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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsRaid Rx: Best practices for healing heroic Chimaeron
by Matt Low 
Mar 25th 2011 at 9:00AM
Next big test on the raid list after taking down heroic Halfus is the heroic multi-face boss (commonly referred to as Chimaeron) in Blackwing Descent.
No, Chimaeron isn't the dragons that are pictured above (although they're all in the same place). I haven't been able to get him down yet, since he is one tough dude. The reason why I've found Chimaeron more challenging than Halfus is because the Halfus encounter is over in a minute, if your raid can survive the initial rush. In Chimaeron, the healers are working overtime. We've been able to consistently get him down to the final phase. I imagine we're not the only ones who are still struggling with him (or it).
When we were first learning the encounter, we brought in eight healers. We learned quickly that it was one healer too many, because it tipped us past the enrage timer. Eventually, we settled on using seven healers: two of them assigned to the soak tanks, the other five on the raid. Those raid healers will be called on to heal specific players and specific groups.
Spend some time beforehand spacing people out. Make sure people in the same groups are relatively close to each other so that healers can cast their AoE spells on all of them.
Our mistake
Our first few tries at this boss relied on splitting up the five healers and making them responsible for any Caustic Slimes that were in that group. I realized after spending many hours on it that placing healers with that kind of responsibility may not have been the best idea. Not many healers can react or respond to the dreaded three-slime scenario. If it happened to my group, I would have cast Flash Heal on two of them and then hit the third target with a Penance or a Holy Word: Serenity. Even that was cutting it close, as a Massacre would hit a second right after.
Imagine three targets in your group all hit with a Caustic Slime that drops their health down to 1. You have a maximum of maybe 5 seconds before the next Massacre or Caustic Slime reaches the group. There is little margin for error.
I'm able to catch these incoming hits on my priest and keep up said players on my own without additional help, but I realized that some members in the guild were struggling. It may been due to a simple class healing imbalance. The diverse array of spells makes priests the go-to choice, followed by paladins and shaman. Druids just seem to have the biggest difficulty; my guess is that it's due to the way HoTs and the other druid spells function. Any awesome druid healers out there willing to offer some insight on how to handle Caustic Slimes that are immediately followed up with a raid-wide Massacre?
Our renewed efforts
After that, it was back to the drawing board. It turns out the biggest thing for us that did the trick was the automatic marks that were placed on players by your boss addon of choice. We assigned one healer to look after one mark. If their mark was already above 10k health, they were free to check on and heal anyone.
Skull Priest
Cross Priest 2
Square Resto shaman
Moon Resto shaman 2
Triangle Paladin
But that's not all. Your healers need to stand in such a way that everyone is in range of each other. It wouldn't do to have one bookkeeper on the side. The problem I had was telling people where to stand. Naturally, I told the healers to stand in the middle and allow the DPS to adjust to their positions.
Check your distances. I learned that one as a form of survival. It took me a few tries before I was able to really get it. If the healers are spaced out, there is a chance that their marked target won't be in range for them. That's why we moved every healer to the middle area and made sure the crew was able to handle themselves.
Inefficient healing becomes inefficient
I received numerous tips from multiple players who suggested using fast heals against targets hit with a Caustic Slime. The trick is to get players above the 10k health mark fast. You're not casting fast heals all the time, so you don't run the risk of burning through all your mana.
Stick to casting one fast, inefficient heal for each target until the next Caustic Slime or Massacre hits. If a Massacre does hit the raid, each raid healer should heal his own designated party once or twice to get them above the 10k health mark.
Feud!
Feud phases are fun!
Since your tanks actually take damage during this phase on heroic, I really advise getting every healer to hit that one tank with one healing spell each, to drive up their health to full. Have your five raid healers start healing their assigned groups. If one healer manages to get his group's health leveled off, he can swing over and help with another one.
We're on pace for four Feud phases before Chimaeron pushes into the last phase. When you get to the last phase, have a discipline priest or two begin placing shields on everyone. This is the Heroism/Bloodlust phase. Every healer starts piling on the DPS spells.
