Monday, January 10, 2011

Healing Chimaeron

Most of the bosses I've faced so far have been dealt with in a similar fashion for me:
  1. Keep lifebloom on a tank.
    Pop ToL if I want to roll lifebloom on two tanks. Refresh it with nourish or, if necessary, HT. I'm pretty comfortable with rolling two lifeblooms, though sometimes fumble them from range or spell pushback.
  2. Rejuv and swiftmend on raid damage
    ....trying to place the green puddles appropriately for maximum healing effect. Nourish, lifeblooms, and NS+HT if necessary and the tank doesn't need it more. Pop ToL if I need to spam lifebloom across the entire raid.
  3. OoC procs for regrowth or HT.
    As the most expensive heals, why not make them free?
  4. Tranquility!
    ...if the raid is spiraling the drain, and WG if it's less dire.
Generally speaking, it's worked, if a bit underwhelming on the mana management when I need to raid heal. THIS DID NOT WORK FOR CHIMAERON.

Chimaeron took my healing methods and said, "Okay, let's see how much I can screw with you. RAID HEALING, GO!"

I panicked. An entire raid constantly near death is a healer's nightmare to begin with, but the concept of just keeping everyone afloat above 10k health is a manageable one after you spend some time seeing everyone constantly drop to 1 hp and not die, due to Finkle's Mixture. You adapt; you say, "okay, as long as I keep you above 10k hp, you'll all live." I added a little Grid debuff warning for the Low Health debuff.

But I still was panicked.

This was not the standard healer panic of seeing lots of low health bars... no, this was the panic of facing a fight I didn't think I could, in current druid mechanics, handle. The raid damage was too high, and my HoTs weren't ticking fast enough to top people past 10k before the next health-dropping ability splatted them to the stone floor. And in my attempts to make it work, I was going OoM by 90% boss health.

I was upset. I was frustrated. And then my raid leader chucked me in a vent channel with the other healers and said "make it work."

Silence. My frustration boiling over, I waited for the others to speak first. Was this boss even possible for us right now? I wasn't sure. I didn't know if the others could handle the raid healing, and I knew that I alone couldn't handle the tanks.

You know what?

We made it work.

Props to Togopan (holy priest) and Draukadin (holy pally): I was the third wheel in that fight.

We grouped all of the ranged DPS in one party with the holy priest, who was chain-spamming Prayer of Healing in all its party-only glory (edit: yes, it can be cast on other parties, but we had him focus on only one party). He set up a lightwell in melee range. We put the other two healers (me, holy pally) with the melee (one cat) and the tanks in the other group: two healers dedicated to this group. And while Draukadin used Beacon and Protector of the Innocent and Flash of Light and Holy Radiance and all those wonderful paladin spells, and while the two tanks taunted the boss back and forth during the double-strike to keep from being sliced in half by Chimaeron's claws, I built a healing rotation and stuck to it.

A healing rotation.


Healing Rotation: Backstory

To truly appreciate my situation, you have to understand something about healing rotations. I was once told, back in Wrath, that I was a horrible player because I didn't use a healing rotation. This was coming from a sub-50 alt whose main was a caster DPS class, of course: a player whose entire world is focused on damaging a mob, not healing someone. Not triage. The concept of not using a casting rotation was a foreign, evil, wrong, bad, ludicrous idea to him. Of course, him saying I was bad because I didn't use a healing rotation to triage my raids became a huge running joke in my guild. Me with my Bane of the Fallen King title, world-2nd 10-strict guild to get it, was bad because I don't use healing rotations.

Healing rotations don't work, generally speaking. Healing is a more fluid creature, reactive to the health pools, aggro, gear, and decisions of the raiders around you as the combat situation shifts, new creatures coming in, walls of fire charring people, aggro being stolen or swapped, debuffs being gained, and so on. Healing is a triage situation: who is taking the most damage, and is more important to the overall survival of the raid? What spell is best for the situation: how fast are they dieing, is the mana use worth the cost or is it sustainable, will it leave me unable to save someone more important later? Rotations were not for such dynamic situations. Rotations were for healers who weren't capable of quick thinking, healers who couldn't do their jobs.

