Spiritual Guidance: Priest healing the Madness of Deathwing and heroic Dragon Soul
by Dawn Moore 
Jan 2nd 2012 at 4:00PM
This is it -- the last priest healing boss guide of the expansion! (After this, it's pandas or bust, baby!) Are you excited? You should be, because the last boss fight of Cataclysm is
Priests of either spec should know that cooldown management is the key to succeeding in this encounter as a priest. The encounter as a whole is not particularly difficult, but using your regen cooldowns at the right time will pave the way for you to hold onto just enough mana from start to finish. I recommend using your first Shadowfiend after the Mutated Corruption dies on the first platform, and your first Hymn of Hope just after jumping over to the second platform. Your second Shadowfiend should be used as soon as it becomes available, which will allow you to pair your third Shadowfiend and second Hymn of Hope together (just like we used to always do it in Wrath -- cast Shadowfiend, then immediately follow it up with Hymn of Hope). From there, use everything on cooldown, and you should be sitting pretty for mana the whole fight.
In phase 2, you'll be raid healing again, this time against the damage done by Shrapnel and Corrupted Blood. Holy Word: Sanctuary is now plenty effective, since your raid is stacked up the whole time. You can use Divine Hymn again this phase, though save it until the Deathwing gets to 10% or 5% health when Corrupted Blood gets stronger (you'll want to have a cooldown rotation to keep things in order, as always). Guardian Spirit will be reserved for your tanks when the Elementium Terrors come up.
Discipline strategies Most of your time will be spent pre-shielding players with Power Word: Shield on this fight. In phase 1, you'll want to target players with low health so they're not killed by the Mutated Corruption when it crashes against the platform. In phase 2, shield players who get the Shrapnel debuff so when the damage hits, a good chunk of it is soaked by the shield.
Cooldowns like Power Word: Barrier can be used in phase 1 against the Elemental Bolt damage with some attention to placement. You want to place it away from the impact point of the bolt so you're not mitigating damage your raid could have otherwise avoided from being farther away. It's best to place the barrier on a marked player so the raid knows where to stack up ahead of time.
In phase 2, the raid will be stacked up, so barrier placement is a given. Just make sure you're saving it for when the damage from Blood Corruption is actually difficult to manage. Pain Suppression usage is the same as it is for holy; in phase 1, use it on the tanks against Impale, in phase 2, also on the tanks but when adds are up.
Heroic Dragon Soul
The following are some notes and insights I have about healing heroic Dragon Soul so far. If you're a strict holy priest, you probably won't like what you read, but do take things into consideration. Holy's lack of a real raid cooldown has hurt its viability in cutting-edge heroic content tremendously this expansion, and I wouldn't expect to see many holy priests making it into the later encounters of heroic Dragon Soul until the content is nerfed or gear is stacked enough that the fights become easier.
Morchok Because the heroic mode of this encounter is pretty much the same fight, there isn't much more for a priest to know. Neither spec is favored.
Warlord Zon'ozz Both specs are good for heroic Zon'ozz, for different reasons. Holy has more mobility (the core spells in their tool box are mostly instant-cast) to keep up with the increased movement in the fight, while disc priests benefit from being able to pre-shield targets during the black slime phases.
Yor'sahj the Unsleeping In general, priests are strong on Yor'sahj because of Prayer of Healing and Prayer of Mending. AoE and smart healing spells don't give you much control over who you're healing, so you're always at risk of accidentally stacking the Deep Corruption debuff on the wrong target if you use Circle of Healing or Wild Growth. With Prayer of Healing, you know exactly who you're healing, which makes a big difference on the more stressful heroic mode of this fight. Prayer of Mending, on the other hand, is a free heal to spam on cooldown, since it doesn't apply a stack of Deep Corruption at all.
Beyond that, both specs can be used on heroic Yor'sahj. Holy priests are useful for blue slime phases because they can drop Lightwell and Holy Word: Sanctuary before losing all their mana. Disc priests are obviously good because of Power Word: Barrier, provided you're not on a purple slime phase.
