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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsRaid Rx: Healing Ulduar and what to expect
by Matt Low 
Apr 12th 2009 at 2:00PM
Raid Rx has returned from retirement! Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. Ulduar is almost here! Are you prepared?
The patch for Ulduar is imminent. There's no release date yet. Personally I believe it will land sometime this month. Healing assignments has just gotten more complicated. Incoming damage is more than what's currently in the game. To cap it all off, mana regen's been slightly nerfed.
So here's a quick summary of what to expect and how to counteract for it. I've participated in some of the normal mode Ulduar raids and a few heroic mode Ulduar raids. It's tough. The level of complexity and effort required is somewhere along the pre-nerf Hyjal and Black Temple days.
Come to think of it, when I participated in these encounters early on, the game designers felt that it was too easy. So they ramped up the amount of healing overall that needs to be done since the last time I tried these out. Ho boy!
Mana regen
Get used to using these instead of Flask of the Frost Wyrm. Two things happening here are the fact that regeneration for most of the healing classes have been affected in some way and boss fights are expected to get lengthier. We haven't quite returned to the 20 minute Illidan encounters yet.
To help ease the stress, your guild may wish to bring another healer or two.
Damage output
Expect overall raid damage to increase. It seems that every raid boss is going to have an AoE spell or an effect that will damage the whole raid. The raid group as a whole is going to have to take steps to buy as much time for the healers to get to them. Yes, stay out of the fires. This time around, it's also stay out of the falling snow.
Again, bring another healer. My guild will not be going in with less than 7 healers.
Damage mitigation
This is where the Priests in your guild will shine (hopefully). I have a soft spot for Discipline Priests (since I play one). Expect bosses who have the ability to two shot your tanks. Having a Priest can increase the odds of survival due to their Power Word: Shields. Instead of being two shot, they'll have to take three in order to go down.
Although a Priest isn't exactly a requirement, I'd say it's a strong recommendation.
Complex assignments
Assigning healing isn't necessarily going to be harder or more difficult. It's going to require much more finesse. The closest thing that comes close would be your OS3D encounter. Every healer has a job. Not only that, certain healers have to do certain things at certain times for certain results. Coordination demands will be going up. The brute force healing methods being used aren't going to last very long into Ulduar.
A classic example of this is Kael'Thas in Tempest Keep. That fight was a virtual nightmare the first time I did it.
Augments
This should go without saying. At the moment, I'm gemmed for pure throughput. On a good day I'll have ~2900 spellpower as Holy and after raid buffs and consumables. The gems may need to be dialed back down for extra mana regeneration instead.
This is it folks. We've asked for something harder and more challenging. Welcome to year 2 of raiding. Let's hope we're up to snuff.
Want some more advice for working with the healers in your guild? Raid Rx has you covered with all there is to know! Looking for less healer-centric raiding advice? Take a look at our raiding column Ready Check.Filed under: Raiding, Raid Rx (Raid Healing)
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Daedhir Apr 12th 2009 6:17PM
Well, wouldn't it be more reasonable to call them unskilled players rather than casuals? Casuals aren't all bad players. Hardcores aren't all good players.
You're happy they're raising the skill level, great. So am I, and I am what most would consider casual. I just take issue with the incendiary language, I guess.
masterraistlin Apr 12th 2009 6:27PM
I think that a lot of the more "hardcore" community define "casual" as more like:
They don't feel the need to put in any time or effort into making their character the best that it can be. They think it's "fine" to be dragged through Naxx pulling zero thousand dps. They think if they only have 2 hours a week to play that they should be handed epics.
Right now Blizz is catering to them. This is what some of us have an issue with. The current content is allowing horribly bad players to get the same rewards as good players which makes them never have to improve or think critically about how they're interacting with the rest of the game. It's polluting the community.
I think Octale from "Octale and Hordak versus the World" podcast defines them best as "entitled casuals"
Eisengel Apr 12th 2009 10:33PM
@Sithik
The long and short of it is that Blizzard is changing their design strategy. Rather than making the OPPORTUNITY to raid the reward, they make sure everyone can raid, but they then make the Achievements and hard modes the reward. People are used to the old way of doing things, so they want there to be really hard raids. The thing is, they can be really hard, you just have to choose for them to be really hard now. You have to be aware of the hard modes present and go for them. I this this design strategy is a good idea.