So, healing rotations were a joke. Something we laughed at.

The irony of the situation struck me hard last night, as I started testing how many lifeblooms I could roll and what I could fit into the refresh cycle during a break in the raid.


The Rotation

With party 1 covered by the priest, the paladin self-sufficient with his own heals and the tanks half-covered by the paladin as well, that left me 2 people I absolutely had to keep up, and then whatever else I could throw at the tanks. Okay, I know I can roll 2 lifeblooms: why not a third, if that's all I'm doing?

Shortly after the pull, I popped Tree of Life and got my lifeblooms rolling: four to start, with a focus on keeping three main ones up. If the fourth dropped, I didn't sweat it. I told the paladin which of the tanks I was keeping a constant lifebloom on, and that's all that really mattered. Lifeblooms on me, tank1, and melee cat. These are the three I would try to keep up come hell or high water. While ToL was still active, I popped lifeblooms on tank2 and anyone else I could reach, and started my nourish rotation. I went straight down the last three players of my grid frames because our alphabetical arrangement made it pretty easy.
  1. Nourish self.
  2. Nourish tank1.
  3. Nourish melee cat.
  4. Cast something shorter than nourish/HT: regrowth, or instant casts. WG, or lifebloom on tank 2, or regrowth on a tank, or on someone who had lingered with Low Health for too long. I could, if I was tight in my GCDs, cast two insta-casts (rejuv + swiftmend, or two LBs) before needing to refresh the cycle, but this was risky.
  5. Rinse, repeat.
With this, I could have kept 4 full stacks of lifebloom rolling by using LB on tank 2 and nourishes on the other three, and at times I did have this going. But I appreciated the flexibility of the fourth block of my rotation to sometimes cast regrowth during an OoC proc, or use WG, or swiftmend, and letting the 4th lifebloom bloom itself on tank2 was often beneficial.

On the plus side, I had absolutely no mana issues: nourish and lifebloom are our cheapest heals. It was only when I fumbled the stacks and lost one (or all) and I had to use the more expensive heals instead until ToL came off of cooldown and I could restart my lifebloom stacks that I then had any sort of mana problems. In future attempts, I will be looking to cast my innervate on the poor OoM holy pally instead.


Beyond my Heals

Due to the cast-heavy and time-strict nature of balancing 3-4 lifebloom stacks, it was beneficial that I was chosen to be the stack target for Fued. They stuck a big orange circle on my head and I stood near melee with the lightwell and it wasn't until about 20% boss health that I moved even an inch from that spot. Everyone would periodically move over and hang out and give me hugs while spamming their own survival/healing cooldowns (feral's tranquility, moonkin's tranquility, etc etc) and I kept chugging along with my healing rotation. They'd flee as the bot came back online and massacre was cast and poisons would start flinging around, and I was still standing there, trucking along through my rotation.

And then at 22% or so: I pop ToL again. I spam lifeblooms across the whole raid afresh, and tranquility, and get everyone as high as I possibly can because come the 20% mark, there's no more healing.

I look up. I see the boss before me, the Mortality debuff bright near my minimap, and I gulp. "Well, here goes," I say to myself, and start DPSing. I smile to myself that I have no DPS rotation. I spam wrath, and try to keep moonfire and insect swarm on the boss, while everyone in ventrilo is going wild with trying to survive as long as they can and DPS, and when it's finally my turn, I'm bearform and using frenzied regen and barkskin in vain hope of surviving more than a couple seconds, strafing away to keep my furry tail from his claws, even as I'm tugged across the room by a priest's lifegrip and Chimaeron swipes out and double-strikes my face.


An interesting fight. One that challenged me, as a healer, in brand new ways. While I would hate having a "healing rotation" as strict as that become the norm, it was a challenge that I enjoyed, simply for its deviance from the norm. I know better, now, my limits on how many lifeblooms I can roll at my current haste level.

