Problems downing normal Stone Guard 10

Yeah, unfortunately it's not working out. I'm not sure if it's me, or just one person, or a combination of everything. I play the holy priest Arcaneheal. We have a resto shammy and holy pally as well. I'm reforging into mastery since I'm mainly healing our bear tank. The pally is healing our dk, and the shammy is healing the raid. I'm wondering if there's anything we (or more so I) can do to improve the encounter healing wise. Many people are hitting the cobalt mines and getting killed from the chains, which is something I'm getting tired of. I need to work on it myself too.
Here is our log for tonight's raid:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-j0b3sac1vi4ywviu/

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated! :)

I had the same problems healing on my shaman. Look at the sources of the damage taken for some of your attempts, some of the dps are taking way to much damage from chains and bombs. Ideally jade shards should be the top damage taken for non tanks because it is the only unavoidable damage. All other sources of damage like overloads, chains and bombs should only be coming in when you have 90% reduction. People will make mistakes and that's understandable but if too many people are making too many mistakes then you will be OOM long before the boss is dead.

I explained that to the people I raid with and we basically came to the conclusion that until we start wiping to enrage, avoiding damage is the top priority of the dps. We downed them a few attempts later. I don't know how you guys are positioning yourselves but if you don't have amethyst you can have everyone stack in melee and ignore the chains, this leaves only bombs to worry about but as everyone should be moving together it's easy to call out.

We just started to look at this fight, did a practice run with some of our normal raiders. We have for healers, Monk(me), Pali, and Druid. Pali/warrior tank. From the few runs we did last night, here are some of my thoughts. The chains, in 10man there will be a max of 3. So what we did, is buddy up, ignore the chains all together. When you are close they do no damage. When jasper was up, we slowly broke the chains.
As for the bombs, ppl just need to get out of it. seems like the damage might bleed a little bit ouside the circle it puts on the ground. They be poped if they overwhelm you, but s.preist, hunter, or who ever has a damage mitagator.
Getting the tank swaps down to deal with the explosions seems like it will be one of the harder thigns to do. That will be up to the tanks to taunt the bosses and swap when needed. To help advoid extra damage.
The other boss should be up next reset, he drops purple pools under ppl, they will, have to get outa them asap.
But we shall be trying our normal group in a couple days so will see how the damage is and how to best deal with all the damage.

You are spending 200.000 mana on dispelling people. That's 2/3 of your mana pool. That's way too much. I would cut that number down to at least half. For example, ranged dps should not be dispelled unless they are standing in a purple pool. Melee DPS shouldn't be dispelled unless they are out of range of the boss. And even then, there still is the option to not dispell them. 7.8k is a lot of mana to use on something that will keep the player in place for, what, 4 seconds or something like that?

Also, don't get discouraged that you're not topping the healing meters. Holy priests are not gonna do that in MV. Especially not on The Stone Guard, and especially not if you're mostly tank-healing. Spirit Kings is more our fight! I would recommend you threw in a lot more CoH. It's a great spell that you should almost always keep on CD on The Stone Guard imo. I think it says on your WoL that it's 0.9% of your total healing. Cast it a lot more!

And why would you be stacking mastery if you're tank-healing? I agree that holy priests should generally not prioritize haste over mastery, but you are tank-healing, which means you won't be casting as many AoE spells as other Holy Priests, which mean not a lot of people in your raid are going to benefit from Echo of Light.

You cast Flash Heal too much. Greater heal should be used more than Flash Heal.

I'm no pro, but what I wrote seems logical to me. Use at own risk =)


STRATEGY TIP: You write that people are walking into cobalt mines too much. That might be because you are not detonating them when you should be. When the Cobalt Guardian is petrifying the raid, everybody should walk into Cobalt Mines to clear them out. As long as the Cobalt Guardian is the one petrifying, people will take 90% less damage from the Cobalt Mines, and the floor will be clear for some time, resulting in a lot less Cobalt Mine-damage taken. If you're not using this tactic, your raid leader is not doing his job good enough, and you healers are getting punished.

