Practice Makes Perfect

As we've lovingly been deemed by the other raid leader, "Team Ty" has been on a heroic run spree for the past week or so.

We've got a groove, myself healing, Kyn as DPS, our guilds MT and his boomkin girlfriend and a 5th random guild member, normally our favorite mage/Int provider/cupcake maker. The 5 of us together just seem to make a great team. I've learned the tanks quirks, he's learned mine. We know when to pop what cool downs to make sure he stays alive or that I have time to heal the party. We have awesome CC with druid roots and mage sheeps. It just seems to work, you know.

So over the last week, we've successfully ran H-HoO, H-Vortex, H-Deadmines and H-SFK several times with little to no problem. Surprisingly, out of all of those, SFK has to be my favorite instance so far. Not that it really has loot specific to me but because the fights are just plain fun.

Let me pass on what I've learned to any other holy priests out there that may not have attempted to heal this one yet.

Really the first boss is the most difficult. We were able to 2 shot him without much difficulty. Once we understood the concept of the fights, our melee dps had the interrupts down to an art. That's the most important part of this fight. There are a couple abilities that MUST be interrupted no matter what.

First off he puts a debuff on random people called "Pain and Suffering". This needs to be stopped, interrupt or dispell. It inflicts increased shadow damage on the target every 1/2 second for 8 seconds. It should more appropriately be entitled "Pain and Suffering to Your Healer".

Secondly he will cast Asphyxiate on the entire party. This will drop everyone's health to 1. Immediately following this he will start to cast "Stay of Execution" to heal himself and the party back to full. While it's nice of him to heal our health back up, we don't want him to also heal himself. So when he starts to cast this you want to have someone interrupt after 2 ticks of the spell. Why not immediately you may ask? Because those two ticks, as well as the healers AoE heals are enough to heal the party back high enough to withstand the next phase of damage without draining their mana pool. Be sure you let him get off 2 ticks of this cast before you have your melee interrupt him.

Last thing to really worry about comes at about 20% health. He will use Calamity. This inflicts massive amounts of damage on the entire party every 1 second until he is dead. The fight now becomes a DPS race against the healers mana pool and cast times. Pop your cooldowns, cast speed boosts, whatever you've got and burn him down ASAP!

Now, my advise to healers is simple. If you're a holy priest have your Chakra ready to use Holy Word: Sanctuary when he drops everyone's health to 1. This combined with a cast of Circle of Healing or Prayer of Healing will bring your entire party up above 30K health. It's not necessary or recommended to try to heal everyone back to full. It does not matter how much health they have, the next time he casts Asphyxiate, it will drop to 1. You only want to make sure your party has enough health to withstand any party damage/tank damage they take before then.

It is important however to watch the health of the boss. You want to have everyone as close to full as possible before he hits 20%. Use whatever cool downs you have and try to keep your highest dps and the tank alive long enough to kill him. Accepting that you will probably loose a person or two during the last 20% will take a load of stress off of you. I personally sacrificed myself, since I had Spirit of Redemption and knew that the unlimited mana use I had for 15 seconds would be enough to let me spam heals on all the dps and the tank while they killed him.

With all of that being said, the rest of the instance so extremely easy on a priest. There are lots of undead mobs so you are useful to shackle as well as heal. Compared to most of the other instances, this was unbelievably easy.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday and Happy Hunting!