Resto shaman needing help with H-Malkorok

[Cenerae 1]

Hey all! So my guild recently got up to this guy, and last night was the first time I'd been put in on the fight. I knew what to expect from it, but I found I had a really hard time trying to keep track of everything that was going on in the fight. This caused me to make several blunders that ended up causing wipes, and I was overall very dissatisfied with my performance.

 

Is there any general advice any healers can offer for it? I have logs here too, if anyone would care to take a look and see if I can be doing anything better: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-231hd902lon5g478/  (And yes, that is in fact 3 tanks you can see there on the attempts. Our guild leader decided to try and make the blood rage easier to survive for the tanks while everyone else sweeps for orbs, and we have the DPS to kill him this way despite that)

 

Thank you!

Edited March 18, 2014 by Cenerae

[Stoove 347]

We're progressing on Malkorok Heroic too right now, and the biggest thing that has helped me is getting Vuh'do to remove all the distractions and color the bars correctly (which we discussed in this thread). That certainly improved my healing and survivability skills! :)

[Grahmrook 6]

My 2 cents.  We three heal, 2 tank it.  Glyph of Chaining, Glyph of riptide, Glyph of SWG.  I get riptides rolling prior to the pull and about 3 count throw down UE+HR under the boss for when the tanks run in and melee.  This is nice as it gives the extra 10% HP for initial shields.  Druid heals tranqs for the raid shields.  From there I start Chain Healing targets to build shields.  Trying to keep up with riptides as I go, and always hitting my CH target with it first.  I also try and keep UE/HR under the boss on CD.  For blood rage, right before it hits the War will take extra stacks to make sure the DK has none and they swap at the start.  War takes a hit or two then moves out and we spam heal the DK while folks soak puddles.  When the blood rage starts, (the black mist gets sucked in) I drop HTT and pop Ascend and start pounding the DK with heals.   I take AG for the fight and use it after Ascend.  Exiting first Blood Rage we have a Spriest symb'd and he tranqs, then the druid does his again ~12 second later.  Remember crap hits harder after blood rage.  Keep an eye on your zone and soak your puddle.  Use lock rocks if your shield is low during second p1 before soaking a puddle.  Lots of movement so don't be afraid to use SWG to keep people alive.  Don't stand in the forming orbs as when they pop you lose your shield and take 120k damage.  Biggest learning curve for us was getting dps to *not* get hit by orbs.  We also call out who gets the knock up so tanks know where the add is.  Ranged has assigned spots so after breath/BR we know each zone is covered.  Last week we had no spriest so made due, but was a little more messy. 

 

Honestly, we had 74 wipes prior to our first kill, and that was everyone learning what worked for them.  Since then, we average maybe 2-3 wipes per kill, usually at 5%ish because folks will tunnel and miss a puddle.  Hope this helps. 

 

Comp is DK/War tanks

Druid, Shaman (me), Pally heals

War (Fury), Lock (DST), Mage (FR), Hunter (SV), Spriest

Edited March 18, 2014 by Grahmrook

[Cenerae 1]

We're progressing on Malkorok Heroic too right now, and the biggest thing that has helped me is getting Vuh'do to remove all the distractions and color the bars correctly (which we discussed in this thread). That certainly improved my healing and survivability skills!

 

I already use VuhDo and already have it set up to track the barriers. So that's not the problem - mine lies with trying to juggle the healing with watching my feet for orbs spawning on me, checking for smash direction, and checking for purple puddles of doom to stand in. I even went and turned off floating combat text just to keep the vision around me clear. I'm just having great difficulty processing everything, and I feel like I've reached my limit, so to speak. I don't know if practise will make perfect or if I'm fundamentally doing something wrong or what, but the fight just feels horrible to manage.

