When I sat down to do the voice over for this guide, I thought to myself “there is no way I’m going to have twelve minutes worth of things to say about this horrible fight”. Boy was I wrong! Not only did I have twelve minutes of things to talk about, I had a whole list of things that I forget to mention, or ran out of time to discuss! As such, the moral of this is that Beru can talk about anything…a lot. Needless to say, there will be a fair bit of additional information in the notes below, and I do recommend taking the time to read through them, as there are a few “non-druid” related tips!

This video will be best viewed at one of the higher resolutions.

Tips and Tricks!

• Dispels. Uh, Beru, didn’t you kind of forget something? Well, it seems I sure did! You will need an assigned dispeller for this encounter, we’ve used both a disc priest and a druid for the chore, but any healer can handle the job. The key early in the encounter is the get the earth buff/debuff to your tanks. The debuff will jump across Deathwing’s spine each time it is removed from a member, so the easiest way to get it to the tanks early is to have the raid stand to the right of the spine, and the tanks to the left. After the tanks each have two stacks of earth, you want to get earth to as many raid members as possible in the time that the debuff is active.
• Trinket Talk. I know that I mentioned you should use your Jaws of Defeat if you have it for this encounter, but if you don’t or you don’t want to loose the extra intellect from your other trinkets, I can’t urge you enough to make sure you are using at least one regen trinket for the encounter. It really will make a large difference over the course of the fight!
• What gear set up did you run? I run this fight in 4 piece T13, with around 2600 spirit and just under 20 mastery. Mastery really helps so much in this encounter that if you aren’t already running a strong mastery build, I’d strongly encourage you to consider one. If you find that you just can’t sustain your mana with the 4 piece T13, don’t hesitate to utilize a 2 T12/2 T13 combination.
• Love your Barkskin. Barkskin will be a lifesaver for this encounter. Use it for rolls and when you are gripped. But it should be kept almost on cooldown for the duration of the fight.
• Nature’s Swiftness. Use it with a HT on a newly selected searing plasma target. Don’t wait for the “perfect time” to utilize it, unless you are on the third plate and worried about tank deaths, keep that sucker on cooldown.
• You are your number one best friend. Clear the debuff from yourself (or other healers) first. I always focus on removing my own debuff as quickly as I can without neglecting the raid too much. The reason for this is that I always get blood aggro by the end of the fight, and it’s much less panic inducing if I’m able to be healed up a bit. I always try to make sure that the healers are more actively cleared towards the end of the encounter, as a dead healer is just as likely to wipe your raid as a dead DPS.
• CLICK THE FUCKING LIGHTWELL!Holy priests can be very strong for this encounter, but it is important to make sure that your raid is clicking on the lightwell to assist with removing searing plasma. Divine hymn can be used the same as druid tranqs to help clear debuffs as well.
• Use your offspec tranqs and hymns. While you will only get one use out of them for the encounter, utilizing Moonkin and Shadow Priests tranqs/hymns can help alleviate some of the burden if your healers start to fall behind or if things start to get hairy. We like to use ours after the second and third rolls to help smooth out the healing and clear some of those extra debuffs from the raid.
• Mana Hymns. Don’t discount your priests mana hymns as a solid source of mana regen for your healers. We have our priests hymn after the first roll, and then on cooldown. Each priest should be able to hymn twice during the encounter.
• Killing Blood. First, I strongly suggest downloading the version of DBM (it might be the alpha or beta) that tells you how many blood you have dead on the ground. Otherwise much of your raid will be filled with “how many blood do we have?”, and believe me it can be heartbreaking to wipe at 11:30 because you miscounted and didn’t get that final plate lifted. As for killing them, we assign one person along with a “backup” for the job. We use a ret paladin, but really any DPS would probably do fine. If he needs help, we throw a rogue or a warrior in his direction. The key to killing the blood is to remember to do it over the course of the almag’s life so that there is 9 dead when the amalg is ready, but you aren’t doing immense amounts of damage to your raid by killing many of them all at once. Also keep in mind that your tank will do a fair bit of damage to them as well. Additionally, be careful where you kill them, so that they are not too close to a hole and creep back into one before it can be absorbed, and kill them in a position that a new amalg isn’t going to run over them on the way to the amalg tank. Sometimes your tank will have to move a fair bit when absorbing the blood, so don’t kill your amalg early! Wait for it to be in position to lift the proper side of the plate before bringing it down.
• Dealing with Corruptions and Grips. I mentioned that we use 4-5 DPS to break the corruptions, but regardless of how many you utilize the most important thing is to do just enough damage to break the grip without over damaging the corruption, so that you can time killing it while the tendon is exposed in such a fashion that it has a somewhat negligible loss to your tendon DPS. The best grip breaker are arcane mages, followed by hunters, and then shadow priests. That being said, your arcane mages will do some of your highest damage on the tendons, so you may want to assign different DPS to break the grip that comes during the tendon exposure (we usually have Hunters/Shadow priests do it). We never use more than 3 DPS on the corruption during the tendon, but if it’s timed properly no one should be gripped, or will only be gripped momentarily during this phase. That being said, if  one or more of our grip breakers is gripped during the tendon on the third plate, we assign a back up who will swap to the corruption so we don’t lose people to that grip.
• Timing the Rolls. While it seems so simple, it can be very deadly. Rolls need to happen as soon as the corruptions are down. Everyone needs to be in position to roll and get locked down as soon as it’s called for. Even one person being slow on moving can wipe the raid in the second or third roll. For the second and third roll, there will always be a grip that come right before you need to roll. Have everyone be in position such that they are just a few steps away from the designated roll point, and have all of your range get on that grip ASAP and knock that corruption down. As soon as that grip has been cleared, Deathwing should roll.
• The Kite Tank. By the end of the encounter the kite tank will have so much blood on them that one mistake has the potential to one shot them. We utilize lifegrips to help keep him ahead on the kite, and all healers focus on his life so that if he takes a hit he is topped back up immediately. Our tank places a marker down for the grippers to stand and will call out for when he wants grips in his kite rotation. He will give them a head’s up that they are on deck to grip so that they know to move out of the pack and get to the “grip location”.

