[Resto] HM Elegon

[land]

** Can't fix title, should say: [Resto] HM Garajal & HM Elegon

I saw this post in the resto guide but I think it deserves it own post:

"Also, was curious to talk with any other Resto druids that are in guilds currently working on Heroic Elegon, or Heroic Gara'jal. What are the healing playstyles that you use to combat burst damage? Did you feels yourselves lacking, or underpowered in these two fights?"

Disclaimer: I'm going to write this from a 10 man perspective.

HM Garajal: we 3 heal this, healers dps as much as they can to help with enrage - and with all the mana I get back in spir realm I usually go with some dps trinkets for this fight even as resto druid. Overall the fight doesn't seem much of a problem for us, we got good tanks with lots of mitigation and I just keep rejuvs rolling on the voodoo dolls with some regrowth spam every once in a while (since I get all my mana back in the spir realm, I'm not afraid of going nuts on regrowths). Also, we rotate spir shell with other cds like iron bark, spir link, pain supp on the tank taking the most damage (least geared usually).

HM Elegon: I've been struggling a bit with heroic elegon as a resto druid, usually our resto shammy and disc priest are the ones healing (I go balance and pop tranq at end) but I had a couple of weeks that I had to replace our shammy and we it sucked. The part me and the disc priest were struggling the have to burst to keep ppl alive and at the same time top off the soaker before he was going out to soak. One the first week we didn't assign a healer to watch over the dude going out and it was bad, the other week we assigned the disc priest to heal the soaker but he complained not having the burst either. We endup running out of time and are continuing this monday when the shammy is back. His burst is amazing and we usually 1 shot with him healing. I'm yet to kill this dude while healing as resto.

Next time we do this I'll suggest having me as the one healing the soaker since with the glyph of regrowth I can top ppl off real quick (3 globals are usually enough), maybe I'll do better than our priest on that part. The thing wiht this fight too is that is the tank doesnt time it right pulling the add off there's a lot of raid damage out and we had our tank on boss about to die with other 4-5 ppl reaaly low on hp besides the soaker. On top of that you have 3-4 ppl with that debuff (might be less, not sure). Its a reaally bursty fight and I really hate it. If only my tree of life was a smaller cd that I could pop more often to counter the damage with insta regrows...

Funny enough, was looking at the top resto druid in out realm and he's got a lot of heroic kills (cleared hm HoF if I'm not mistaken) but he doesn't have a kill for hm elegon. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Anyways, I'm also very curious how u guys handle this fight.

[Deleted]

Just killed HM elegon with me healing as resto together with a disc priest, both of us around 490 ilvl.

I don't see how it's a problem topping the soaker off before he runs out to soak as he shouldn't take any damage? The only damage he'll take is from that debuff the add throws out and possibly one pulse from him when he hits 25%. If he takes any other damage, either your tank is too slow or your soaker is taking unneccesary damage.
Topping them off once they've soaked is also real easy as a resto druid if you run with the regrowth glyph. Just run out, regrowth, rejuvenation and swiftmend. NS + HT is also a great idea.

The only issue I have healing it is keeping everyone alive in the last phase, but seeing as we start that phase with the boss around 25-30% health, it doesn't last for very long at all. Mana isn't an issue at all for me, but I'm running with 8500 + spirit flask. I usually just innervate once the beginning of first phase 2 and once in the beginning of last burn-phase. Pop a potion of focus in the 2nd phase 2.

Here's a log of our healing if you're interested in that.
http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-8p...?s=8037&e=8454

[Beastest]

When I was in the 480s ilvl I had some midfight mana issues on Elegon but I was always fine by he end and I never really thought much about the burst healing being a problem. It's not hard to get your efforvecents circle from your swiftmend to hit the person outside the circle and well timed rejuv and wild growth help too. What classes did you have soaking? That might be part of your problem. If its that bad you could precast some shrooms by the soakers and detonate when you need to.

