Priestly Bubbles

Just typed this up for my guild:
Hey guys!! I had some ideas floating around in my head for progression and such and thought I'd share them!!

Ulduar is still progression for us. We haven't done all the hard modes and some of them are possible for us. Most of the time we just run out of time or people become tired of the place. I think our issues with Ulduar is that it's such a long instance and feels like a drag sometimes. I know that's why I hate it. I wish it was shorter.

So! My idea is this:
Obviously, we want to roflstomp Onyxia and ToC25 every week. VoA25 too. It's free loot. We also want to work on ToGC25. But we don't want to spend 4-8 hrs wiping on the same boss.

We need to do Ulduar but trying to do a fresh Ulduar every week causing us to become tired and run out of time. So I think we should extend each raid lockout while working on hard modes. Like say, we finish Onyxia, ToC25 and VoA25. We work on ToGC for about 2 hours. If we don't wipe on easy content, that's basically one raid night. So we go into Ulduar and that week kill FL 4 tower, Ignis, Razor and XT hard mode. And then we start working on IC hard mode.

So maybe we won't get IC hard mode the first night. We may move on and kill Kologarn or we may not. But we'll extend our raid lockout and move into the next week.

The next week, we do the easy raids. We work on ToGC for a bit. Then we start on IC hard mode and perhaps down it! Then we can move to the next hard modes.

This counters the "Ulduar drag" and allows us to progress. A little slower maybe, but more enjoyable and possibly more efficiently.

Well we finally got it. And I think we FINALLY have a solid raid group. Some of them hadn't done Yogg yet. >_> Anyway, the paladin got his hammer and according to one of the more annoying healers in my guild, that's gonna make healing SOOO much easier. Some of my guildies are under the impression that that hammer will make or break our raid. Reality check loves, hard modes are still hard!!! I hate that hammer. With a passion. It basically makes that stupid paladin a paladin and a disc priest in one. I wonder if those stupid bubbles stack with all of my bubbles...
Moving on from the paladin and his OH SO AMAZING hammer. We didn't get to try any hard modes this week, due to sucking on Yogg for 10 billion years. But we did finally get in and roflstomp ToC25. We wiped on NR Beasts. On REGULAR NR Beasts. Because people were getting charged...
Anyway two new loots for me. QQ all you shamans and pallies on the cloak. It's an upgrade for me and I think only one shaman rolled against me. And he's a back up healer. So I didn't bother bidding low for it.
Cry of the Val'kyr
Maiden's Adoration

So since I know how to heal all of ToGC on 10 man, I thought I'd share my strats on keeping my tanks and raid alive.
Northrend Beasts

• Phase 1-Gormok the Impaler

Best spells:
Power Word: Shield
Prayer of Mending
Prayer of Healing
Penance
Flash Heal
Greater Heal

Start this fight by shielding the first tank. Send a ProM and give him Renew. Don't spam your heals but as soon as the tank gets the first debuff, start using Penance whenever it's up. Here you must use your own judgment. Flash heals must be used in between Penances. If you have a Scale of Fates, macro it to your Greater Heal and use it whenver Scale is available. If you are doing this correctly, you and your other tank healer should be focusing on the tank tanking, but should be able to keep the second tank up. When the boss's aoe goes off, your ProMs should be bouncing in the raid. Macro your Power Infusion to Prayer of Healing and use this spell on the two groups. This will help your raid healer. If you get a snobold, use shields, ProMs and Renews until it's gone to avoid getting spell locked. One thing we noticed is that when DBM announces Fire bomb, if you strafe into an empty spot you will never get hit.

• Phase 2-Acidmaw and Dreadscale

Best Spells:
Power Word: Shield
Prayer of Mending
Penance
Flash Heal
Greater Heal
Hymn of Hope

You want to heal your tank basically the same way as phase 1. Don't forget that if you're burning Acidmaw down first to switch to Dreadscale's tank when Acidmaw dies if you were healing Acidmaw's tank. Dreadscale's tank will start taking a lot more damage. Shields are perfect for this phase. Shield anybody who gets poison or fire. Don't forget to spread out! You may also want to use Hymn of Hope here when you get low and the worms are underground.

• Phase 3-Icehowl

Best Spells:
Power Word: Shield
Penance
Prayer of Healing
Shadowfiend

You will probably be very low on mana at the beginning of this phase. Pop your shadowfiend as soon as the tank gets aggro. Keep up your tank healing rotation and shield+flash heal those who get caught in Icehowl's Arctic Breath. If Icehowl charges you ro someone near you, look around while you're stunned and plan your path. Use your strafing keys to follow this path. After he slams into the wall, use this time to top off your raid.

