WotLK Healing Discussion v3.3: Icecrown Citadel awaits!
 

Healing Discussion


This thread is for healing priests, both Disc and Holy, to come and ask moderately detailed questions about healing in Icecrown Citadel. If you're still struggling through Ulduar and ToC, so long as you ask politely, I'm sure people will also be willing to help you out, although our focus is clearly going to be on the new content.

Things to possibly include when you post:

• * WWS/WoL/WMO or similar report if possible
  * Information on total number of healers being used
  * A note about what spec you were using. Remember that Armory shows both specs, do NOT link a random spec if it's also your Dual Spec; just mention it's Dual, and on Armory
  * What problem you're encountering, or what facet of the job you're curious about
  * A specific fight or group of fights you're currently interested in
  * Your role on the fight(s) in question
  * If relevant, the healer composition
  * Your experience with the fight you are asking about . Please don't just attempt a boss once then come asking for help/advice. Give it an honest night of attempts then bring your issues here.

If it's truly a Priest: Simple Questions/Simple Answers, then place it in the proper thread. This is for detailed discussion of WWS reports and raiding issues in Icecrown. Theorycraft does not belong in this thread, nor, to the most extent, does spec advice. Obviously if you're struggling with a fight, someone might suggest picking up an alternative talent, but if this thread starts to devolve into spec discussions and arguments I'll just start removing posts to the other thread and slapping infractions on the people responsible. Keep it focused, keep it helpful, and keep it accurate.

We have some amazing theorycrafters and incredibly experienced priest healers on these forums. Pick their brains -- in the appropriate threads.

Saurfang idea
 

My guild got to Saurfang on 10m last night. Initially, I was holy, but after wiping several times, we decided to try it w/ me as Disc, to help w/ the mitigation of the dmg of blood boil, which seemed to work. Anyone else have similar results? Or any strats they used. The rest of the boss's in 10 man aren't all that difficult or at least they didn't seem like it.

Boiling blood was fairly weak. I kept renew (fully talented and glyphed) on it, and threw a flash heal if they got too low. The real mana drain was Mark of the Fallen Champion, which effectively adds another tank to heal each time its applied.

What have your groups found to work? 3 healers to deal with the rough healing once the marks start stacking up? Or possibly dropping to two healers to try to end the encounter faster.

We've tried both but with alt DPSers its a bit interesting heh.

With alt dpser's you're going to end up having over 5 mark of the champions, which is going to be very stressful.

I was disc and kept shields on the tanks and Blood Boiled people to help reduce the amount of Blood Power Saurfang got from his abilities, which worked to some degree.

We used a shaman/druid/holy priest solely for raid heals, while 2 paladins kept our two tanks up with beacon.

Once we had our dps switch to the adds properly, it was fine. The fight really relies on your dps being able to switch quickly and that no one is being melee'd by the summoned beasts.

Our Log:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Only had 3 marks, which was easy to keep up.

I found being Disc for Saurfang 10m to be really useful for the reasons Bain mentions. If an attack (e.g. a Blood Boil tick) is fully absorbed, Saurfang gains no Blood Power from it.

Unfortunately we didn't manage to get him down. We went with 3 healers and I don't think I'd want to drop to 2.

We didn't get him down because we didn't notice the Rune of Blood debuff mechanic. Saurfang regen'd over 3 million health from that alone.

Bain, out of curiosity did you guys use a tank rotation or did you have an offtank taunt him to get the debuff and then have the main tank taunt back (kinda like Thorim)?

I also healed Saurfang as disc the other day after failing miserably as holy. We had three healers but my main priority during the fight was to keep everyone shielded at all times as a preventative measure. It worked great. We one shot with myself as disc. We then did the same in 25man after seeing those results, even bringing in a disc priest alt to make it smoother. Worked beautifully.

Need two tanks for the fight. Saurfang places a debuff on a tank that reduces their threat by 20%, and it stacks.

He's not tauntable, so basically you have two tanks working for threat the entire time, so that when the debuff applies, one just takes over the other.

In 10man we used a shaman/paladin and i think i was holy. But disc could work too, shields + fh spam.

We did saurfang holy pala + disc priest without trouble.
Probably harder but still doable with any other combo.
The main trick is to not let the worms attack people, but that has nothing to do with healing. Unless PW:S would prevent the boss from gaining life, in that case... :D (didn't have time to test much).
We could sustain the healing with one mark, but not two.

