I found that disc was by far the best specc on all bosses.

I'm no holy priest, I only have it as an off specc to use it on bosses that it's better for and when I'm bored, so yeah, I'm way more comfortable with disc. Keep this in mind!

Here's the kill for Deathwispher (I'm disc):
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Here's my best try as holy:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Hehe, I smell some absorb thievery here

After looking over the logs I've notice a few things I would like to point out. First off I agree as the only healing priest in the raid that I do believe that Disc brings more to the table (as the only healing priest). That doesn't mean that Holy still isnt good in ICC it just means as solo priest disc has more to offer. Also looking at your healing done, I find it that you do not utilize PoM nearly enough. For both Disc and holy its one our best spells. Especially as holy, I think you may have had like 6 hits in the 3 min attempt. And as for disc I know that you shield everything, but you really should weave in PoM on cd if its not still out and about.

Thanks, I'll look into it. WTB Healing dummies for some theory-crafting sometimes

You can easily just do it by healing yourself if thats what you're looking for. Our numbers are all very absolute, as long as you don't overly care about overhealing.

Sorry for being a litlte offtopic here, but no. PoM, shields, insporation, what ever, doesn't apply to people not taking damage. So no, it doesn't work just as well.

Dummies aren't meant for theorycrafting, they're mostly there to practice rotations or test edge-cases. Spreadsheets are what you're looking for.

I've gone through this dungeon twice now on 10 man so I thought I might share my experiences thus far in case it helps.

I am a Holy/ Disc Duel spec Priest. I typically run with a Disc Priest and a Resto shaman so I find myself more often then not running Holy even tho my preference generally speaking is Disc.

Our First run through 10 man ICC through Saurfang we did with all 3 healers. Disc on tanks, myself(as holy) on raid and backing up tanks and Resto on Raid. Pre nerf Marrow I was pulling around 5.5k hps on that encounter our first week and it was very hectic. (to be expected our first try I suppose) Deathwhisper hps fell to about 4k to reflect the lower damage output in general of the fight. Gunship I was sleeping, then Saurfang.

Our trouble with Saurfang began with the fact we only had 2 range. Both Warlocks. So our melee joined in helping with adds.. in general we where sloppy I'd say, two or three attemps we even got up to 4 people with marks on them which is about the point things would completely fall appart. We could handle heals on 2 or 3, but 4 was just too much. We eventually DROPPED the DISC Priest, had them got on a Boomkin for more dps and a Holy Priest and Resto Shaman where able to keep up with the encounter just fine and we did it first try. (holy priest made up roughly 60% of healing done)

This week, we ran it with 2 healers, Holy Priest and Disc Priest and we one shot everything but Deathwhisper (tanks missed picking up some adds that whiped out the healers) And it was very easy. We got to Saurfang and downed him with just one Mark up.


So, to sum up my experiences. A holy Priest can handle healing Saurfang just fine, and consistantly (even on our 25 man) when I run holy I dominate the healing charts by a good margin. However, a Disc and Holy Priest team in ICC can easily handle everything and makes the first 4 bosses almost easy and is what we're likely to do from here on out.

My guild had little trouble healing/killing Saurfang in 25man this week. link

We ran with 6 healers: 2 holy pallies, 1 disc priest, 1 holy priest, 1 resto druid, and 1 resto shaman.

The key seemed to be having a new healer dedicated to each marked raider by the end of the encounter. Initially, the first three marks were all handled by a single holy paladin (with shields from the disc priest/hots from druid). When the damage really started to ramp up towards the end that pally went to healing two, and each new person with the mark got his/her own dedicated healer. The resto druid was helping with all of them.

We had a total of 6 marks, the last coming seconds before Saurfang fell, so effectively we only had to heal 5.

I was playing as shadow for the kill I linked, but I healed and organized the healing the week before, where we developed the above idea.

