Tag Archives: raid

Disc Priesting for Tier 15 (part 2)

05 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by in Gaming, Raids, World of Warcraft

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So I’ve turned into a bit of a raidlogger these past few months. I’ve been busy diving back into Aetolia lately, and the type of immersion and engagement you get in a roleplay-focused game with a much more intimate community…is heady. The new patch looming has drawn me back, and I feel like I should finish this post just for completeness! Enjoy a beautifully moody song that’s only tangentially related!

 

 

So, here’s the last third of Throne of Thunder’s fights from a disc priest perspective.

10. Iron Qon

Man, what is it with Blizz and their love for tornadoes this expansion? I get that the tech to throw people around is new, but….ugh, I hate this as someone who runs a pretty low-end computer. The tornado effects in general are very unforgiving for those with latency, and this fight features a double whammy of invisible ground effects on low settings (I won’t get into a rant about graphics settings). Anyways!

If you have decent DPS, you can push a lot (or all) of the first phase with only a single group stacking in melee. This goes for heroic as well (although the damage is going to be a LOT higher). The basic mechanic here is somewhat similar to the Majordomo from Firelands, with increased amounts of damage being taken by the stacked group in periodic bursts, so open with a spirit-shell fairly quickly (I usually do a holy fire and a smite or two to get an archangel charge or three) to get the CD rolling on that – it’ll be back up off CD when the damage is getting nasty again. Directly bubble the individual members of the stacking group and if you are running power infusion, feel free to use it as needed during this phase. Feel free to go WILD with your mana – there is a lot of upcoming downtime and you can completely regen to full. I tend to pop a shadowfiend at the transition on Iron Qon himself then slip in a hymn of hope – if you hymn while shadowfiend is out, it raises your max mana pool, remember, and shadowfiend is still coded to regenerate based on a % of your mana, so you get like an extra 2 or 3k mana a tick.

I belieeeeve we can fly....it only toooook fifty wiiiipes.... (totally unrelated, I know, but it's preeeetty)

I belieeeeve we can fly….it only toooook fifty wiiiipes…. (totally unrelated, I know, but it’s preeeetty)

Spirit shell should be back by the early part of phase 2 (be careful in heroic with timing, as the dogs vanish at 25% health! I kept forgetting this and was using CDs thinking I had until they got to 0 for a phase transition). Tossing a shell out on your team right before the wind storm is a great way to help mitigate that damage everyone is going to be eating, as heals do essentially nothing while inside the radius of the storm. Sidenote – a fun trick you can do if you have a warlock: drop a warlock portal at the stack point for windstorm and one outside of the storm’s area. Hop through the portal and lifegrip the tank to you for basically zero downtime on boss control (having the tank go through the portal makes him unable to taunt for 6 seconds, so you gripping him makes him instantly ready to tank the dogs).

Basically sit and do your nails and atone until the last phase. Very little going on here if people do mechanics right. On heroic, the damage is high, but not insanely so. Get a feel for who’s taking damage and shell as appropriate or just use FDCL procs to shell the tank.

Final phase – shell in the first or second fist smash so it’ll be off CD for the later smashes, which increase in pain the longer the final phase goes for. Gauge your DPS’s potential here to asses how long this phase will go for to help you with the timing.

11. Twin Consorts

This fight is insanely boring as a healer. It’s really a facile fight in general (unless you kill blue before red comes out. Don’t kill blue before red comes out, oh god). I pretty mindlessly atone for the majority of it, using spirit shell before tidal force. If you wanna heal snipe, use bubbles/shells on ranged before cosmic barrage. One thing to actually pay attention to – use bubbles on your tanks! Direct heals give a debuff which sometimes kills inattentive healers, but absorbs don’t give you that debuff!

 

Let the bodies hit the floor. So....so many bodies.... :(

Let the bodies hit the floor. So….so many bodies…. 😦

 

12. Lei Shen

This fight is actually fairly low on healing demands if your team pulls off the mechanics right – that’s a big if, though, so be prepared for lots of heavy and random spot healing. Atonement + FDCL shines here, as smart healing and flash heal procs give you a nice coverage and instant casting as needed.

This isn’t really a big glaring spiritshell! fight, so just kinda weave it in where you want. If you want to game numbers, toss it out at the very start to absorb the first thunderstruck and stagger use from there, or use it before each transition to a new platform to absorb the raid damage. After the first intermission, shell can be good if you preblanket the raid before ball lightnings are formed. For phase 3, you can pretty much use it whenever as the raid takes fairly constant damage, but I like to save it as a tank CD option if things are getting hairy.