Whew! That is a lot! If I missed anything, or you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to ask! Good Luck and Have Fun!

I promised myself that I wasn’t going to make a post about MoP changes this early into the Beta process because everything is subject to change, and many things likely will be changed. I had the best intent of keeping that promise, I really did. However when I opened up my feedreader this morning and saw some of the datamined information on MMO-Champion, my resolve erroded. Mostly because I do have some strong opinions on some of the things that I’ve read about to date, and I don’t like a good deal of it. As such, I thought I’d go ahead and give my thoughts on some of the reworked talents and abilities, because if I complacently don’t say anything I don’t really have the right to criticize it later.

Let’s take a look at what we have coming down the pike, shall we? As we have this discussion, please take note that this is an extremely early examination of these abilities and they are all subject to changing as the beta progresses. I only pulled out the mostly resto-centric abilities and talents, so this is not a comprehensive list of all of the changes. I would recommend checking out the post over on MMO-Champion if you are looking for the full list.

Another fairly late guide, but better late than never, right?! When watching the video of this, please keep in mind that it’s roughly two months old and so the damage patterns that you see towards the end of the encounter aren’t nearly as devastating as they were previously. That being said, all of the information that I added into the guide is pertinent and will be useful at the currently buff level. As always, there will be a few tips and tricks that I forgot to mention in the guide at the end.

Please note that this video will be best viewed at one of the higher resolutions.

Tips and Tricks!

• Bloodlust. The reason that we go up top at the start of the encounter is so that we can lust our DPS while all of their cooldowns are up at the start of the fight, and everyone is in the proper realm to DPS the boss, but the healers don’t get sated. The reason for this is that we utilize a second bloodlust when the bronze phase starts to so that the healers are lusted when healing is needed the most and the damage is the heaviest.
• Nature’s Grace. I trigger Nature’s Grace at the start of the fight, and then try to keep it triggered as soon as the ICD on it is up, so that I can have the extra ticks on those rejuvs, WGs and Efflorescence as often as possible.
• Concentration Potions.  I didn’t learn about this trick until well after our first kill, however Vixsin clued me in to a very cool trick! If you concentrate 5 seconds before an Hour of Twilight, utilizing heroic will does not break your concentration, and by the time you return you’ve had the time to get the maximum benefit from the pot.
• How many healers did you use? We utilized 5 healers. For our first kill we had 2 disc priests, 1 shaman, 1 paladin and one druid. However, for subsequent kills we’ve used any combination of healers.
• What buffs did everyone take? We always give our druids the red crystal. However, if we only have one druid healing we give the other red to one of the disc priests. We always give our shaman and a paladin the green. And we have a paladin (one of the ones that took the green) and second priest/paladin the blue.
• Feral Druid Shenannigans in your Resto Blog? You betcha! A feral druid with the 4 piece set bonus can shit into bear before an hour of twilight and utilize his raid cooldown to help boost healing when the raid could use a little extra help. Note that he has to be in bear for 15 seconds before he’s able to activate the bonus, but can shift out of bear once it’s cast.
• What cooldowns did you use for the Bronze? We start off the bronze phase utilizing a shield wall, we follow that with a SLT and a tranq going into the 7th Hour of Twilight. Coming out of that hour, we use a barrier followed by Raid Wall and Rallying Cry. However, any cooldown rotations will work! Just make sure that you have them mapped out in advance and everyone is ready to utilize them when their cooldown is on deck.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have questions! Good Luck and Have Fun!

