Healing on Anub'arak HC

[Wulon]

So as topic says we're working on Anub'arak, as we try to get the most out of the raid one of the officers started a discussion about what specc some classes in the raid should be. In case of healing priests he told they should all be disc. I've asked why stacking disc priests but he couldn't quite tell why. Only that he got it from some stats other guilds who had killed him used.

I don't really have anything against respeccing disc but I just can't understand why stacking them up would be important or even an improvment for that matter since 2 or more disc priests tend to work alot against each other when it comes to shields. More then 1 disc don't really grant any buff improvment other then an extra Power Infusion either as I can tell.

Been looking on the subject for some time now and found some guilds who don't even use disc priests at all in their raids but do have holy one. Is this just a matter of miss information form the officer or is there a plan behind stacking discs?

[harky]

How many Priests are you using? Anub really does prefer Disc by a wide margin, but only up to a point. You can bring 3, but 4 is pushing it. The point is that you'll be using 3 tanks for P1, in P2 it's just a clustered mess and bubbling anyone with a scarab headed at them works great. For P3 you'll still have multiple tanks, but raid shielding becomes the absolute best healing strategy due to the encounter mechanics. It also lets you keep PS up on a tank for 24 seconds straight with 3 Disc Priests. Tank damage is amazingly high in P3. When you start getting 4 you're just over-stocked on Priests anyway. Druids are better on P3 because they don't instantly heal big bursts. Shaman are better for quickly bringing up DoT targets. Paladins are better for the same reason along with the obvious need for massive tank healing. Holy is really only that great on Anub if you have no Resto Druids. Most I've seen are using 2 Pallies, 2 Disc Priests, then some mix of Resto Druids and Resto Shaman.

[Qualia]

You should spec Disc for Anub, it's not that you can't kill him with a holy priest in raid, but a Disc priest is way more useful than a Holy one here. It doesn't mean you should stack more than 2 Disc priest though, since you won't want to bring more than 7 healers to this fight (1 pally 1 Disc 1 druid 1 shaman leave maximum 3 free slots for other healers).

First of all, Disc priest give PI. Give it to people with channeling AoE (SPriest for example), they (and your raid) will love it.
Secondly, let's go through the fight:
- P1: besides tanks' damage, there are barely any damage in raid. Whether your spec is holy or disc, it won't make a difference since you will probably Mind Sear / smite most of the time in this phase to help out DPS (unless you are on tank healing, and Disc will do it better than Holy anyway).
- P2: same as P1, you won't need strong raid heal. GS won't help much with kiting (maybe prolong kiter's life by 1sec?), BnS is a bit better, but it still can't beat 6 extra seconds from PS.
- P3: you won't want any raid heal at all here, except passive heals (Totem, JoL, LoTP, VE, etc.) & PC heal (6k dmg / tick DoT). Therefore, CoH / ProH / Renew is no good; A holy priest has to rely on his PW:S & FH to keep one PC target up while a disc priest can easily keep two PC targets alive at time (i.e: Shield, penance, Shield, FH) - I think Disc is the only spec that can reliably keep two PC targets up, but I can't be sure since I'm not a healer in Anub.
DON' T raid shield in P3, though. The absorb damages still heal Anub for full amount, and you won't want your PC target has a Weakened Soul debuff on him/her.

[Kyrstlol]

Its because theres not much healing to be done in the fight.
As previously mentioned, Phase 1 and 2. Your tanks will be taking damage, and a few people with PC.
Where Disc is super is Phase 3.
You have 22-23 people at 1-2k health, healing passively from JoL, HST, LotP, etc.
Maybe some low rank rejuv floating around.
5 people get Penetrating Cold.
You have 3 seconds to make sure they will all be able to take the 6k damage tick thats incoming 3 seconds later.
Between 2 Disc priests you can have a PW:S on 4 of them in ~2.5 seconds.
The other can be healed >7k.
Disc bubbles are advantageous in that since the target will still be at low HP (1-2k) Leech will only be ticking on your shield for 200-400 per second, meaning that unless you have naxx gear, the shield will still eat the first tick of PC.
Gives your other healers plenty of time to prop up HP for PC.