See you next week, Chimaeron. I won't be panicking this time.

29 comments:

Vènividivici said...

Congrats! We haven't attempted that fight yet, but I haven't been looking forward to it.

One comment and one question:

Try popping ToL while everyone is still buffing/eating/chatting and get your LBs rolling early - refresh with Nourish until the fight begins - you're now at full mana, 2 or 3 stacks rolling - and ToL is nearly off CD should you happen to fumble the refresh cycle early on.

Question: from a numbers perspective, how did your 3-4 stack of LB rolling and spot raid heals measure up against your Pally and Priest?

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, Chimaeron is indeed a very difficult fight for us Resto Druids!

Unfortunately for us, both Nourish and Regrowth currently are insufficient heals for the debuff. So we're stuck using HT.

What my group ended up doing was assigning healing like this: Paladin was assigned to spam heals on the double-attack tank, beaconing the main tank, healing himself through Poti. Rdruid (me) was assigned to heal the top-left splashed target. Rshaman assigned to heal the bottom-right splashed target. On Massacre, I just splashed a WG and Nourish x2-3 until out of Low Health. The Shaman did a similar strategy: riptide self, HW x2.

As far as I have been able to tell, after completing 10/12 fights on 10m and 7/12 on 25m, the 10m fights are tuned to be harder. Certainly, we've been able to let dummies die on 25 man and still beat encounters, and there's no way you can afford to lose people on 10 man.

Alyae said...

I was actually surprise we beat this after gettign spanked so early on most of our other attempts, but something changed when the RL and I pushed kae and the other healers in a seperate channel to discuss.

If one thing holds true about Vortex, it's that we're determined, and we always try to find ways to fix our issues, and Kae did just that with the healers. Bravo! :D

I look forward to our next week of raiding come Tuesday.
First real week of raiding went fairly decent considering the time spent.

Beruthiel said...

Kae - I'm a little confused on your comments re: your Holy Priest's use of PoH being group only. This was changed quite some time ago and they can cast PoH on any group - it will only heal the 5 people in the casted group, but it can be cast out of party. It seems that you had him healing only the group he was in, and placed him in that group specifically to do that. Did I misunderstand what you said about that?

I ask because what worked really well for us with a Priest/Pally/Druid combo was having the Holy Priest chain PoH between the two groups when the Bile o Tron was offline. So she'd start with group 2, then PoH group 1, then PoH group 2, then PoH group1 - you get the point - until the Bile o Tron came back online. And it worked beautifully, giving the Holy Paladin and myself time to work in other heals without the worry anyone would be dead before we got to them.

Also, what I found worked really well for my spit target when I needed to quickly get them back up to 10k health (and yes, I was equally as frustrated with trying to heal this as you sound!) was to rejuv/swiftmend - if swiftmend was down rejuv/regrowth (although - once you factor in the GCD a HT might be just as effective if SM is on CD). That seemed to get everyone to 10k health every time.

My last question was how did you do the tank swaps? Keeping your "main tank" at only the 10k he needs to survive a hit and your OT/Taunt tank topped off? I was able to largely just keep a LB on the OT with our paladin beaconing the MT healing the OT when he taunted (or healing the MT w/ beacon when OT was already full) to keep the MT at 10k. If you aren't already keeping only one tank topped off - that might help the mana crunch some!

Not trying to say OMG DO IT MY WAY! Just trying to offer some alternative (less stressful!) healing strategies :)

Kae said...

@Vènividivici:
I considered that, but found it uneccessary. The damage didn't really start until well after I had time to move into position and get things rolling, and ultimately it was the movement itself that kept me from being able to really pre-pop ToL and get things rolling. As long as I didn't fumble, having the cooldown available wasn't a problem, too :)

As for comparative healing, I was pushing out some insane HPS given how little mana I was using. My healing was steadily comparative to that of the other healers.