It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down and done a guide, and truth be told, I almost didn’t do this one. Partly because this was our fifth Warmaster kill and I wasn’t sure if people would find it helpful or if it would be outdated already (I missed Frapsing our first two kills, and our second two kills were a mess!). However, Kurn nudged me a bit, and so I decided to go ahead and sit down to get this done. In listening to the replay of the encounter, there isn’t really a ton of druid-centric advice, but I think that’s because the encounter is fairly straight forward from a healing perspective. That being said, if you have a question please don’t hesitate to ask! I will list a few additional tips below!

As always, this video is viewed best at one of it’s larger resolutions.

Tips and Tricks!

• You mentioned that you have the raid take Onslaught 2 and 4, but what about the rest of them? For Onslaught 1,3,5 we utilized fire mages and shadow priests. As long as you have a minimum of 3 people in the the onslaught and don’t let too many barrages hit, your boat should be OK. Fire mages can take every onslaught with cauterize, however your shadow priests can only do 1/5 or 3 as dispersion, even glyphed, will not be up for 1/3 or 3/5.
  • Druid Tip: Pre-hot your mages taking the onslaughts to ensure that they receive adequate cauterize healing.
• Can you go over those barrage groupings again? Sure thing! We use 4 groups, 1 for each quadrant of the boat. Each group will have 3-4 people in it, and will be comprised of ranged DPS and healers – with the healers split up between the groups. Each group is given a “group leader” and the group follows that person to know what barrage to soak. It is exceedingly important for the raid to keep their group alive by moving as a unit. Too many deaths early on will be a wipe. During onslaughts 1, 3 and 5 those groups that have mages and shadow priests will refrain from soaking to prevent deaths – and if you are grouped with a shadow priests or mage don’t let their tricky mirror images and apparitions fool you!
• ToL and Tranquility. We used two druids for this encounter, so we split our tranqs to maximize them. She tranqed on the second onslaught, I tranqed on the fourth. I utilized my ToL for the second onslaught to split the cooldowns. This allowed me to have both cooldowns available again for phase 2 when there is a fair amount of raid damage. If you are the only druid on your raid team, feel free to swap the order of when you ToL and Tranq to better fit within the other cooldowns being used, just be sure that you utilize both abilities early enough in the encounter to have them back up during phase 2.
• Any Special Times for Nature’s Grace? You can try to time is so that you have it up going into onslaughts, but there is usually enough damage going out during the fight that a nature’s grace proc isn’t wasted. During the second phase, try to time it as you are hotting up the raid for a shout to maximize your rejuvs and WGs!
• Do You Do Anything Special in Phase 2? I do not! Just run through your basic raid healing routine to keep the raid up. Make smart use of nature’s grace, don’t forget to utilize your trinkets, WG as needed for damage and SM as needed for damage. If you find yourself going OOM in the second half of the encounter, try using a little less rejuv – but lean on rejuv as much as your mana will allow and pre-hot in preparation for for shouts as you are able.
• How Do You Decide Who to Swiftmend in Phase 1? Since we ask the teams to stick to their team leader, I’ll often times try to SM that person. However, I’ll also use it on the tanks or melee as well. Since everyone is supposed to stay relatively grouped up, it shouldn’t matter who you SM, as it should hit the maximum number of people in that group.
• Why Does My Raid Suck At Barrages and What Can I Do to Fix it? If only I had a good answer to that question! The truth is that phase one is really the meat of this encounter. Once your raid learns to prioritize the barrages and sticking together, it gets easier. Outside of making sure that there is enough damage on the adds, there is nothing that is more important than working as a team to soak those barrages. I recommend zooming our camera out as far as you can, and looking down on the screen, so that you can see the entirety of your quadrant without ever having to move the camera. This is really one of those fights where everything just “clicks”. In fact, that’s how I missed FRAPSing our first kill. I was like “eh, half the raid ate solo barrages, we’ve still got some work” – and the next pull somehow he was dead!
• When do you Bloodlust? One of the most important things in this encounter is to make sure that you have one set of adds down before the next set arrives. When we were learning this fight, in order to facilitate that, we would use personal CDs for the first set of adds, Bloodlust the second set of adds, and use Potions on the third set. However,when the 10% nerf came we had a devil of a time in phase 2 because our boat was covered in fire all of the sudden. The reason ended up being because we were now killing our adds too fast and it changed the timing of the encounter for us such that we were getting fresh fire at the end of the add phase instead of during the third wave of adds. To remedy this we stopped bloodlusting the second wave of adds so that we’d take longer to kill them, and now bloodlust when Goriona lands. However, if you are struggling with killing the adds timely, do not hesitate to lust one of your add waves – if you can get through the adds, you can kill Blackhorn so don’t worry about not having lust up for him!