[Maxvla]

On Elegon your disc should be dpsing the boss to heal. The boosted damage he is taking combined with the higher healing granted by the buff means he can actually to much more by dpsing than by healing. Towards the end on my disc I'm hitting Elegon for 300-400k per smite, almost a full heal on anyone in the group every 1.3 seconds. I actually do zero healing at all on Elegon when I'm playing my priest. I spirit shell at the start of phase 3, drop a barrier, then continue to dps until a tank needs a pain suppression. I think my last kill I did around 120k dps and 80k hps and was by far the highest healer simply by dpsing. My priest is 494 ilevel and is 14/16H.

As for druid specific, Elegon is really not bad at all. Shamans have more trouble because people tend to be spread out on this fight, specifically during the orb killing and pillar/collapse phase. During orbs, let your hots do their work. People will normally take 50-80% of their HP in damage per set of killed orbs. We split the raid to 2 sides so I toss rejuv on my 5 including myself, keep lifebloom ticking on someone for regrowth clearcasts and wild growth. When people return to the center to dps boss briefly after orbs have been killed I swiftmend someone, especially if they are sitting next to another player. During the pillar phase you should sit there doing absolutely nothing for 20-30 seconds until all pillars are down and you have moved to the console area to join with the other half of your raid to kill all the adds then move to the platform. This regen period is really important for progression pulls. I can pretty much do whatever I want now on that fight on my druid because my raid's ilevel is beyond the difficulty of the encounter, but I needed those times when it was our next heroic to kill in order to make it through the fight. For the soakers, I would let your other healer do it, and you stay inside keeping the Elegon tank stable. Every other healer has better single target nuke heals than our regrowth, not just in size/speed, but mana cost. If you are doing this with a disc that is dpsing, though, you should keep him on the platform and do your best to nuke heal efficiently (this fight in particular is excellent for un-glyphing regrowth if you are the one to heal the soakers since you can regrowth into swiftmend). This should get you around 150k for a reasonable amount of mana in a fast cast, assuming the regrowth still crits and the swiftmend does not. During my testing with un-glyphed regrowth I saw a normal crit rate of ~80% with a little crit on gear and raid buffs.

I would suggest not using spirit flask as was mentioned before. Intellect flask actually does more to give you mana than spirit flask due to spirit costing twice the budget of intellect. Stronger heals mean fewer heals cast.

For Spiritbinder, our first half dozen kills or so were 2 healed. Me on druid and our shaman. It was pretty rough as a druid since regrowth hits for so little compared to my shaman partner's heals able to burst like crazy. There were times we'd take several shadow attacks and even spamming regrowth (and having rejuv ticking) on all the dolls was not enough to keep up. Lucky for you, you have a disc who (again) can dps to heal to not only keep people alive but shorten the encounter and the length of the burn phase as well as providing pain suppression (which when cast on the tank reduces doll damage on the other 2 players as well) and power word barrier (make sure to catch the tank and both dolls at least, preferably the whole raid, since again it will reduce tank damage and thus doll damage, and then dolls take 25% less after that as well). Just have your disc go down once or twice and spam binding heal to build buffs on him/herself and the 2 dps in the spirit realm, and to restore his/her mana. I now do this fight on my disc and do 40-50k dps while 2 healing and providing those great cooldowns. When my partner healer has to go down I spirit shell, otherwise it's pure dps.

[land]

I see a couple of things we were doing it wrong base ur comments:

1) assigning the disc priest to heal/topoff the ppl going to soak (instead, he should be atonement boss and me keeping ppl alive by prehotting and rg when necessary). Interesting tip about efflo hitting outside too, I personally hate how the LoS works, gotta get my grid to show when ppl are outside - I can't see that and get a bit frustrating trying to heal when u cant.
2) our tank messed up the timing a few times and add aoe ticked on us 3-4 times instead of one.

By the way, we did this boss today with the shammy back and we 2 shotted it. The damn shammy died to adds but he ankh and with our 3 druids tranqs (bear, cat and me as balance) we manage to heal through the end - boss died really fast too as we were pushing 7 orbs each turn.

