Spiritual Guidance: Priest healing strategies for Cho'gall in The Bastion of Twilight
by Dawn Moore 
Apr 4th 2011 at 8:00PM
I've had this idea for a social experiment in my head for the past few weeks, where you lock five priests together in a room with nothing but Highland Spirits and force them to have a round table discussion about Lightwell. While I work on my hypothesis and proposal -- and find a way to bait Fox Van Allen into this possum trap -- you guys can finish reading up on the finer points of healing Cho'gall as a holy or discipline priest. Seeing as this is the last boss of The Bastion of Twilight, this will be the final installment of Spiritual Guidance's priest healing guides for this tier.
Cho'gall is a two-phase fight featuring a long first phase that alternates between heavy tank damage and heavy raid damage for healers. The shorter, second phase is a chaotic burn phase that you'll have to keep under control, both with healing and execution.
As always, before we get started, you'll need to get acquainted with the fight. The fight is not terribly complicated for healers, but you can check out L2R's guide to Cho'gall if you're not familiar with the basics.
Coping with Corruption
As you'll know from general guides, Corrupted Blood is the gimmick mechanic of this encounter. Players want to avoid the many forms of "fire" in this fight, as all of it will cause your percentage of corruption to go up, which can eventually result in you turning into an unhealable, faceless monster if it gets to 100%.
Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do as a healer to reduce the amount of corruption your raid takes (since corruption is primarily caused by avoidable boss abilities), but you can help out in one tiny way. The second level of corruption, Corruption: Accelerated, is a debuff that will increase the rate at which an afflicted player receives corruption. Bad, right? Fortunately, Corruption: Accelerated is a dispellable magic debuff, so use Dispel Magic against it as quickly as possible. More and more players will end up with Corruption: Accelerated as a fight goes on, so make sure that this debuff is added to display on your raid frames. Also, Glyph of Dispel Magic comes in quite handy, especially in the second phase of the fight.
Phase 1
In phase 1 Cho'gall will constantly summon a fire or shadow elemental, consume its powers, and then perform a corresponding attack on your raid. When he uses Flame's Orders (fire), he'll attack your tank with powerful melee swings and place patches of fire on the ground. For Shadow's Orders (shadow), he'll attack your raid with three pulses of AoE shadow damage. Cho'gall will alternate between both these orders, but if you're not paying attention for a moment, forget things easily, or just want a quick visual reference, it's useful to set Cho'gall as your focus so you can see what buffs he has. (Good for Twisted Devotion, which we'll get to later.) You can also just look at the hammer he's holding, which will glow red or purple depending on which buff he's consumed.
You'll want to adjust your healing on this fight to match the output damage. Holy priests will find the duration of each buff is just right for them to switch between Chakra: Sanctuary and Chakra: Serenity. That means before the shadow attack, a holy priest might want to place Holy Word: Sanctuary, get some Serendipity stacks, and make sure the raid is topped off with Circle of Healing. For the fire attack, spam your single-target spells and use Holy Word: Serenity if you fall behind before the next melee swing.
Disc priests, on the other hand, can respond to the fiery tank damage with the usual arsenal of strong, single-target spells (Penance, Greater Heal, etc.). For Shadow's Orders, prepare for the AoE by casting Power Word: Shield on as many players as you have the mana for, then cast Prayer of Healing after the pulses begin. Power Word: Barrier can also be used, especially if Cho'gall has a stack of Twisted Devotion. Let's explain that now.
Conversion Cho'gall will periodically afflict members of your raid with Conversion, an ability that causes your allies to worship Cho'gall. If this goes on for too long, Cho'gall will gain Twisted Devotion, a buff that increases his damage. It is thus very important that Conversion-afflicted players be interrupted.
The best ability to interrupting these players is -- wait for it -- Psychic Scream. Psychic Scream is instant-cast and AoE, so you can hit all the afflicted players at once without targeting. So if you're a healing priest, don't be stubborn about helping out with the crowd control. You're the best person for the job! Just know that right after you've used it, your friends will immediately be broken free of Conversion, so dispel Psychic Scream off them quickly so they don't run into anything bad on the ground. Oh, and if it wasn't obvious, you'll probably want to add Conversion to your raid frame display so you can respond quickly with Psychic Scream.