EDIT: Please ignore the <> stuff, i wrote all this and then had to log in again, nearly lost it and have no time to reformat it, sorry.

Hey, I'm the RL of a rather small but okay-doing 10man Guild and we started this ID. I play a Holypriest too ( After trying out and failing hard with Disc for the first time, will look into that later as i think its somewhat harder to play very good, like a higher skill cap and i took a 2 year break :D).

Im definitely not pro too, but nevertheless i hope my first impressions will help you:

1. I dont think mastery stacking is bad. Not in AoE-Chackra, not in Singletarget Chakra. Mastery Stacking is like HpM Stacking, it makes you even more efficient, provided you are already playing efficient. In the fights i experienced ( 3 Bosses down this week, and we started this week) its never a Question of pure Output where you would'nt be able to heal s.b. if you don't stack haste. We even play without Haste Buff so my normal Heal takes the normal 2.5 sec to cast <img src="http://www.tankspot.com/images/smilies/smile.png" alt="" title="Smile" smilieid="1" class="inlineimg" border="0"> For me Echo of Light is always a big part of my Heal. (And according to your Logs its also that way for you. But i'll get to spells used later.

2. Senzo is definitely right about Dispelling. DO NOT dispell just because. 5 Seconds is not much time, Dispell Only Cobalt Mines only when its Important ( This of course is not that easy to do and see ). Important is: S.b. that is standing in Amethyst pools, S.b. that has Chains on them and needs to run, MAYBE tanks if a swap is imminent and they have moved too much ( they need to get into position again ).

3.Stone Guards is DEFINITELY a Fight where optimizing Damage Taken is a absolute requirement. You will see in the logs i post later that our kill took nearly 8 Minutes <img src="http://www.tankspot.com/images/smilies/biggrin.png" alt="" title="Big Grin" smilieid="3" class="inlineimg" border="0"> ( Of course you can do it a lot faster than that if you have the DPS and Coordination ).<br>

- Not standing in Ameythyst pools, not getting DMG from Chains when petrification is not active, not triggering Cobalt mines when petrification is not active . These three Factors are not nice to have, they are a MUST if you dont have SUPERB DPS and overthetop Healing. Also do what Senzo said about controlled activating the cobalt mines.

4. You can Tank the 3 Mobs in two Ways, either you taunt the one that should be overloading back and forth, which is less work for the tanks but the melees have to run with the mob so there will be less dps. We tried it like this at first, which kinda worked. Still its better if you always swap two Guardians, so basically there will always be one place where you dps. Kinda hard for me to explain in English, so if further elaboration is required i'll edit it (i think there are enough guides out there though)<br>

<br>5. General Holy Playstyle stuff:<br>
<br>Greater Heal should always be cast more than Flash Heal<br>

<br>I don't think this statement is true generally. Of Course it makes sense that you dont want to spam flash heal, and its also a no brainer that greater heal is pretty good. But there is more to this:<br>If you use From Darkness Comes Light (And i think it is the best Talent for Holy in most cases, but especially for 10 man and Tank or favored singletarget healing) There are is always the possibility you have more Flash heal Casts than greater heal. <br>Greater Heal is NOT a spell you want to spam. It is not a spell you necessarily want to cast without at least one stack of serendipity! FDCL is my favorite Talent because it allows you to build serendipity without spending mana on FH, while using spells you cast often and that are efficient, i.e. Heal, Binding Heal, Greater Heal with Serendipity and Flash Heal with FDCL. The Flash Heal from FCDL can proc another FH, and can crit. It's just wonderful :)<br>

