Heroic Thok - Restoration Edition

[Deleted]

I think I am going to give this a shot. I figured Heavy Crit was the way to go, so that is what I will gem and reforge for.

Thanks a lot guys, i'll let you know if we kill him!!

Keep in mind, that what Tiberria and Varzik recommended is also completely perfect for Thok and other fights.

Also keep in mind the tips from former post, e.g., my first post about healing strategy for this fight. As I already pointed out, imho, what matters most is having a proper plan for this fight. It's just all about synergy between classes and organizing the different phases, e.g., fast re-stacking after the kite phase, not having people with debuffs out of range, arranging cooldowns.

We killed him the last two times with only one tank, our first kill was with two tanks - just to give you a hint to alternative strategies.

Just try to find what works best for you.

PS: Just plugged you into AskMrRobot and optimized your gear and gems for a haste build. You could reach the 15k haste with reforging completely into haste and changing all your gems to pure haste gems. Just fyi.

[Deleted]

Just listen to what Tiberria said. When we were approaching Thok's progress, i dag out the discussion we had about it some time back and i went for 15k haste breakpoint and Conductivity (i am using Riptide glyph as a baseline anyway). I quickly discovered Conductivity doesn't do as much as i would initially expect and you can easily get screwed if you get locked out because of, say, missing Devo/lagspike.

So i alternated between Rushing Streams and AG, depending on the raid setup (read: throughput cd's available). RS is your best bet, it really helps a lot, especially if glyphed, on the subsequent stack phases (when the aoe becomes elemental, instead of physical).

Tip unrelated to class: try making it to 25+ stacks, each stacked phase and 10+ on each running phase. With a priest in the raid, it's totally doable due to feathers and Leap of Faith - get the priest to grip the person on the last go around (12~ or so stacks on the boss) while opening the cage. What do you get by doing that, is one single rotation of cd's, because if you stretch both phases that long, stacking phases are 3+ minutes apart - all cd's will be back up and ready.

Oh, btw, you can drop below 10k spirit here, mana should never be an issue.

[Tiberria]

As with almost every other fight, RS is going to be more total healing than AG. You only want to take AG over RS if you feel that the extra cooldown burst healing is needed for your raid to survive. On top of that, if you want to get the best use out of AG on the higher roar stacks, you almost have to have a BoP, in which case you can burst out a ridiculous near 1,000,000 HPS over a 15 second window with both Ascendance and AG. However, unless you are running multiple pallies, your Resto Druid is going to need the BoP far more than you do, because he won't even be able to really use Tranq without it, whereas you can mitigate it with a different cooldown order or spec.

[Varzik]

There's also the option of the druid using Soul of the Forest hasted Tranq during Devo Aura, thus saving the BoP for the shaman to use ascendance or AG.

At the 13k haste bp on my alt druid, I can nearly fit a full tranq in between screeches (7+ cap) without devo aura by having SotF talent.

[Tiberria]

There's also the option of the druid using Soul of the Forest hasted Tranq during Devo Aura, thus saving the BoP for the shaman to use ascendance or AG.

At the 13k haste bp on my alt druid, I can nearly fit a full tranq in between screeches (7+ cap) without devo aura by having SotF talent.

The other option of course is having the Druid do that, the Shaman not worry about AG and just giving the BoP to a caster DPS. If you aren't wiping due to healing as is, that is probably better than using it on a healer.

[Packard]

From a Top 10 US 10 man kill standpoint this is what I did at the time with like 560 ilvl

Other healers in raid - Disc Priest and Holy Pally - We burned Bops on Disc instead of me because I can still output even after 20 stacks no problem while he can not at all.