Jaraxxus
Best Spells:
Power Word: Shield
ProM
Dispel
Penance
Flash Heal

Heal your tank just like normal. Shield+Renew the offtank as well. Be sure to help dispel the tank if he gets the debuff and dispel Jaraxxus's buff. Your tank won't be taking a lot of damage but the raid will. Pay attention to who gets Incinerate Flesh and spam heal them til it's gone. Throw a shield on whoever gets the Legion Flame. Make sure that there are 15 yds between you and the other raiders to avoid heavy chain lightning damage. A new mechanic of the fight is a type of charm cast by the Mistress of Pain. If you see the hearts above your head telling you she has charmed you, target the boss and cast Mind Blast. It will spell lock your shadow spells and you can go back to healing.

Faction Champions
Best Spells:
Power Word: Shield
Penance
Mass Dispel
Psychic Scream
Pain Suppression

Dispel, dispel, dispel. That's your main job here. Your only real healing spell you will use is Penance. Throw it on raiders taking massive damage. Shield the raiders who are taking hits from the champions. Make sure that you are dispelling any dots or debuffs on the raiders and be sure to dispel the champions' bloodlust/heroism. If you get aggro, fade (it actually works oddly enough) or psychic scream. If these abilities are on cooldown or the champion resists and you are taking a lot of hits, pain suppress yourself. You will get a lot of aggro this fight for mass dispel. I don't know why but it happens. So be careful and keep yourself alive.


The Twin Val'kyr
Best Spells:
Power Word: Shield
Prayer of Mending
Penance
Flash Heal
Binding Heal

Since you constantly take damage in this fight, Binding Heal is a very good spell to use. Be sure to not overheal too much with it. Prayer of Mending shines in this fight as well. It will be bouncing all over the raid to tackle that raid damage. Get the opposite color of the majority of your dps near you and be sure to avoid orbs of the opposite color and touch the ones of the same color. Not much else to say here. Just make sure that when one casts the shield, the other one's tank is being spam healed. She will do more damage when she is shielded.

Anub'rekhan
Best Spells:
Power Word: Shield
Penance
Flash Heal

I haven't actually downed this but I know how to do it for the most part. This isn't a heavy healing fight until phase 3. Just typical tank healing. Phase 2 is the critical phase. You have to stay alive here. On phase 3, designate one healer to keep the tank up and the other two to keep the raid at 30% or so. If you are tank healing, use your usual tank healing rotation. If you are raid healing, shield your group and flash heal those that get below 20%. Keep them at 30% so Anub'rekhan does not heal too much.


And that's all I got! Critiques are welcome.

Onyxia was tons of fun! The fight was pretty much the same with one minor difference. Adds like the trash at the beginning spawn and have to be offtanked. We did it on 10 man too and got a bunch of achievements.
She Deep Breaths More – Defeat Onyxia without anyone taking damage from a Deep Breath in 10-player mode.
More Dots! – Defeat Onyxia in less than five minutes in a 10-player mode.
My helm dropped too!
Aurora of Transcendence
Last night we did our usual 10 man ToC, regular first and then heroic. Almost got Anub down! He was at 20%. I got several upgrades (it's good to be one of the few casters).
Pendant of Binding Elements (a slight upgrade)
Scepter of Imprisoned Souls (I had the regular version)
Illumination (OMGOMGOMG IT DROPPED)

A couple of things to note on the helm and staff. The 10 man helm from Onyxia is actually better than the Tier 9.5 helm. Definitely lost all interest in the Tier 9 4 set bonus after getting this helm from 25 man.

Also, heroic Illumination is the best staff for discipline. It has everything a discipline could possibly want. Crit, int, haste and spell power all in a neat cool-looking package with 3 slot bonuses!!! 3!!! I'm gemming them with a crit gem, an int gem and a spell power gem since those are the 3 stats I gem for. I fell asleep while gemming it last night so the int gem isn't in it yet but it will be when I get home this afternoon.

Going to try to get my guild to do Onyxia tonight. They want to do Yogg or whatever to get our paladin's hammer but I want us to do Onyxia first. I've never actually done it before because I started playing way after BC came out. Well, we'll see what happens. I'll post about it if we do it tonight!

