Council 10N - Problems with healers?

[Deleted]

Hello everybody

I will start with logs from yesterday raid : http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-mckssx98vtrpqsd0/

We were using tactic like this:
- Pala tank hold frost/sand
- DK tank hold priest
- DK dps stays on sul all the time

We aggreed that pala tank can survive max frigid assault stacks - after he learned how to handle it, it wasn't a deal.
Tbh I think we are able to kill this boss, our last wipe was when sandstorm hits and pala tank got roflstomped. But since the 5.2 I have a feeling our performance isn't that great. My biggest concern is our disc priest, I think she should do way more healing/absorbing on this fight and yet - I don't know how to help her. Maybe you guys have ideas? On the last try she was oom just before sandstorm - which is too fast imo.

I'm analyzing those logs but a little help (especially from ppl who are better than 2/12 ToT normal) would be great.
Thanks in advance!

[Thoaeealonsus]

to be fair.. disc priests shouldnt have that big of an issue with mana, our Disc priest rarely goes oom, were at 1/12hc
so shes doin it wrong if she goes oom that quickly - shes clearly using her abilities wrong when i look at our Disc. anyhow, im not a disc priest. so i cant really help yo with her. but i believe that if you just keep going, telling her to perhaps look into her class abit more or even the fight it might help, perhaps using Spirit shell on Sandstorm, i dont know.

not sure how much help this is... but its clear to me that she is a part of the problem.

[muko]

Just took a short look on the logs, i'm not that great disc (main shadow). What i've seen so far..

She used in 8 trys only 5 times Power Word: Shield. I assume she hasn't any rapture tracking addon. curse com/addons/wow/ingelasrapture (can't post links so just put it together) is great if she hasn't something like weakauras or tmw. Rapture should be always on cooldown.

Prayer of Mending should be used on cooldown, and if she only used Power Infusion twice on this evening she should spec DI.

[Deleted]

We avoid sandstorm completely, nuke Sul at the start, keep nuking sul while cleaving the current empowered boss down, if their energy is getting too high switch onto them to ensure they don't get to full (although you can survive for a while at full energy)

Sul is always dead before we finish nuking the 3rd empowered which is always Kazra'jin, not sure if its always this rotation but it seems to be for us.

[Deja Thoris]

Yeah the disc priest is underperforming massively.

The best thing to do is to pull up the logs of one that does ok and compare what spells they use and why. I'm not an expert on disc priests but heres a few pointers.
-Cast PWS on the tank every 12 seconds or so for rapture procs, they return mana. Get an addon to trackk this.
- No POM cast in the longest attempt. It should be pinging the whole damn fight
- Spirit shell used once in 4 minutes. It's probably one of the most situationally powerful CD's in game. Use it when reflect dude is empowered for comically high absorbs. Use it any other time any type of raid damage is incoming.
- No prayer of healing cast (big wtf here) It heals 5 raid members ^_^
- Greater heal used. I'd drop it completely tbh. Flash heal in emergencies if at all.

Having said that, I think your approach to the fight can be different.

Stack up all 4 bosses. This does 2 things.
1) Huge cleave damage far outweighs the healing loa add.
2) It allows the second tank to easily taunt frost dude when stacks are high so no stuns happen. Sure, you can eat them but its a dps loss and pallies aoe is very stong. Why eat extra damage and lose dps for 15 or so seconds?

If you do the above, the idea is to kill sul before he empowers, it sounds counter intuitive but to do this you may need to drop to 2 healers. Its pretty severe damage for maybe 3 minutes but once Sul dies the fight is basically over. To do this you bloodlust and pot on the pull, nuke Sul to maybe 50 energy and then switch just in time to burn whoever is empowered before they start aoeing the raid. Rinse repeat for the others, more damage on Sul but just enough to break an empowerment before the aoe starts.

Finally, your pally can improve somewhat.
1) His sacred shield uptime is 60%, it should be 80 minimum, its big absorbs with vengeance.
2) He has talented execution sentence, thats shit for a prot pala. In this fight I'd recommend holy prism. Spank the boss with it every 20 seconds and watch it do nice damage and ping a fat heal to half the raid.

Hope this helps.

[Deleted]

As muko said, she is not making optimal use of her heals, especially if she is short of mana.

Power Word: Shield should optimally be cast once every 12 seconds to proc Rapture to gain mana back. This is particuarly important as she is using a haste build which depletes mana fast using heavy atonement. With two other healers in the raid, Power Word: Shield is more efficient than using an expensive greater heal or flash heal.

She is mindbender specced - she should switch that to solace with a heavy atonement build, providing even more mana as she is not casting mindbender on cooldown anyway.

To reiterate the above, Prayer of Mending should be used on cooldown, it's a great inexepensive fire and forget heal every 10 secs.

[Deleted]

Fairly easy question to answer.