Log of all Chim attempts:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/9qmdp4fmgzs9tn2k/sum/healingDone/?enc=bosses&boss=43296

Log of kill:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/9qmdp4fmgzs9tn2k/sum/healingDone/?s=13583&e=13927

Kae said...

@Beru:

Well, the priest told me it was party-only, so I went off what he told me. I may have misinterpreted his meaning, but he was only spamming on one group for the most part--on the kill, he got one hit of PoH off on the tank group. Considering that we had 3-4 lifeblooms running in that party, though, it may just never have been necessary: the one un-LB'ed target was the self-healing holy paladin.

Alyae and Rycharde/Theladas can speak better to the tanking situation, so I'll let them comment on that :) All I can really say is that Alyae's health was typically a lot lower than Rycharde's, and I had my lifebloom rolling constantly on Rycharde.

How was your mana with the HT strategy for topping off targets?

Alyae said...

Actually he said it was part only but it can be cast out of party.
I remember but the caveat was that it was chewing through a lot of his mana, so he was concerned abotu doing that for both parties.

Alyae said...

I was the MT for this fight, and the OT taunted after the first hit of the double thingy so i wouldn't get gibbed to death by the two large hits.

After that I would wait for my health to go up, and teh boss debuff to leave, and taunt.

We were never really concentrating on keeping both tanks full. Only constantly above 10K which is enough when the bot is online. Pretty sure my heath never really got to far over 50% for any duration worth noticing.

As a prot pally, by the end of the fight I was doing a lot of my own healing. Every 3 holy power gives me more then 10K worth of health. The boss dosen't hit very fast, just very hard when he does hit. The tanks rarely we're the ones to die first once we got our strat down.

Beruthiel said...

@Kae -

I might have been unclear! I used Rejuv/Regrowth for my spit people if SM was on cooldown - and my mana was tight, but doable. HT might have been a better option.

I took one target, the priest took a second target. If the groups were split, she would to the G1 target I'd do the G2 target. If they were both in the same group, she'd heal the first alphabetically and I'd heal the second (both our grid's were set up the same way).

After a massacre - she's do her group heal bit in group 1, and the Holy paladin and I would handle group 2, with her filling in once her PoH was finished. I saved my WG for this and then would rejuv/nourish people back to the 10 k. With the paladin and priest helping we never lost anyone in my group after a massacre.

While the Bile-o-Tron was offline is when we'd do the rotating PoH groups. In that phase I'd ToL the first time we got there, Tranquility the second, and ToL the end of the third when ToL came back up going into the final phase. I'd Rejuv/WG/SM in between. Mana was tight - but doable for sure.

With regards to holy priest mana - is your priest using renew for this encounter? If so, take it completely out of their rotation. Once ours did that, the PoH spam became extremely mana efficient (she ended the fight with an unbelievable amount of mana left, I was jealous). I believe she used PoH, Binding Heal, Flash Heal (for spit targets) and PoM exlusively for this encounter (you are welcome to dig throuh the logs of our second kill - which is where we changed to this smoother healing strategy - to see exactly what her breakdown was). She stayed in the PoH chakra 100% of the time - and renewed it with PoM when necessary.

@Alyae - what we ended up doing that worked really well for the tanking (and healer stress!) was having one tank that did nothing but take the double attack. He was kept topped off 100% of the time. When the double attack was coming he'd take the first hit - survive and still be above 10k life because he was topped off - and then take the second hit, surving from the Bile-o-Tron. After the second hit, the other tank would taunt back. We kept the tank that was on Chimereaon full time at just the 10k health needed to survive (this was easily done via the paladin beaconing him). We made sure the Taunt tank was always full health to survive the full double attack, and just top him up after the other tank had taunted back. If the double attack lined up with a massacre, he'd rotate cooldowns and we'd use healer cooldowns on him to ensure he lived. It really minimizes the amount of healing that needed to be thrown at the tanks, made tank damage very predictable and gave a lot of room for the healers to take care of everything else in the encounter.

