Heroic Gara'jal 10m video. 3 healed without a Disc Priest. Post Vengence Nerf.

[apinksquash]

Since pretty much every 10 man heroic kill I've seen has used a disc priest (or even 2), I figured I'd share our heroic Gara'jal video and explain in brief what we did and how we met the dps check 3 healing without a disc priest, post vengence nerf, and post HotW nerf.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUg5u04gQtQ

We're only a semi-hardcore guild in that we only raid about 10 hours a week (1st week of heroic progression we only did 5 hours) and we don't have an army of alts sitting around to bring in for fights. So when we got to Gara'jal we had to try and wrestle with the decision of whether to try and pug a Disc Priest from some other guild or something. Disc priests not only are amazing for meeting the dps check, but shields help immensely with stopping bad RNG gibs by the adds in the spirit realm. Ultimately we decided that we'd stick with the classes we had and just make it work (having a couple druids helped out too).

Basically our strat worked like this:

- Rotate CDs on the tanks between healer CDs and tank CDs to minimize the chance of gibs by Voodoo / Spirit Adds. This included Symbiosis abilities, BoPs, basically anything and everything we could use.

- Both Druids (tank and healer) use HotW at the start of the fight during hero. Our tank equipped dps trinkets and macro'd a weapon swap into HotW as equipping a caster weapon is a significant dps increase. Lastly, since he's an herbalist he used Lifeblood for the haste benefit. The combination of these things brought his dps during HotW up from around 80k to the 140k you see him reach during hero.

- Our Monk and Paladin healers both DPS'ed whenever possible and did a few million damage each (our holy pally's damage, while small, shaved 5 seconds off the fight and we only beat the enrage by 4 seconds)

- Our Holy Pally kept beacon on one of the non-tank voodoo targets and healed the tank directly. This maximized the benefit of paladin mastery shields on the tank (our version of a Disc Priest lol).

- Another minor thing, but I guess not everyone knows this, but Spiritual Innervation (the buff you get from heals in the spirit realm) lasts 30 seconds from when you last got healed, not from when you leave the spirit realm. For this reason our Holy Paladin made sure to instant cast heal herself when leaving the spirit realm to maximize the time she'd have the buff.


To anyone working on this boss, good luck and keep at it!

[CausalXXLinkXx]

This boss isn't impossible to get without a disc or druid, my 10m guild killed it last week with 0 druids and 0 disc priests, but we had to 2 heal it to meet the dps check. If you don't have a disc priest, I would heavily advise you find a non braindead one. While possible to kill without, it's a million times harder and those gibs are infuriating.

[apinksquash]

Having our paladin heal the tank directly and instead put beacon on other targets actually worked well. Between that and rotating CDs on the tanks we eventually got it to the point where gibs were almost non-existent. Due to the mana buff in this fight it's possible to spam on the tank quite a bit. Highly recommend guilds with holy paladins but not a disc priest try that (and obviously the paladin wants to be stacking mastery).

[CausalXXLinkXx]

Having our paladin heal the tank directly and instead put beacon on other targets actually worked well. Between that and rotating CDs on the tanks we eventually got it to the point where gibs were almost non-existent. Due to the mana buff in this fight it's possible to spam on the tank quite a bit. Highly recommend guilds with holy paladins but not a disc priest try that (and obviously the paladin wants to be stacking mastery).

Yes our Paladin did this, but we had the unfortunate luck of also having a Blood DK on this fight (The worst tank for this fight)

[Draenox]

My guild is struggling with this boss atm, we have enough dps for it, but we have many issues with the voodoo dolls going for the same healer twice in a row, even when the other one comes out of the spirit realm early, leaving us unable to send any people in there with much benefit, since we have to wait for the voodoo dolls to switch again or until the other healers debuff falls off.

Are we doing something wrong with them? Or is that the exact reason some people are going for 3 healers? Because our healing seems fine with 2 healers (Holy paladin and a Resto druid), just those voodoo dolls creating pretty huge problems when cast on the same healer multiple times in a row.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

[apinksquash]

That's the very reason most people go for the 2.5 healer approach with a disc priest. It's not because three healers are needed for the healing, but rather to have a fallback for when neither primary healer can go down. Similarly, that's why we chose to 3 heal.

[eijin]

doesn't really sound like anything youall did was out of the ordinary. your dps was just really good. we tried all 2, 2 1/2 and 3 healing it. we ended up doing the best with 2 heals and using a shadow priest or boomkin to heal the bottom area if needed.

with a bit more gear, this week was infinitely easier than last week.

[Deleted]

Nice job on the kill, I don't think the vengeance change really affected tanks on this fight much (if at all on this fight) though - correct me if I am wrong. It's cool to see guilds working with the makeup they have rather than feeling they need to have a particular make up.

congrats

[WindFurie]

Just did a 3 hour of wipes on this boss.
Was 3 healling and when we tryed to skip totems we had issues (people getting wtfpwned in 0.86 secs... yeah) and when we entered every single totem for add control we end up hitting the enrage at 15%. any advices would be listened, altho i really doubt there will be anything of much use since i already looked everywhere.
We don't have any disc priest or any descent multi dotters. running with hunter / 2 mages / dk / warr and they can still clear the adds pretty decent but need to use all the time inside and can't get back early.

[Deleted]

To help fully it would be useful to see your logs, or at least know your full raid comp.

I'll tell you what we do though, 2 heal. Though it can be fairly easily 3 healed now with current gear levels, 2 will ease issues with enrage. Which 2 healers you have to choose from will make quite a difference, we use holy paladin and holy priest (I'm the priest in question and do have Disc also, but choose to play holy, I prefer it and lightspring plus serenity and binding heal spam is pretty amazing, just keeping those renews rolling) One of the key issues is tanks using cooldowns to mitigate doll damage at the appropriate times, especially during the final burn when no more totems appear. Shadowy attacks plus Doll can often lead to a player being virtually globalled.

Don't be afraid to have your healers simply spam an entire mana pool on healing between trips down to the other realm. Of course if you choose to 2 heal, having a hybrid to go down to the other realm when neither of the "main" healers can do so is virtually essential. When healers have people topped in the other realm, you may find it useful to just leave DPS clearing so they can return and help with doll healing, or simply help kill the adds, even better, do both!

If you have questions or want to give more info, I'll try and reply as time allows.

[Deleted]

We killed this (3 heal) within 2 attempts this week after having skipped it the last few resets while we focussed on the two new instances, with tier bonuses and upgrades from HoF and Terrace the dps check for this fight is much less of a challenge.