For instance... heroic CoT isn't all that tough, even with normal blues and maybe a few pieces of badge gear, most groups should be able to get through it... however the achievement for that dungeon requires a lot of sustained DPS and a lot of mana management from the healer(s), good use of cooldowns from the tank, and a pretty decent gear level across all the players. In short, gear and skill. If you want the instance to be hard, you can do the optional challenges, but there will not be a brick wall raid that is automatically tuned to be almost impossible.
The casual/hardcore argument can cut both ways. You can say the casuals want gear handed to them, but then you could also say that hardcores want the hard progression path handed to them instead of going out and finding challenges to complete to show just how good they are.
You also say that DPS should basically smoke the tank on damage. Sure, they should be higher, but why? It was the old design that tanks do basically no damage and DPS does a crapton. The person who introduced me to WoW had a Warrior main. When they were explaining the class roles they told me not to roll a Warrior if I wanted to do damage... that he chose one for that reason and was quite disappointed... that Warriors were for taking damage, not dealing it. I think that it is natural to presume Warriors can do good damage, and I am glad to see tanks start to clock in around the hybrids for DPS.
Just back up and take a look at what these design changes mean for the game and the players. Yes, it is different. Is it a bad thing? I don't think so.
DruidGuard Apr 12th 2009 3:46PM
This is probably getting off topic but...
What do we know about the legendary healing mace? I'd like to set aside a topic in my guild's forum about it, but so far I have no real clue as to where/how the fragments drop in Uldar. It may not seem that important, but it could save my guild some drama in the long run if rules and whatnot could be set aside ahead of time, instead of the inevitable clash that will happen should a fragment drop and all the healers and the guild itself have to figure out what to do with the fragment (who would get them all) on the spot.
Has anyone come up with any ideas as to how to distribute the fragments or exactly who drops them and how (hard modes, etc)? Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Dave Apr 12th 2009 4:55PM
My understanding is that fragments drop from each of the bosses in Ulduar. As time goes by and we get more familiar with the new encounters, I think we'll be able to spread the wealth.
In my guild's case, we as the officers came up with a short list of potential candidates based on attendance, healing ability, WWS, and time in the guild. We also picked an alternate with the same criteria, if for some reason, our primary pick had to miss a raid. No initiates were considered. No officers were on that list, by design.
Hansbo Apr 12th 2009 6:11PM
As far as I've heard, it drops from all ulduar bosses who are killed in hard mode.
So yeah, it will probably take some time for a lowly priest like me to get it. But it will taste sweetly.
Percy Apr 12th 2009 4:00PM
Don't use mp5 flasks. That would be retarded.
Distilled wisdom is a much better investment.
Apra Apr 12th 2009 4:23PM
I'm glad I didn't stack haste, like many priests have said to do.
Just about every piece of gear I have has Intellect, Spirit, Crit and Spellpower, leaving me with 2419 Spellpower (with inner fire), 21.67% holy crit, and 1022 MP5 (outside 5sr).
With the 40% spirit nerf, I should still have about 740 MP5 unbuffed.
I think people who will be dropping spirit for other stats are going to make a big mistake.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but when spirit gets nerfed, that means you'll want more of it. Spirit has been a very valuable stat for priests for a long time, they just happened to have balanced it wrong in wotlk, essentially making it have crazy diminishing returns past 1000 or so, whereas now each point will be more valuable than ever. Stacking int might work fine a lot of the time, but it gives you very little flexibility on fights where you need to really stretch your mana.
The Claw Apr 13th 2009 2:39AM
"Stacking int might work fine a lot of the time, but it gives you very little flexibility on fights where you need to really stretch your mana."
