by Matt Low

The professor has a masters degree in potions and a Ph.D in raid wiping. Even the most stalwart of healers will have face a barrage of obstacles that will affect healing ability. This guy is my personal Achilles heel in Icecrown so far. Not more than a few days ago, I went an embarrassing 8 for 8 on Malleable Goo deaths. Talk about my pride being wounded. I’m supposed to be good at dodging stuff that comes flying toward me not running into them or getting drilled in the face by this green exploding goo.

Anyway, keep reading for my awesome mistakes and what I learned from them.

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a basic understanding of the Professor Putricide encounter. This article is meant mainly for the healers.

Alright, on to phase 1!

Phase 1

Pick two tank healers to cover your tank on Professor Putricide. If one of them gets focused by a green slime or has to kite the orange cloud, at least you’ll have one more for support. In any case, this early phase is a light one and there isn’t a whole lot of healing that needs to be done. You can probably get away with five healers. If your DPS is jaw-droppingly amazing, take 6 with you instead.

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?by Matt Low

Arguably one of the most unique encounters in the entire game, Valithria Dreamwalker is one where the success of the raid rests entirely on the shoulders of healers. After some more practice and attempts, I can pass on several aspects of the fight that I learned onto you.

This week’s post is designed to purely cover the healing side of things from a defensive and “offensive” stand point.

To start with, your raid group isn’t going to need more than 7 healers. Your DPS and tanks play an important role in keeping the pesky trash mobs that come in off your back side. You can get away with 5 or 6.

The portal team

As the portal team, your job is to swim up and tag as many of those healing clouds as much as possible. Each one that is popped within close proximity grants you a 10% healing buff and it is possible to stack these buffs to 100 (Emerald Vigor). Is it likely to happen? Probably not. The portal team does not rotate with other players. You want the same crew going in and jumping out to continue building up their buffs. To my knowledge, the last encounter which revolved around building up buffs on dragons was Malygos.

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by Matt Low

A great team of healers need a leader who can help them stay focused and give them the right assignments. Without their direction (or at least, someone to coordinate healing actions), it can get pretty messy fast. Being the boss of healers and acting as an intermediary between them and the raid leader or officers can often times be stressing. They’re often the first person people go to after a wipe wondering what happened or who failed and so forth. As a healer though, you can help ease the stress that they experience.

Have a dual spec: In current raids, there’s a degree of variability on the number of healers used in a fight. Want to be valuable? Pick up a DPS and healing spec. Offer to do both depending on what the raid needs. A fight like Valithria could benefit with 7 healers for raids that are just starting out. On the other hand, Festergut needs a reduction in healers in order to match the DPS requirements. You can get away with about 5 on that encounter. Your second spec doesn’t have to be one of a different role either. I myself run holy as one spec and discipline as the other. It’s handy in case I need to mass cast Power Word: Shield against Saurfang and then switch it up later to holy for Valithria.

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by Allison Robert

A quick note on what I want to accomplish here: I’m addressing this to people with no prior knowledge of the spec who want the tools to become reasonably competent healers quickly. By necessity, that means we’re going to gloss over a few finer points; this is a cheat sheet, not an encyclopedia. When I say (for example) that Improved Tranquility needs to be dragged out behind a barn and killed with an axe, I’m not going to spend paragraphs explaining why that is, or examining situations where you could actually get some use from it.

1. What is restoration?

Restoration is the healing tree (pun!) available to the druid class.

2. Restoration’s benefits:

• The best array of Heal over Time (HoT) spells in the game.
• Tremendous mobility while healing.
• A specialized form (Tree of Life) available as a 41-point talent, providing a 6% healing received buff to the raid and boosting the druid’s healing efficiency and throughput.
• Arguably the most mana-efficient healer, with a choice over using Innervate for themselves or giving it to another player.
• Arguably the most annoying healer to kill in PvP (when specced and geared).
• Very little competition for gear if you stick with leather +spellpower pieces.
• In the hands of a skilled player, the best and most effective healer for fights with heavy and frequent raid damage.

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by Mimetir @ WorldofMatticus

Say you’re storming the Citadel on a fairly regular basis, massacring the Lich King’s advance nasties from Lord Marrowgar right up – literally – to Deathbringer Saurfang. You might be progressing through it at your own pace, or you might have it on farm and are running through weekly as a warm-up to pick up gear. Well, either way. Here are some general and some shaman-specific tips from my own experience on how to healing can help your group steamroller the nasties.

Lord Marrowgar:

1. Bone Spike Graveyard: Pain. In. The. There are two things you can do to mitigate its effect on your healing. Firstly, make sure you remind your healing  teammates to watch out for bonespike on each other. For example, if your tank healer is spiked then you need to pick up the slack for him and heal the tanks. Just til he gets back on his feet. Secondly, standing behind Marrowgar as shown in the diagram will help your DPS get you un-spiked as quickly and safely as  possible.

2. Coldflame is not cool. Really. Move out of the fire before it gets to you. Yep, I know it’s a pain and it seems to as soon as a healer has moved there’s more coldflame racing towards you. Standing at range will give you time to see it and move.

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by Matt Low

The focus is a feature that came out several years ago. I’d say that there’s still a number of players who don’t have a firm understanding of what it is or just have yet to realize the potential it has. DPS players frequently make use of focus to keep enemies crowd controlled. Think Polymorph or Banish as examples.

What exactly is the focus?