 

 

My 2 cents.  We three heal, 2 tank it.  Glyph of Chaining, Glyph of riptide, Glyph of SWG.  I get riptides rolling prior to the pull and about 3 count throw down UE+HR under the boss for when the tanks run in and melee.  This is nice as it gives the extra 10% HP for initial shields.  Druid heals tranqs for the raid shields.  From there I start Chain Healing targets to build shields.  Trying to keep up with riptides as I go, and always hitting my CH target with it first.  I also try and keep UE/HR under the boss on CD.  For blood rage, right before it hits the War will take extra stacks to make sure the DK has none and they swap at the start.  War takes a hit or two then moves out and we spam heal the DK while folks soak puddles.  When the blood rage starts, (the black mist gets sucked in) I drop HTT and pop Ascend and start pounding the DK with heals.   I take AG for the fight and use it after Ascend.  Exiting first Blood Rage we have a Spriest symb'd and he tranqs, then the druid does his again ~12 second later.  Remember crap hits harder after blood rage.  Keep an eye on your zone and soak your puddle.  Use lock rocks if your shield is low during second p1 before soaking a puddle.  Lots of movement so don't be afraid to use SWG to keep people alive.  Don't stand in the forming orbs as when they pop you lose your shield and take 120k damage.  Biggest learning curve for us was getting dps to *not* get hit by orbs.  We also call out who gets the knock up so tanks know where the add is.  Ranged has assigned spots so after breath/BR we know each zone is covered.  Last week we had no spriest so made due, but was a little more messy. 

 

Honestly, we had 74 wipes prior to our first kill, and that was everyone learning what worked for them.  Since then, we average maybe 2-3 wipes per kill, usually at 5%ish because folks will tunnel and miss a puddle.  Hope this helps. 

 

Comp is DK/War tanks

Druid, Shaman (me), Pally heals

War (Fury), Lock (DST), Mage (FR), Hunter (SV), Spriest

 

 

Our current setup is 2 heals 3 tanks. I think it's being done that way because of DPS concerns and because we only have one copy of Rook's Unlucky Talisman among those tanks, which is hurting a lot on the second phase. But the healing comp was myself and a monk. The monk was blowing the healing meters up, whereas I felt like I was being relatively ineffective. I popped every cooldown and spammed the tanks during blood rage but one of them died anyway. I've been running chaining/SWG/recall glyphs for the fight, but I figure I'll switch out recall. Not sure what for - riptide honestly doesn't feel like a good glyph to be using. And we have 2 DPS shamans blowing ancestral guidance on the pull so initial shields is a nonissue.

 

There are DPS getting hit by orbs occasionally, but I've been the cause of several wipes because I'm having a very hard time keeping up with everything going on.

Edited March 18, 2014 by Cenerae

[CptDan 25]

H-Malk is a fun fight for healers. I get to put a shorter response in due to you already having visibility on the shield colorations.

 

Even though I heal in a 25 man setting, I wouldn't do anything differently in 10 man

 

Stat weights: I find that crit and mastery both do well on this fight. I just stick with my standard crit build. I also alter my spell selection a bit to mostly single target heals and Chain Heal, glyphed with chaining for the range. I roll hots on the people I can reach. I use a lot of Healing Surge on this fight. One HS can take someone from a red/orange shield to a green one and as Robert Frost said "That has made all the difference." (That's right I quoted Robert Frost on a wow forum)

 

Healing aside, this fight is a mechanical challenge and represents a jump in difficulty from the fights previous. Based on your guild's strategy it will be paramount that people are following the mechanics. One thing I've shared with the raid is making sure THEY watch their shields and not just assume a healer will jump on them right away. Usually 2 people in a 10 man raid are always in range of a pool, If one of them does not have a good shield, the other should soak the pool. The things that really kill here are people that hit an orb on the way to a pool or get hit with a slam and then soak a pool immediately. This is raid awareness and there isn't much you can do to heal through that. 

 

Having someone with an immunity (mages/hunters) spread throughout the room helps as they can soak orbs on an ongoing basis with the caveat that they cannot soak a pool if an orb does manage to damage their health. This can help so that people do not run into an orb on the way to a pool. This is up to raid leadership though.

 

The other key element is the blood rage. We personally use a rotation of druids to ensure everyone can stay stacked, but this is up to raid comp and I know in 10 man this isn't always possible. Then a healing CD rotation is needed with the final cooldown being used just as the raid spreads again to top shields. I personally try to get RT rolling on as many targets as I can then Ascendence on this.

 

The last element is getting every to spread after each breath and rage really quickly. This allows for quicker pool soaking and possibly more importantly, fewer people earning frequent flyer miles.