As always, please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions! Good Luck and Have Fun!

I have been invited to be a part of a Resto Druid round table tomorrow night with the Waffle Cast crew. It will be at 7:00 pst, and will be live streamed if you would like to listen/participate. You can also head over to the Waffle Cast website and post any questions that you’d like to have addressed during the round table. The participants for the round table are as follows:

Arielle: Moderator
Diziet: Tournament Player (most recently WCG 2011 in Korea)
Beruthiel: 25m Heroic Raider from Falling Leaves and Wings
Hamlet: EJ Math/Theorycrafting Guru and creator or Tree Calcs
Synergy: Multi Season Gladiator
Lissanna: Restokin and Druid Class MVP

There is a very diverse list of participants, so don’t hesitate to ask any resto druid questions you may have on your mind and tune in to hear all things resto!

I’ve had a few queries about my thoughts on T13, how I am gearing for progression, and more specifically on some of my stat weightings as viewed in armory; as such I thought I’d take a few minutes to go over my thoughts on set gear this tier. The most common question I’m asked about are spirit and mastery ratings – and more specifically my spirit and mastery. And, honestly, depending on when I’m asked and what gear I’m wearing my answer changes.

The Great Four Piece Debate

There is a lot of speculation about how valuable four piece T13 is for resto druids. Unfortunately, I don’t have a solid, analytical answer for that question. What I can tell you, however, is that I’ve been playing around some with the set bonus. To date, I’ve not been successful at finding how often timeslip procs in the logs - or how much of the casted spell is overheal. What I can tell you is that on the two heroic fights I used the bonus on this week I did marginally better than the prior week, and had slightly more rejuv healing. However, without definitively knowing how much of that is attributable to timeslip, I don’t know that I can say anything definitive regarding how much of an impact the bonus had.

What I can say definitively is that I still prefer the extra mana gain from 2 T12/2 T13 for progression attempts – with heroic Yor’shaj being the only exception to that rule. I find that the extra mana return far outweighs any value from “timeslip”. It gives me more leeway to learn how to heal the encounter and let’s me be a little more aggressive during learning attempts. I started our Heroic Ultraxion attempts with 4 T13, and quickly swapped back into my 2/2 set and found myself significantly more comfortable. That being said, once I am familiar with an encounter and the damage patterns in the encounter, I’ve had no issues swapping over to the 4 T13. However, I am still uncertain of the overall value outside of just increased stats on the gear.

What is up with your spirit and haste?

I’m glad you asked! My question to you would be “what was I wearing when you armoried me?!”. Because I’ve been toying with the 4 T13 bonus, but most of my gear is shared outside of the set items, and I want to be able to flip between the two seamlessly, I’m limited in what I can do with reforging on my sets. My 2/2 set sits at exactly 2005 haste, which means that I can’t tinker with any of those items when dealing with my 4 T13 set. This limits what I can do with reforging and means that my spirit in this set is a little high (2700) and I have roughly 80 more haste than I need. My mastery also takes a bit of a dip in the T 13 set.

