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!