A) Haste at ~18k riptide breakpoint + AS for 5% (I changed it later to 15316 haste with more gear and dont be afraid to gem pure haste in mismatched gem slots) Cleave healing trinket is 5-10% of heals and Prismatic Prison for trinkets
Haste to breakpoint>Crit>Mastery Minimize Spirit

Riptide the entire raid - Keep up entire time

Unleash elements (Unleashed fury talent) + Healing rain kept up as much as possible

Earth Shield on active tank

Healing Stream totem after first shout and kept on CD entire fight with Rushing streams and also Call of elements for full duration of bats on poison phase

Ascendance around 8 stacks on boss which would carry into devos around 12-18

Healing Tide at 18 carries through 22ish then Spiritlink and a AS+UE+Healing Rain somewhere in there when you cant cast

Kite phase should last long enough that CDs are at the same points next phase.

Priority is HEALING RAIN WITH UNLEASH ELEMENTS > whatever totem at the time > Earth shield > riptide

Edit - With this setup currently I can probably 2 heal thok with 574 ish ilvl. With 3 heals we have accidentally hit 30 stacks without trying.

B) What are the best glyphs to use on this fight?
Talents - Astral Shift - Call of Elements - AS - Rushing Streams - Unleashed Fury
Glyphs - Healing Stream Totem - Riptide - last one is personal pref (spirit walk/chaining/Water shield) doesn't matter so much. I go with Spirit walkers for kite phase

C) Is it worth breaking my 4 set for heroic warforged helm and heroic crit gloves if I go for a crit build?
Don't do that unless you need the haste (if the heroic items have it). Spirit walkers 4 set is nice during fucked up kite phase

D) Which two trinkets should I use out of the Thok, Nazgrim, and Sha trinkets? I have all 3 from normal.
Sha - Thok normal>PBoI>Dysmophic

If you need 25 man please let me know...

[Deleted]

Unleash elements (Unleashed fury talent) + Healing rain kept up as much as possible

[...]

Priority is HEALING RAIN WITH UNLEASH ELEMENTS > whatever totem at the time > Earth shield > riptide

You do realise that UF does nothing for HR, right? It's a garbage talent for resto on just about any fight, Thok is definitely one of them. Additionally, Thok is pretty much the quintessential fight for PE.

Edit - With this setup currently I can probably 2 heal thok with 574 ish ilvl. With 3 heals we have accidentally hit 30 stacks without trying.

I would hope so, considering that 2-healing it is a perfectly viable strategy for progression. I've never done it with more than 2 healers with a resto shaman/druid setup.

[Kesandri]

Normally playing elemental and being our '3rd' healers for fights just like this I found the following worked perfectly for us.
I would also add this was how I did it for our first kill, not now as we 2 heal it now.

I went mostly haste for the extra riptide tick.
Kept riptide up on entire raid while also keeping up healing rain with 1 x rain unleashed every two (as it doesnt quite line up perfect enough for back to back).
I talented PE not for healing, but to actually help dps. Rushing streams was not that useful for hard healing points of thok which is stack up, and didnt feel I needed PE either.
I used Ancestral Guidance because 1) It was up for every stack up and 2) it works awsome when riptides + healing rain are up on everyone.

All in all I managed to help us through a load of stacks and made this encounter very simple for us to learn, we actually had a problem of finishing the stack phase BEFORE hitting the 30 stacks for a while (which was a nice problem to have).

Remember if you take AG (and you should imo as its far better at the stack up phase than rushing) you have 3 strong cooldowns which covers a load of stacks.
Also would add with the extra haste there was absolutely no reason I needed a paladins BoP ever, keeping up riptides was suffficient enough to only use chain heal mostly when I was using ascendance which in turn I was able to cast inbetween roars very easily.

Oh and another thing I learnt, dont wait on unleash to cast healing rain, just get HR down regardless tbh, we found not having HR down even for a few secs could get us into trouble pretty quickly, its just so powerful on this fight.

