Tank healing Halfus Wyrmbreaker as Holy.

[Slutty]

Mainly looking for tips for Halfus, but tips tank healing as holy in general will be appreciated too. My guild is not progressed at all, but we're trying to push it through specially with 2 friends coming to help from a more progressed server. Our healing comps are, according to them, horrible for the encounter (mostly shamans and druid) . They say a holy priest or paladin tank healing would make the fight incredibly easier, but I CANNOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME heal a tank properly in that fight. I've raid healed it without any problems at all however.

My current "rotation" is: Renew>Heal spam>Serenity+PoM>Greater Heal when Serenity and PoM are on CD>Flash Heal when they might die.

The problem I have is when either the healing debuff gets too high or the dragon breathes, I'm faced with a damage spike that makes me drain through my mana really hard (basically 2 Flash Heal>1 Greater Heal). This problem intensifies when the other tank healer cannot keep up with the damage, and I have to help him and then I'm either having my tank dying or just wasted mana. Is it my responsibility to heal the other tank or should I just focus on mine?

Pity that MMO still won't let me post links and you can't check me out on the armory. As of now, I've only thought of 2 things that could help:

1. Reforging everything I reforged to mastery to haste.
2. Get Glyph of Flash Heal instead of something else.

Any help would be really appreciated.

[Deleted]

Spec disc and spam smite :P

[saberon]

Spec disc and spam smite :P

Terrible Idea. Well, the smite part anyway.

For tank healing, Spec Disc.
Use PS/PW:B early on.

Use this spec:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bfhcrosbcRMochM
the final two points can go into Focused Will, Darkness or Veiled Shadows, or you can go 1/3 Inner Sanctum, 2/2 FW and either darkness or VS.

Bubble the tank on cooldown.
Penance him on CD (assuming he needs a heal, obviously).
Spam GHeal.
Inner Focus on cooldown.

Win.

For Glyphs, I would suggest Penance, PW:B and PoH.
Spend 5 minutes talking with your tank so you can coordinate your cooldowns. It'll make a huge difference.

[mmff4]

Terrible Idea. Well, the smite part anyway.

Speccing disc and spamming smite is the way to go on Halfus, atleast on heroic mode. But lets not turn this topic into offtopic as op asked for HOLY advices not discipline.

[Doomsoul]

Come to think if, after doing this fight countless times, I find myself not being able to give you any tips. Our healing team, on our first night when we tried and downed him, was 2 holy priests and a pally. And since we know our abilities we did not assign any tank or raid healing. We knew the fight was pretty heavy on dmg so we just healed everything. Of course tanks had priority.

We failed not on healing, but on interupting the nova and the tank switching to the anti-healing debuff. I know every fight is different due to the encounter changes each week, but healing was not that hard. There were some problems at first where tanks died in like 2 seconds. After 6-7 wipes we got the timings of our cd's and the tank rotation. We were pretty much oom when we hit the second phase, but some nicely used shadowfiends and hymns of hope in the beginning of the fight managed to give us enough mana to heal through it. And we also had 2 Lightwells up at all times. Lightwell during the stuns are epic. They help immencely.

We came to the conclusion that our misshaps were mostly due to low gear, low avoidance/dodge of tanks, which lead to healers going oom. I might suggest getting some more heroic gear for you and your tanks. And the dps of course.

I saw no flaw in your tank healing method, but as I said, we all healed everything. We didnt assign the pally to the tanks, although he must have focused more on them since he knows that the class is perfect for this. If you manage to survive the first dragon kill, it gets easier after that. You can empty your mana to help keep up the tanks. After awhile you will be able to regen some, even use a Concetration pot if possible and pop a hymn. And, no, holy priest are not, I repeat NOT a tank healer.

Sorry for not being so helpful.

[saberon]

But lets not turn this topic into offtopic as op asked for HOLY advices not discipline.

Fair enough. However Holy is excellent for raid healing, whilst it's subpar for tanking. Disc, on the other hand, is superb for tank healing.

And, especially for progression fights, being in the superior spec for that role is huge.

[Deleted]

It's in situations like this that Off Spec makes it's appearance. I'm sure that you certainly would LOVE being holy on this fight and that you're currently more used to the Holy Mechanics. But for Halfus Wyrmbreaker, the option with " Healing " only comes down to Atonement Spec.

Why?

Since Halfus takes increased damage for every dragon released, Atonement spec will give your throughput a HUGE boost. Since you'll hit for about 40-50k each Smite with a cast time of about 1.6- 1.7
This makes a huge different than if you were to keep a Greater Heal which in my current gear ( full 358 ) only reach 2.0 - 2.1 cast time and the throughput isn't as near as a Smite would be.

