Dragon Soul - Disc

[Deleted]

Sup my priesty bros.

We did 8/8 on the PTR and tested hardmode Zon'ozz tonight, just thought I'd share some thoughts about each encounter here, feel free to contribute.



Unfortunately I don't have any logs from these raids, I'll try and take some next week.

Note: All of these were on 10-man.
'Personal Healing' is from in-game meters and of course includes absorbs, I'll try and post some logs next time we do PTR.
-Normal mode-

Morchok:
Walk in the park, very easy fight mechanic-wise and with healing requirements. Priest is good due for soaking crystals (i was doing it with 2 of the ranged) due to binding heal, PoM, even holy nova is nice for healing while moving and healing crystal targets.
Personal Healing: Not that high, but there's not all that much damage in this fight, 12k.

Zon'ozz:
First phase is pretty average damage on some split targets, until orb is spawned. Once orb is spawned assuming each orb group is in a different raid group precasting Borrowed Time-hastened PoH as well as a pre-emptive PoM to the first ranged group can net some high hps.
Once the dark phase starts, I popped Jaws and PI (with T13 2 set) and spammed PoH, using penance as triage, PoM on cooldown, standard aoe healing stuff. Rinsed and repeated, using hymn just after the second dark phase (watching for debuff to make sure i didn't get kicked while casting Hymn from the knockback)
Really well tuned fight, healing as disc here is great.
Personal Healing: 24k.

Yor'sajh:
Not a hard fight to heal really, unless you get a shitty combination of adds. Mana isn't an issue at all due to mana void giving you close to 100% of your mana back, even if you had 50% when it got absorbed, so gheal/poh spamming all the way here.
We got some pretty easy combinations most of the time so we didn't have to deal with stuff like green+blue (aoe and no mana) for example, which was nice.
Personal Healing:15k.

Hagara:
Lots of spot healing, there isn't too much whole-raid damage until the lightning phase, where PoH spam is the way to go. In the ice phase holy nova/pom while keeping rapture on tanks and using single penance ticks is pretty much the only way to heal here, at least most of the damage here is avoidable. Goblin jump was nice to get way ahead of the group in order to cast GHeal or PoH. During normal phase there's only tank and spot healing really, as long as ice lanced people move out the way.
Personal Healing: 18k, totally boosted by lightning phase where due to us not doing the conduits perfectly we spent some extra time taking raid damage.

Ultraxion:
OH LAWD.
Amazing fight.
Started off with pre-stacked Divine Aegis on both groups, I was taking the 100% healing buff, so I got off some really nice HPS right from the outset. Generally really well tuned for a fight which is pretty much PoH spam for the whole fight, was running out of mana towards the end but didn't really have a problem with it due to rapture up close to 100%, jaws, PI + t13 2pc, innervate from boomkin etc.
The raid damage felt really well tuned, hp amounts were really dipping towards the end but the holy paladin with blue buff (part of your heals go to everyone in the raid) really helped there.
Personal Healing: 32k. Absolutely sick fight, mad props to whoever came up with the ideas.

Warmaster Blackhorn:
Good fight, we split up the four squares of the boat into teams of 2 and had both tanks free-floating. As with Morchok, Binding Heal/PoM really comes in handy when taking the bombs in your section, same with a precasted Gheal and a PoM on the people on another square with a bomb inc. I used Jaws and PI on cooldown here as the damage is pretty consistent even if it is kind of low, except when you're stacked.
Phase 2 has quite high tank damage (we had good dps), and some medium raid damage.
Fight felt very smooth and was very enjoyable and satisfying to heal.
Personal Healing: 17k.

Spine of Deathwing:
Ok, this is officially the shit healing boss of tier 13.
RNG of shields that absorb 200k healing going on the worst possible targets, stuns that last 30 seconds until an add is killed, and high raid and tank damage. I pretty much hate this boss and would like to spend as little time as possible reliving the wipes we had on it.
Personal Healing: 16k, would probably be about 20k if it wasn't for the fucking absorbs

Madness of Deathwing:
Quite fun but bugged quite a lot. We consistently got to phase 2 before bugs with jumping onto Deathwing's platform, jumps not activating and people falling to their doom, it eventually went down after about 10 tries getting to p2. Anyway on to healing.

Damage is high due to impale, paladin handled it like a boss though. Bolts and meteors do some pretty high raid damage, but nothing exceptional as long as it's handled correctly.

My biggest complaint is that in the whole fight is that while it's a fun fight, we don't actually fight DW himself, just his tentacles and arms and adds and shit, while it's quite cool, I really don't think it's a good enough end to the expansion, pretty disappointed, especially as the rest of the Dragon Soul was pretty cool, with a great atmosphere about it leading up to the final disappointing encounter. Hopefully they'll make some improvements and ohgodvoiceoversareshit, and maybe heroic mode will be different although i doubt we'll get to see that any time soon.

Personal Healing: 14k.

-Heroic mode-
Zon'ozz
FUCKINGOHGODDARKPHASE. More info incoming if we actually ever kill it.
All 3 healers on 25k hps. dat class balance.
I did actually consider going holy for this but before I had time to go respec (shadow offspec) blizz disabled him so that never really happened.
We didn't really get too much time on this due to it being an off-day, pugging people and so on, so we didn't have time to work on a decent strat for it, if anyone has one please let me know on in a PM.

Thanks for reading, again please contribute your thoughts on DS from a healing perspective, logs are nice too so I can see what you're doing healing-wise.

Shak

---------- Post added 2011-11-07 at 10:56 PM ----------

Added note:
Gear-wise I was running a haste/mastery setup with about 2100 spirit due to most fights having high to extreme raid damage, we used a paladin healer so I wasn't on tanks for the most part, except pw:s for rapture.