There are also occasionally spawning adds in phase 1 called Corrupting Adherents. Priests should be mindful of this part of the fight in a couple of ways. First, when an add spawns and your off tank goes to pick it up, you'll immediately be splitting your healers between targets. If this happens to occur during Shadow's Orders, the healing will start to get stretched thin and you may want to consider using a cooldown like Guardian Spirit or Pain Suppression on whatever tank needs it most. (You can also reactively use these two cooldowns before Flame's Orders if Cho'gall has Twisted Devotion.)
Most of the raid damage is avoidable when the Adherent is present, but there is a chance that you'll have to do some raid healing if anyone stands in fire for too long. Additional raid damage can also occur if your tanks and DPS don't interrupt Depravity, one of the abilities the Adherents cast. Your normal approach to AoE healing will work just fine in these cases.
When an Adherent dies, he will always create a void zone under him that spawns miniature slime adds called Spilled Blood of the Old God. In addition to that, any existing void zones created earlier in the fight will also spawn miniature slime adds. So, to keep things orderly and make it easier to AoE down the slime adds, your raid will want to stack void zones on top of each other. That's where you can come in as a priest to help. A tank needs to kite the Adherent across the void zone as it dies in order to get the void zones stacked. A tank obviously can't run through the void zone, though, so depending on what abilities he has, you may end up using Leap of Faith to pull him across. Clever, huh?
One last thing to note is that when the Spilled Blood of the Old God does spawn, you will almost always aggro them as a healer. You don't want to get hit by these adds, so counter their threat by using Fade every time they spawn. This is important because sometimes they will die slower, particularly late in the fight when there a lot more of them appearing at a time.
Phase 2
Ideally, you'll go into phase 2 with a lot of mana so you can heal reactively to whatever your raid needs. This phase can be quite chaotic because corruption in your raid will start to increase since Cho'gall will be hitting the raid with Corruption of the Old Gods, a pulsing aura that damages and increases corruption. Remember that you'll need to stay on top of dispelling Corruption: Accelerated!
In this phase, Cho'gall will also summon Darkened Creations, which are eyestalks that will channel a 75% healing and damage reduction debuff on members of your raid. Killing these eyestalks is a priority, because your raid is not operating at 100% output until they're all down. For that reason, even healers should try to help out with damage. Smite your heart out if you're a disc priest with Archangel. If you're holy, do the same, but I don't recommend taking on Chakra: Chastise; there is plenty of healing to do, and you don't want to get behind being in the wrong stance.
Use cooldowns wisely
I already mentioned how to use Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit, but that still leaves Shadowfiend, Hymn of Hope and Divine Hymn. For Shadowfiend, you can use the little guy whenever it's convenient for you. Once very early in the fight and then again later in the fight is probably going to be the best choice, since phase 2 is so mana-intensive.
You'll want to use Hymn of Hope sometime before phase 2 starts. I find the best time to use it is right after the three pulses of AoE shadow damage from Shadow's Orders. There is no urgency to heal the shadow damage once it's been dealt if everyone lived through it, so use the time immediately after to channel Hymn of Hope or a Potion of Concentration. I try to avoid using those abilities after Flame's Orders because while the shadow pulse will always be three ticks, the amount of times Cho'gall swings at your tank with additional damage will vary each cycle.
Divine Hymn (and its older brother, Tranquility) are best if saved for phase 2. You can use them after your raid has killed all the eyestalks and you need to get caught up on healing quickly.
Holy or discipline?
This is one of those fights you can go either way on as a priest. The blend of damage will keep either priest busy, and cooldowns each priest has are on par with each other. That said, holy priests are perfect on this fight because of their ability to swap between two healing "stances," so it may be one of those fights you want to try out as both and see what works better for you and your raid.
Questions? Concerns? Leave them in the comments. Also if you have any questions for future columns, I'll be getting into individual topics over the next week. If there is something you'd like me to cover, now is the time to let me know what.
You may also be interested in reading Priest healing strategies for early Bastion of Twilight and Priest healing Ascendant Council.
Spiritual Guidance has the inside line on pre-raid gear, valor point and raid gear, and healing strategies for bosses such as Atramedes and Chimaeron. Newcomer to the priest class? Look into Discipline Priest 101 and Holy Priest 101.