Remember though that Halfus is probably the only exception ( Heroic ) to actually go Atonement since it's about x3 times more efficient than Holy/Normal disc is. This doesn't mean it only apply to Heroic, but normal mode makes it a WHOLE lot easier on you and puts you less restrains in keeping a tank and raid up.

Making the spec viable, have people spread around Halfus ( 15yards ) and this way you'll hit the person with lowest HP in your raid. That way you'll both raid heal AND tank heal at the same time. Leaving your other healers assisting tank healing when AoE damage hits. Since your 40k heals will probably get people up. ( 10-man )

For our 25man we use 3 disc priests on the raid Smite spamming, and our tanks assigned with 2 healers each ( Hard Mode ) and I promise you it'll help you out on solely that fight due to the Damage increase.

Good Luck and hope you'll down that piece of junk ! : )

[Deleted]

Capped atonement heals + good tanking cooldowns makes disc the best choice for halfus. I can smite heal the tank through the 100% attack speed buff without even worrying about mana consumption.

[Kryesta]

He asked for advice on holy...not be told to respec disc and heal that way.

First post what gear you have and also you raid comp and what dragons you were fighting this will make it easier to give you advice.

If they tanks are getting to high of stacks then they arent switching fast enough or you arent freeing the right drakes...

[Deleted]

Terrible Idea. Well, the smite part anyway.

For tank healing, Spec Disc.
Use PS/PW:B early on.

Use this spec:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bfhcrosbcRMochM
the final two points can go into Focused Will, Darkness or Veiled Shadows, or you can go 1/3 Inner Sanctum, 2/2 FW and either darkness or VS.

Bubble the tank on cooldown.
Penance him on CD (assuming he needs a heal, obviously).
Spam GHeal.
Inner Focus on cooldown.

Win.

For Glyphs, I would suggest Penance, PW:B and PoH.
Spend 5 minutes talking with your tank so you can coordinate your cooldowns. It'll make a huge difference.

Lol have you even tried halfus heroic? Attonement is crazy atm on halfus.

[matti0006]

Hi there,

I have tank healed this fight as holy multiple times, what is important to remember is that you can basically use 95% of you mana in the phase where you kill the 2 dragons, use shadowfiend, a mana potion, or regen trinkets at the start.

spam flash heal and greater heal as much as your mana allows it when necessary, since to be honest, you won't need any mana at all for the remainder of the fight, don't try to save up to much.

[Slutty]

Thanks for all the replies. I had my offspec as holy pvp, but I guess I could try out disc if it's gonna help the guild get through that fight. I just had HORRIBLE experiences with disc in wrath and switched to holy and everything was rainbows and puppies, reason why I'm kinda reluctant :/

I'll try the spec in 5 mans right now and if it feels better I'll be ready for the continuation tonight.

I hate Halfus with a passion.

---------- Post added 2011-01-28 at 06:26 AM ----------

He asked for advice on holy...not be told to respec disc and heal that way.

First post what gear you have and also you raid comp and what dragons you were fighting this will make it easier to give you advice.

If they tanks are getting to high of stacks then they arent switching fast enough or you arent freeing the right drakes...

Lets see... avg item level is 350, 5837 SP, 19 mastery, 8.59% crit, 2.92% haste and 3.5k mp5 while in combat. As I said tho, I plan to change all that mastery into haste. My raid comp is usually warrior and dk tanks, shaman holy priest and druid healers, frost mage, arcane mage, enhance, frost dk and survi hunter for dps. Most of the time we get the shadow nova dragon and the healing debuff dragon.

I have tank healed this fight as holy multiple times, what is important to remember is that you can basically use 95% of you mana in the phase where you kill the 2 dragons, use shadowfiend, a mana potion, or regen trinkets at the start.

I suspected that, but didn't try it outright... I'll give it a try too, thanks

[Deleted]

I'd say that you really need more haste. From what I can tell your cast time should be around 2.3 - 2.4 averagish and since you're tank healing your mastery will ovwrite all the time, so I'd suggest more haste if you're really determined to tank heal as holy.

Make sure that your interrupters are spot on for shadow nova, or else it'll just cause distortion. And Tank should swap about 6-7'ish stacks depending on their current gear. More if they're well geared.
If it gets too heavy on you, Pop BL at the start of the fight since that's where the hectic part is and as each dragon dies, it'll calm down.

WotLK disc is nowhere near as Cataclysm disc and by learning the mechanic of each of our healing specs ( Yes ! We got 2 ! ) it will make you more viable to what setup you're faced with ( raid / boss / ehaler setup ) etc. Since in this case, holy isn't really favored due to the boss' mechanics.

