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.

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.

We definably have room for improvement, I don't think our disc priest was actively attempting to shield every blood boil in order to absorb more, but I will definably bring that up. Our range could also tighten up the add kiting a bit. I'll see how we do next week.

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.

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.