Shes atonement healing but is reforged for haste, worst stat EVER for a disc priest. Crit if mainly atonement, mastery if actual healing.

5 power world shields through all of your attempts, tell her to go read a guide on how to play a disc priest....

[Deleted]

For the disc herself:

• Wrong build: She uses a haste build, which in general is valid. The thing is, if you want to play a haste build you need to have a very good mana mangement - Supportet by you expierence, your raid setup and your gear. You don't have any strong Mana CDs in your composition and the her gear is 497 (quite low). Recommend her a Crit/Mastery (Post #14) build and all her mana problems will be solved.
• Talents- Use Insanity instead of Mindbender. There is calculation in the priest forums, that (if at least played somewhat correct), you can gain a lot more mana with Insanity+Shadowfiend than with Holy Fire+Mindbender

For your raid:
Propably it's also you tactics? You can try not to solely tunnel Sul. Just start with BL+Burn Sul. But Around 50-60 energy of Malakk switch to Malakk until his Dark Phase is over. Then always switch back to Sul (unil dead), but switch back to the current empowered (dark phase) target, if the target has about 30 energy.

We do this this way, because we avoid a lot of damage from Dark Power with that way. In your 04:12 min try everbody took around 700-900k damage from Dark Power. In our last kill (took 8:05) we only got 300k each over the whole fight.

Healing up Dark Power Damage drains a lot of mana - especially if also somebody is affected by Malakk's empowered Debuff.

[splowN]

The disc priest is very low indeed, make her read a guide before your next raid, will most likely help alot. Although you shouldn't be blaming it all on healers, might be your tactic / dps?
I can see that you're using 3 healers for some reason so shouldn't be hard to survive

[Deleted]

Like Nyxxi said, your whole group should be cleaving Sul to try and get him down ASAP. My guild is similar in progression so I've included a log of our "cleave" approach to the dps (http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-gb4bribyf76jabw5/). No, I don't know why it keeps picking up randoms! You want him below about 20% before he empowers. Your dps are ok to be honest, even for not doing that. Your disc priest... well, she's not treating the fight correctly imo, even a 3 healing fight. There is absolutely LOADS of raid damage spiking about at various points here; Atonement imo is the wrong approach to take.

Techically this explains her lack of shields; there are two sorta distinct disc approaches; there's the atonement based (which favours a lot of crit on gear) and the mastery approach, making good use of shields. Spirit Shell is absolutely amazing, and it really powers off mastery. At any rate Rapture needs to be tracked for good mana management with either. Have you defined her targets? ie, is someone else on raid healing/tank healing and she is sniping whatever is left?

[Deleted]

Thanks for all answers
Because I don't want to change everything at once - I gave her link to rapture tracking addon and changed her reforge to more crit-favored. We are jsut a casual guild but still we want to kill some bosses, some of us are semi-hardcore.

Again - thanks for everything, I will make another post on sunday to tell how our fights improved

[Magpai]

We avoid sandstorm completely, nuke Sul at the start, keep nuking sul while cleaving the current empowered boss down, if their energy is getting too high switch onto them to ensure they don't get to full (although you can survive for a while at full energy)

Sul is always dead before we finish nuking the 3rd empowered which is always Kazra'jin, not sure if its always this rotation but it seems to be for us.

That only works if you have a certain amount of dps. They can't possibly get the same result if their dps is too low.

[Deleted]

I'm not sure if it will work for you, but it works for us. We have low dps as well, so we try to stack the bosses on top of each other.
The healing from the add is 3,745 million every 30 seconds for which you need a constant dps of 125k for 30 seconds to "outdps" it. This should obviously be no problem.

The point of this strat is to make the fight easier and manageable for everyone, so you only focus dps on the bosses and on the shadowed add (when Marli gets empowered). This way both tank can keep on dpsing Sul also (the dps of both tanks should be enough to outdps the heal from the add btw). We've tried spreading Malakk and Sul from Marli and killing heal adds, but it's add to the chaos a bit more for us.

Also use Heroism/Bloodlust from the start and nuke Sul. We bring Sul to ~50% now before switching to Malakk (who should be at ~35 energy by then). Mind you we're at 500 ilvl average. Have the Frostbite person stack on melee/tanks (in case a melee runs off to kill a shadowed add or Kazrajin who is jumphappy). Try to interrupt Sul as much as possible with both tanks and melee on him (the sand bolt does 4 yard aoe dmg from the person it hits) to reduce damage intake from him.

* If you kill Sul before empowered, it's a kill from then on. If you dont manage to take down Sul before he gets empowered have everyone stack up during the sandstorm so the tanks can get aggro (not sure if gorefiends graps works, you can try it out) then let everyone else move out right after 3-4 secs, so that when the adds die they leave a sandtrap below them and nobody gets trapped. Tanks must kite the adds slightly so they dont get sand trapped as well of course.