Hope that helps! :)

Beruthiel said...

oops! Quick correction on the priest healing, I believe she'd use a CoH after massacre while the Bile-o-Tron was online to help with group two, but only if the paladin and I didn't have it in order.

I'd forgotten to add that she used CoH in her list of spells - but not often, and only if needed, relying more on PoH when the Bile-O-Tron was offline.

(sorry for the comment spam!)

Theladas said...

Yeah, the only challenge for the tanks on this one (Alyae the paladin, and myself the warrior) was handling Double Strikes. The taunt back-and-forth approach trivialized this, though. Basically, I would taunt in as soon as I saw the DS buff go up, and would call over vent as soon as I saw the buff consumed. The 10-15s between DS's gives the healers plenty of time to pick me up to ~140k health so I can safely survive two 120k hits (if they're unmitigated, and I don't have any Break stacks, I was getting hit for about 120k per swing, so that was the worst-case we needed to prep for). Even with the maximum of 4 break stacks on our MT, she only needed 25k healing (reduced by 60%, leaving her with 10k effective healing) to survive each incoming attack, so the healing demands on the tanks were actually quite manageable after this: no more frantic "gotta top off the MT through these single-hits to survive the next DS" crap.

A note for tanks: Massacre will consume the Double Strike buff if it is active before he gets another melee swing off. This was happening to every second or third double-attack for us, which felt a little silly. It definitely beats the alternative though.

As for the healing assignments, we gave the H Priest the ranged group because he was at range, too, and so could guarantee that the whole party was in range of his PoH. During Feuds, which is when the Bile-o-Tron is offline, he continued to focus on the ranged group because they were needing his attention more: the melee group was loaded down with LBs and Beacons. We decided that PoH would've been largely wasted on the melee group, though we knew full well that we could get PoH to hit us without group-swapping. After all, if he's cycling PoH and burning his mana like a champ, there's not a lot else that our other two healers needed to cover - seemed like a fairer distribution of labor to have him watch just one group.

Kae said...

No worries on the comment spam :) Happens every now and then!

I do love the discussion, though, it's good to see what others have done to make such a difficult encounter work!

Anonymous had mentioned they were "stuck using HT" to counter the damage, along with nourish and WG.

As for our priest, looks like by logs that he only cast a couple of renews. PoH, CoH, and lightwell were his top heals. He didn't go OoM to my knowledge, though: the only one who absolutely went bone-dry was our paladin healer. Either way, I'm sure both of the Vortex priests wouldn't mind taking a peek at your kill logs for your priest's strategy :)

Alyae said...

@Beruthiel

That's basically what we did.
Sometimes he would take both double attacks, and sometimes one.
It really depended on the taunt. If there was a timer for that I certianly did not have one so it was a taunt when required/alert on type of scenero.

Basically, once we got the strat down, we never had a problem with the healing (especially on the tanks) until the bots wen't offline.

I used raid wall for every second one, and my holy radiance on every one. Our boomkin used tranquility, and so did the feral druid in cooldown rotations.

It really only took us two tries after Kae worked with the other healers to secure a kill.

While your strat makes sense, aside from the specifics of what the priest was doing. (I don't know) it was basically the same.

Dalthas said...

This reminds me of healing during the trash waves back in Hyjal. Another druid and I would roll lifebloom on 3 or 4 tanks (my memory is a little fuzzy there), while weaving rejuvs in.

That was also the easiest way to top the healing meters! :P

Togopan said...

I only used renew on myself mainly just incase PoH didn't heal for 10k, (somtimes just below) so that right after a massacre if I got hit with a Caustic Slime it wasn't a problem. When it came to mana, I only really had an issuse towards the end but then the final stage started so, not really an issue to a degree.

I can cast PoH on the other group yes, but like stated, it would of been a waste of mana sometimes since the lightwell and kae's hots had that group pretty much at 10k constantly.

