The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
High King Maulgar, from the Healer’s Perspective
by Vonya
Green bars.
The end. =]
Kidding! Kidding! You didn’t really think I was capable of a post that short, did you? Pffft.
Okay, firstly, this is from the healer’s perspective. What does that mean? Two-thirds of the strategy for this fight is left out. It’s best if you read about the fight in its entirety on someplace like BossKillers first. Why? So you’ll understand what I’m talking about here.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
*taps hooves*
Back? Good.
Right so I’m like the…25 man raid healing coordinator. Or something. So I actually have to know all this stuff and assign people to healing roles.
What that really translates into is me getting bored with going over the fight a frillion times in vent as we bring in new healers. So I’m postponing the next section of my raid healing series for this, so I can post it on my boards and be all “READ THIS OR SUFFER MY WRATH!” Yes, I’m selfish. This has been established.
From a healing perspective, the only things that matter are 1) Who is getting hit and 2) Is there anything else I need to know?
Let’s look at 1) first.
Who is Getting Hit?
Well, let’s back up a bit more. Who is doing the hitting?
Mobs
Krosh Firehand (mage)
Olm the Summoner (warlock)
Kiggler the Crazed (shaman)
Blind Eye the Seer (priest)
Maulgar (the big guy)
You’ll want to give each of these unique raid icons.
Tanks (people taking damage)
Krosh - tanked by a MAGE - Needs one dedicated healer.
Olm - tanked by his own hounds - warlocks in charge of this if we have them, otherwise he gets a tank who will need some healing.
Kiggler - tanked by Boomkin or Hunter duo. - Needs one dedicated healer, someone who can handle swapping hunter targets if the yoyo method is used.
Blind Eye - No real tank, but during the short time he’s alive, there will probably be one dpser who needs some heavy heals.
Maulgar himself - tanked by 2 tanks - Needs 2 dedicated healers. As other healer targets stop being tanks, healers should refocus on these tanks.
And…although not technically a “tank”, the raid as a whole may be taking incidental damage. Must have at least one healer not assigned to a specific tank, to help cover the rest of the raid.
Healers
Taken from the above :
5 Healers Minimum
This is a moving fight. As the fight happens, healer targets will no longer be taking damage, and thus don’t need a healer anymore. The single dpser who will need heals at the start during Blind Eye? Blind Eye DIES there (funny how that works) and then they don’t need dedicated heals anymore. Kiggler dies? Those hunters or boomkin don’t need a healer anymore. Your healing target WILL SHIFT unless you are assigned to the Maulgar tanks.
So, with five healers, this is how the fight would work.
1 healer always on whoever is taking damage from Maulgar. If it’s the main tank who is a warrior, then him. If he gets feared and the offtank bear picks him up, then heal that guy. NEVER EVER get so complacent that you are healing a name. You are healing a ROLE. Whoever is filling that role is the person who is getting your heals. If I can, I usually make this healer a paladin, since they’ll be casting heals the whole fight, and will only get assistance later on.
1 healer who is on the mage tank until Krosh dies (this means a single target for most of the fight). When Krosh dies, they heal whoever needs healing, taking note of the main tank healer’s mana and filling in if needed. They may themselves be low on mana at this point, however.
1 healer who is on the person/people tanking Kiggler. They’ll stay on their target(s) until Kiggler dies (fairly early in the fight), then shift to help heal the person tanking Maulgar. This is the first time that healer gets a break, and I’m sure they’re happy to WORK WITH the new healer to set up a rotation. The healer with the highest mana will be the one “main tank healing” and the other will be the backup. Good communication is key.
1 healer who is on Olm’s tank. This healer will probably be fairly bored, but when they’re needed, they’re needed. If your guild is blessed with multiple warlocks, this healer may be unnecessary - the felhounds will be the ones tanking him, and they’re supposed to take damage and die. When Olm dies, they swap to helping with the main tanks. They need to be able to gauge their own healing load and possibly toss helping heals elsewhere if they’re confident their target will be okay while they do so.