Also, we assign healers. 1 on tanks, 1 on tank and Frostbite/Biting Cold player and 1 on raid.

When you kill Sul, make sure to spread Marli and Malakk out. From here on you do kill the healing add and just coordinate.

I feel we were in the same spot as you before, although a different raid comp but still same situation. This is our log, maybe you can compare: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/uom594gd9e8brkzp/

So that's the tactic I would suggest you guys could pickup.

As for performance wise.
I'm not sure what your guilds ilevel is, but if they are at 495-500 then they should do about 100k each on average. I dont have much knowledge on these classes, but boy do they pop out:
- Have the priest look at Disc videoguides on youtube or just look the forum here on mmo-champion. Have herself do it. Not you. She needs to take the initiative and show that she wants to improve her gameplay. Works better that way.
- The elemental shaman is also not performing well. About 20k lower than the others is a significant dps loss. Make sure he/she uses Stormlash totem at the start with Heroism.
- The Blood DK can do more dps. Yes, his main goal is to reduce the damage taken through (active) mitigation and position bosses etcetera, but that's really low. Tanks can do dps nowadays, try to mash them buttons more.

Other than that you might have to replace some people who dont perform well enough (skill or gear).

Good luck.

[Ninotchka]

Yeah, I think you're making a mistake by letting your paladin get stunned every minute or so. That's a huge amount of healing he's going to be sucking up, 15 seconds where he can't interrupt Sul, 15 seconds where he can't dodge, and 15 seconds where he's not dps'ing. It's not the end of the world if a tank gets stunned during this fight, but...

We drag Marli over by Malakk and Sul and then ignore the blessed spirits. The spirits have something like 1.8m health and only heal for 3.8m health (in normal mode) so we figure we lost more than that target switching, losing focus, and losing cleave opportunities.

Bringing Marli closer will up your tank and frost dk's dps considerably.

[Deleted]

We were in the same spot as you, players would wipe left and right and sandstorm would me wipe.

- What we did is 2 heal it (we tried 3 but it didnt work out), BL on pull, focus Sul. He would drop to 50/55%, and then we would switch on frost king when he had roughly 50/55% of is energy bar (this is depending on your dps)
- Leave one melee non stop on Sul, so he keeps dpsing him and he should interrupt as much casts as possible, this will reduce the raid damage ALOT. So do it ! .
- We had some trouble with Kaz something too, the one that reflects damage. What we did what don't dps mar'li at all, and dps him a little, so that the next empowered boss would be Mar'li, its a lot easier that way too.

Once we did that, we never had any sandstorm, Sul would die maybe 2 minutes after the end of the Bloodlust, from there is pretty much win.

Hope this helps =)

[dennisdkramer]

other comments are good, one thing nobody mentioned is the fact that she's actually doing atonement wrong. :P Penance on cooldown! Also, be sure to use archangel to increase healing when its needed, even if you're just continuing to smite. It makes smite cost more mana while you rebuild stacks, but once you have your 5 stacks back up atonement is doing another 25% more healing.

I'd probably switch to divine star too, cascade isnt bad but it isnt great and costs a lot more mana.

[lordsphinx]

Someone else mentioned it here, but rapture is disc's bread and butter mana generator. If your disc priest was tracking rapture and throwing more than lol5 PW:S's, then she wouldn't even be close to being OOM. I would have her work on tracking rapture and throwing more shields and watch not only her mana but her performance improve.

[Mattachine]

The discipline priest may need to improve somewhat, but I think the main issue is you guys take too much damage. Damage from quicksand, damage from Frostbite not spread out, and tank not doing well to deal with Frigid Assault.

The most difficult part of this fight is before Sul's death. After he's dead, things get alot easier. Use cool down/damage reduction generously, especially at this gears level.

[Kesandri]

My input would not be about your healers (tho as others have said yeh your disc is quite far off the pace somewhat), I would ask you to have a chat with your elemental shaman and tell him to start using chain lightening (unglyphed) on sul as it should also be hitting the frost king AND often hit kazra. His dps should jump a good 10-20k tbh by only doing this.

[420rogue]

other comments are good, one thing nobody mentioned is the fact that she's actually doing atonement wrong. :P Penance on cooldown! Also, be sure to use archangel to increase healing when its needed, even if you're just continuing to smite. It makes smite cost more mana while you rebuild stacks, but once you have your 5 stacks back up atonement is doing another 25% more healing.

I'd probably switch to divine star too, cascade isnt bad but it isnt great and costs a lot more mana.

She's already having mana issues and 5x evangelism while smiting is better than archangel because healing is almost the same but damage is higher and less mana.

I'd also advise against divine star because cascade is fire and forget. Divine star requires a lot more attention to use effectively and if they are having trouble now, don't compound the issue with position requirements.