Healing Heroic Yor’shaj (video guide)

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!