Edit: When I did heal this encounter as holy, I found the healing very tame until the end. I renewed targets with blood boil and made sure to give out body & soul to targets that were kiting/about to get hit by adds. I guess I was "lucky" to get the mark myself, since I was able to just spam binding heal and effectively keep myself and someone else with the mark up.

I 2 healed 10 man with a Resto Shaman. We cross-healed with me raid shielding and tank healing, and he focused on raid healing with tank support.

Marrowgar was fairly easy with the nerf that went through to tank damage. Even while the shaman was impaled, I had no trouble keeping the 2 tanks topped off and shielding the raid. However, on Lady Deathwhisper there were times that I struggled with tank healing against the adds, especially when there was raid damage going around and the healing absorption debuff was up. Even spamming a max throughput rotation, I lost 1 tank to this. Afterwards, I kept weakened soul off of the tanks so I could save the shields to counter the debuff and the heavy burst of raid damage after it. Has anyone else had this issue? We made it through the encounter, but the issue was non-existent on the immediately preceding run where I was a Resto Druid and the shaman was on his Holy Pally.

On Saurfang, through careful minimizing of Blood power including liberal use of shielding, we downed him without him getting his first Mark off. With the buff to his healing from Rune of Blood this should still be achievable with quick taunts, though it would require some very high dps to do without Discipline shields.

What worked for us in ICC25 last night was to simply let the people who get marked die. No healing, just a quick death. We did that up until the soft enrage time, then we kept everyone up. This let us reduce the number of healers we had, and focus our DPS.

Once we adopted this stratagy, things went much smoother.

I'm tempted to think there's something wrong with your strategy if you get 5 marks. We also got that the first reset, this time we just got two. As a discipline priest, I just kept all the ranged/healers shielded as all times, then shielding whichever melee got Blood Boil. And obviously some good add work. Better to focus on avoiding marks, than healing them.

If you go with the sacrafice strategy, have enough DPS (go short on heals) and/or have disc priest, I think [I've Gone and Made a Mess] is very likely, but since there are many guilds which have downed him without getting it, I wouldn't say its automatic. In other words, brute force is still a valid strategy, even if its not one I'd personally reccomend.

Discipline would definitely appear to be the spec of choice for Saurfang. Normally I run Holy but for the first time since Ulduar when healing Saurfang yesterday I had the feeling, "this would be an awful lot better if I were specced Disc". We had a 1x Paladin, 2x Holy Priest, 1x Resto Druid, 2x Resto Shaman so there was a lack of beacons to deal with mark of the fallen champion.

How are other dealing with this? We assigned specific healers for the debuff as it was cast but I found myself resorting to mostly flash spam with a renew/coh/pom thrown in on CD, which is not my idea of the optimum way to play holy and would surely have been better dealt with if I had a better shield and a penance at my disposal.

We have run with 1 or 2 pallies/extra shaman, 1 druid, 1 shaman, 1 holy priest and me, disc. We haven't assigned individual healers to dealing with the mark. I keep them shielded and bounce my poms off of them, and flash/penance when needed. I'm sure the holy priest keeps a renew on them and her poms, the druid rolls hots, while shamans presumably chain heal through them. The pallies watch the tanks, with me helping. We haven't run into any problems keeping up everyone who gets marked. I'll have to agree, even though I'm partial to disc, the shields are So extremely useful in tossing one on someone and then forgetting about them for a bit while tank assisting.

We've taken to put our paladins on healing Marks. With a beacon on one target, they can easily keep two targets up by themselves. If you have 2 paladins, that's 4 Marks you can deal with with hardly any trouble. Saurfang doesn't hit the tank THAT hard.

The healing is so light, in fact, that I would recommend that some healers dps until like the first or second Mark. You want the fight over as quickly as possible, and any little bit helps.

on SF we run with 5 healers on 25 man.. 2 Disc priests 1 holy 2 palas, the first 2 marks can be covered up by 1 disc priest. mark 3-4.. 2nd disc priest.. disc priests can easily cover 3 marks if they dedicate them selfs to it. 5 healers isnt suggested if its a first kill.. first kill i would go with 2 disc 2 pala 1 resto druid 1 resto shaman.
if you bring more then 6 healers prepare for alot of marks.