1 healer on the raid/dps. When the fight begins, they’ll be big-healing on the dpser tanking Blind Eye. Once Blind Eye is down, they’ll be tossing out heals to any nontank who needs them, and any tanks who need them as well (since the dpsers shouldn’t be taking damage from anything at this point). They stay on this task until the end of the fight.
Extra healers above and beyond the required five is extra love. I’ll assign an extra raid healer. If it’s a tree, I’ll let them hot everyone with low health, regardless of whether they’re a tank or a raid dpser. They basically don’t have a primary heal target, they just help everyone else and smooth out the damage for the other healers.
I might also assign a secondary healer to the main tank right from the start, to help the Maulgar healer. I like to pair Paladins and Priests for this - Priest can HoT and Frisbee, and cancel-heal to help against spike damage.
I think five healers is doable. We’ve done it with six before, but we always seem to have extra raid slots and I’m not opposed to filling them with a few healers - we’ve got a great healing team, and the more people that come, the fewer times I have to explain this.
*grins*
Is There Anything Else I Need to Know?
Your raid may handle positioning differently than ours does, so I’ll just say make sure you know where you need to be and you can reach your heal target. If you’re assigned to Kiggler’s tank and you’re still standing in the hallway, you’re probably going to wipe the raid. If you’re assigned to the mage and you’re off in the back corner, then you’re definitely going to wipe the raid.
Know where you should be standing and know who your primary and secondary heal targets are. Who are you healing when the fight starts? What do you do when your heal target is no longer a tank?
If a healer dies, and the raid healing coordinator yells out for you to fill X healing slot, be sure you know what that means. (This really doesn’t happen much on this fight. If we lose a healer too early due to a loose felpuppy, that’s generally a raid wipe)
The biggest thing on this fight is DON’T GO NEAR KROSH. His AOE WILL kill you. Not that healing is an activity that lends itself to running up and giving the mob a great big hug, but you could accidentally back into his AOE area if you’re not careful.
February 8th, 2008
You’ll probably just have one tank on Maulgar until phase 2 (50%) when he starts fearing. It used to be that you would have one tank stand out of fear range and then charge in, but since they changed it in some patch awhile back, and every priest has fear ward now, this isn’t really a big deal. We normally have a real tank helping out with the warlock and pets because of our lack of warlocks, and then they just help out on Maulgar in phase 2 as an extra taunter if some dps pulls aggro.
Watch out for Krosh definitely. Watch out for Kiggler too - his knockback can send you flying and suddenly you find yourself standing right next to Krosh. Krosh/Kiggler are both pretty much impossible to reposition - it is your responsibility to stay away from them, not the tanks responsibility to reposition them away from you, imo.
Healing, in my experience, gets pretty boring after the adds are down (unless your melee decide they want to eat a whirlwind). But it can be incredibly intense during the first few minutes while all of the adds are up. Imo, don’t worry about mana efficiency too much at the start of the fight. The healing required during this encounter diminishes with every dead add, so aggressive healing at the beginning is not going to make you pay later in the fight.
February 8th, 2008
[...] Job on Maulgar - supplementing Ego Ego just wrote a good Healer Strategy for Maulgar and friends. Go there first, because I’m going to supplement, not reinvent the [...]
February 8th, 2008
“NEVER EVER get so complacent that you are healing a name. ”
You aren’t kidding there. I had so many problems with this a while ago it wasn’t funny, *especially* on the Vashj fight.
It’s funny how a healer will not heal anyone else but a person you assigned them, even if their assigned person is completely full on health and the toon right next to them is sitting at 10% with a giant fireball heading their way.
February 8th, 2008
As mentioned, you only need one tank on Maulgar….. ever. By the time fear happens, you’ll have a free tank to put in the raid in case the main tank gets feared (and fear ward is down, for whatever reason).
We also put a tank on Blind eye…. but I guess that’s somewhat optional.