Edited to make the giganto image a thumbnail. -Arlee

[Ellumina]

I skimmed through your post very quickly. A couple questions:

How's loot looking for us this tier? I haven't really looked at the loot tables, but I see you have yourself a helm =P

How many healers were you running on these fights, 2 or 3?

Thanks for all the info you shared! =]

[Deleted]

Loot is pretty nice, tier gear is favouring spirit+haste mostly, with a couple pieces of crit, it's looking like blizz wants us going with haste as our main stat from here on in due to the raid-wide damage in a lot of fights, I don't even think Zon'ozz heroic will be doable until all healers have sick gear and tanks have 4 sets for the whole raid and leaving us to choose between crit and mastery depending on the fights
We saw mostly mail and plate drops during our clear, but i picked up an awesome trinket (http://ptr.wowhead.com/item=77204/se...he-seven-signs)
So far I've got 3 pieces of t13, 2set bonus is lovely, although for holy i think it would be better for the effect to occur once divine hymn stops ticking, so 8 seconds of the bonus isn't wasted channeling.

We used 3 healers for all the fights except morchok where our paladin went dps, I imagine we'll be using 3 healers for all the fights on hard.

[Agatha]

Oh god... great post.
The fights sound very interesting... I can't wait to go there healing with my priest <3 is the only healing class I really like.
In gear terms, do you think the raid requires to go with some FL heroics, or is it do-able with mostly 378 gear? :3

[Deleted]

Tks for sharing.

[Deleted]

Thanks!
As regards gear, it's pretty much the same as with T11-T12 transition - FL normal gear will see you through the first few bosses as you gear up more, but you might be waiting a while to replace those BiS 391s. I don't see a problem doing these with FL normal gear (a lot of our players had to use 378 premades as we're in EU gg blizz) as long as you have skill with your class and can handle mechanics correctly.
Hardmodes definitely seem more of a gear check, don't expect to progress more than a few bosses into heroic without some normal DS gear at least beforehand.

---------- Post added 2011-11-08 at 06:27 PM ----------

Additional: I'll be pugging DS a lot this week, so if you see a 'Shaktaz' in trade, don't hesitate to /w \o/

[Dougall]

very nice post, thanks for taking the time to do it

[Malania]

I'm curious how Holy is there. If you have time/can be bothered can you try a night as Holy and write a comparison for Disc/Holy and how each feels on the fights.

[Deleted]

A good read, giving a nice insight into the encounters from a disc perspective, gj. Been itching to do Ultraxion ever since first reading about the encounter, then having watched some videos, and your summay of it, I can't bloody wait to sink my teeth into the encounter!

[Deleted]

@Malania:

I haven't played holy since early T11, but I might give it a go with the new divine hymn buffs.

@Agoraphobic, I 2 healed Ultraxion with a holy paladin a few days ago.

I took first buff, he took second, I took third as I was nearly oom at this point (about 2 minutes of PoH spam with almost no time to channel a hope, did it really badly and only got about 2/3 of the ticks due to having to click heroic will).

HPS:
Paladin 36k
me as disc 35k, 8/10 people died from the final aoe he did before dying haha, but that's probably because we had a shitty warlock doing about 12k dps, would be dead alot sooner if it wasn't for that.

[Deleted]

Thank for sharing.

I have a question anyway - how did you itemized those fights? 4 set T13 looks for me awesome enough, to drop as much spirit, as possible. What were your stats on these fights?

[Deleted]

Haste/Mastery setup as I was on raid, paladin was taking tanks for the most part. Crit seems a bad choice for the most part unless you're on tanks. There's a stacking spirit trinket with +int bonus which means you'd be able to reforge out of even more as mana is only an issue on some fights, and that's if you're 2-healing.

[kinetiks]

Were you using an AA/A build? If not do you think an AA/A build will be just as good as a non AA/a build? If you are using it, did the hit box change help on larger bosses?

[nobodysbaby]

It's funny, I did now atleast 8-10 complete raids with the RF, and were often grouped with 2-3 hpriests. I saw a disc only once!

My own theory is that Holy got a change that the dpriests wants to check out, maybe they want to see if they can return to the holy way of healing etc Anyway, it was very nice and a bit odd to see so many hpriests again, like deja vu My guess is that normals will be perfectly fine as holy and hc will req the damage mitigation disc brings.

I can't say anything about performance of healers, I did log some raids, but it varies too much with gears to make any assumptions.

It doesn't look like Paladins AoE will be horribly OP to me (or I was just unlucky to get any samples from a HR spamming hpala?), and Druids seem fine after their nerf to WG. It even looks like Bliz knew what they were saying "DS bosses will be good for rshamans to heal", since there is so much stacking on these fights it is sick.

[Mythricia]

Great post, thanks, was a good read leading up 'till 4.3 since I haven't had a chance to play on the PTR in any shape or form.

Just out of curiosity, did you run with the gear setup you have on Armory (With the addition of DS drops obviously)?

[Deleted]

I thought shaman would have their hour of glory because of all those packing and pulsing aoe damage bosses, but I didn't see any shaman who really shined.
I have to see more before I'm sure, but from what I saw IN NORMAL, they were last again.

[cryptic22]

Is smite healing more effective with its 100 yard range now??

[kinetiks]

Is smite healing more effective with its 100 yard range now??

I guess we're going to find out tomorrow. I asked the same question : P

[keRmis]

It doesn't have 100y range. They only fixed it to work on a bigger mobs like Ragnaros.

[Deleted]

Whoa, been a while since I looked here.

I was running without AA/A so couldn't comment on smite healing and no, the premade I copied now has better gear for healing than my copied main, I only log that for shadow now.

Haste/Mastery setup.