[Jester Joe]

I see a lot of people saying spam chain heal, not sure how they're managing that after like 13 roars, since healing rain has a shorter cast than chain heal and I can barely get that off in time.
What I did was used Glyph of Riptide (Only fight I use it on), Rushing Streams instead of AG, didn't think AG would be as great in a 10 man situation, dropped healing rain on CD while keeping up riptide on everyone, using healing stream on CD of course. Popped Ascendance at about 11-12 stacks, dropped healing rain and Mana tide then the paladin would pop Devo aura at like 17 stacks, and then 21 stacks we'd aim to transition. I'd use my primal elementals whenever it would get iffy overall, except right off the bat I'd drop the fire one for some damage on Thok, just because.

For trinkets I used Thok's and Sha of Pride's, and did fine with 3 healing it.

[Deleted]

I see a lot of people saying spam chain heal, not sure how they're managing that after like 13 roars, since healing rain has a shorter cast than chain heal and I can barely get that off in time.

With 15k haste+, you're more than capable of landing a Chainheal inbetween roar's, just got to start casting one right after the last one went. Also, in the case of 25's, most guilds are capable of creating a huge window of cast-at-will, due to chained devo's.

[Hypasonic]

Yeah I heal thok hc in our alt run, I play Ele as main as offheal when needed. I go for the 11.5k or so haste breakpoint then put everything else into mastery/crit, you can easily get a CH off after every screech with that haste.

[Deleted]

I use the chain heal method with conductivity and PE, and had about 9k haste at the first kill. I never had problems weaving in chain heals up to wave 26 where we would transistion with our 2 healer strat. That said, I do have consistently low lag (<25ms). If you decide to go for chain healing, it's down to your timing ability moreso than gearing for haste.

[Jester Joe]

With 15k haste+, you're more than capable of landing a Chainheal inbetween roar's, just got to start casting one right after the last one went. Also, in the case of 25's, most guilds are capable of creating a huge window of cast-at-will, due to chained devo's.

How do people reach 15k haste? Gem pure haste, or just get lucky with drops? I can't seem to get out of more mastery personally.
And yeah I derped and missed people saying 15k haste, I'm only at like 9136, which gave me enough time to just cast healing rain, so I was assuming that was the norm, especially for progression.

I use the chain heal method with conductivity and PE, and had about 9k haste at the first kill. I never had problems weaving in chain heals up to wave 26 where we would transistion with our 2 healer strat. That said, I do have consistently low lag (<25ms). If you decide to go for chain healing, it's down to your timing ability moreso than gearing for haste.

Are you not using anything like Elemental Mastery or something? I get usually like 85-100ms, but still, I will literally start casting healing rain as soon as his roar goes off, and it will just make it in time before the next roar. Not sure honestly if the ms would make much of a difference, but I'm pretty sure I'm good at timing with the roars.

[Deleted]

Some haste gems might be required, depending in your gear. The only real "musthave" is the sha trinket.

[Deleted]

Are you not using anything like Elemental Mastery or something? I get usually like 85-100ms, but still, I will literally start casting healing rain as soon as his roar goes off, and it will just make it in time before the next roar. Not sure honestly if the ms would make much of a difference, but I'm pretty sure I'm good at timing with the roars.

I never use anything other that NS as resto. The only thing I can really think of besides miss-timing is lack of haste buff, is that perhaps the case?

[Deleted]

Saying something is stupid without knowing what you're capable of doing at 15.3k haste breakpoint is naive at best.

You know you can fit in CH, Healing Surge, or GHW between screeches at that haste level, right?

Shamans are very adaptable to fights. It's best to factor what classes you're healing with and how latency will affect those casts.

Do what best fits you and your raid.

I only do normal but I think the screech times are the same so here goes.

With just 9100 haste my chain heal becomes 1.9 sec and I can chain cast chain heal on the stack phase with a split second wait each time. I dont use conductivity but like above said it is perfectly viable. I stick with rushing streams, healing rain is even easier to place as it is about 1.7 secs cast time. I would guess that the output is similar using any of these talents on a stacked fight. No chance I would use the Riptide glyph though as I only cast it on tanks / 1 or 2 peeps for chain heal spam - I dont like the riptide glyph on any fight.