[DarkFerret]

- P2: same as P1, you won't need strong raid heal. GS won't help much with kiting (maybe prolong kiter's life by 1sec?), BnS is a bit better, but it still can't beat 6 extra seconds from PS.

No, GS forces a target change on spikes if the person with it gets hit. The person won't die if they keep moving, but the spikes don't slow down and will run off after someone else at full speed.

[harky]

That's only true if they charge direction in a manner that's optimal for the person who was saved. If Anub focuses on someone between him and the saved person, they'll be overtaken very quickly depending on when Anub hit them during their focus. Thus dying a second later.

[-Ethos-]

So as topic says we're working on Anub'arak, as we try to get the most out of the raid one of the officers started a discussion about what specc some classes in the raid should be. In case of healing priests he told they should all be disc. I've asked why stacking disc priests but he couldn't quite tell why. Only that he got it from some stats other guilds who had killed him used.

I don't really have anything against respeccing disc but I just can't understand why stacking them up would be important or even an improvment for that matter since 2 or more disc priests tend to work alot against each other when it comes to shields. More then 1 disc don't really grant any buff improvment other then an extra Power Infusion either as I can tell.

Been looking on the subject for some time now and found some guilds who don't even use disc priests at all in their raids but do have holy one. Is this just a matter of miss information form the officer or is there a plan behind stacking discs?

We use 2 Disc Priests, 2 Holy Pallies, 2 Resto Druids and a Resto Shaman to heal Anub.

We have two warrior tanks tanking two Burrowers each, and a Feral Druid tanking Anub.

One pally goes on each warrior with Beacon on the MT Druid and the Shaman spends the whole fight healing the druid.


For P1 the Disc Priests just DPS as there is such minimal damage, when the first set of Burrowers spawn and get moved next to Anub we PI our mages/spriests andcontinue using it on CD when the adds spawn again.
P2 is done pretty much different with each guild and as priests we dont do anything interesting this phase. Gogo hand of protection.

P3 is the first fight where stacking disc is beneficial. P3 is all about controlled healing, so thats why we can get away with stacking. Our RL using an addon that marks the 5 penetrating colds.
(http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/72/...0409195321.jpg)
The other priest and i get two marks assigned to us and our shadow priest shields the other mark to be safe. The druids roll hots on each mark and the Disc Priests flash heal/penance if neccessary their marks. The spriest helps out basically as insurance if people get overlapping Colds or if the targets Frost Pot or Healthstone is on CD.

Basically, with FRR Aura up Cold will tick for 4-5k. Penentrating Cold takes 3 seconds after application to do damage, because your raid will be kept at 1kish they'll die if they dot get a PWS or use a Frost Pot/ Healthstone. For that reason we are pretty much the difference between killing the boss and wiping.

[Deyus]

We used a 2 tank strategy with a feral on the boss and one warrior tanking all of the adds. Our healing setup was 2 holy pallies (beacon the tanks and spam HoL), 2 druids, a shammy, disc priest, and holy priest. We also used a mod to mark each penetrating cold target and had one of the raid healers assigned to each mark.

Disc is good in conjunction with druids for healing targets with penetrating cold as the shield can give the druids an extra buffer to get their hots rolling. If you are using a 3 tank strategy a second Disc priest might be superior to Holy, but remember that Holy is pretty good for that fight too due to the Body and Soul talent (increased run speed is win for kiters during P2 - especially if you only use 2 HoP's).

To minimize the healing to Anub during P3 we had all healers avoid smart heals (ie. no PoM, Wild Growth, Chain Heal, etc.).