February 8th, 2008
Just a note, while Maulgar’s fear isn’t as much of a problem as it used to be, if you take a while to get that last 50% off of him, his random charge is some sort of an aggro wipe on the tank. It’s helpful to have an OT be second on the aggro list to handle this so that after the charge he goes to the OT and MT has a change to taunt him back. For my guild the Maulgar OT is usually the tank who was on Olm.
February 8th, 2008
It’s so funny that you posted this today because I have been sitting at my desk putting the final touches on healing assignments for our next raid. On Sunday, we will be headed into Gruul’s Lair for the first time as a guild. We are actually teaming up with another guild to get the numbers together.
It is hard to organize the healing assignments when you don’t know your healers. I know our healers like the back of my hand and that includes strengths and weaknesses. I am very comfortable giving them assignments in which I know they will excel. It’s the unknown of the few healers from the other guild that I’m weary of. I figured my best bet would be to give my guys the “key” healing roles which will make or break the fight and fill in the other guild’s healers as support until I can feel out their abilities.
I also planned on not only giving our healers the “key” roles, but also assign myself and another guildie to healing tanks of adds that will die early like Blind Eye, so that we can use our own judgement for who our next healing target(s) will be, based on who needs support, instead of relying on someone I don’t know to make that decision.
February 9th, 2008
@Hildi
You can’t heal everyone. If you’re on a tank, you should be cancel casting to be ready for the next damage spike. It’s easy to say that in exceptional circumstances you should obviously help out on someone else, but that just isn’t practical. You have to have trust that the other tank healers are doing their job.
Imagine the situation you described. You see that the other tank is on low health. You go ‘oh crap!’ and fire off a heal. But you need not have worried, because the other healer has it all under control, and before your spell gets casted a massive crit greater heal lands and that other tank is absolutely fine again.
However, while you’ve been distracted your own tank has landed himself in the middle of a big fat damage spike, and is now himself on low HP. You go ‘oh crap!’ again and switch back to where you should have been all along, but by the time your heal has charged it’s too late. Your tank is dead. The raid wipes. You’re the one who’s gonna get blamed. ‘Why did the tank die?’ ‘Oh I… uh… was healing someone else.’
If its clear that a tank is in trouble, and needs temporarily more healers, then the raid healers should be the ones to step in, not the healers on the other tanks.
February 9th, 2008
My guild has been doing Maulgar for a while, and we set up the healing assignments a bit differently.
We always have just one tank on Maulgar, with three healers, for the whole fight. We also put two tanks on Olm, because the felhounds just aren’t that reliable, with a healer to take care of them and the enslaving warlock.
The person who tanks Maulgar tends to need a ton of healer output right at the pull, so if you use just two healers, they need to be on the top of their game.
When we began doing this encounter a few months ago, we used to take eight healers. Now that we outgear it, we take six to eight, just whatever we happen to have available.
February 10th, 2008
[...] night, Draconis Occisoris entered Gruul’s Lair for the first time. As I was saying in this thread on The Egotistical Priest blog, we teamed up with another guild on the server to accomplish [...]
February 11th, 2008
@Disako
I didn’t say to heal everyone. My point was that you shouldn’t be so target fixated on one person that you end up letting 4 others die.
February 12th, 2008
And I’m saying that on some fights if you AREN’T target fixated then the target you were supposed to be fixated on will die. You have to trust in your other healers.
February 12th, 2008
I wish you good luck in your further progression then!