 

Have fun and heal on my friend.

Edited March 18, 2014 by CptDan

[Stoove 347]

I already use VuhDo and already have it set up to track the barriers. So that's not the problem - mine lies with trying to juggle the healing with watching my feet for orbs spawning on me, checking for smash direction, and checking for purple puddles of doom to stand in. I even went and turned off floating combat text just to keep the vision around me clear. I'm just having great difficulty processing everything, and I feel like I've reached my limit, so to speak. I don't know if practise will make perfect or if I'm fundamentally doing something wrong or what, but the fight just feels horrible to manage.

 

Getting better at that is all about simplifying your UI, and the suggestion I made had more to do with that really. If you set your bars up so that you aren't tracking the debuff but instead color your bars based on which debuff your raiders have, you remove a lot of clutter from your bars. That, in turn, means you have more time to look at other things.

 

Also I don't think Healers have any reason to use floating combat text anyway, so good going :)

[CptDan 25]

But the floating numbers are so pretty stoove.

[Stoove 347]

But the floating numbers are so pretty stoove.

 

And what about when they obscure your vision and get you killed?  :P

[Grahmrook 6]

How else am I going to see the 200k crit from Healing Rain??

[Stoove 347]

o.0

[Cenerae 1]

Getting better at that is all about simplifying your UI, and the suggestion I made had more to do with that really. If you set your bars up so that you aren't tracking the debuff but instead color your bars based on which debuff your raiders have, you remove a lot of clutter from your bars. That, in turn, means you have more time to look at other things.

 

Also I don't think Healers have any reason to use floating combat text anyway, so good going

 

I guess I misunderstood what you meant. I shall definately look into that.

 

I use floating combat text to check for meta procs, mostly. I have a crappy computer so I can't go running too many addons to track for that kind of thing. But this is the first fight where having all of it on has actually hurt my performance, so off it goes

 

 

 

Stat weights: I find that crit and mastery both do well on this fight. I just stick with my standard crit build. I also alter my spell selection a bit to mostly single target heals and Chain Heal, glyphed with chaining for the range. I roll hots on the people I can reach. I use a lot of Healing Surge on this fight. One HS can take someone from a red/orange shield to a green one and as Robert Frost said "That has made all the difference." (That's right I quoted Robert Frost on a wow forum)

 

I'm actually running a high mastery build on request of the raid leader, with very little crit (and I'm at 40% buffed spell haste). I'm not sure if this is good or bad but it's seemed to be ok. ~50% of my healing is coming from chain healing and healing stream ticks, with most of my single target healing coming from riptide and healing surge - though this is making up a far smaller portion of my total healing. Again, I'm not sure if this is correct or not. I may need to spot heal more frequently perhaps.

Edited March 18, 2014 by Cenerae

[CptDan 25]

I use the floating text but not for healing data, mainly just on some fights when i want to see snares etc. 

 

I tried a mastery build out and it did okay but i preferred the crit and having enough haste to make it "feel" okay to me, mainly just a comfort issue. I mix it with chain heal and spot healing. For 25s and with our comp I find it best to use chain heal after the pools are soaked to seek out the people that need the shield topped off and use spot healing for the slams and unexpected single target damage.

[Cenerae 1]

Ok so I forgot to update here, but I bit the bullet and tried out the riptide glyph...and it actually wasn't nearly as poor as I was expecting it to be. HPS is about the same as a CH spam setup and I can actually get some control over who gets healed.

 

Thanks for that. Now I just need to keep my head in the game long enough to get through the fight. Having a weak PC seems to be a real killer on this one. >_<

[drumsmani 47]

If you haven't done so already, try turning down the view distance setting to low / medium to further help your system.

[dean771 3]

3 tanking seems like a terrible idea. It really hurts your dps and makes healing alot harder.

 

Some things that helped me though, 

 

Clear my one or two orbs with sheild totem if they are blocking me in.

 

Single target each person in range after they soak a puddle (HS or targeted CH)

 

Dont try and beat the monk on the meters,

 

Smart heals don't work well with the shield

 

 

edit: I'm a fan of mastery over crit (mostly to save reforging for ele) but on this fight I fully reforged to crit

Edited March 24, 2014 by dean771