Halfus Wyrmbreaker is the next in my series of narrated Resto Druid guides. Halfus is probably the easiest of the thirteen hard modes in this tier of content, and is likely the first one that you will encounter. I’m actually tank healing for this fight, so it will have a slightly different perspective than the other videos that I’ve done to date. As always, I’ve added some additional notes below the video 🙂
A friendly reminder that this video will be viewed best at one of the higher resolutions, and either on YouTube or in full screen.
A few notes!
- Atonement – In before half the internet corrects me, atonement is FIFTEEN yards. I mistakenly indicated that it had a sixteen yard range in the video, so have everyone take one step closer.
- Hand of Protection – You heard me state that I received our “first Hand of Protection”. I forgot to mention that we HoP a healer for each roar – and if we are out of HoPs our paladins will bubble the roar.
- Power Word: Barrier – While this isn’t as vital as it was before they changed the mechanics of the encounter, it is still helpful to drop a PW:B under your tanks during the roars. (The tank tanking Halfus at the time of the roar should also utilize a cooldown as well).
- Four Dragons? – We only free four of the five dragons (we never free the one that stuns Halfus). We found that our damage was sufficient with just the 400% buff, and not having to worry about healing two tanks through the roars made them much simpler to deal with. However, there are benefits to having that last drake active, as the stuns to Halfus to mitigate a fair bit of damage. (Most people that I know that free him, don’t kill him, just free him after all of the other drakes are dead for the benefit of the stuns). You will have to decide which strategy works best for your raid team 🙂
I hope that you found the video helpful! Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have questions or feedback!
Falling Leaves and Wings 
Thanks for posting this, very helpful. I have a couple of questions… I have read before that atonement is very good, but was also told that it’s no longer necessary – do you think it is still extremely useful though? Also is the dps they do significant?
Thanks
With the changes to the mechanics of the fight, it’s probably no longer necessary to have atonement priests – but we learned the encounter before the changes went in and stuck with our original strategy. Our disc priests are extremely competitive healing with atonement on this encounter – often times near the top of our healing meters.
What I like about it is that two disc priests can pretty much single handedly manage the raid, and you never have to worry about raid damage, which frees up your other healers to focus on the tanks.
Do I think it’s necessary? Probably not – but it’s a very simple solution to managing raid damage, and it’s a lot of fun for your priests 🙂 They aren’t breaking any records with their damage – but I wouldn’t call it insignificant either.
We do this encounter almost the same way, but one of our disc priests hates smiting (blaspheme!) but her choice, she does great doing her thing, regardless.
Also, I find ‘pre-potting’ with a volcanic pot (PRE PULL!!) really useful for this fight, that 20 seconds of increased burst with heroism helps get things stable, fast.