Feud was the only time I use PoH on the other group unless otherwise needed.

CoH was tossed out for a small help.

and Divine Hymn for a feud or just before the pushover to the final phase.

It all comes down to not overhealing because you only need to get the person to 10k and tossing out a heal to someone who seems like the need it.

Beruthiel said...

Kae -

Here is the parse for that night, if you'd like to look at it:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/0u01fm6y7o82btss/

We might have pulled the boss on accident without the bile-o-tron once or twice... -_-

One other thing that I forgot to ask you was during the time when the Bile-O-Tron was offline, did you have everyone group up? We piled everyone at max range of Chimeron, including the tanks, so that the damage was split between all 10 people. I am assuming that you all did that as well, but thought it was worth asking! :)

@Theladas - I understand your reasoning with regards to the PoH and wanting the other healers to "have to do their share". Our first kill we did not have our priest do the PoH spam, and it was very rough on ALL of the healers, and every last one of us was at the bottom of our mana bar pushing into the final phase. The second kill, we swapped our healing strategy, and it was so, so much better. I can't even tell you how much better it was.

Believe me - there are absolutely other things for the healers to be helping heal when the bile-a-tron is off line, one priest can't solo heal it - it's absolutely still a group effort, but adding the PoH to *both* groups added so much stability to that phase, I can't even tell you how much it helped. Once we changed the strategy we didn't lose a single person when the bile-o-tron was offline. And more than that, there was never the risk of losing someone either.

And from another healer's PoV, it really smoothed out that phase and made it so much less stressful for me. Even if you decide not to go with it - giving it a whirl the next time you are there to "test" it out might be worth it, for Kae's stress level if nothing else!

Regardless - I was just offering thoughts for munching on and a different insight on how we handled the challenges with a similar healing configuartion. Thought it was worth it to share my experiences on the encounter. Feel free to toss it all in the rubish bin if you aren't interested in it! I was just trying to be helpful, recognizing some of the problems we had with the encounter in Kae's post and wanted to share how we smoothed them out =)

Beruthiel said...

@Togopan -

Perhaps I wasn't clear. The only time we utilized the PoH spam between the two groups was while the bile-o-tron was offline and the raid was taking massive, increasing raid damage. Not for the duration of the encounter. While the bile-o-tron was online, we simply only healed the spit targets back to 10k life.

When the Bile-o-Tron was online, after a massacre, our priest would handle one group, I would do the other (with the help of our paladin) with the priest filling in if we were behind and her group was in order.

Hopefully that clarifies it some. I get the feeling that I'm perhaps not being percisely clear on our healing strategy.

I'm by no means saying you all have a bad healing strategy - I am just sharing what changes we made with ours that made it incredibly smoother the second time we went in for it from a healing persepctive. =)

togopan said...

@Beruthiel

What I meant by poh during feud is what you stated. When the Bot is offline (which is during feud), I would be spamming the 2 groups.

And when it was online I would be back to my group and tossing out coh if needed.

I probably should of said that in the first place XD.

Theladas said...

Side Comment/Correction: The Break Debuff is not, in fact, a Mortal Strike Debuff. It is instead a healing DONE debuff. That is, it reduces the self-healing performed by the tank. So Alyae's WoG and Holy Radiance actually get tanked, rather than all of the inbound heals from our healers. This debuff is primarily to prevent Blood DKs from trivializing MT healing, apparently.

Kinda sucks to see Alyae's Holy Radiance tick for ~300 instead of ~600 on average - for all the extra healing she was trying to add, that Break seems to soak more than we realize.

Scythe said...

All I know is that this RL in question sounds like an ass. Fire that guy!

Kae said...

Actually, once I settled into my little lifebloom hole, my stress levels abated :) It was just insanely stressful before I found I could roll 3-4 lifeblooms in a group. As Dalthas mentioned, it is very reminiscent of the TBC healing style, although most of it isn't insta-cast. So... a mix of vanilla and TBC? Due to keeping lifebloom stacks rolling (TBC) but doing so with nourish (HT rank 4 spam?). I dislike that it forces you to be unable to move much, but it's honestly less stressful than healing some other fights that require more dynamic thinking.

