The Light and How to Swing It: Blinding Ultraxion with the Holy Light
by Chase Christian 
Dec 11th 2011 at 6:00PM
As the fifth boss of Dragon Soul, Ultraxion is the gateway boss to pursuing Deathwing and stopping the second cataclysm. While Thrall and the dragon aspects are busy with the Dragon Soul itself, we're tasked with defending Wyrmrest Temple from Ultraxion's assaults. Simple, right?
Ultraxion is an incredibly simple fight for tanks and damage dealers. In fact, it's already being called the Patchwerk-fight of this tier. Aside from a few extra button presses, non-healers are simply tasked with bringing Ultraxion down as quickly as possible. Healers, on the other hand, play a very special role in this fight. We're fighting against rapidly increasing AoE damage to the raid, and the aspects themselves step in to help us accomplish our task. Ultraxion is the healer-centric fight of this tier, like Baleroc and Chimaeron before him.
Fading Light and Heroic Will
The fight's basic mechanic has nearly everyone in the raid pushing their newly found Heroic Will button every time they pick up the Fading Light debuff or Hour of Twilight goes off. You can read up on the fight's particulars, or ask your raid leader about how to handle this. The key takeaway is that your tanks will be swapping on a fairly regular basis and that you might be out of commission for 5 seconds every so often if you're targeted by Fading Light.
You should be proactively casting heals on the tank who's going to be taking over tanking Ultraxion, as they'll be swapping back and forth regularly. I don't depend on Beacon of Light on the off tank for this, as once the current tank uses Heroic Will, he isn't targetable for heals. It's better to Beacon the current tank and then heal the upcoming tank, as that ensures that both will get the healing that they need. This encounter isn't particularly punishing to tanks, so don't worry too much about them. Their defensive cooldowns have their durations doubled and cooldowns halved by Thrall, so they're more than capable of handling whatever damage Ultraxion throws their way.
Raid healing: A holy paladin's worst nightmare
The above header would've been accurate at any point over the past several years, but not today. Holy Radiance is everything we've ever wanted out of an AoE heal and more. The entire Holy Radiance and Light of Dawn cycle is so clean and so effective that I don't know what we were doing without it. Why weren't we asking for this all along?
Ultraxion is going to be pounding everyone in the raid fairly regularly, at increasing speeds for every minute the fight goes on. The whole raid will be stacked up nice and neat, so the situation is optimal for Light of Dawn and Holy Radiance. You can typically handle the incoming damage with your cheaper, regular heals as the start of the fight, and then transition into more Holy Radiance usage when the damage comes more quickly. You'll be using your entire toolbox to keep the raid alive through the increasing damage, but eventually the damage will overwhelm even the most potent healers.
The powers of the aspects
In order to counter Ultraxion's massive incoming raid damage toward the end of the encounter, the aspects give healers a boost. The aspects create crystals in the middle of the room, and when those crystals are activated, we're imbued with a powerful buff for the remainder of the fight. Each aspect's buff is different, and so choosing which healer is assigned to which buff becomes critical.
Alexstrasza is the first aspect to grant us a gift. The Gift of Life boosts the healer's output by 100%, doubling all healing done until the fight is over. Because of the intense focus on AoE healing as the fight progresses, you want this buff to go to a healer who already has potent AoE healing. Giving this to someone with poor AoE healing doesn't help you beat Ultraxion. I find that restoration druids and priests are good choices for this blessing, as their AoE healing is already quite good.
Ysera give us the second bonus, the Essence of Dreams. This effect causes all of our single-target heals to also splash that same healing out across the raid. Think of the old Glyph of Holy Light, but on steroids. It replays the entire heal and splashes it across the entire raid. It effectively doubles your healing done and enables single-target healers to heal the raid as well. Holy paladins do well with this buff, and we definitely would've been relegated to the green crystal in the past. Any healer can benefit from this buff, as even AoE healing is replayed across the raid.
Kalecgos gives us the final buff, which becomes active much later in the encounter. His Source of Magic blessing cuts our mana costs down by 75% and gives us an extra 100% spell haste. This is the buff that you want to beg your raid leader for. The Source of Magic is so incredibly good for holy paladins that any reasonable raid leader should assign it to you immediately.
Druids see very little benefit from the Source of Magic, as they don't have any castable AoE heals without cooldowns. Shaman are limited to Chain Heal when it comes to chain-casting AoE heals, but its potency is seriously lacking. Priests are able to spam their Prayer of Healing spell quite effectively with the Source of Magic buff, but that spell only affects one group at a time.
Only holy paladins have a spammable AoE heal with no restrictions, and it's incredibly powerful to boot. In fact, Holy Radiance scales better with haste than any of its competitors, as haste both increases the number of Holy Radiances we can have active and also increases the healing of each individual Holy Radiance cast. The only thing preventing us from spamming it all the time is its high mana cost, which Source of Magic also addresses.
There's a reason that the Ultraxion healing meters are dominated by holy paladins. The Source of Magic buff turns Holy Radiance into the best healing spell in the entire game. We literally spend the entire remainder of the fight cycling Holy Radiance between raid members. I just go up and down my raid frames, casting Holy Radiance on each one as I move my mouse over their name. With Firelands-quality gear, you won't run out of mana, and your HPS will be more than enough to keep the raid healthy.
Here's your argument to your raid leader: Holy Radiance is one of only two true AoE healing spells that can take advantage of all that haste, and it outscales the other one several times over. Holy paladin AoE healing has only one throttle, mana, and Source of Magic removes that throttle. There's no other healer that can compete with us in this space. It's actually kind of funny, because as the fight gets harder for the other healers, it gets easier for holy paladins once we pick up Source of Magic. We simply spam Holy Radiance across the raid, basking in its light.