<br>Stone Guards is definitely a Fight where SingleTarget Chakra shines. Always Keep Renew applied to both Tanks, preferably with Glyph. If you refresh it directly, with either Holy Word Serenity ( Which is a WONDERFULL spell ) or some other Spell, it has the normal Duration, and is easily held up on both tanks without much effort. You can refresh it with FDCL Proc, binding Heal, heal, greater heal, all those spells you cast anyway. Cast Heal As often as you can fit it in to get low cost FDCL procs, or just to be very efficient. Use HW:Serenity as often as possible. Use CoH, as its very efficient and a Smart heal ( Senzo said this too). Use Prayer of Mending with Glyph, but dont use it on Cooldown if You dont need the output, or need to save a bit mana. It has to bounce to be efficient. I think you know all of this, but i just wrote what came to mind :)<br>

<br>Generally speaking i think DPS players are challenged more this addon. And especially in beginner phases. Every Class has awesome abilites to stay alive. Every bit of Damage that could have been avoided is distracting you from your main chore: healing damage that CANNOT be avoided. First priority for them should always be staying alive, then optimizing dealing damage while staying alive. Its not your fault if they die because of damage that could have been avoided.<br>For healers a big part is always not panicking, and seeing the whole picture of the fight. When you raid, think about what spells you use when you use them, and if you cast a flash heal because you panick, ALWAYS try to think what you could have done to do the same heal, with more efficiency. Also USE DIVINE HYMN IT HAS A 3MIN CD ITS AWESOME :D

Ill post our logs of last week here, if you want you can check out the fights. I always play holy atm, use singletarget chakra for Stoneguards and Garajal, Aoe for Feng. We did Garajal with 2 healers because our dps was not good enough ( dont know if this is normal ). <br>Also note that im not playing my best of course and should have used CoH alot more generally. But most of the FH are from FDCL procs, or to gain serendipity for increased output ( should only be done if you know you have the mana and its needed).<br>You can clearly see that we have rougly the same raid HPS, or even less (look at your Try 15) while having 10-20k less raid damage taken /s <br>

<br>i apologize for my bad english, if you want to chat about healing or anything i said is BS and s.b. wants to discuss it feel free to do so and i will try my best to participate :)<br>

http://www.worldoflogs.com/guilds/17789/

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You have some good points, Darchigh.

I will have to disagree with you on mastery. I love mastery, but you can't just reforge all your items to mastery. There's a balance that you must keep between haste and mastery. DO NOT stack haste unless you can hit the +1 renew tick breakpoint. Its around 4,7k haste. But DO NOT stack mastery like a mad man either because you will nerf your other stats too much. I don't think it's a good sign that your biggest healing is coming from Echo of Light. It's.. abnormal I think. Which is generally not a good thing in raids.

If you are using FDCL, it's understandable that you've been casting more flash heals than greater heals. I do think mindbender is the better choice, and so does the majority of hardcore raiders, but if FDCL works out best for you, go for it. It's a great talent as well.

It's true that it's A LOT about the dps not taking damage from the mechanics of the encounter. But it's also true that you could've healed better. Your raidleader will probably get the dps to do their part better, so you should just focus on what you can do better yourself. That's how you become a better player - by looking at your own mistakes =)

Other than that, I tend to agree completely with Darchigh. And yeah, the skill cap for disc is really higher than holy atm. Maybe a bit too high. Blizzard will probably change disc soon.

I'm checking your logs -- specifically looking at your bear tank. He/she is going the Dodge and Mastery route (which isn't necessarily wrong, by the way, since he's dodging pretty well), and he isn't hit/expertise capped, so he's got 20% of his Mangle hits and 19% of his Melee hits that are not connecting, which combined with his slower swing speed (he's got 0.74% haste on his gear) is giving him less Active Mitigation resources to work with. He's at least keeping up Savage Defense on your best attempt (34% uptime, 37% overall), but he's not helping your healers much at all in the Frenzied Regen department (he has 14 casts over 18 attempts; in comparison, on our guild's kill, I have 26 casts totalling 3.1 million in one attempt). He should be using FR to help your healers when he only has one dog on him, and SD when he's got two dogs on him to cut down the melee damage hits. I'm wondering if he noticed the changeover on the FR cooldown, because he's using it like it was back in the old days - once or twice a fight at best.

Hope this helps,
-Tielyn