Normally, I'm the one who's offering advice and help to both newer healers and veterans. In this case, I'm not sure if I'm qualified. We're close to getting it down, though. Any additional insights or tips in the comments would be invaluable.
Need advice on working with the healers in your guild? Raid Rx has you covered. Send your questions about raid healing to mattl@wowinsider.com. For less healer-centric raiding advice, visit Ready Check for advanced tactics and advice for the endgame raider.
Filed under: Raiding, Raid Rx (Raid Healing)
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
sherman.jacob Mar 25th 2011 6:58PM
Chim was our 2nd hard mode in our progression (currently 5/12 HC). Like other posters have said, Druids seem to have the most trouble with the fight (unless they re-glyph).
Druids and Paladins assigned to group heals really need to forget how they used to heal. As a holy pally, I took over a group when one of our druids couldn't handle it, and had to use a spell I almost never use: flash of light. The time you need to get everyone above 10k can be quick, and you need the quick heals to get those 2-3 people up.
Tanking can be done a few ways. Our progression kill was done by switching up building a few stacks of break before switching, then the tank without any break stacks would be the 'feud' tank. However, we have cleaned it up by doing the following:
The mixture you get as a buff makes you survive any attack as long as you have 10k hp to start out. This also applies to tanks. Therefore, what we did is have 1 person to build up break stacks, 1 person to take the double attacks (only thing Chim has outside of feud to break the mixture effect), and 1 person to tank feuds. This made tank healing much easier on mana, due to the fact that we only needed to keep the break tank above 10k, not at full. Beacon stays on the double attack tank, and the feud tank gets help from everyone on transition.
The real key to the fight is to have everyone with as much hp as possible going into phase 2. The most important people to have this are the tanks. Therefore, with 2% HP left until phase change, we use our Lay on Hands for all tanks, and feral druids who can act as tanks. The longer the tanks stay up (sacrifice, pw:s, pain sup helps), the easier it is for your dps to pew pew.
Good luck, we're on to Omnitron (only took 2 hours of attempts for H Magmaw, it must have been super nerfed).
Diatenium Mar 25th 2011 8:27PM
Aye, as a ten man team, we find it a little bit more strenuous at times.
Generally we have our three healers--myself included--assigned to have two of them heal each of their respective groups and myself to keep the Double Attack tank at full, I think this method works for a smaller group where it did not for 25 man.
BIG TIP for those keeping the double attack tank up, with the general exception of the first massacre, Chimaeron will interrupt his second double attack with that raid-wide aoe. So after a massacre (Assuming it doesn't cause feud) you only need to heal your double attack tank to full once, after he takes the first double attack you shouldn't need to heal him to full a second time, great way to conserve mana!
As for feud, we'll burn a hard cooldown on the main tank for this phase (We had two lay on hands and one guardian spirit) right at the beginning, although this tactic isn't too effective when he randomly decides to feud for every single massacre, yech!
The dot Nefarian places on you in the final phase is a kinda pointless soft enrage designed specifically for 25 mans, which doesn't work due to bubble spamming; unless you failed to heal everyone to at least half health then Chimmy'll kill your raid long before the dot ever does. If you're -really- lacking on dps for this end phase you might want to consider speccing specifically for this fight--I removed aura mastery and sacred cleansing in favor of denounce for this fight since I use neither of the former--else, Find the caster with the highest dps and carefully time a hand of protection on him to buy a few precious seconds!
FenixRise Mar 26th 2011 9:01AM
I don't actually play resto on my shaman as much as I used to, but I still find myself healing a lot as enhance spec. Even more so on Chimaeron. In our 10 man attempts I spend a lot of time spot healing just to make sure people are above the needed health line, either with free chain heals, or a free healing rain. I love how useful I can be in the big damage situations due to maelstrom weapon, it has helped us finish quite a few encounters and saved the healers lots and lots of mana.