Hagara the Stormbinder From what I understand, most raids are choosing to brute force the healing on this fight by letting some or all of their healers stand in the middle, taking damage from Watery Entrenchment and healing through it. In that case, both specs fare all right, with holy being strongest for its ridiculous amounts of HPS, and disc for Power Word: Barrier.
Ultraxion You will probably want to go disc on this fight just because it's a DPS check. You simply don't need all the healers you bring to the fight for the first 4 minutes, so having Atonement and Power Infusion are an added bonus holy can't bring. On top of that, Power Word: Shield, Pain Suppression, and Power Word: Barrier are all ideal tools for dealing with Hour of Twilight.
Warmaster Blackhorn Disc is also stronger than holy on this encounter because of the damage in phase 2. To survive the increasing damage from Disrupting Roar, it's essential that you have as many damage-mitigating raid cooldowns as possible. Divine Hymn does nothing if people are getting one-shot. Barrier is also good for the Twilight Onslaught in phase 1, provided they're back up for phase 2.
Spine of Deathwing Both specs are arguably good on this fight, though it's a little hard to tell at this point if holy is on equal footing with disc. Disc's cooldowns and utility is what will bring it to the fight, but it's also excellent for its ability to quickly swap between dispelling the Blood Corruption debuffs (Blood Corruption: Death and Blood Corruption: Earth), healing the tanks, and shielding the players with Fiery Grip.
Madness of Deathwing I can't really say anything about this encounter at this time, unfortunately. I'll come back later and update this when I've got more than just speculation.
Read more
- Priest healing for Morchok, Warlord Zon'ozz, and Yor'sahj the Unsleeping: Healing priest strategies for Dragon Soul's first three bosses
- Priest healing for Hagara the Stormbinder or Ultraxion: Priest healing for Dragon Soul's Hagara and Ultraxion
- Priest healing for Warmaster Blackhorn and Spine of Deathwing: Healing priest strategies for Warmaster Blackhorn and Spine of Deathwing
Spiritual Guidance has the inside line on healing priests in patch 4.3. Check out the 4.3 raid gear guide to plan your next upgrade, or leveling a healing priest if you're just getting started.
Filed under: Priest, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
yahoo514 Jan 2nd 2012 4:08PM
Sitting pretty for mana, why thank you!
Revnah Jan 2nd 2012 4:26PM
But Holy does have a real cooldown now, talented Divine Hymn. It's awesome. In terms of raid-wide damage (and I'm healing a 25man), I leave everyone else in the dust. Not because I'm so great - I'm not - but because these fights are ideal for holy priests, as if they were made for us.
Bit surprised at this assessment of our expected performance in heroics.
Dawn Moore Jan 2nd 2012 5:27PM
Trust me, it's not something I'm particularly happy with but I also don't want to paint an inaccurate picture of what's going on in the top end raiding scene right now. Holy hasn't had much representation in heroic logs this tier, especially for the last four bosses. While I can't be sure that this trend will affect the strategies every raid uses, I do know that strategies and raid compositions for heroic kills tend to trickle down from guild to guild when content is still very difficult. I'm sure holy will start showing up more as more raids start facing the tougher heroic bosses, either because content is nerfed or gear is stacked. I have no doubt that in some raids a holy priest will be present simply because they outclass every other healer in the group, but an individual player's skill and the skill of his allies needs to be accounted for. In better guilds though, where most players are on equal footing with one another, the details become more important. Wipes start being about DPS checks, shortage of cooldowns, instead of bad healing and people standing in doube shit. In your situation, it's very well possible that you are the strongest healer in your raid, not because of your class but because of you yourself.