So why make a game harder than it is : ) But yeah, hope you down him !

[zenkai]

Having your Holy priest tank healing is a terrible idea, not that we can't do i but because we're OP for raid healing atm (hence the nerf coming in 4.06)

Oh and smite healing is really great for Halfus even after they nerfed it some.

[Chitzu]

Terrible Idea. Well, the smite part anyway.

For tank healing, Spec Disc.
Use PS/PW:B early on.

Use this spec:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bfhcrosbcRMochM
the final two points can go into Focused Will, Darkness or Veiled Shadows, or you can go 1/3 Inner Sanctum, 2/2 FW and either darkness or VS.

Bubble the tank on cooldown.
Penance him on CD (assuming he needs a heal, obviously).
Spam GHeal.
Inner Focus on cooldown.

Win.

For Glyphs, I would suggest Penance, PW:B and PoH.
Spend 5 minutes talking with your tank so you can coordinate your cooldowns. It'll make a huge difference.

Who are you and why are you posting about stuff you know nothing about?

Being smite specced on Halfus isn't a terrible idea at all, even after they capped the Attonement heals it's still really good, i don't know if you've realized it yet but when the drakes is out Halfus is taking increased damage = Increased Attonement heals, i had mine hit for over a 100k heals on people, this was after the MS fix and before the HP cap with smite, i've been running with the specc after those as well tho and still works fine.

However, if they insist on you being Holy, then that's fine. You're able to heal the fight as Holy, i had to do that on one of our kills cause we were lacking a healer and had the Shadowpriest go the disc smite specc instead and i tank healed as Holy.

If your gear isn't that great, then you should for no reason be on the Halfus tanks, if as you say is true that you got mainly Resto shamans and druids there, then you'll go OOM so quick by healing the Halfus tanks through the MS. Personally i were mainly healing the Halfus tanks but even switched over to heal the Drake tank and raid whenever and were doing fine on mana, yes it were dipping low, yes you're supposed to.

All you need to do is to not waste mana on spells you wont need to cast, i.e Flash Heal <-- This is a huge waste of mana, will run you OOM so quick, PoM is fine but don't spam it as melee is getting hit alot by Fireball barrage (eventho they shouldn't...) which surely gives you more HPS, but who cares about that, what you will and should care about is tanks not dying on you.

So, put a renew up on each of the Halfus tanks (should be 2 of them due to MS debuff) throw a Heal on each of them to increase the duration of the renew, then it's just to start healing whoever is taking damage, once in a while throw a heal on the other one to keep the renew rolling, if you can't due to the current tank is almost dying, then that's fine, just throw up a new renew before he's about to taunt.

if shit is starting to hit the fan, i.e Tanks is about to die, then Greater heal is your tool along with Serenity to use as little mana as possible by increasing the chance of a crit, just remember to not heal the tank if he got 100% reduced healing.

Mainly talking about Heroic mode here as it requires alot of the healers, if and as i assume, you're doing normal mode so that should be a lot easier and not as stressfull on you healers, but read through what i said and yeh, line up your CD's so that you're using them early.

Trinket (30-40 sec into the fight) > Shadowfiend (1.20- 1.50 into the fight) > After a bit here a Mana tide should be dropped, then just use your CD's as they come off CD, save mana hymm for before you go into P2 if someone needs mana.

[Slutty]

Thanks for all the replies. As of last night I tried 3 heroics with discipline and sadly, I just couldn't feel it this is not a "the spec is broken/underpowered" complaint, it's just not my style of healing. In my fairly decent gear, people were dying a lot and my mana just wasn't doing it. Got vote kicked from the last group right before the last boss (Throne of Tides). I know I'm not going to master the spec in a few hours, but I just felt so much more comfortable with holy, even tank healing.

I guess I'm going to:

A) Reforge to haste and focus on tank healing or
B) Leave this toon as raid healing reforging to mastery and level the loladin.

I'm still going to try the blowing all the mana at the start suggestion and see how that goes. Or hopefully our paladin healer will show up and I can raid heal like was intended Thanks for all the support and oh we already got him down twice, it was just living hell. Both times 9+ wipes before the sweet death phrase.

[Kelesti]

Reforge to Haste for both. 2.4 second cast times are unacceptable.

And as someone pointed out above, the hardest part of the fight is the time the drakes are up. When they die, there's almost no damage to worry about, so feel free to blow everything during that.

Beyond that, I can't really think of specific advice without seeing your attempt. Are you moving a minimum safe distance from the fire? You're less likely to have to hard-counter random spikes by moving as little as possible (like 4 yards instead of 20).

