by Matt Low

Now that you’ve taken down the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel on normal mode, what’s next? The heroic versions of the bosses, of course! You’re ready for the next step. Plus with the 30 percent buff active, you’ll have a bit more breathing room and leeway. This week, I’ll give you a quick walkthrough on all of the bosses in terms of healing expectations.

Except maybe the Lich King. Haven’t quite solved him yet, and the guy is worth a post of his own in the future.

Lord Marrowgar

I like to utilize a triangle setup on this boss during his Bone Storm phase. By placing the raid in three isolated groups apart from each other, you’ll make the old bone lord travel more. The more he travels, the more time he eats up during this phase when he isn’t destroying someone. Group your tanks as one unit and divide your raid (and healers) evenly into two others. Your tanks won’t be in jeopardy, anyway.

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by Dawn Moore

So here’s the situation: you’re putting together a raid and either your normal pally is absent, for some reason (read: debauchery), or you’re in a pug and there are no paladins to be found in ye ol’ trade chat. What do you do? Can your other healers handle the tanks or are you doomed to a wipe fest?

Holy paladins are probably the most influential healers a raid team has because what they do for the raid is so important. That role is, of course, healing the tanks.

But don’t think that a healadin’s influence is just the result of what he does and not what he is; holy paladins heal the tanks because they’re very good at it. They are designed for single target healing, and have been that way for a very long time. Currently, a paladin’s bread and butter spell, Holy Light, is the strongest single target heal (not on a long cooldown) around. Paired up with Beacon of a Light and you have to wonder why they think they can’t raid heal you’ve got more single-target fire power than a disc priest can produce in twice the time, and that’s counting the absorbs.

So here’s the big question: do you really need a holy paladin to raid?

The answer is no.

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by Matt Low

The 3.3.5 patch brought us the final raid instance before Cataclysm strikes Azeroth. Halion, a fairly large Twilight dragon, has invaded the Ruby Sanctum. Naturally, the job falls to us to try to repel him and and the rest of his followers. Before you get to engage Halion, you have to deal with Saviana Ragefire, Baltharus the Warborn and General Zarithrian.

There’s also the trash, which has crippled and stalled many pickup raids (and some guilds).

Quick trash tips

Use any form of crowd control, if you feel it’s necessary. As an example, druids can easily Hibernate dragons. If you need to, have them sleep the Invokers (the spellcasters). I find the Invokers’ AoE explosive abilities are quite annoying. Strong group heals will be needed to counteract this if there are loose Invokers running around.

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by Dawn Moore

In the guide I’ll be covering Halion, as well as the three mini-bosses you’ll have to defeat before you can face him. I will also examine priest appropriate loot in the instance and compare it to a few pieces we’ve seen in Icecrown Citadel.

Mini-bosses

The three mini bosses in Ruby Sanctum aren’t much to worry about, to be honest. Just like the three dragons in Obsidian Sanctum, surviving the brief encounters only requires that you know what to expect.

Baltharus the Warborn As a healer all you need to do is hang back and spam heals on the tank. What you heal with doesn’t matter too much, just expect the damage to be a bit spiky. There is a knock back ability Baltharus does, but you should be at range so it won’t matter too much. At 66% and 33% (50% on 10-man) Baltharus will clone himself and the clones will need to get picked up by the off-tanks, and at that point you’ll need to start healing the off-tanks too. Again, it doesn’t matter how. Baltharus has an attack called Blade Tempest where he spins his weapon around and does a pretty hefty sum of damage to your tanks (and any DPS standing in front of the boss.) It will get worse if any players with the Enervating Brand debuff are in range of the boss, which they may well be if you’re in a pug, so be ready to toss out a priest cooldown if things look dire.

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by Matt Low

Welcome to the end boss. It is possible to heal through Arthas with a less than ideal composition — my first kill with 25 players was done without the presence of any holy paladins. If your guild is still struggling with it and the issue might be from the healing side of things, maybe I can help you out here with some additional pointers.