[Chispy]

I really dont see why you want to bring a holy priest to the fight anyway. If you're having trouble kiting without the use of B&S then you're doing it wrong. 2 Disc >>> 1 Disc 1 Holy. Even if you only use 1 BoP per kite. If the BoP will go off a bit early you can have one of the Disc priests put Pain Suppression on the target, they will live if they get spam healed. Should only last for a few seconds anyway.

[Kelesti]

I really dont see why you want to bring a holy priest to the fight anyway. If you're having trouble kiting without the use of B&S then you're doing it wrong. 2 Disc >>> 1 Disc 1 Holy. Even if you only use 1 BoP per kite. If the BoP will go off a bit early you can have one of the Disc priests put Pain Suppression on the target, they will live if they get spam healed. Should only last for a few seconds anyway.

It's not that you kite him faster, it's that with a speed buff, you can kite him farther out, taking longer coming back in. The further you can do this safely, the more time your raid has to deal with everything else. Limited Ice means you want to stall as much as you can. And really, if you doubt having 1/1 Priests, and think 2/0 in favor of Discipline is superior, well, shielding the leeching aura is nice and all, but the raid still takes damage. Spending all GCD's on maxing out 25 people with a mending bouncing around, maybe a penance doesn't stabilize anywhere near as good as one does, with Holy Priests using a faster mending, Empowered Renew, a Circle, and healing to counter the hungering cold.

People see that Discipline is getting brought to every hard mode, so they're jumping all over it like it's FotM, but Holy still has a lot of give to it, and you have to take a second look at it.

[Deyus]

Ahh yes, the "you're doing it wrong" crew. Personally I consider anything that kills the boss to be "doing it right". After all, if the boss is dead it can't be that wrong, can it?

B&S has some significant advantages for phase 2, such as allowing everyone to remain clumped near the tank patch by giving the kiter a "sprint" to get some separation quickly. A clumped raid lets you kill the remaining burrowers faster (good) and have an easier time preventing the swarm scarabs from reaching raid members (also good). It's a tool that can be used to help get the job done easily. It's not the only tool out there, but it can be an effective one if the strategy you use lends itself to it.

For the OP, a holy spec has some good tools for Anub'arak. If holy is what you love there's no need to spec disc in order to make the raid successful. Work out a healing strategy that uses the strengths of that spec and you'll be fine.


Also, depending on your group setup active heals or shields for leeching swarm may not be required. Our LS healing is strictly passive (and because of this using shields to prevent LS damage effectively useless). The groups look something like:

1) 2 tanks, 3 melee with self healing abilities (DK/warrior).
2) 2 dps shammies (without healing stream glyph), 2 ranged dps, 1 healer.
3) 1 shadow priest, 3 ranged dps, 1 healer.
4) 1 shadow priest, 2 rogues, 2 other melee.
5) 1 resto shammy (with the healing stream glyph), 4 other healers.

If you don't have sufficient passive heals using shields and active healing might be worthwhile, I don't know though as we didn't consider that option with our comp.

[Qualia]

shielding the leeching aura is nice and all

No, it's not. It's terrible actually. The absorbed damage STILL heals Anub (i.e: The Leeching Swarm hit for 5000 dmg, fully absorbed, it will still heal Anub for 5000*120% before any healing reduction), and having weakened souls on raids make it much harder for a Disc Priest to keep 2 PC targets up.

with Holy Priests using a faster mending, Empowered Renew, a Circle, and healing to counter the hungering cold.

This is bad. You will want your raid to sit at *minimum* hp possible to survive 250dmg/tick from Leeching Swarm (except tanks, of course). A heal that heals for more than 200 hp will just hurt your raid, so, no CoH, PoM and renew on raid, FH and Shield (or maybe GS, but you would want to give it to your MT anyway) are your only helpful tools to keep PC target up.
A disc priest can keep his targets up much easier than a holy one (not saying a normal spec'd Holy priest can't keep two PC targets up, but I don't see how it will be as easy as Disc). If you assign 1 healer - 1 PC target, any spec is fine, though.