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy helps holy paladins become the powerful healers we're destined to be. Find out just how masterful mastery healing can be, gear up with the latest gear, and learn how to PvP as a holy paladin.
Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Josh Dec 11th 2011 6:13PM
First time I have ever felt over powered as a holy-paladin healing the raid.
Josh Dec 11th 2011 6:14PM
...and I swear that was unintentional.
Montas Dec 12th 2011 5:03AM
We had real trouble killing this, or better, our dps had. We were trying 3heal it and lasted without problem till hard enrage. Then two healed it with resto druid.
Let him have red one, then take green ASAP and blue when it comes up. You can only have one at the time so you will loose green once you take blue, but man is that buff worth it. You need about 10k mana for the rest of fight :P maybe mana pot ;)
Did anyone tryed if its worth using LoD to get rid of HP?
Whoami Dec 11th 2011 6:46PM
Your Shaman must be bad! How's is your shaman?
Diatenium Dec 11th 2011 7:14PM
You look at a fight like this and our four-set suddenly makes a lot of sense.
I'll try out the blue crystal, I usually stick to green or red because I generally don't have mana problems, Blue might prove very powerful though--particularly at the tail end when mana -does- become an issue, I also like ensuring I top the charts on the LFR, because I way overgear the content and I have nothing better to do with my spare time but stroke my ego.
Still, there's something utterly hilarious about the circumstances which brought us here. Holy radiance, while OK, isn't -that- great a heal until people stack up... Which is the vast majority of the fights in this tier of raiding. Suddenly, druids, the defacto raid healers, can't keep up with their prominently tank-healing brethren, and all because we spam one spell on the raid, something they were nerfed for doing themselves.
When you also take into account tank 4-set bonuses or, for example, the blood DK 2-set bonus which annoyed blood DKs because, "hey, if blizzard fixed their burstyness in damage taken then this would be useless, right?" except there are fights which can an will bring you very low very quickly, you begin to see a fairly subtle change in blizzard's design philosophy: Build set bonuses to compliment a raiding tier's mechanics.
B1ue Dec 11th 2011 7:41PM
@Diatenium
Same. I'll need to pay closer attention to the effects of the blue crystal on me next time I wander through LFR. As I usaully talk faster than anyone else, I usually pass out healing assignments there, as well as in my guild's runs.
Chance Dec 11th 2011 8:59PM
My raids H-Pally is always bottom in heals because the druid and shaman CONSTANTLY snipe heals from him. This fight is his sigh of relief, he grabs that blue buff and leaves the druid and shammy in the dust crying about how OP Holy Radiance is now. I forsee us 2 healing this fight once we all get more gear and having whoever the non pally healer is switching to do minimal dps once the blue buff goes active.
Rockbeard Dec 11th 2011 10:41PM
Our raid is currently two healing this fight due to slightly low dps output. I'm a Holy Paladin healing it with a Resto Druid, can I afford to skip out the Green Buff in favour of the blue one without people dropping like flies?
Nina Katarina Dec 12th 2011 8:29AM
The blue one is out last, so take the green when it pops then take the blue. It will overwrite the green's affect, but that's OK, it served its purpose.
r.furrer91 Dec 11th 2011 11:42PM
I two heal this fight, myself a H-Pally and the other healer a resto druid. I take the red buff, he takes the green, and then I take the blue at the end and spam HR like it's my job. We've tried this other ways but the blue really is the best for us because we can just pump out massive heals, 3 HRs+LoD=H-Pallys actually doing aoe healing....when everyone's stacked up haha.
This is a great ego-booster fight for us =P
Dave P Dec 12th 2011 8:13AM
Can I just confirm that you can have multiple buffs sequentially? Everything I've read so far addresses who gets what buff, with each class arguing their case for the blue phase - and it seems to assume that once you have a buff - e.g. red, you cannot get a different one - this is certainly explicitly stated at icy-veins for example.
If this is not the case - i.e. clicking a second crystal changes your buff, then the obvious HP plan is red buff until blue spawns, then blue for HR spam.
Is there a limit on the number of healers who can click on a crystal?
Also, does Righteous Fury still trigger Last Defender of Azeroth for non tanks as it did on the ptr?
I've done this fight on the LFR, and clicked red, as it was the only one with which I could interact - too many people on top of anything else (I'd been waiting for blue initially). I read the discussion about using the interact-with-target keybind to access covered npcs, and a similar thread on mmo-champion about interacting with lightwell. Does anyone know if it is possible to bind an interaction (I know that several keys might be required) to the different crystals?
sandslice Dec 12th 2011 12:45PM
@Dave
Each buff is single use, and you can grab a different buff afterward if you're running 2 healers.
thontor Dec 12th 2011 1:04AM
I feel like a god with that blue buff.. so awesome
Scorfula Dec 12th 2011 7:50AM
"...you might be out of commission for 5 seconds every so often if you're targeted by Fading Light."
I can't speak for heroic modes or 25s, but on 10 man normal healers are never hit by Fading Light.
Nina Katarina Dec 12th 2011 8:29AM
yes, taking a second buff will overwrite the first.
zmalmquist Dec 12th 2011 11:16AM
I picked up red and stayed with it. Let the holy priest juggle blue and green. Pulled 46k hps on kill.
dj.clayden Dec 18th 2011 10:00PM
Holy Paladins can soak hour of twilight every with glyphed divine protection, just make sure you have shaman health buff fully stacked and use 2-3 divine lights on yourself before hour of twilight finished casting, the mastery shield will allow you to soak it without dying (just)