Priest's guide to Dragon Soul Hardmodes

[Deleted]

Madness down. Ez fight

Grats! What worldrank?

[zakaluka]

Jelly, I notice you stay in chakra sanc for spine.

What do you think of chakra switching for this fight? On normal I like being in serenity after a roll, as long as I'll be healing debuffs. Switch back to sanc for nuclear blast and stay there until the next roll is over. I just found hw:serenity->ghealx3 to burn off a debuff faster than spreading renews.

Does something change in hard mode? Or am I just doing it wrong?

[Jellyphant]

Jelly, I notice you stay in chakra sanc for spine.

What do you think of chakra switching for this fight? On normal I like being in serenity after a roll, as long as I'll be healing debuffs. Switch back to sanc for nuclear blast and stay there until the next roll is over. I just found hw:serenity->ghealx3 to burn off a debuff faster than spreading renews.

Does something change in hard mode? Or am I just doing it wrong?

If you look at some of our earlier attempts I did this alot but found that having higher uptime on sanctuary and a constant 10% buff on renew gave me far more throughput. I compensated for the efficiency loss by stacking upwards of four thousand spirit, and found both my total throughput and sutainability to be significantly higher.

Grats! What worldrank?

Thanks ^^ For 25 mans this was a rank 15, overall rank 23.

[Deleted]

That's a very very nice guide.

For Hagara, there are several strategy tho, I don't know if it's covered already, but if you use the strategy where you pack in the middle, so that all the casters can multidot and dps every pillars, disc is also a very good option with the barrier allowing everybody to temporize while running to the middle.
I mean, once you're in the middle, to get the time to heal everyone.

Once again, good topic !

[Deleted]

Brilliant guide. Kudos on that Jelly. Loved reading every bit of it.

Since you haven't mentioned in detail the last two fights, I wanted to ask you for some tips regarding spine.

I run 10 mans with a Hpala and myself as holy/disc and would like to know how your team handled dispels and how you prioritized the fight in general, healing-wise of course.

We had a few tries yesterday but I was finding myself rather oom. I play a heavy mastery based holy spec since my main spec is disc and that's what I generally focus on.

[Jellyphant]

Brilliant guide. Kudos on that Jelly. Loved reading every bit of it.

Since you haven't mentioned in detail the last two fights, I wanted to ask you for some tips regarding spine.

I run 10 mans with a Hpala and myself as holy/disc and would like to know how your team handled dispels and how you prioritized the fight in general, healing-wise of course.

We had a few tries yesterday but I was finding myself rather oom. I play a heavy mastery based holy spec since my main spec is disc and that's what I generally focus on.

Thanks, appreciate it ^^.

I intend to get around to those guides eventually, just hard to find the motivation. Been using my time off from progression to catch up on some breaking bad =p. Anyway, on to your question.

We 5 healed the fight with 1 disc, 1 holy, 2 rsham, 1 rdruid. Our basic approach to the fight was this, there are three primary parts of the fight (well technically two) where there is raid danger. Assuming you 2 phase each tendon, theres the first explosion, the second explosion, and the roll following the removal of the plate. These are the times in which major cooldowns are needed. Since we didn't stack as many shamans as most guilds do, we needed raw throughput to get the debuffs off of people as quickly as possible. As such, we had a holy priest and resto druid for insane tranqs. We coupled this with 3 feral druid 4 pieces, which were active for each one of these phases. Aside from these three points, we made sure we were always using global cooldowns, as there is always something to heal on this fight. For this reason we stacked high amounts of spirit (With my trinket stacked I had well over 4k + jaws of defeat).

The resto druid and I were the primary debuff healers during the portions of the fight where there was no raid damage going out. Because of hots, we could be very precise and efficient with the healing we pumped into debuffs. The disc priest, being the worst of the debuff healers, was the primary dispeller and tank healer. The resto shamans were kind've a hybrid. We used their ground aoe and incidental aoe to do some efficient healing to debuffed people, and also to keep the raid up.

During the final plate, blood aggro starts to get out of hand. To deal with this, the healers moved to the front of the plate so the tank could quickly pick aggro off of us (and the bloods had a long way to go to get to us). Other than that, we just made sure we had efficient cooldown usage, and the fight was fairly easy to heal.