It's not that Discipline is FotM, but it brings much more than Holy in this certain fight since there is no raid-wide heal needed. PI for dps, PS for 8 extra sec kiting (should be at least equal to BnS 4s sprint), and good single-target heals.

[Klorox]

For the most part, there's no drawback to having multiple Discipline Priests. Having a 2nd Pain Suppression for tank damage reduction, Power Infusions, and Bubbles galore are all useful in regards to pre-Phase 3 healing. And as most posters have stated, the goal in Phase 3 for ALL healers (with the exception of the tank healers) is manage your mana and do as little overhealing in P3 as possible. I think for once this becomes the case where I agree with Blizzard in their "bring the player, not the class/spec" philosophy. We got Insanity last week and the healing set-up we used was actually different from our 2-3 previous weeks of Anub'arak kills.

Normally, we used 3 Holy Paladins, 2 Restoration Druids, 1 Restoration Shaman, 1 Discipline Priest. 3 Holy Paladins was a pretty easy decision seeing as we had 3 active Holy Paladins in our raids to start with and you can never go wrong with a second Beacon of Light on the main tank (2 on the MT, 1 on the OT). One of the Paladins (in our case, me) was placed on one of the specific Penetrating Colds. As someone else mentioned before, we use a Grid modification that allows a player-written script to assign a Raid Icon to each of the Penetrating Colds. So we had 2 Druids, 1 Shaman, 1 DPriest, and me healing PC.

The week we killed Anub'arak with 50 attempts left, we were forced to use one less Paladin and one more Druid than we normally used. Worked just fine, but surprisingly slightly less well than our normal set-up. I suppose the added bonus of a third beacon and Holy Shock glyphed to have a five second cooldown was rather helpful.

There's really no "right" way to do it, so long as all five of the healers have the reaction times and skills to cover and keep their Penetrating Cold target alive. How they do so, whether it's their spec or their talent choices, is more often than not a case of skill and class knowledge.

For Burrow Phase reference, we've never had to use Body and Soul or Pain Suppression to lengthen our time between using Ice Patches. We just use 2 Hand of Protections in the first down phase, and then the 3rd Hand of Protection in the second down phase. This consistently leaves us with 1 unused Ice Patch for Phase 3. Also, we only use 2 tanks during any of the phases. Death Knight tank on Anub'arak and a Warrior tank (geared/talented for threat and block over pure avoidance and survivability) on the four Nerubian Burrowers.

TLR - We've never felt the need to have our priest change his talent either which way since we don't explicitly rely on Body and Soul or Pain Suppression/Power Infusion. We leave his consistency and ability to keep his assigned Penetrating Cold target alive entirely up to him.

[Puupi]

I don't want to go into too much detail about the healing in P3, but I would like to address the question OP had about Disc priests.

Overall, Disc priest are better than holy in P3. But for the whole fight, holy priest with Body and Soul makes lots of stuff easier.

Body and Soul shield is very useful , for example, in these situations:
- MT moves the boss
- Add tanks move adds/kite them/go grab them
- People are being pursued by Anub
- Scarabs are attacking someone

As far as P3 healing (considering Penetrating Cold heals) goes, I think every class/spec can heal Penetrating Cold. The thing you should really focus on, is getting lots of haste in your gear. Anub'arak P3 is the only "real" content in the game for the moment, and haste is superior to any other stat in that situation. Stack haste, and your targets stay alive. You can heal every other hard mode boss in the instance with that haste gear. When Icecrown comes, you might need to re-gem your gear again, but who cares

[harky]

No, it's not. It's terrible actually. The absorbed damage STILL heals Anub (i.e: The Leeching Swarm hit for 5000 dmg, fully absorbed, it will still heal Anub for 5000*120% before any healing reduction), and having weakened souls on raids make it much harder for a Disc Priest to keep 2 PC targets up.