Filed under: Priest, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
North Apr 4th 2011 8:39PM
Great header image! How was it made?
Dawn Moore Apr 4th 2011 8:41PM
Disconnected in Blade's Edge Mountains after dismounting in my RP outfit =)
Travieso Apr 4th 2011 9:35PM
"I've had this idea for a social experiment in my head for the past few weeks, where you lock five priests together in a room with nothing but Highland Spirits and force them to have a round table discussion about Lightwell."
Is this the basis for the Circle of Healing podcast? I would listen to that.
Nikolai Apr 4th 2011 9:47PM
"A tank needs to kite the Adherent across the void zone as it dies in order to get the void zones stacked."
Just thought I'd point this out, they need to be stacked in roughly the same area, but if you attempt to kite into them to stack the zones you take a massive corruption tick. I would not recommend any tank going in these zones at all.
A better strat is to place them in the roughly same place (eg by the door) so they all come in a straight group, but not to attempt to stack them.
Dawn Moore Apr 4th 2011 10:04PM
Read the rest of the paragraph =)
mark Apr 5th 2011 4:05PM
and the "dependant on the tanks abilitys"
warrior: heroic leap, intervene, charge if boss is close
bear: charge if the boss is close
DK: stuffed
paladin: stuffed
warriors will always have options - any other tank offer to do it for them
Alan Apr 5th 2011 1:52AM
Discipline is OK for now, but will be in a very dark place at patch 4.1.
Might as well get used to play holy right now, as that spec will come out stronger out of 4.1.
Twill Apr 5th 2011 3:14AM
Dawn -- great writing from a great raider. Can you post your stuff earlier in the day though? I always enjoy tips from the comments which die off on posts after 5PM. (Funny, work hours end around then too!)
Either way, thanks a lot. Knowing every class is a headache without WoW Insider ^.^
Tharama Apr 5th 2011 6:38AM
Great post, I see someone still has to get to the Heart of the Matter though. ;)
Redielin Apr 5th 2011 7:24AM
When we did Cho'gall this week, I healed it as Holy (2 healing a 10 man). I tried switching Chakras for "Orders" phases, but they were actually too close together - sometimes as close as 5-10 seconds - I thought they were much more spread out than that but apparently the timing is a bit more random than I thought. I think having infinite duration Chakra will help because you won't have to needlessly spend Chakra CDs on just maintaining the buff like you do now. However, it has never been my experience on Cho'gall that you have enough time to switch Chakra states.
I addressed this problem by putting our other healer, the Holy Paladin, on Cho'gall's tank and I covered the other tank, so our Paladin could take care of Flame's Orders on her own, while I could help a little with Sanctuary based Heals and Renews.
Using your Shadowfiend as early as you can helps a lot when you are two healing, so that it is up again for the burn phase when mana is tight, and to make sure you are stingy with your mana in general and only heal beyond your assignment when absolutely necessary. I actually went into phase two with 70%+ mana this way (and I still beat the Holy Paladin on the meters by about 2k).
Helios Apr 5th 2011 12:05PM
What Redielin said. Until 4.1's infinite Chakra state duration, it's too much of a distraction to switch state. If you are assigned to the MT (cho'gall tank) then stick to Serenity most of the time until phase 2. If you are assigned to the OT (add tank) then only use Sanctuary. The AoE damage is pretty exceptional and if your composition lacks good aoe heals you'll be forced into Sanctuary the entire time. As Red said, send out shadowfiend early. I tossed mine out there around 15 seconds into the fight which was timed about right for the first big aoe dmg.
Disc isn't worth it in this fight in my opinion. If it's all you got then you might be able to get by, but it didn't have enough throughput for me to keep the raid up. Penance isn't a good spell in this fight either because you are forced to sit for 2 seconds to channel. In this fight you have to move a lot and I'd rather stop and restart a spell rather than losing it altogether by cutting it off a channel early. On the other hand, Holy's powerful instants are perfect... dodge a corruption crash, cast, dodge, cast, dodge, scream, dispel, etc.