I haven't posted in a while. New job is really a bunch of little jobs in one. It's a lot of stuff to keep up with so I'm adjusting. Updates!

Last week I subbed in for a druid healer in the 10 man heroic Trial. They had already downed the two bosses I downed with my guild's main tank and his friends.
We downed Faction Champions after some adjustments. We discovered that in any group it's best to burn the shaman first if he is present. Then the warrior and other very hurtful dps. Healers next and not so hurtful dps after. This worked out rather well. We burned the shaman, then the warrior and death knight. We then burned the warlock and her pet. Then the hunter. And finally the holy paladin and shadow priest. We had our warrior tank preventing the paladin from casting any heals. After attempting this strategy, we downed it no problem. One thing that I did notice as a discipline priest is that mass dispel pulls a lot of aggro. I spent most of my time healing and bubbling myself after mass dispels. I also spammed my fear button every time the dps champions got close.
Next we killed the Twin Val'kyr. Much much harder than regular. There are only two major changes. One is that the two Val'kyr will randomly target a player in the raid to put a debuff on. You simply need to make sure that you are the color of the debuff. The second major change is the amount of colored orbs. The number of colored orbs nearly triples, making staying alive much more important. Zooming out all the way makes this slightly easier but not by much. We managed to kill them after several attempts.
Last week's Anub'rekhan-bad times. Had some issues with adds being able to burrow. There was less permafrost on the ground, which meant less room to maneuver away from the small adds. The poison debuff stacked up on us and wiped us several times. We ran out of time so we called it after several wipes on this one.

Tuesday-I missed the regular ToC 25 man. (Gonna try to pug it Friday night) We didn't have enough tanks to try heroic ToC so we went to Ulduar to work on some hard modes. We're hoping to get into heroic ToC tonight.

Last night we went into heroic 10 man again after finishing it on regular. Flew through Northrend Beasts, had a few hiccups on Jaraxxus due to a healer not helping with Incinerate Flesh. We one shot Faction Champions using our ideas from last week. We ended at the Twin Val'kyr. We're still having some issues with orbs and we ran out of time. Monday night we will down the twins and start working on Anub.

I got some hit boots from heroic Faction Champions last night that are better than the ones I was wearing. I'll gem them as soon as I get a chance.
Sunreaver Magus' Sandals

So we went into normal ToC last night on 25 man and the server lagged as soon as we started the first fight. In phase 2, half the dps were dead because the tanks were having trouble taunting and the healers were taking five min to get off a 2 sec cast. We managed not to wipe but we almost hit the enrage timer because the dps were dead. One person got charged because he was disconnected. I know at least five people disconnected on some point of that fight. It was bad.
The lag was clearing up when we started Jaraxxus but then it hit again. Just a little but enough to make the fight more difficult. We survived that one with only two deaths.
Faction champions went pretty smooth. The same idiot warlock that dies in fire every time we do any boss with fire bitched about getting heals again but whatev. He's muted on vent now so I just ignore his chattering in raid chat. I think most of the healers just let him die now. Maybe he'll eventually figure out that fire hurts.
The leaders wanted to try a new strategy on the Twin Valkyrie so we said why the hell not? It's normal right? It was a weird strategy and we won't be doing it again. I spent the entire fight dead, but that might have been because I was super pissed at the druid who took the ONLY cloth healing boots in ToC. I would have been perfectly happy if they went to a cloth dps, but a druid? No. There's an unspoken rule that you don't roll on cloth healing gear unless the only two priests in the guild don't need it if you're a druid. But why am I surprised? This druid believes the world revolves around him. Which I'm inclined to believe is a resto druid thing, but the other two resto druids seem less "the world revolves around me". Maybe it's just the two resto druids I've had the most contact with.
Whatever, anyway, after calming down from my nerd rage, we killed Anub'rehkan on the second try. Why not the first? Because I was on the main tank and my friends in our private channel were trying to cheer me up. They showed me a text from that site texts from last night and I died laughing...well the tank died while I was laughing. I can't remember exactly what it was but it was something like this: "I bought alcohol with a fake ID earlier while wearing my badge from work. They have different names on them. God I love my boobs." Seriously, best text ever.
Afterwards, we went to VoA25 and killed Coralon and I was displeased because the priest who already had two trophies got the priesty piece that dropped with no dkp cost. It was the gloves I already had. My bad luck just increases. He outgears me now, but I like him, so I can't really complain. Right before we went into heroic ToC I bit the bullet and bought the stupid Tier 9 10man shoulders. That 2 set bonus is just so much healing for melee and so much less annoying that the Tier 8 4 set bonus. So WOOT I'm wearing Tier 9.5 gloves and Tier 9 shoulders and I have to say, I look pretty damn sexy.
We only had about 45 min to work on hard mode NB but we cleaned up phase 1 quite a bit and started figuring out phase 2. It is WAY more difficult than it is in 10man. My 2 set bonus went a long way too. My PoM kept some of the melee up I'm pretty sure. So we just need to spread people out more on phase 2 and get all the dps and heals avoiding the fires on phase 1. Healing assignments were a little awkward too. We decided that all the healers are going to meet on vent on Thursday afternoon to discuss how we should heal hard mode NB.
Thursday night we pick up with hard mode ToC again. I hope it's a little more organized this time. Tonight is ToC 10 mans. Hopefully we'll get the next two and possibly the next three bosses in hard mode down! I'll post tomorrow about how the raid went tonight!