Until I can decide what I’m going to do with the gear, I imagine that my 4 T13 set is going remain a little off stat wise. In time, I am sure that I will go straight T13 and be done with it. But for now, I’m not ready to give up the extra regen from the 2/2 set and want to continue having it as  an option for progression.

As far as spirit is concerned, I can tell you that I’ve upped mine from T12 somewhat significantly. I ran roughly 1700 spirit by the end of T12, but found that was not sufficient for my healing style in the T13 content. As such, I’m currently running around 2400 spirit and feel comfortable. I’m not yet to the point of having a surplus of mana left at the end of encounters, but as gear increases, I imagine that I will get there – and when I do I will be reforging some it back off and likely back into mastery. As far as spirit is concerned overall, you just need to find a number that works well for you.

And that is what is up with my gear! Please keep that in mind if you are running an armory on me. I’d love to know if anyone has found a way to track timeslip in WoL. Additionally, I’d love to hear any experiences that you may have with the set bonus and what you think!

Druids can’t heal that! Yes, yes we can. While it’s true that we don’t bring any of the goodies that the other three healing classes offer the raid (Barrier, SLT, Beacon of Light), and there are plenty of arguments for why those other classes are more valuable to the raid on this fight – Druids are still viable healers for this encounter and it can be done with a leafy healer in the raid. Let’s talk about how to navigate through this content tier’s “druids are terrible” encounter.

Please note that this video will be best viewed at one of the higher resolutions.

A few tips!

• Don’t stress the mana void! I talked about this in the video, but forgot to mention one thing: when blue is out it’s a license to go nuts with your mana. The mana void is going to drain it all from you anyhow, make good use of it before it’s gone! Additionally, I forgot to mention that I always save my mana pot for a back to back blue void as the mana void tends to take a little longer to die due to not having as much time to DPS it down between voids. I found that a well timed mana pot could work wonders. Additionally, many of the blue combinations are the easiest! Learn to love seeing that blue slime creep in towards the boss.
• Love your melee. One thing that we learned was that as long as all of the ranged and the healers were at range, the melee were never targeted with  the green ooze. This made it significantly easier on both the melee and the raid. Let your melee pile right in and have the range eat all of the green.
• Purple, Shmerple. The only really challenging purple combination is a black/purple. The rest of them are fairly easy to navigate once you get a feel for them. The biggest piece of advice I can give for surviving the purple is to make sure you raid is topped up before the purple ooze hits.
• Who is healing MY group?! We used 6 healers and assigned one to the tank and one to each group. During purple phases healers were given very strict assignments and did not heal outside of their group. We used a shaman on the tanks, with a paladin who healed group 1 bouncing Beacon of Light between the tanks (more below).
• Deep Corruption. Make sure your raid frames show deep corruption stacks. No matter how good you are, when things get hairy it’s easy to forget if you healed that person 2 , 3 or 4 times.
• What do you mean I can only heal the tanks FOUR times! Tank healing on this encounter gets tricky, and requires a combination of good communication and smart cooldown usage. We had one healer assigned to heal the tanks directly during the purple phases. When the tanks would taunt, our paladin would beacon the non-active tank (who had four stacks of deep corruption) and go nuts to keep him up, while our tank healer would swap to the new tank. Once that tank became unhealable, our paladin would swap his beacon again to deal with the damage the new damage on the tank. We utilize both tank cooldowns and external cooldowns (Hand of Sac./Pain Suppression/LoH) to help keep the tank up during the sticky parts where they could no longer receive  direct heals but were still taking heavy damage. Additionally, towards the end of the purple phase, stay with the tank and time a heal to hit the second deep corruption drops off to get the tanks back in order for the next phase. There will be a fair number of tank deaths while you work through what needs to be done to keep the tanks alive during the purple phases, it’s just part of the learning curve as your tank healer and paladins work through finding the perfect combination of timing heals, swearing and prayer.
• ToL/Tranq. Unless you are trying to wipe your raid, never utilize Tranq during a purple phase. I panicked once and did this, and the raid was dead before Tranq finished casting. Oops. Additionally, save your ToL for a Red/Black/Blue or a Red/Yellow/Black phase were the extra healing and can be useful. While I suppose you could test it out during a purple phase, I feel that is a lackluster time to utilize it due to the nature of Lifebloom and your limitations on healing during that phase. I tend to favor mine on the Red/Black/Blue because LB is dirt cheap, but will also utilize it on the Red/Yellow/Black phase should we see that one first.

Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have questions!

