Yor'sahj Heroic black-purple-red-yellow combo question

[exocant 0]

Hello,

My guild only recently started progressing on Yor'sahj Heroic. In your guide, you suggest dealing with the black-purple-red-yellow combo by killing purple. Many people in my guild and on my server are saying to kill yellow. I tried to come up with arguments to counter them, but I didn't manage. Could you please help me there?

Edited May 26, 2012 by exocant

[Vlad 411]

The reasoning is simple: having purple active means that you cannot heal players (you can perform only very very minimal healing), so if the other oozes are dealing damage to your raid, you will end up wiping.

From your combination, both black and red deal damage to the raid. Black especially deals quite a bit. You will find it difficult to keep players alive through that sort of damage without healing.

On the other hand, if you kill purple, you will be able to heal as much as you want. Yes, there is more damage to counter (from yellow being active), but with proper healing and usage of healing cooldowns, you should be ok.

Note that with the 20% nerf active, it might be possible to do it by killing yellow now, too, but you still need to be very careful not to trigger Deep Corruption (more details about Deep Corruption can be found in our guide).

[Damien 1,514]

Actually, killing yellow has been viable for a long time. Some hardcore guilds have been doing that during heroic progression. The main reason why we advise to kill purple and not yellow is because we believe that most players prefer pulling out big healing numbers rather than having to deal with a complex mechanic like Deep Corruption.

[LCSscallywag 57]

My guild has always killed purple. Basically we have always felt that it's easier for our healing team to just heal their asses off then like Damien said about dealing with Deep Corruption.

At this point, it doesn't matter probably. But during progression, we would actually use bloodlust on this phase for the added increase to healing output.

[HardBeatZ 39]

Personally we found killing yellow to just work out better. Having yellow and black means two waves of adds and probably none or very little dps on the boss. Pre nerf this made the enrage timer trivial at times (for us). By killing yellow we left purple up, but once we've gotten used to it, it has become a non factor. Ensure each healer has preassigned targets for healing and just heal through the black / red damage. Be sure to use cooldowns that don't add stacks. Disc priest bubbles are awesome.

Edited May 27, 2012 by HardBeatZ

[MadMonk 154]

All these answers are great and as you can see raid groups can approach this combination in different ways. Basically you should just try both options out and ask your healers which one they prefer.

In my guild we tried both and decided that killing purple was the easiest, pop heroism, bubble halfway through with selfcooldowns and healthstones. Most adds were killed by 'passive aoe' (cunning of cruel, D&D, chain lightning, disease spread, bleed spread and so on).

[Zagam 1,982]

As my guild's raid leader, on this combination, I kill Yellow. Healing through Red, Black, and Purple just requires stacking tightly to minimize the Red damage is trivial with a Holy Paladin and any other healer only using their big heals (Divine Light, Greater Healing Wave, Healing Touch, Greater Heal). Red, Yellow, and Black does terrible things to the group, especially with two healers including massive damage and 2 sets of adds from the Black Ooze. You should only deal with Red, Yellow, and Black when you get the "Oily Stoplight" which is Red, Yellow, Green, and Black (kill Green, pop Hero/Bloodlust/Timewarp).

[OldWolf 0]

(10man) The healing for red-black-purple is not very strenuous: Red targets the three people furthest away, and black prefers to target ranged and healers. So you have your ranged stack dead centre under the boss, and the melee stand on the edge of the targeting circle, with tank at max hitbox. Then the tank + 2 melee take red damage, and ranged take black damage, so the damage is spread around.

To heal this all you need is 1 healer per party sequentially casting a large heal on the party members one by one. If you have a raid cooldown available like Aura Mastery or PW:Barrier, or a tank 4pc bonus, then you barely need to do any healing at all.

IMHO this is a lot simpler than dealing with the logistics of the double black spawn, not to mention the massive raid damage yellow does.

[Astropolix 10]

Well we also kill yellow for this just to maximize boss dps (necessary during progression for us, now it's just because we want to go through it as fast as possible). Have a holy paladin put the beacon on the tank and heal up the red targets with big heals and all is fine. Usually our firemage and me playing arms in that fight just kill the black adds in a few seconds, so they don't contribute a lot leaving us with just red and purple, which is totally manageable (especially now with 20% nerf). If you are not able to kill the adds that quickly you're in for some trouble either way, because if you kill purple you have 2 sets of adds... While that's great for boosting your DPS (for those world-of-logs-highscore-guys) it sure isn't great for the boss-dps.