Disc Priesting for Tier 15 (part 1)

23 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Gaming, Raids, World of Warcraft

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2025 update, the OG post of this series: link

First, hey! You only need 50 lesser charms to get your 3 weekly Mogu Runes of Fate. Seems Blizzard realizes that the dailies are…not being done daily. I may actually get mine each week. My raid team will be happy (shh, don’t tell them, I’ve just been feigning horrid luck).

So, a post. Since I’ve been lazy.

1. Jin’rokh the Breaker: This fight is actually a fairly simple one. It took my team 2 pulls to down him, and that was the first week with Tier 14 gear. The trick is just managing where you drop the ball lightning (hint: the grates at the edge of the area are all outside of the puddles) and healing through lighting storm.

This fight is GREAT for a disc priest. First, when your tank gets slammed across the room, a pool forms underneath him. Standing in that increases your healing AND your DPS. Hello – atonement! Lightning storm is a great time to use barrier and it happens every 2ish minutes, which means that you can preblanket the group with spirit shells every time (and the spirit shells benefit from your increased healing from the pool!).

1.5 Bridge Trash: The banshees here put a debuff on everyone, reducing healing done, so once you get 5 stacks for archangel, when she is at 75%, spirit shell for a few prayer of healings to eat up the damage before it gets to your team (and is subsequently harder to handle since the healing gets eaten by the debuff).

2. Horridon: This fight is more about properly dispelling and add management and is fairly relaxed as a healer. Atonement works well as a low-mana spot heal. If your team is having issues getting all the dispells off, switch to the glyph of mass dispell to help there – remember MD and purify are on their own CDs so, glyph or not, you still have 2 dispells to work with. Just be wary of overextending yourself mana wise – MD completely eats it up. Spirit shell is best used here as a tank CD (I like to pop it when I have 2 from darkness comes light procs) and it can also be helpful during the venom phase, when the second priest comes out, as you should see an increase in AoE damage there. At the 4th gate, when people have the reflective damage curse, it’s also useful to mitigate the damage they are doing to themselves, since DPS are lazy and bad. >_> Switch to atonement once Wargod Jalak is dead, as the raid gets a DPS boost at that point.

3. Council of Elders: Disc can be helpful on this fight if your team is having trouble burning Suul before his phase. Our DPS, although low, can definitely contribute. Aside from that, both holy and disc work quite well for this fight. For disc, use barrier at the very first empowerment from Malak to eat the damage from his empowered frost dot; follow that with spirit shell and/or bubbles on the 3 people splitting that. Make sure to put bubbles on the people with the dot when he is not empowered, and spirit shell if desired. I tend to leave spirit shell for a tank heal, with FDCL procs, especially when the tank gets stunned and can’t mitigate.

4. Tortos: Great fight for disc, as every time you kick a turtle shell at Tortos, you get a 30% temporary DPS increase! Keep bubbles up on the tanks and (at least) on yourself before quake stomp. The few seconds before that can be good for spirit shelling the team up, but the hectic nature of that fight makes that hard in actuality, especially once more than one wave of turtles has gone out. FDCL procs + bat tank sprit shells are a good alternate use which is much easier to do while remaining mobile.

Ignore the skeletons...

Ignore the skeletons…

5. Megaera: I think this fight is DESIGNED for disc. Spirit shell can (and should) be used every rampage. What I do is power infusion for the 1st ramage, barrier for the 2nd, power infusion again on 3rd, and the 4th (THE ONLY RAMPAGE I CAN’T COVER OMG HOW AWESOME IS THAT COVERAGE!) is handled by our Shaman. Then barrier again! This fight works so so so nice with our CDs.

6. Ji’Kun: I pretty much exclusively heal up top during this phase, but atonement is great for helping kill the hatchlings/healing quickly. Spirit shell is great for quills. The fight itself is pretty basic, as a healer. I use barrier as needed (usually when we get a downdraft into pools because WHY DIDN’T YOU INTERCEPT THEM DPS ARRGGHHH).

7. Durumu the FORGET IT: I have a crappy computer, so I hate this guy SO. FREAKING. MUCH. Can barely see the maze. Anyways, disc is very useful for this fight – pop spirit shell during the beam phase to eat up damage your team will take from red. If I have any FDCL procs, I’ll convert those into shell as well before disintegration beam just to give me a bit more wiggle room with running the maze.

8. Primordius: We really only pulled this guy once so far, and he died, so. But, from a theory standpoint, I like holy better for this fight. I think disc can potentially be potent if you snag all the empowerments, but until that point, you’re going to be switching targets a ton while also being mobile (Primordius himself takes reduced damage unless you get buffs). Bubbles and spirit shell are good for caustic gas to mitigate damage, as well as for the single dot that gets slapped periodically on people.