I’ve gotten quite a few questions on this bugger of a fight, and I know that I’m a little slow getting this out, but I hope it’s still timely enough to be helpful! I only have kill footage of this encounter – which went beautifully until the very end where we squeaked by on the skin of our teeth,  so please forgive the “oops” at the end.  I will tell you what was supposed to happen as the fight came to a close and point out where that went awry. I dealt very specifically with druid healing in this video, but will add a few more comments/tips below.

Please note that this video will be best viewed at one of the higher resolutions.

A Few Tips!

• How many healers did you use? We heal this with seven healers. Our first kill was 2 druids, 1 paladin, 3 priests and 1 shaman. Our other druid healed one of the tentacle tanks during the black phase. We’ve used any number of combinations since then and been successful.
• Oh God, my mana! This is an extremely heal intensive encounter, and mana will be very tight. I opted to run with 2 T12 and 2 T13 while learning it so that I had extra regen for the encounter. Additionally, I found that, for myself, if I didn’t innervate before the first black phase things were so hectic and every GCD in the black phase was so precious, that I often forgot to innervate until we came out of the phase and I was often sub 50% mana. As such,I try to make a point to innervate before entering that first black phase to maximize my innervates through the fight. Additionally, don’t forget to maximize your trinkets if you have additional  regen focused trinkets so that you can utilize them  the maximum number of times in the fight.
• Love Nature’s Grace. I can’t stress this enough! Whether you are solo healing a group or healing with a partner, make smart use of Nature’s grace so that you have it available during heavy damage phases to help boost the healing you can do during those times.
• Tree of Life. As I stated in the video, I preferred to use ToL while the debuffs were active so that I could do more effective healing for less mana and it ensured that I could maximize ToL twice in the encounter. I, personally, found it somewhat lackluster for dealing with the black phase damage and found that I often reverted to rejuv/regrowth even if I was in ToL so it made the most sense for me to use it as more of a conservation tool to help support the aggressive healing needed in the black phases. This worked very well for me, but you will need to play around with it to find the best time for you and your raid team – you may well find that you like it better at a different time in the encounter.
• Tranquility. Also as stated in the video, I favored using Tranquility during the first and third black phases. This meant that I had it available for two of the phases where the healers are spread out and have to focus on keeping their group alive. I found this imperative for solo healing a group, and extremely helpful when working with another healer. While it meant that I did not have it available for the final push – we had many mitigation cooldowns available to get us through those final seconds of the fight during that fourth black phase where you ignore everything and just burn through the boss.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help. When your raid is first learning this fight, navigating the black phase as a druid is brutal. Our tool kit lacks any burst AE healing, which means that you need to do a lot of prep for the black phase and smartly utilize your cooldowns and toolbox to navigate through it. If you also 7 heal, one of your groups will have 2 healers in it – and if you are struggling with the black phase do not hesitate to ask to be placed in the “team up” group. We found that priests of both specs were especially adept at solo healing a group, and that paring up our shaman and myself made life a lot less miserable for the both of us. Asking for help doesn’t mean you are a bad healer, it just means that the black phase sucks and our toolkit isn’t the most adept at navigating the damage. By our third kill, with some gear upgrades and the raid more familiar with the fight, I had no issues solo healing a group – but during progression trying to solo heal it was one of the worst healing experiences I’ve ever had.
• Mitigating Damage. Something to keep in mind is that the gaze from the eyestalks can be brutal when all 8 of them are active (especially in those 5-10 seconds the flails are alive), however, those buggers can be interrupted! You probably don’t want to make it a priority to interrupt each and every one, DPS can (and should) interrupt the ones they are DPSing to help the black phase damage be more manageable. While they do not have a cast bar, you can easily tell when they are casting because they “squat”. Additionally, everyone in the raid with damage mitigating abilities should be sure that they use them during black phases.
• Raid Cooldowns. You absolutely want to have a raid cooldown rotation for the final black phase “push”. (This would be the part in the video were we made a mistake and blew up). We set up PW:B rotations, as well as Aura Mastery and 4 piece tank cooldown rotations. Once you hit that phase it’s pure survival mode. Cycle your cooldowns and keep as many people alive as you can. I might also recommend prayer.  Additionally, we used Aura Mastery and 4 piece tank cooldowns during the black phases, and PW:B throughout the fight while the debuffs were active. We found that having a PW:B as the debuff comes out immediately after your first black phases to really help keep the raid stabilized - as that set of debuffs occurs almost immediately upon entering the light phase and many people are still low life from the black phase.