If your tanks are stacking too high, they need to switch sooner, but there's no reason your partner can't drop a heal or two on your target to hold it up while the switch goes out.

This is still a Holy Discussion. Next person to bring up Atonement or Discipline in general gets a ban. Consider this your one and only warning.

So yeah.

[Mazi]

If your tanks are stacking too high, they need to switch sooner, but there's no reason your partner can't drop a heal or two on your target to hold it up while the switch goes out.

I think this is the most important thing here. Your rotation sounds just fine, but if your tanks are getting super high stacks then it's going to be extremely tough and/or impossible. You might want to focus more on Gheal and less on Heal. You might even want to throw in some PW:S when the debuff is high since it won't lose it's luster like your other heals from the healing debuff. It's not much, but it can help.

Also, if you have more haste, like you said you're going to forge - you can get 2 Gheals off within a Serenity crit buff. That will help a lot, even though it's RNG. Try to get Serendipity up when you need to with BH (if you're hurt) or FH. Get the Druid to give you the innervates and I'd hope that you were getting mana tide. Try to time your fiend with Hymn of Hope. I know that's hard with tank healing, but if you can just cast the Hymn to get the 15% mana buff you'll get a lot more mana back which will give you more freedom for the big heals.

Give your tank the Lightwell as well. Every bit helps. Your other healers should be giving assistance. There are such huge lull moments on that fight that the druid should be hotting up the tank & shaman chain healing off him when melee take damage, etc.

You can just tell us your char name & server and we can pull up your armory

[Chitzu]

read through my post and some of the more into depth posts by others here regarding healing it as Holy, it might help you a bit on the way, but the key to tank healing this fight as Holy is to manage your CD's and being aware of the stacks that the tank(s) got so that you're not burning mana on something unhealable, that will just end up with you standing there casting "Heals" as your mana allows you to which is a bad thing.

Also, as above posted said, please post your armory so that we can have a look at what you're working with and through that give you more precise tips on how to heal it as Holy, it's really hard to generalize a style of healing if your gear/specc etc doesn't allow that type of healing, would also help to set a somewhat close points to where you should use your CD's.

Also, what raid size is it? 25-man or 10-man? this is another thing that makes a huge difference in the way you're healing and how we can help you with it, if it's 10-man and your gear is kinda the same as mine is, then you'll have zero problems at all, i'm healing all 3 tanks + raid healing in 25-man with mine, if you're far behind my gear then you might not be able to do that as much even in 10-man, even less in 25-man and therefor needs to adjust who you're healing and how you're healing that specifik person.

[Slutty]

I think this is the most important thing here. Your rotation sounds just fine, but if your tanks are getting super high stacks then it's going to be extremely tough and/or impossible. You might want to focus more on Gheal and less on Heal. You might even want to throw in some PW:S when the debuff is high since it won't lose it's luster like your other heals from the healing debuff. It's not much, but it can help.

Know what's funny, I think I actually had more trouble with the 100% attack speed week than the healing debuff week, because the tanks seem to be switching correctly. I think what's getting me the most raid comp wise is that the shaman healer doesn't have as much throughput and I often find myself healing his target and having my tank get really low as a result, having me panic and waste mana in retarded ways. I thought about the shield but the mana cost scared me off, I'll try it next attempt.

Also, if you have more haste, like you said you're going to forge - you can get 2 Gheals off within a Serenity crit buff. That will help a lot, even though it's RNG. Try to get Serendipity up when you need to with BH (if you're hurt) or FH. Get the Druid to give you the innervates and I'd hope that you were getting mana tide. Try to time your fiend with Hymn of Hope. I know that's hard with tank healing, but if you can just cast the Hymn to get the 15% mana buff you'll get a lot more mana back which will give you more freedom for the big heals.

Hadn't thought about the serenity+gheal advantage of haste. I just reforged to haste like Kelesti said but it's not much... my Gheal is at 2.22 sec self buffed, no food or flask. I'll just try to go more all out on the first phase, and hopefully the fully raid buffed haste will help.

Give your tank the Lightwell as well. Every bit helps. Your other healers should be giving assistance. There are such huge lull moments on that fight that the druid should be hotting up the tank & shaman chain healing off him when melee take damage, etc.

I guess since raid damage is so controllable in phase 1, all healers could help patch up the tanks I think we would be way off better if the druid keeps rejuv/lifebloom on one tank while the earth shield goes to the other one. I'll have to talk to the healers for tonight's attempt.

You can just tell us your char name & server and we can pull up your armory

BUT THE HAXXORS

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...aneesha/simple

Cool, looks like I posted enough to post links