For your position I would recommend this: you have the pally do a beacon dance on debuffed people and pump large efficient heals into them and the tanks to cover the majority of the debuffs while you cover dispelling. Try to bait the buff onto tanks / heals at the start, as they will take the most damage. Whether you go holy or disc depends on your raid comps and the parts of the fight you're struggling with. I'd suggest holy just for the raw throughput. Throw renews up on the debuffed people and put good heals into the tanks. Pom and circle of healing will cover most of the raid healing, renew and beacon will deal the debuffs, and the rest of your efforts can be forced on dispelling and tank healing. Hope this helps, 10 man isn't my strong area =p

[Deleted]

Thanks a bunch for the info mate. Would make good use of it for sure.

And also gz on the rank for this fight. =)

[Powerlamer]

If i may, i just have one question: we are doing Yor'sahj HC 10, and i'm healing with a resto druid (i'm disci); my only question is about the healing debuff and Power Word Shield.

If i remove the Power word shield glyph, and use a shield on a target, it's not considere an heal am i right? The stack doesn't goes up... i guess/hope

[Deleted]

If i may, i just have one question: we are doing Yor'sahj HC 10, and i'm healing with a resto druid (i'm disci); my only question is about the healing debuff and Power Word Shield.

If i remove the Power word shield glyph, and use a shield on a target, it's not considere an heal am i right? The stack doesn't goes up... i guess/hope

I can answer that one. :P

PW:S Gives 1 stack of the debuff regardless of glyph or not.

[Deleted]

Thanks for the guides Jelly. It makes me sad that after Holy being so amazing for normal modes, heroic favours Disc once again due to Blizzard's "Stack up and mitigate AOE to win!" encounters

We've got Morchock, Zon'ozz and Hagara down now, can't wait to try Yor'sahj next reset

[Mazi]

Thanks for the tips for Spine Jelly. I was doing the Renew bit with Sanc before and GHeal spamming but my overall throughput definitely increased by keeping HW:Sanc down and focusing more on keeping Renew up than Ghealing

Spine down! US 7th World 27th

[Flay-]

Hey star, how are ya?!

[Jellyphant]

Thanks for the tips for Spine Jelly. I was doing the Renew bit with Sanc before and GHeal spamming but my overall throughput definitely increased by keeping HW:Sanc down and focusing more on keeping Renew up than Ghealing

Spine down! US 7th World 27th

Grats!! I'm so glad I was able to help you in some way ^^. Gogo get madness!

[Mazi]

Madness was a horrible disappointment to the end of this tier

[Exiztence]

Madness was a horrible disappointment to the end of this tier

An understatement.

[Jellyphant]

An understatement.

Indeed, but in a way it was a relief for this tier to finally be over x.x

WTB more tiers like t11

[Mazi]

Indeed, but in a way it was a relief for this tier to finally be over x.x

WTB more tiers like t11

The issue will forever be blizzard's normal -> normal / heroic -> heroic. T11 was so great because you actually spent time doing normal modes and THEN heroic modes. Every tier after that is 1 week of blowing normals then heroics. It's dumb.

[Jellyphant]

The issue will forever be blizzard's normal -> normal / heroic -> heroic. T11 was so great because you actually spent time doing normal modes and THEN heroic modes. Every tier after that is 1 week of blowing normals then heroics. It's dumb.

I'm just enamored with tier 11 because it was my first tier and everything was new and awe inspiring.

Now I'm jaded and upset at blizzard because of what spine did to my guild (went from world 3rd during first 6 bosses to world 15th because we refused to over recruit or borrow mages just for rankings).

And then to see us crush a fight that didn't require class stacking right after (lol like 24 pulls on madness >>) bleh..

[Zarqa]

Very nice guide. Just another Morchok question: If you do end up healing it as Holy, would everyone agree with Themos that Serenity with rolling renews and binding heal / fheal / gheal as needed and PoH/CoH once a crystal explosion? Or do other people find Sanctuary better, and why?

I have to say I miss that part in the guide: it doesn't always cover both Holy and Disc, even if one is clearly superior. I am a shadow main spec/holy offspec that does heal heroic on occasion. I don't have the experience to go Disc efficiently, so it's either Holy or nothing.

[Jellyphant]

Very nice guide. Just another Morchok question: If you do end up healing it as Holy, would everyone agree with Themos that Serenity with rolling renews and binding heal / fheal / gheal as needed and PoH/CoH once a crystal explosion? Or do other people find Sanctuary better, and why?

I have to say I miss that part in the guide: it doesn't always cover both Holy and Disc, even if one is clearly superior. I am a shadow main spec/holy offspec that does heal heroic on occasion. I don't have the experience to go Disc efficiently, so it's either Holy or nothing.

I would agree with themos in that sanctuary doesn't mesh well with the burst type damage. Single target chakra will be far more efficient.