Same as last time, folks. Go look up the Gruul fight on bosskillers or wowwiki or something before you continue reading. Otherwise you’re gonna have no idea what I’m talking about.

…back? Good.

Gruul is actually easier to heal than Maulgar, because the incoming damage is more predictable. With Maulgar, you’ve got five sources of incoming damage in varying quantities. If any one of those “tanks” dies, then you’ve got yourself a pretty nasty problem.

Gruul, on the other hand, while not the only source of incoming damage, is pretty straightforward.

Let’s look at what we’re up against.

Where does the damage come from?

There are three sources of damage in this fight.

• Gruul - he’ll be keeping two tanks busy.
• Shatter - negligible, unless you’re dealing with people who are unable to get out of range of each other. Possibly devastating, possibly raid-wiping.
• Cave-In - mostly-avoidable AOE damage

An addon like DeadlyBossMods is particularly useful in telling you whether you are too close to someone during Shatter.

So what is the healing assignment?

To cover all that damage, I will typically have three healers on the tanks.

I’ll have one healer on the Primary Tank.

I’ll have a second healer on the Secondary Tank.

And I’ll have a third healer assigned to helping them out. We have an excellent shaman who generally snags this position because she can toss in a chain heal and help out the melee dps as well. This third healer should act as backup healer for both tanks. If one tank is low (say, 50% or worse), they’ll toss a heal to help out that healer. They are not primary healers, and should never spam heals or waste the heals of the main healer - they’re backup and assistance.

These healers are supposed to be tunnel-vision healers. They should be stopcasting and keep the tanks topped off at all times. The fight gets gradually worse and worse, so a tank that you can be somewhat careless on at the start will die in the middle if you don’t get the lead out. They should not stop and help heal someone else (this rule becomes more and more important as the fight goes on, but is still important at the start). If they stop to heal someone else, and their tank takes a bad hit and they don’t have time to swap back and cast a heal to save him…that’s inexcusable. The third healer is the one that “helps out” the other healer. The first two tank healers should remain on target.

These healers are also assigned to a ROLE, not a name. The Primary/Secondary notation is intended to indicate aggro levels. If you have three tanks on this, all three tanks should be building significant threat. When Gruul does his Hateful Strike, whoever is second on threat will take the damage. THAT is the person the second healer is healing, regardless of the NAME that started the fight.

Why is this so important? Because if the Secondary tank dies, then the Tertiary tank has to be able to step up and eat Hateful Strikes. If DPSers are eating it, you’ll quickly lose your top dps to one-shot kills. The name of the person who is tanking may change, depending on environmental issues (like..yanno…death) and aggro.

For Gruul, you heal ROLES, not NAMES.

So that’s three healers, what about the rest?

Everyone else is on the raid, to heal the damage from Shatter and Cave-ins. HoTs are particularly useful in this situation, not just because most of them don’t have a cast time, but because more incoming damage is not just possible, it’s guaranteed.

There’s a little extra trick to this, though.

Phase Healing
This fight uses a Phase Healing strategy. That means who you heal and how you heal changes depending on which phase you’re in.

For healers, there are three phases.

Phase 1 is from the beginning of the fight until 10 growths. During this time, the healers on the tanks will have no problems keeping the tanks alive, and it also encompasses the majority of the time in the battle. The dps gets all that unneeded tank healing. Priests will toss frisbees into the tanks and maybe a hot or two depending on how the raid healing is going.

Phase 2 is from 10 growths until 14 growths. During this phase, only the “mobile healers” change. For our guild, that’s our team of priests. The tank healing setup never changes. The raid-healers (a tree, if we’ve got one) will also remain. But our priests shift their focus at 10 growths and concentrate MORE on the tanks. Frisbees, HoTs, assisted heals, whatever it takes. Things aren’t quite drastic yet, but once you hit 10 growths, he’s hitting hard enough that two or three poorly timed hits will down even a skilled and well-geared tank. Priests can still contribute HoTs to the raid, so long as it doesn’t interfere with tank healing.

Phase 3 goes from 14 growths until either you or Gruul is dead. At this point, EVERY HEALER IN THE RAID is healing the tanks. DPS drink potions if they need health, or someone who is very low may get a quick heal or a hot from a druid or priest. This is make it or break it time, and heals are spammed on the tanks regardless of whether it’ll be overheal or not. There is no mana efficiency this late in the fight. If the tanks go down, the raid is over.

This strategy does not require a ton of healers. And if you’ve got really good dpsers, then you can get Gruul down at or around 10 growths. (with practice, and everyone being aware of shatter positionings).

Anything Else You Need To Know?

Yup, he also does an AOE silence (love those, right?). Here’s where Unbreakable Will comes in handy, and it’s also why we want to keep priest hots up on the tanks. If you resist a silence, try to help out on the tank group with an extra frisbee or a hot (or a heal, if one is low enough). Give the dedicated healers time to recover.

Also, keep your Inner Fire up during this, it can mitigate some of the incoming damage. (I’m not 100% positive on that, but I’m sure enough to say it here. Doesn’t cost much, anyway).

A neat trick my druid and I worked out a few weekends ago, when we agreed I was overwriting his HoTs too much. I help hot, and I toss either Flash Heals or downranked Greater Heals (depending on the emergency of the situation) only if the target is below 60 or 50% health. It works out beautifully. Both of our mana efficiency shot up, and we stopped losing dps to clashed heals.

Talk to your other healers, find a strategy that works for you.

Also, we put raid icons above the heads of our healers, and position them in a circle around Gruul (the devs put a nice pale circle in the dirt, we stand around that). DPS is taught that if they’re thrown near us from Ground Slam, they have to AVOID THE LUCKY CHARMS. We all try to avoid each other, of course, but losing multiple healers to improper Shatter positionings is a raid wipe.

If you’re standing on your spot and the Cave-In finds you, move to the side away from it. If it “chases” you, then move back to where you were originally standing. You don’t want to vary too much from your assigned standing spot (it helps with Shatter positioning. Sometimes. Not always. Stupid Ground Slam.) but you should never just stand and blow bubbles while you’re in a cave-in. It’s your responsibility to move away from it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 and is filed under Healers, ~ Vonya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.