Overall, I think the healing model Blizzard is using is flawed and I'm frustrated that they've said they're not planning to change it in MoP. Sure, healing niches weren't great, but you didn't often see healing teams comprised almost entirely of resto shamans in Wrath, did you? And the problem isn't really that holy priests are bad either, it's that pallys, resto shaman, and disc priests are so much better for the encounter design we've been seeing. The way encounters are designed now, healing has become less and less about healing, and more about using the right cooldown at the right time. As long as cooldowns are used properly, you don't really need a team of skilled healers, you just need healers who can follow directions and do some damage clean up. Truly talented players who are available to raid are hard to come by, and that's really what prevent so many raids from succeeding in the past. By Blizzard changing encounter design, they allow more players to succeed and in turn be rewarded. Unfortunately that system sort of screws up healing if they don't homogenize things across the board.
But anyway... In a situation where there is a dramatic difference in skill, of course you'll do better than other players. It's a given. The question to think about is whether you could offer more by using a spec that has a leg up on the encounter, and whether you're willing to do that or not. Fights like Ultraxion and Gunship are blatantly biased to disc utility and I don't think it's in good practice to not address that. Most of the other fights are fine, though I don't have personal experience on Spine as holy so I can only speculate, as I did. I may post an addendum at a later date when I get the opportunity to do some of these fights as holy.
Dawn Moore Jan 2nd 2012 5:41PM
A few typos in there... can't seems to edit them out like I usually do. Curse you administrative powers! Why have you forsaken me?! D=
scotlandap1 Jan 2nd 2012 6:26PM
But Dawn, wasn't the talk on the official forums a month or so ago that the devs *are* indeed looking at some major changes to healing...again...in MoP? I'm talking about the idea they are throwing around of having the mana bar go static and int would increase the power of the heals (spirit supposedly would be--as it was promised--the major regen stat).
What are your thoughts on this? I have to say that even though I'm OS heals, the idea of a major overhaul again might have me reroll a pure dps class. (Though I agree with you that the current model did not live up to the hype, either).
Revnah Jan 2nd 2012 8:13PM
Thanks for the reply, Dawn. I agree with your overall assessment of the flaws in WoW healing these days, but I don't completely agree with your conclusions. Now, to stay with the Ultraxion example, I haven't done the heroic version yet; but if it's not *that* different in principle to the normal version, then it's a dps race, yes, but also an AoE healing race towards the end. You could look at it both ways: Bring a disc priest and gain dps during the first half of the fight, or bring a holy priest and make up for slightly less dps (because the disc priests I've seen haven't done *that* much dps with Atonement) by better AoE healing.
It was on Ultraxion normal that I got myself a ranking once, with the red buff and an end result of over 51k hps. I don't always top the healing meters, actually I usually don't but this fight is one of those where I shine, together with both Spine and Madness of Deathwing. Maybe that's why I reacted so needled :-)
Again, I have yet to see those fights on heroic. It's not that I'm totally opposed to going Disc; it's just that I don't see a compelling enough reason (yet). Btw, I healed Baleroc heroic as Holy too, my "secret" being the Jaws of Defeat trinket. It allowed me to spam Flash Heal without going oom and gaining very nice stacks so I could tank heal well when needed. I wasn't topping meters but I wasn't at the bottom either.
Could there be a case of a perception self-perpetuating itself? Holy priests are perceived as weaker, that's why fewer guilds use them, and then everyone looks at WoL and says, "oh my, hardly any holy priests! They must be crap. I'll go disc." Or it's because most guilds are 10man now. Whenever we have to go 10man for any reason, my healing is terrible, my hps stink and I'm at the bottom of the meters. I think Blizz might have involuntarily created another "niche" here, with holy being great in 25mans and nowhere else...
Diatenium Jan 5th 2012 3:31PM
@ Dawn
Your comment is a rather good read, but for brevity's sake let's pare it down a bit to the simple fact that healing in Cataclysm is now "Bring the Cooldown, not the player."
I can understand that things like Tranquility, while nice, aren't ideal raid cooldowns because they reactive instead of proactive, and prevention is generally the best kind of medicine.
So, the issue being defensive cooldowns altogether, they should either be removed, nerfed to the point of being only a minor convenience, or given exclusively to tanks as it feels like they're more appropriate to fill that role.