9. Dark Animus: This fight is fairly easy from a healing standpoint, with the only heavy lifting coming in at the end. Use bubbles on the matter swap people and dispel them as soon as the bubble is there (it’ll be about 7-8 seconds on the debuff) – this will ensure that the person with the debuff is taking the majority of the damage, which your bubble then mitigates! Use spirit shell before interrupting jolt (make sure to stop casting before it hits), both to mitigate AoE damage and in case your fellow healers (but never you!) get interrupted and can’t heal for a bit.

And! This is as far as my team has gotten. Hope this is helpful!

Raiding Trick: How to Sneak Your Team into Terrace

14 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Game Leadership, Raids, World of Warcraft

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[edit from 2024: this post will get some serious traffic when classic MoP launches, you’re welcome to the future, check out my mop disc stuff]

So my raiding team has had the first fight in Terrace of Endless Spring (TOES, as we call it) on farm for 3 weeks now. The council fight, Protectors of the Endless, features a unique mechanic called “elite” mode. Basically, if you kill the bosses in a harder order, you get better loot. How much better?

ARE MY BOOTS NOT AWESOME

ARE MY BOOTS NOT AWESOME

Normal is 496. Elite starting level is 503. Heroic is 509. Two upgrades on an elite item and it is BETTER THAN HEROIC QUALITY. This is an amazing opportunity for guilds who are behind the gear curve, like our team was. We started the tier quite slowly and with a lot of hiccups. We weren’t showing enough discretion in who we brought, and tried to just let everyone have a try, with the more experienced and geared raiders doing a separate Heart of Fear run. Once we realized that we had more progression in Heart of Fear than in Mogu’shan Vaults, we knew we had to switch things around. We now have training raids for the newer members, and a dedicated progression group…which means we are flying through content, downing at least one new boss every progression night.

But, like I said, we had a slow start, so we’re playing catch-up with gear. And one trick we’ve used is leapfrogging ahead into TOES.

Yes, our server has a lot of raid teams.

Yes, our server has a lot of raid teams.

We downed Garalon last night, but WoWProgress is being stupid and won’t update. Anyways…

As you can see, we downed protectors before we even killed the second boss in Heart of Fear. It’s actually a very simple trick and something I suggest considering if your team is struggling on DPS checks or with gear. Terrace basically won’t let you in if you haven’t cleared HoF yet. The stupidly simple solution is just….clear Heart of Fear.

The thing is, only one member needs to do that. It’s just like switching to heroic modes. As long as the person who has gotten the requisite kill is the first one to enter the raid, the rest of the team will also be able to enter.

For us, we had the fortunate situation of one member in our group being an alt from a hardcore raiding team. They are already on heroic modes and had someone who had to miss a day, so they were happy to bring our rogue (and his ranked DPS – yes, he ranked 113 in the world on our Garalon kill!) along for a HoF farm. Same with our (nearly as DPS-tastic) warrior. So both of them now have a clear of HoF under their belts and we can all progress in Terrace simultaneously with progression through HoF.

Now, I will advise one caveat about this idea – gauge your guild. Some teams might feel offended by a member jumping ship for a week to get a “carry” (although in our DPS’ case, they definitely held their own) to a clear. It might make members feel as if the raid leader has lost confidence in their own ability. Take careful stock of your team and your members before you consider something like this, and decide if it is going to hurt team morale. It is a sort of a gimmicky short-cut, afterall. For many teams, the value of defeating the boss together is more important than advancing in progression – hell, I’d say the same likely will apply to our team for next tier. We just are trying to recover from that initial hold-up at the start of the expansion.

Plus, our raid lead definitely framed it as something to be proud of – we’re basically the only team on our server outside of the top 15 getting kills in TOES. That’s kinda cool, especially for a group that hasn’t started heroic modes yet.

And DO try elite mode. Our first pull, I freaked out, panicking into mumble, “Hey, I think this order isn’t the one the guides suggest…!”

Our raid lead just mumbled “You must be confused321pull!”

After a dozen or so pulls, we downed them (as seen in the video above) – and my eyes immediately widen when I see the loot.

“We did it on ELITE?!” I was stunned. I felt tricked, but also really awesome about the deceit. I felt proud of us – we had not only downed the encounter, but done it far tougher than intended, all unknowingly!

“Did you know this was on ELITE?!” I demanded.

Our raid leader merely chuckled, replying, “Of course.”

“Why?!”

“Because,” he calmly stated, “I knew we could do it.”

Pfffffft. He was right, though – we totally could.