Well, apart from the fact that int is ALREADY a better mana regen stat than spirit, and will become even more so after 3.1.. try looking at how much int and spirit each affect your regular mana regen, and also how much of your mana regen comes from that and how much from replenishment/shadowfiend/etc.
shamman22 Apr 12th 2009 5:08PM
I sure hope that all the people saying how easy the content is and that the heroics modes are puggable all have the black proto drake.....? Let me guess, your leet guild just happens to not have that one achievement finished? Or wait, your main on another server in a REALY leet guild has it.....
Because if you don't, then you're basically full #@$@...
Falcom Apr 13th 2009 2:14PM
well said. I've seen maybe 3 black proto-drakes on my server and those players i know are skilled. but the amout of people on this blog seem to all be skilled enough to have it! Why don't more people have it if thats the case? Because they're all FULL OF $#!+.
syco Apr 12th 2009 6:17PM
I'm a holy priest, I learned to raid in Naxx10, I'm mostly wearing naxx10 gear, but the way this article sounds, we'll be lucky to still be able to clear Naxx after the patch, much less make a dent in Ulduar. Things may be different with 25 man guilds, there are more healers and more room for error, but Naxx is still a bit rough sometimes, we still wipe on bosses occasionally, even with all the awesome gear on our tanks and healers. In 10 man, all the mistakes that are made come down on the shoulders of 2 or 3 healers. One person screws up a mutating injection on Grobbulus and I have to blow half a mana bar healing the raid up. That's normal, and fine, and avoidable, but my point is I feel most guilds are going to want to run a wing of Naxx as a sanity check before they bother trying Ulduar. I know i'm going to try get my guild to consider it.
Honestly, the regen nerf is going to be hard enough, even without ulduar with it's new bosses and mechanics and difficult fights. It's going to be hard to keep raiders attending if we wipe every time one person makes a mistake.
Maximize Apr 12th 2009 6:48PM
I very much appreciate Blizzard opening up content for the average player.
This gets said so often its a tired cliche, but it remains true: "Massive amounts of content being only available to 2% of WoW players is just plain dumb." I don't want EQ, and I don't think most WoW players do, either.
Its still annoying to me how exaggerated the low difficulty of Naxx is. Most PUGs still cannot do Naxx 25 in one sitting (if at all). If you are under some other impression, its probably because you are in a very good guild and have been doing it for months. And don't get me started on EoE; hardly any pugs I have been in there with succeed unless they mostly consist of folks from a solid raiding guild.
I'm happy to see a lot more "hard mode" fights in 3.10 because I am in a serious raiding guild, and (TBH) I wanna strut around Dalaran and have everyone drool. :-)
BUT I am hoping Blizzard doesn't completely overdo an increase in difficulty for the fights in Ulduar that aren't on hard mode. I am hoping for most fights on normal to be somewhere along the lines of Sapphiron, Kel, and Malygos.
-----------------------------
On the actual topic, I have been on PTR, and I predict I may have to change a trinket and maybe a few sockets, but I plan to still roll with Frost Wyrm.
Pyornthe Apr 12th 2009 9:56PM
Oh god.
I'm officially scared now.
Soulsong Apr 13th 2009 12:41PM
All I can really say is, Im ready for something new and something that will be hard, actually SUPER hard, something that will take up the time for the reset of the raid. I don't want something that will take the guild a few short hours to run through then wait days and days and oh ya another few days and hours to try again. I want something that will make people like my guild master not be tanking something and playing ps3 at the same time. Boring. So they are making Ulduar hard? woot! Will people get their faces creamed first couple of raid trys? hurray! Just please send it out already :(
guston Apr 14th 2009 3:09PM
I like things that cover peoples missing eyes.
Timj11dude Apr 15th 2009 7:05AM
@Sithik post 20
All I have to say is that blizzard is seemingly going to make more hardmode content, so that casuals and hardcore players can see the same content but at different levels of difficulty and quality drops.
jks24t Apr 15th 2009 7:50AM
Stop worrying about casual players, or scrubs, or whoever else you want to identify, and just enjoy this for what it is....a game. A source of entertainment.
Take it for what it is. Have fun accomplishing the challenges presented to you, while you get to enjoy some time with friends. Stop worrying about E-Pride.