Although I'm not absolutely sure if this covers the entirety of your bitter feelings towards Blizzard's current healing model. Do you refer to the three-heal model? As a holy paladin I've never really had any contention in this area and it was certainly a step up from wrath which I fairly certain most healers didn't really enjoy, familiarity notwithstanding.
Robert Jan 2nd 2012 6:01PM
Totally awesome blog pic btw
Philster043 Jan 2nd 2012 6:09PM
Hmm, I guess I should be grateful that I'm a Holy/Disc priest right now, but I don't like that I might have to ever consider switching during a raid out of necessity.
Thanks once again for writing these articles!
Philster043 Jan 2nd 2012 8:13PM
Oh, and hope you're feeling better Dawn!
karatesmashunhurt Jan 2nd 2012 8:13PM
Thanks for these posts. We just fought the spine tonight, and your comments definitely made it easier to face it for the first time.
I know that you refrained from making comments about the MoP talent calculator before due to lack of information, but now that more information is up I wondered what your thoughts were. Unfortunately so far I mostly feel negative as you can see in the QQ below.
I'm a bit sad that disco is losing binding heal, while holy is losing Prayer of Mending they're both excellent spells. While that decision fits the flavor of the specs it feels like it will be a nerf to both specs. And it feels is part of a bigger thing they seem to be doing i.e distinguisihing the two specs by restricting each of them. It seems that one of the fun things about priests which is their range of spells. In fact, for every healing class, isn't the process of quickly deciding and using the right spell for that moment one of the things that makes healing so much fun?
Spirit Shell replacing heal for disco mystifies me - the only use of them I can think of is to use on a tank who has had a power word shield cast on them in the last 15 seconds.
Since they're casted you can't use them like an instant cast shield on a low health target to keep them alive for a few more moments, whilst someone gets an actual heal in. Why use a a cast time shield on a low health target when you could just use a heal instead?
Maybe the idea is that that since shields/shells and hots have good synergy you could pop a few over the raid before a high damage phase whilst other healers blanket the raid with hots - but given the duration is 8 seconds and it's casted you can't blanket the raid with them.
The fact that it heals for nothing when it expries if the shell has taken any damage, rather than healing for a percentage of what was left of the shell also seems really strange. Because it replaces heal for discipline it seems that it's supposed to be discipline's slow small efficient heal the trinity of slow-small-efficient/big-slow-efficient/big-fast-inefficient. But if the target takes a tiny amount of damage within the 8-sec duration then the hpm of it would be terrible.
Also rereading the tooltips there's no mention of weakened soul, and I can't see strength of soul anywhere. Which makes it seem like they plan to remove the two disco builds and force all disc priests to be smite healers.
Holy nova replacing PoH for disco ... I've only properly been been playing WoW for this expansion, but I know you've said that holy nova used to be a good spell (but don't quite remember why you said it was). But to me, the spell just seems like a joke - only useful for killing lots of low level mobs, and not even as good as mind sear.
karatesmashunhurt Jan 4th 2012 9:51AM
Bah! You already wrote your thoughts on Priests in MoP. Sorry - I'm an idiot.
floss Feb 2nd 2012 7:47AM
When I heal madness as a discipline priest, I'm usually healing with a holy priest and a druid. Compared to the holy priest, I'm finding having enough mana easy especially when the other priest and I strategically use our Hymn of Hopes and Shadowfiends to work together.
The one problem that we seem to have is with our rotation of tank cooldowns. There seems to be an issue when we get to the big adds in p2 which give the Tetanus debuff and Shrapnel. Despite using either Pain Suppresion and Guardian Sprit and a mixture of tank cooldowns, one of the tanks is almost guaranteed to get fried by the debuff, which then stuffs us up during the rest of the fight - especially if we can't battle rez them because someone made a silly mistake earlier. That combined with shrapnel, which always seems to hit at least one person in consecutive turns seems to be the main reasons why we have trouble downing this boss.
Plus, our gradual loss in concentration for the 10 minutes of easy pewpew before we reach that phase.
Not sure if anyone had any tricks to overcome this?