I’m going to pull a definition from WoWWiki as I can’t explain it anymore eloquently:

A focus target is a secondary target system, used to keep track of a second unit other than the currently targeted unit. The focus is a sort of “target memory” meaning that the focus can be set then recalled with simple macro commands. Furthermore, the user interface supplies full real-time updates for the currently stored focus, including health and mana updates and enemy casting bars. Some user interface addons provide a complete unit frame for the focus.

This is incredibly valuable for healers. It opens up a wide array of stuff we can do while healing. For Priests, we can Shackle targets without risking too much (such as in Halls of Reflection). Shamans can then Wind Shock to interrupt mobs without losing healing time (Lord Jaraxxus and his Fel Fireballs anyone?).

Those are just some of the applications that can help in raid settings
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by Matt Low

With the impending release of the Plagueworks wing in Icecrown Citadel, how about some healer tips for the two abominations? Between the two of them, I think Festergut is easy to understand conceptually but harder to execute. Be prepared to bring on the healing as it will stress the healing team.

Festergut

Your raid group has exactly 5 minutes to blow him up before he enrages and blows you up. For number of healers, Drop it down to 5. If your raid group DPS is amazing, your raid can get away with 6 in favour of stability. Stock up on raid healing if the players are available for it. 1 tank healer should suffice.

But to break it down, Festergut has 42 million health. With 5 minutes, that’s about 140000 raid DPS. With 19 DPS players (assuming 5 healers and 1 tank), that is a little over 7300 DPS needed individually. Festergut is the new Patchwerk (almost)!

Correction: Forgot to mention that 2 tanks will be needed on the fight to deal with Gastric Bloat. The current tank will be hit with it and after 10 applications, it’s going to explode and deal AoE damage.

When your raid begins the encounter, the room will be flooded with gas. The entire raid is going to suffer damage from it. Holy priests, shamans and resto druids will have a field day healing due to the constant damage ticks that are going off.

Once your tank parks the abomination in the middle of the room, if you have a paladin or a disc priest (or any tank healing player for that matter), place your tank healer in the middle of the room along with the melee. Your tank healer isn’t going to be doing anything else other than tank healing.

Players who suffer from Vile Gas need to be healed up. They’re going to take some damage over time and will become disoriented. The gas usually targets players who are at range instead of the melee. If Vile Gas hits a player, nearby players will become disoriented as well. In other words, spread out. The damage from the DoT is roughly 5000 every 2 seconds for 6 seconds.

Periodically throughout the fight, players at range will be hit with a Gas Spore (3 on 25). When the gas spore detonates, the raid will take some damage but they will become inoculated. Now, I believe there is a cap on the amount of players that can get inoculated per spore but that may have changed. 1 Gas Spored player needs to run into the melee group and ensure those players get inoculated. The other 2 gas spores need to stand apart from each other and the range should head to the closest one.

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by Mike Schramm

Now that players have had their hands on the Dungeon Finder out on the live realms for a while, they’re learning a few more tricks and tips about how to use it. As Rohan brings up over on the WoW Ladies LJ, it’s easy enough to keep a good player once you’ve found them through the system: as long as none of you drop group once you’re done with an instance, you can go back in and run as many as you want. Unfortunately, you can’t friend them yet (hopefully that will show up whenever Battle.net functionality does), but the comments on that post point out that if you both sign up for an unpopular instance at the same time, chances are good you’ll end up in the same group together (of course, that requires coordination, but maybe you can set up a time out of game).

Other tips we’ve heard: finding an instance as tank or healer will go even faster than trying to get in one as DPS, so if you can specialize into a more useful role and just want to grind out instances fast, do that. Damage meters are supposedly broken — they haven’t figured out how to track ranged damage across realms quite yet. Which may be a good thing, as lots of players never liked following those meters anyway. The vote kicking system seems to be working well — the number one reason we’ve heard that players are kicking each other is that they’re going AFK without notice, so if you’re in a random PuG queue, be sure to be ready when it pops up to do the instance ASAP. Oh, and let’s just agree right here and now: Frozen Orbs are Need, unless you don’t want them for some reason.

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by Matt Low

There’s two methods for taking down Twins and I’ll go over them in detail here. One is the traditional method which stresses individual ability to dodge balls and the other is the not-so-traditional method which relies heavily on lady luck.

The traditional method

While there is an enrage timer for the encounter, between any power ups from the essences that your DPS receives, it should not play a detrimental role. The fact that your raid has gotten this far should be evidence enough that the DPS is present.

Healing setup

I like to bring at least 6 healers for this. The damage is noticeably higher and you’re going to need as much healing as possible. Ideally, you’ll want to include a few healers with instant casts like druids or holy priests. I’ll explain why later.

So in the playbook, the basic outline here is that a majority of the DPS is going to pick up the Dark Essence and unload on Lightbane (the white angel). They’re going to be grouped up in the middle of the room with the twins tanked fairly close to each other so that incidental AoE will affect both of them (Divine Storm, Chain Lightning, etc). Granted players with the dark essence aren’t going to do a whole lot of damage to the dark angel, but damage is damage.

With most of the DPS grouped inside as dark, the remaining players are going to have to pick up the Light Essence. The idea is that with the dark players on the inside, the light players will form a ring around them and intercept any light orbs that are coming in and move out of the way of dark orbs.

The healers best suited for movement are druids and holy priests since they have an easier time healing on the run. Granted, it’s not likely your raid is going to have a full complement of druids and priests. Any paladins and shamans are better off standing in the middle with a dark essence.

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