were at the same time (3:23:23).

Zixx · 04/04/10, 6:27 PM

Originally Posted by Zamboozle

Looking at the timestamp...

Were you being attacked by two things at once? Both attacks were at the same time (3:23:23).

Ah, indeed I was. I almost forgot that the combat log bugs like that sometimes. That rules out the 12k then, ty

Nynneve · 04/05/10, 6:22 PM

sorry... wrong thread...