Finally got around to doing 10 man hard mode with some of Gizz's friends. It was fun, though I wish I had been with guildies. We did really well. After several wipes of figuring it out, we down Northrend Beasts. We did have some issues. Phase 1 and 2 were very smooth. Phase 3 was a pain in the ass. Without some kind of ability or swiftness potion, it's near impossible to get away from Icehowl's charge. He managed to target a hunter, a rogue, and a shadow priest who apparently has hacking skills. I'm not sure how the shadow priest got away unless dispersion actually gets him out of the stun. Anyway, we got lucky and that's how we downed him. So tonight for 25 man, I will be making swiftness potions galore....
Compared to Northrend Beasts, Jaraxxus was retardedly easy. The only major difference was that the volcanos and portals need to be dpsed down. The portals will continue to spawn Mistresses if they're not killed. It took us four mistresses to figure that one out. Other than that, you gotta stay outta the fire and heal the hell outta people who get the debuff. If the debuff goes off, it's a ton of damage. But we killed him after about 3 attempts.
Tonight: 25 man ToC normal and then 25 man ToC hard mode!

So I've come to realize that those raiders that make it into hard core guilds that do nothing but hard modes and have no lives are nothing but self absorbed pricks. I've yet to meet someone who is friendly and helpful and a hard core hard mode raider. I'd like someone to prove me wrong. But I doubt it'll happen. We'll see though. However if this is true, I'll stay a normal mode raider forever.

Anub'arak down! Fun fight. Or at least I think so. I'm also amused that both of my ideas of how the fight worked came to be true. When we finally did it the way I'd been suggesting, we killed him. The permafrost does NOT prevent Anub from burrowing. It only prevents the adds from burrowing. Also in Phase 2, you have to make him hit the permafrost. If he doesn't he'll just chase you around until he hits you, which is bad times. Phase 3 is fun as hell as a healer. Gotta keep everybody between 20-30% to prevent Anub from healing too much. When looking at the healing logs, I noticed that I healed this part way differently than I normally heal things. Flash heal was my top heal by about a mile. PoM and Penance were both pretty low. I didn't want to use heals I couldn't control and I didn't want to use big heals that would get the raid back up to full. That would mean that Anub would heal more.
I got a Trophy of the Crusade. I'll get my Tier piece today but I doubt I'll use it until I get a second piece for the 2 set bonus. I'll do some math later to figure out if the stat increase is worth losing the Tier 8 4 set bonus. I highly doubt it.
We attempted hard mode Northrend beasts. It didn't go too badly. We had some major problems though. The tank who was "leading" wanted us to use 4 tanks instead of 3. Bad times, too many tanks taking damage and diminishing returns killed us. No one stepped up to assign healers as most of us were uncertain of what we were doing. One tank might have been getting spammed while the others were dying. Another thing was we needed more dps. Less tanks and heals + a 25th (we lost our 25th to real life drama) would have solved this problem, but the "leader" wanted more tanks and heals. Also, the dps just tried to burn Gormok while ignoring the snobolds, another bad idea. The snobolds need to die because they almost incapacitate a healer or dps, both bad. Anyway, we've come to realize that you don't do it much differently than regular, just need to do it with one more tank and hard dps. Basically things just hit harder. One thing that we did notice is that the next phase doesn't wait for you to kill the Gormok. It starts after 2 minutes. So Gormok needs to die in 2 minutes. Fun times. Anyway, with a little more gear and organization, I think we'll have it.