Ofcourse it is if you have 2 disc priests that almost completely starves his blood generation, shields are all that matters, that's basically what everyone agrees on. No hits from beasts, boiling ticks absorbed, as much shielding on the tank as possible and the fight is cake. Try it without a single disc priest if you're up for more of a challenge (perfectly doable as well just requires your dps to be more focussed as well as beast kiting/stunning needing to be very well executed).

Without a disc priest we went from wipe around 15% our first try with 5-6 marks, to 3 marks easy kill a few tries after that (just to indicate how much executing matters). Blood power management is all that matters and if you have a 1 or more disc priests you hardly need management at all, just need those priests to know what they're doing.

In our 25m Saurfang, what we have been doing is letting the first and second marks die, purposely. This prevents blood power from stacking at a rapid rate. Our DPS is fairly high, and since dying to a mark only heals him for 5% of his total health, it's fairly simple to let him heal and DPS through the heal, as the time in between marks is greatly increased and we can generally knock him down 30% or so before the next mark comes. This makes the healing really simple, and allows us to bring only 5 healers, or maybe less, usually being a druid or two, two priests and one or two paladins, with a possible shaman.

Additionally, discipline is definitely optimal for this and many of the ICC fights so far. In our 10 man Saurfang kill, we managed to kill him before he threw out any marks at all, with me healing as disc and another restoration druid hotting. Shielding the blood boils, tanks, and ranged DPS that are kiting the adds makes the blood power gain virtually nothing. I have also used a Body and Soul (speed shield) spec in holy for Saurfang, allowing the ranged DPS to kite the beasts away quickly, and that seemed to work very well, but is really only manageable in 10m; in 25, there are just too many beasts and people they aggro to, making much less viable and coordinated.

(a little off the priest topic, but still interesting) Recently, I ran a 10m ICC with a few of our alts from the guild, and we managed to come up with a very interesting strategy for the 10m encounter. Our raid comp was not very optimal and we did not have any priests to shield/absorb damage and our range DPS was very slow. So, what we did was had our two ranged DPS, a warlock and a hunter, on one of the blood beasts, while our OT picked up the other and tanked him (wearing full avoidance gear). All the dodges, parries, and (I believe) blocks did not generate any blood power for Saurfang, and allowed our melee stacked group to tear through the beast very quickly. Using this method, we had 1-2 marks go out, and was strangely effective =P.

Yeah, shield spamming is pretty amazing on Saurfang, and you shouldn't limit your targets to tanks, blood boiled people or people who might be hit by blood beasts. You should also shield spam the rest of your raid, starting with people standing at range. This is mostly to avoid blood nova damage, but it also helps when a person who has had a shield on them for a while gets a blood boil, because it allows you to use two shields on that person during that blood boil instead of just one.

Comparing the two runs we did last week (both with a mix of alts and mains), the run where I spam shielded had people take less than half as much blood boil and blood nova damage than the run without a disc. priest, despite lasting 15 seconds longer.

I run as with 2 resto shammies, 2 holy priests (including myself), 1 holy pally, and 1 resto druid. I agree that beacon of lighting the first mark works well, then we left the pally on the tank. Each shaman took the next mark. Because, even though I was holy, I was bubbling the Blood Boil targets, we ended up killing him without anymore marks going out. Definitely a fight that could be 5 healed. I'm just left wondering why so many guilds are stacking disc priests, its seems like you would get into issues with Weakened Soul.

One Disc Priest can't cover the entire raid with shields, but two can. Any more than two would be overkill and you'd start to run in to problems with Weakened Soul.

This is exactly why our raid used two disc priests. I keep everyone shielded and the fight is a joke.