I am curious about deathwhisper 25, do you have to shackle the empowered adds? We didn't try that yet, and don't always have shadowpriests.

Deathwhisper 25 for us went something like this.

2 tanks, either side, melee split between them em. A paladin either side focusing on a tank each. Our ranged dps were on deathwhisper, with hunters assisting on adds occasionally.

Shaman/holypriest/druid were the raid healers. I, as Disc, was assisting on one of the side tanks that had a paladin looking after it, while the raid healers were able to assist the other tank if it was needed. The tank i was looking after had the back-door adds MD'd to him (2tank strat).

Healing was relatively easy until an empowered add came along. He'd call it out on vent, and range dps would switch to nuke it down. I'd start spamming at this point with the paladin, while our tank blew a cd. Once it was down, it was back to normal. Ranged dps on Deathwhisper, while melee finished off the side adds.

Hope that was of some help, in a bit of a rush.

we did 10man with pala/disc/restoshammy tonight.

i (disc) went for a spec with divine fury for the fight, and the pala and restoshammy healed the entire first 50%, with me adding a tiny bit of dps. as soon as Mark of the Fallen Champion got cast, i was dedicated mark healer. once a second mark got up, saurfang was at 20ish %, we got two pala's to Hand of Protection on the two marked people, and finished it off.

once we get the hang of this fight, i'm sure we can do this with our usual pala/disc setup.

In 10 man its easy to keep shields up on everyone, which gives you the ability to stay more focused on the tanks, and can be beneficial for incoming debuff damage. As for healing the mark of the champion, we saw 3 on our first attempt, which turned into chaos to heal, and decided just to wipe it. The second time we didn't see a single mark, and my 10 man's DPS isn't that great.
However, in 25 man, I don't think it's as practical to toss raid wide shields out. We ran with 1 holy pally, holy priest, disc priest, two shamans, and a resto druid, so I was tank healing, but still was tossing out shields on each debuffed person, and the raid healers kept them up through the mark.

No shackles are needed.

Healing needs on Saurfang depend mostly on Blood Power management:

1) Adds need to be killed before they hit anyone.
2) Avoid blood boil to hit more people than necessary (1 on 10 man)
3) Use two tanks, switch when the current tank gets Rune of Blood
4) Have the tanks wear full avoidance gear.

Doing the encounter when only watching for 1) and 2) is very, very hard to heal if at all possible. Issue 3) makes a vast difference, preventing Blood Power gains is far more important than getting an additional DPS slot.

Healing the encounter when all 4 issues are handled well is a piece of cake - chances are the group doesn't even see a second mark. Issue 4) makes it very hard for the boss to gain extra Blood Power from the first mark applied. On our kill in 10-man, we did not see the second mark, yet average DPS per damage dealer was only around 4000.


Are you sure about this? We noticed this on Lady Deathwisper P2 (Touch of insignificance), but not Saurfang.

Ah! Sorry, i got the two mixed up. Thanks for pointing that out.

You need two tanks because of his ability Rune Blood: "Saurfang leeches health when he performs melee attacks on targets marked with Rune of Blood. Leeches 5,100 to 6,900 health from an enemy target and heals Saurfang for 5 times that amount as well as gaining 1 BP per hit. Basically there to force tank swaps. "

In 10man ICC we healed Saurfang with a Holy Paladin/Holy Priest and didn't encounter any problems.
Although as Disc you can mitigate some damage and therefor bloodstacks on Saurfang himself, but i think more important than mitigating bloodstacks by PW:S/DivAegis is - as Hegen stated before - killing the adds before they hit anyone.

We let our hunter drop a Freezing Trap and our ranged DDs focus fire 1 add. Our second tank (and our Holy Pala) taunts the second add back into the freezing trap to buy some time for the DDs. Worked very fine on the first try although we had 2 or 3 Mark of the Fallen Champion-victims.
Two of them can easily be healed by the Paladin with Beacon on the Saurfang-Tank and a rotation of HolyShock/FoL and some assistance of Renew/PoM/CoH

25man encounter was a bit harder but still no big deal - although the PW:S mitigation might make sense here, because there are always 3 persons hit by Blood Boil. Although it's maybe off-topic, but we decided to run only 1 tank and add another DPS to match the damage-requirements faster. The healing done by Rune of Blood was only around half of the damage done by another DD.