Our team did this with three heals, but I suggest doing it with two. An extra 12k+ dps would have sped the fight up significantly which lessens the strain on heals.
sean2358 Apr 5th 2011 8:24AM
... if you use psychic scream for worship, kindly use the glyph, aoe fear on MC breaks, but feared player running wildly back and forth through fire is not very helpful.
George Apr 24th 2011 4:55PM
I prefer using the alternate and more useful major glyph - glyph of mass dispel.
Psychic Scream if nobody else can take it (if you are horde, arcane torrent, for example, is much better) and then cast an almost instant mass dispel at your feet so that they don't run about.
Zak Apr 5th 2011 9:59AM
Thanks, Dawn. I'm trying Cho'gall for the first time tonight, this will help
eel5pe Apr 5th 2011 10:29AM
Great read! Wanted to hit a few (minor) inaccuracies and misconceptions in this article.
My understanding is that shadow's orders does not pulse three times, it pulses every time Cho'gall lands a hit on the tank (not dodged or parried). Wowwiki and Tankspot back me up on this, but the best evidence would be a tank's combat log if anyone wants to do the grunt work (I'll see tonight during our raid and respond). Also I want to emphasize that it is not necessary to keep the raid topped off during Shadow's Orders- mana conservation is very important in this fight, especially if you are a ten man group two-healing. As Dawn alludes to, the most important part of the fight is going into phase 2 with a lot of mana (50%+), your cooldowns up, and 0 corruption. Since every AoE damage in this fight is avoidable with the sole exception of Shadow's Orders, your raiders are in little danger of dying to AoE. It's ok for them to dip a little low, especially when things get hectic while adds are out.
The fire patches and the void zones left when the adds die do NOT cause corruption. Don't believe me? Stand in them during your raid's next wipe like I did =) This obviously does not mean you want to stand in them during the fight since they cause hefty damage... but if the choice is between eating a shadow crash and running through a flame patch (melee), run through the flame patch.
Trev Apr 5th 2011 12:34PM
"For that reason, even healers should try to help out with damage. Smite your heart out if you're a disc priest with Archangel. If you're holy, do the same, but I don't recommend taking on Chakra: Chastise"
As Holy in Phase 2, I absolutely do NOT have the time to waste or the mana to spare on casting "Smite" on the tentacles. This is an incredibly heal intensive phase and I don't feel that encouraging Holy Priests to Smite spam tentacles is beneficial at all. Let the DPS do their job, and you do yours keeping them up instead of doing pitiful DPS. Maybe Disc can get away with it with their Atonement heals, but not Holy.
Also, a great tip for all healers on this Phase is to heal with your backs to the Raid. Doing so ensures that if you get "Corruption Sickness", you won't vomit on your whole raid and massively increase their corruption. Once you're in position for Phase 2, you don't have to move anyway, so just face away from the raid, but still be grouped up for heals.
vprunic Jun 14th 2011 10:09AM
Why wouldnt someone play Disc here?
Atonement, Shield and Penance are perfect for Fire Orders, as Chogs Tank should be the only one getting it.
Barrier or Power Infusion combined with POH is perfect during Shadow Orders, as youre stacked up anyway.
On P2 save for later Barrier,Power Infusion and Humn and go crazy.
Amenadar Apr 6th 2011 11:25PM
I've done this fight as Disc, 2 heal and 3 heal in 10 man successfully. I found holy to burn through mana faster than disc due to not always being able to be in the right chakra state. raid bubble timed right as the shadow orb is absorbed is awesome, as is inner fire+ smite spam for dealing with the shadow AOE. Always having POM up of course, standard stuff. Overall I had a much easier time with mana than any other healer as disc, however as holy I was lagging behind the other healers. 2 healing was easier in some ways than 3 healing IMO. Making sure to roll mana CDs early and fast is a good idea (I have a mana trinket and BElf racial every 2 min). As an alchemist the mana pot was good enough, although I did successfully use a potion of concentration without wiping the raid once while 2 healing: just make sure you warn the other healer. Finally, if there are other priests (shadow ideally) then syncing HoH is excellent.
Also, I found that the unglyphed fear was often better than glyphed. If you feared them, they run around for a bit, but if they're stuck in place they often eat a shadow crash, get corruption, and take the damage. Either way though dispell it ASAP. It's a dps race after all.