[Sinnerbenkei]

Hey, just a quick question what does your raid comp look like? Certain soakers make the fight extremely easy. I 2 heal this fight as a resto druid with a disc priest, and it's pretty insignificant when our shadow priest soaks. The key to the fight is to have someone who can, combined with disc priest shields, not go below 90% or whatever the exact threshhold is. For this reason we actually had our disc priest focus on topping/shielding the person who was soaking. Once we got that down it was pretty simple.

So what to take away from this:
* assign appropriate soakers
* top off the person and have the disc priest stack absorbs on the target
* have the disc priest top the person
* if the person is too low to be healed up quickly by the disc priest try to step out and instant cast a big heal on them to help the disc priest.

[Ashrr]

Your tank causing AOE damage is his fault, not a problem with the healing. Ideally, it shouldn't happen at all but even then, it's definitely healable as long as you don't take too many ticks. I killed it rather early on wearing quite a bit of blue gear but healing never seemed intense other than the final phase. I used Tree when we split sides.

P3 back then did hurt a bit but we rotated raid CDs and I spent all the mana I had on RJ blanketing. Another thing we did since we were a range heavy comp was stand at the edge of the platform and reset our stacks once by quickly popping out and back inside. I wouldn't advise this unless you're really struggling for mana since the phase gets over much quicker these days.

[Thexx]

For Gara'jal, we two-heal - a holy pally and myself as resto - when neither of us can get in the portal, a hybrid pops a CD and tops up the DPS inside. When I was gearing up, I'd use tranq the first time I was up top alone, and Incarnation the second time, spamming regrowths as needed. Depending on the tank's gear/CD usage, doll damage can be spiky - if you have a rogue in the group, have him pop smoke bomb to stop the damage from spirit adds when healing looks scary.

Elegon, to me, is one of the easier fights to heal as a druid. Again, I heal this with a holy pally, and I always have tons more mana left over going into the last phase than he does. Having good classes for soakers can make a huge difference. Our DK tank takes the first add, and our shadow priest the second. Your soaker should avoid the AoE damage and step out at the last second - if they go outside with full health, HoTs rolling and a shield from your disc, you may not need to have anyone jump out and heal. Switch your lifebloom stack to the soaker, and have a rejuv rolling so all you need to do is step out and SM if needed. Our soakers almost never need heals, but we have very good CDs available.

For the orb phase, I use Incarnation and roll Lifebloom on everyone on my side, which carries me through three orbs easily. HoTs and a couple quick direct heals are all you need to heal the other orbs. We kill five orbs each phase, your mileage may vary. The add damage as you're moving back into position can be a little scary - use a raid CD if needed to keep everyone alive.

For the last phase, the raid stacks up and burns. Use a raid CD as everyone gets into position (we use our feral's tranq.) Rotate raid CDs as needed; I rejuv blanket and SM/WG on CD until the boss drops dead. At this point we kill him so fast that we don't really need the CDs, but if your kills are sketchy you'll want to plan ahead.

Good luck! (:

[Deleted]

I see a couple of things we were doing it wrong base ur comments:

1) assigning the disc priest to heal/topoff the ppl going to soak (instead, he should be atonement boss and me keeping ppl alive by prehotting and rg when necessary). Interesting tip about efflo hitting outside too, I personally hate how the LoS works, gotta get my grid to show when ppl are outside - I can't see that and get a bit frustrating trying to heal when u cant.
2) our tank messed up the timing a few times and add aoe ticked on us 3-4 times instead of one.

By the way, we did this boss today with the shammy back and we 2 shotted it. The damn shammy died to adds but he ankh and with our 3 druids tranqs (bear, cat and me as balance) we manage to heal through the end - boss died really fast too as we were pushing 7 orbs each turn.

You shouldn't take a single aoe tick, just go out just before the tick comes and it should die superfast if your dps doesn't suck. We're going with three people on the add and it dies within a few seconds without us getting a tick.