February 12th, 2008
Hildi/Disako:
I have to side mostly with Hildi on this. I understand having some healers dedicated just to the MT, with rolling lifeblooms or stop casted holy lights is useful, especially on bosses that have crazy spike damage like Morogrim. However, you are unlikely to have many tanks that require 100% of a healers attention. Let’s take Maulgar for instance, since that is the topic of discussion. The last time I did this fight on my resto shaman, we had 5 healers total, and I was primarily watching the moonkin tanking Kiggler. Was I stop casting on the moonkin tank and trusting other healers to get the other people tanking crazy damage in the first few seconds of the fight? Hell no. People would have died, and we would have wiped, if I wasn’t throwing out chain heals to the warlock tanks and tossing a quick lesser healing wave on one of the healers that got bit by the demon doggies. Kiggler does steady, predictable damage, and it would be a waste of my capacity if I just stop cast healed the moonkin the whole time. Hell, even the Maulgar tank doesn’t need that kind of healing if you can keep some hots on him and he isn’t grossly undergeared. I think the only tank on that fight that requires 100% attention at all costs would be the mage tank, since there is a chance his shield will fade before Krosh puts up a new one for him to spellsteal.
One of the hardest things for some of our healers to adapt to when changing from T4 to T5 (and ZA) content is the massive increase in the importance of raid healing. ZA is probably the worst - on many of those fights you can’t let anyone fall below 50% or they could get one shotted on the next ability the boss uses. And I’ll tell you it’s really frustrating on Vashj when you see a bunch of healers running around with the tank and you sit there and eat an entire static charge without getting a heal (which means you die no matter how much health you have). I think this is where Hildi’s frustration is coming from.
February 12th, 2008
Well vashj is a special fight. The tactics we use is for everyone to share the tank healing in phase one but to break off and heal your own group when they get damaged. Admittedly we haven’t killed her yet though…
I know on occasion I’ve been on a tank and seen someone else taking damage, rushed to help out and then looked like a prat when my tank goes down. Not something I want to repeat
February 13th, 2008
I think that’s a case where your personal judgement comes into play. You have to know the fight, know your situation, and know your capabilities. Is your healing target taking steady or spike damage? If you swap targets, will your healing assignment die? Is the person you’re trying to save going to die anyway even if you attempt to heal them? (Improper aggro; too much damage in the time it takes you to cast) These are the things that great healers have to deal with every raid. That’s why healing, in my eyes, is much more of an art form than a science.
February 13th, 2008
@Esoth:
hehe
I didn’t realize I was a side, but thanks
Good take on the point I was doing a bad job of getting across. Yes, you cannot be target fixated, and if you are then you better make sure the rest of your healers are good because you just took a lot of healing away from the encounter. Rarely do these situations arise. I can think of the Shaman boss in the FLK encounter, Supremus, Mother Shaz, mage tank on the Council fight and P5 of Illidan. In all of those I am healing others as well as the tank because they do not need me healing 100% on them….except for p5 Illidan - I don’t take the chance at all there, that part definitely requires full attention. Which brings me to…
@Birkin
Well said. I agree with all of that
@Disako
Yes Vashj is a pain, to the point where we fricking wiped to her on Monday and she has been farm for us for a long time. This again is a fight where you need to be aware of everyone in your range, not just your ‘assigned’ target. In fact, we don’t even assign people, we assign zones.
February 14th, 2008
[...] High King Maulgar, from the Healer’s Perspective [...]
February 14th, 2008
Just a quick note of thanks.
Love your blog, and your uncanny ability to post about exactly what I’m trying to work through … A few weeks back, my guild was trying to figure out healing roles/how to tighten up our healtime ~ and viola, your series on raid healing roles. When we started to stress the importance of raid etiquette to our guildies, I found your RL’s post on the 5 principles of raiding. Now were starting to tackle Gruul.
It’s rather ironic how timely your posts seem to be
Again, thanks for the time you put into this blog. I learn a lot & really enjoy your writing style.
February 19th, 2008
A note with pulling, don’t PoM the tank pre pull. If he gets hit everyone everyone else agro’s there mob he will pull them from Healing Threat. Wait 5 seconds.
In all honesty my guild didn’t have set healing assignments until recently. We have relied on everyone knowing what their class was good at and just doing that role. Paladins on tanks, Druids HoT’n everything, Shamans Chain Heal, and the priests would hop in where ever a class was missing.
We still only have minimal assignments due to the constant flux of phases during raids now. We have cleared SSC and are working on Kael atm.