There is a lot going on in this encounter, so I may well have forgotten to address something.  Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have questions!

Ah, a new tier, a new set of nerfs and relearning how to kick ass at your class.  Sounds like fun! I’m going to start Tier 13 with Hard Mode guides, as I get through them with my guild.  However, if anyone has a specific request for a guide on any of the normal mode encounters please don’t hesitate to ask me if I can put one together.  I do have footage of most of the normal mode encounters, and would be happy to toss something together if people feel that there is a need for the information.

As for Heroic Morchok, he’s quite a bit of fun, but can also be a little stressful from a healing standpoint – especially as a druid with our notable lack of burst AE healing.  There is high raid damage that needs to be dealt with fairly quickly so that your raid is prepared to take subsequent incoming damage.  It can be tricky, but it’s definitely possible for you to perform well on the encounter.  Let’s take a look at how I navigated the encounter!

As always, please note that this video is best viewed in one of the higher resolutions.

A Few Tips!

• How many healers did you take? We used 6, three for each side. The enrage timer on the boss is fairly strict, so unless you have some seriously standout DPS you will probably not be able to take more than 6 healers at this stage in the content.  We used a priest/paladin/druid combination on the left side and a priest/shaman/druid combination on the right side.
• Tank Cooldowns.  Something that I neglected to mention in the video is that the tanks receive a debuff after each stomp that causes them to take increased damage.  It will be important that the have a personal or external cooldown for each stop, and that the tanks and the healers work out a cooldown rotation in advance.  We even had our ret paladins assisting with a bubble/sac to ensure that we had enough cooldowns for every stop.
• Raid Cooldowns.  As I indicated in the video, the tricky part of the fight isn’t having the raid survive the stomp, it’s having the raid survive the crystal after the stomp.  This becomes more challenging as Morchok’s life decreases and his damage ramps up significantly.  As such, we found it far more beneficial to utilize raid cooldowns to mitigate the crystal damage as opposed to trying to mitigate the stomp damage.  This opens up a world of possibilities, as the crystal damage is shadow based, making thinks like Aura Mastery and Anti-magic Zone excellent options for mitigating some of the damage.  Similarly to the tank cooldowns, work out your raid cooldowns in advance, and be sure that you have a cooldown for every crystal in the 25-0% portion of his life when he gets really angry.  Once you’ve done that, navigate the cooldowns earlier in the encounter to they are back up again for that last part, to assist with easing the burden on the healing.  We used our raid cooldowns in the 75-50% portion of the encounter, and again at the 25-0% portion of the encounter.
• Oh god, my mana.  Because of the damage patterns of the encounter, and our noted lack of burst healing, you will find that you rely very heavily on rejuv to manage the healing on the raid.  Be sure that you innervate early and often, and conserve mana when and where you can. Try to line your first innervate up with a power torrent proc for the extra mana – you will have a need for it by the end of the fight. The “ooze” phase is a perfect time to utilize a concentration potion, so be sure to sneak one in during that down time.  (I actually think I missed doing this in the video, and ended up using a normal mana potion as a result – and my mana at the end of the fight kicked me for that mistake!). Additionally, don’t be afraid to set up Hymning with your priest during the encounter either.  The “ooze” phase is another perfect time to take advantage in the lack of healing needed.

Good Luck, have fun, and please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any questions!

Last week I talked about my post 4.3 frustrations while healing. I spent the majority of that week feeling like I was championing a “this is why we are frustrated” cause to everyone who isn’t a druid (and feeling like I was talking to a brick wall 9 out of 10 times), while being a beacon for other frustrated druids who thought that perhaps they were alone in their frustrations and that they must be doing something wrong (and found out that they weren’t). I’m tired of trying to explain the frustrations of our class to people who don’t regularly raid as a druid, subsequently think “druids are fine, I don’t see what you are so frustrated about”, and have spent the past eight months living with what I’ve termed “tranq envy” (thanks for that, by the way, Blizzard).

Since I’m fairly weary (and emotionally worn out) from these conversations (and dealing with the frustrations), I thought perhaps today I’d flip that and write something a little more positive in an effort help the forest that came forth and said “I’m so relieved that it’s not just me”. In short, let’s talk a little bit about how to maximize what we can do with the tool kit we’ve been left with.