Considering the mana restraints and that it basically kept up over half my own party, I think I may even prefer this method for healing this fight, over using other spells. Regardless, it's a method I'm going to keep in mind if we run across any other boss fights where it'll come in handy :) Knowing that I can roll 4 lifeblooms out of ToL is pretty handy if I know I don't have to worry about other players!

Kae said...

No, Scythe. We're not letting you get out of raid leading that easily!

;)

Nefernet said...

Thanks a lot for sharing this. My guild is working on that fight now, we did a few attempts yesterday and will be on him tonight again.
We have the exact same healing team composition.
I linked the post to my guild forum, it might help, and if the healers don't read it (English is not their thing), the RL will...

Gratz on the kill ! I'm currently so curious about Cataclysm raid healing. I'd love to play my shaman, even if I still love playing my hunter, there is nothing new on the dps raiding landscape...

Zy said...

Drau had quite a bit to say when he came to bed after that fight. And even more the next morning as we discussed it during breakfast (it helps when the wife isn't half asleep).

He said the biggest headache was filling up Mal after the double gibbing and he was using Divine Light a lot for that. Alyae was mostly taken care of thru Beacon and he himself was fine thanks to Protector of the Innocent. Apparently he had some plans involving Lay on Hands and the 20% mark but on the kill it hit a bit early and he didn't get to use it the way he planned. He's looking forward to trying it out next shot.

Jen said...

I haven't tried this fight yet (or any raid, for that matter), but I've been dreading it ever since I heard about the decimate-type mechanic. So I have a question to the collective wisdom of you and your readers: is it possible to heal this on 10-man with 2 druids and a priest? Or should I just hope the other priest/paladin get geared and bench myself and the other tree by rotation?

Kae said...

Jen,
I answered here, with a plea for further input from other readers :)
http://dreambound-druid.blogspot.com/2011/01/healing-chimaeron-part-2.html

Alyae said...

I used LoH on myself just before the transition, and after taking a few hits and running as far as i could I bubbled. When it came back to me i used Ardent defender, and to my surprise it actually saved me, and i got the heal from it.

Until the next hit when i fell over dead. lol.
Because of all of that, my kite was almost long enough to make a full circle around the room.

In hindsight, it was probably better to just take the death then bubble because my DPS contribution is next to nothing, and that could have given the real dps that died a few extra seconds to pew pew.

Then again, the long kite, and the travel time gave others more time to dps instead of that one person who died, so I'm mixed on that still.

Jen said...

Thanks for the special post! *blush*

Tiryal said...

I do have a question. What was your tank comp for that fight? We used Warrior/DK (the DK being me). We found that a DK tank was easier to heal (according to the healers) due to the way DS works (25% of the damage healed over the preceding 5 seconds or 7% of your hp, which ever is greater).

So, if a tank gets hit with a caustice slime (or massacre or double attack or Jesus) and they were at say...50k hp, then DS would heal 25% of the damage taken (so in this case 49,999*0.25 ~ 12.5k).

According to our healers, because of the way this work, the DK becomes easier to heal since they basically heal themselves. The only time they would need heavy heals is when they have 2 stacks of Break.

It is also of note, that a DK tank with Glyph of Rune Tap (Rune Tap will heal 5% of your party members' hp) could be helpful for easing some tension on the group healers, albeit only every 30 seconds.

On most attempts, do to the amount of healing I could do to myself, I was hitting about 16k hps at times and was keeping up with our paladin healer on the amount of heals he could do to the other tank.

Congratulations as well! This just maybe something you want to look at in the future to ease healer strain. My priest would ball up and cry in the corner while sucking her thumb and whimpering "makethebigbadmeany3-headedassdoggoaway" (3-headed ass dog is a guild joke in reference to what a healer called Chimaeron once).