I hope you’re familiar with the general encounter mechanics and the strategy as outlined. I’m just going to stick to addressing any aspects that will affect you directly as the healer.

Phase 1

Put one healer on each tank, and the rest can raid heal. You can float a third healer on both tanks.

Infest You’ll be facing this spell for most of the encounter. Personally, I chose to have that covered by a discipline priest and a holy priest. A discipline priest gives you an extra edge by preemptively casting Power Word: Shield on specific players. If possible, assign specific groups for each priest to cover. Any players who stand in close proximity to each other for most of the encounter (such as a melee group or a healer group) should be assigned to the holy priest. Once everything is assigned, what will happen is Arthas will cast Infest, and players who have been shielded will see it fall off. Any remaining players with Infest can be rapidly covered by that holy priest, between Circle of Healing and Prayer of Healing.

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by Dawn Moore

Do

Play to your strengths The internet is a great place to complain about everything, and the shortcomings of the priest class are definitely a discussion that comes up frequently here. But whether you agree or disagree with me (or anyone) about how priests are now (or ever), you should always remember to play to your strengths. That means looking at your best spells (Power Word: Shield, Penance, Circle of Healing, Empowered Renew right now, for exampe) and finding ways to apply them to what you’re doing. If you’re a Renew-centric holy priest, for example, don’t try to convince your 10-man raid that you should be keeping up the tanks. Hit the raid up instead, and let the druid try her hand at single target heals. (Druids can do more than HoTs, contrary to popular belief. They’re exceptional healers, some of them just get grumpy about casting Nourish.)

Basically, what this comes down to is your ability to adapt, which is actually good advice to all healers. As this game changes and evolves, so will your strengths and weaknesses. As a priest, you will see many ups and downs and you should always be willing to try out new styles of healing to account for the shifts.

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by Bethany Myers

So you’re ready to venture into the thankless realm of healing? It’s not for the faint of heart. You will be begged to heal an instance you hate and blamed for deaths that aren’t your fault, only to lose gear upgrades to DPS — all in the same run! On the other hand, healing can be a nice diversion from faceroll macro-mashing, and it’s definitely nice to have instant dungeon queues.

Whether you’re changing specs at level 80 to help your guild progression, stepping into The Deadmines as a level 18 healer or twinking out a battleground medic — here are some helpful hints as you prepare to make those health bars greener.

5-man PvE
Regular dungeons, heroics and group quests in which you are the only healer
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by Dawn Moore

Today, I’ve put together a little guide for healing priests who want to dabble in the darkness of the shadow tree. While there are notable differences between the styles of playing holy or discipline, the switch to shadow is more than just tossing on some hit gear and taking a trip to the trainer.

How to look the part

As I said earlier, there is a bit more required to succeeding in your offspec than binding Shadowform to your bars, but while we have those in mind, let’s talk about them from a healer’s perspective. As far as talents go, nothing out of the ordinary is required of you as a healer when making the jump into the unknown. You can follow this build.

From here on though, things start to shift a little. I say this because I make the assumption that starting out, the majority of healers exploring shadow will not have a full set of shadow gear on hand (unless you were one of those disc priests who opted for the shadow tier 10 early on.) After that, I also don’t expect you to regem every piece of gear you have, since you’ll probably be sharing several pieces between your two gear sets. Because I’ve assumed this, I’m going to recommend that examine what kind of stats you are running with, and weigh out what you can sacrifice, and what you want to keep.

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by Matt Low

There have been moments in the past when I forgot to hand out crucial instructions. Several of these moments could easily have been the difference between a 2% wipe and a kill on a progression boss. Personally, I feel that I’m under extra pressure compared to other healers because not only do I need to look after my targets, I need to make sure the other healers have the right ones. Not only that, I have to come up with a variety of solutions against different boss attacks or phase changes to ensure things go as smoothly as possible.

Too bad it doesn’t always happen. Farm bosses that are taken down routinely can sometimes be challenging, especially when I forget to tell someone what to do. Granted, I normally expect healers to already know what their tasks are. What happens if I have new healers or someone in a different role? I need to make sure all the bases are covered.

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