This is completely missing the point. You shield the targets while they're at low health, minimizing the amount of healing anub gets. If you were to heal them instead their health would go up and give him more healing. If you were to ignore them then when DoTs hit you'd always be at risk of either over-healing Anub, or letting someone die. That's the entire point; you're preventing deaths without increasing health. You don't shield targets who are at high health, you shield the ones are are already low. The shield lasts longer, making PC easier to deal with and minimizes Anub's healing and raid safety.

As far as Holy being better in P1/2, I'd contend that that completely doesn't matter. I don't know of any competent guilds wiping in those phases regardless of what healers they bring. That's completely up to the DPS. I spend most of P1 using Mind Sear as Disc.

[DarkFerret]

This is completely missing the point. You shield the targets while they're at low health, minimizing the amount of healing anub gets. If you were to heal them instead their health would go up and give him more healing. If you were to ignore them then when DoTs hit you'd always be at risk of either over-healing Anub, or letting someone die. That's the entire point; you're preventing deaths without increasing health. You don't shield targets who are at high health, you shield the ones are are already low. The shield lasts longer, making PC easier to deal with and minimizes Anub's healing and raid safety.

As far as Holy being better in P1/2, I'd contend that that completely doesn't matter. I don't know of any competent guilds wiping in those phases regardless of what healers they bring. That's completely up to the DPS. I spend most of P1 using Mind Sear as Disc.

Shield is for targets that get hit with PC. You don't sit there and keep shield on 25 people in P3. That's how people die from the first PC tick, because you have a healer that's busy watching for whose weakened soul expires first, instead of healing his PC target. Though, I guess in some people's cases, it's easier to watch 24 people instead of 25.

[G l o w y r m]

Discipline makes the fight (and almost every other fight in the game) go smoother. It's possible with a myriad of raid setups of course, but Discipline really shines on this fight.

Damn, I love Discipline so damn much...

[Marw]

P3 is the first fight where stacking disc is beneficial. P3 is all about controlled healing, so thats why we can get away with stacking. Our RL using an addon that marks the 5 penetrating colds.
(http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/72/...0409195321.jpg)

I was wondering what the name is of this addon, it can be very usefull. Also like to know what the addon will do when 10 Penetration Cold debuffs are up. The PC cd for Anub is a bit shorter then the PC duration so sometimes new PC debuffs are up before the other debuffs ran out. Will this addon mark the new PC targets while the other PC debuffs are still up?

[Revitalize]

We use 2 Disc Priests, 2 Holy Pallies, 2 Resto Druids and a Resto Shaman to heal Anub.

We have two warrior tanks tanking two Burrowers each, and a Feral Druid tanking Anub.

One pally goes on each warrior with Beacon on the MT Druid and the Shaman spends the whole fight healing the druid.


For P1 the Disc Priests just DPS as there is such minimal damage, when the first set of Burrowers spawn and get moved next to Anub we PI our mages/spriests andcontinue using it on CD when the adds spawn again.
P2 is done pretty much different with each guild and as priests we dont do anything interesting this phase. Gogo hand of protection.

P3 is the first fight where stacking disc is beneficial. P3 is all about controlled healing, so thats why we can get away with stacking. Our RL using an addon that marks the 5 penetrating colds.
(http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/72/...0409195321.jpg)
The other priest and i get two marks assigned to us and our shadow priest shields the other mark to be safe. The druids roll hots on each mark and the Disc Priests flash heal/penance if neccessary their marks. The spriest helps out basically as insurance if people get overlapping Colds or if the targets Frost Pot or Healthstone is on CD.

Basically, with FRR Aura up Cold will tick for 4-5k. Penentrating Cold takes 3 seconds after application to do damage, because your raid will be kept at 1kish they'll die if they dot get a PWS or use a Frost Pot/ Healthstone. For that reason we are pretty much the difference between killing the boss and wiping.

What raid frames are those?

[-Ethos-]

Frames are Pitbull, the addon to mark PC is called Penetrator (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-a...enetrator.aspx) The only problem is if he takes his time using PC and then overlaps it with his next set it wont mark them, so you'll need a backup plan like setting your raid frames to show a glow effect for PC people.