Healing Kologarn 25-man

[Amallthia]

For the past week my guild has been working on Kologarn. We will fly through the first three fights (ignoring Ignis) and only have a couple people die to stupid shit. Then we will spend the next 2hrs wiping on Kologarn. For healers we almost always have two holy priests, a disc priest, and two holy palls... Myself and the other holy priest are finding this fight near to impossible for us to heal. We are popping all of our mana regen tricks, timing our PoHs, DHs, and CoHs, but still going oom halfway through the fight. (We were also taking breaths with plenty of melee in his range? This was on top of his overhead smash)

Last night we were at the receiving end of a frustrated raid who had come to the conclusion that the healers weren't "healing hard enough"... Our group was two holy pallys, three holy priests, and one resto druid. All should be decked out in t7.5 gear and know their class well. Healing assignments were pallys on MT and grips, druid and one holy priest on "raid", and the other two holy priests split the raid groups to PoH specific groups after he smashes. DPS could get him down to about 50% before all tanks wiped and healers were oom.

What suggestions or strats do you have for this fight? (Or other fights to come that we may have issues healing?)

Many thanks!

[Grombrindal]

Do you only have 1 MT? This is the most recent boss our guild got down as well and we have 2 tanks on him, switching aggro when they get a one debuff of the crush armor on them. If you had a very very avoidance heavy MT you could single tank it I think but I don't think I would advise that. We also have another tank for the adds after we kill right arm but I'm guessing you do as well.

Are eye beams a problem? Do people drag them into other people too often? That's something that can make the healing harder too....

As for sand breath I think you can look like you are in melee range (and be able to melee him) but you have to have the tank up near the edge, at least that's where I'm at when I tank and we've never had any issues w/ sand breath.

Grom

[Terra]

We were also taking breaths with plenty of melee in his range?

Umm.. something's not right there. Once we learned the fight I have NEVER seen a breath go off. Your tanks might be messing up in some way. In this particular situation a shammy healer can help a lot, but from the sounds of it, I don't think this is a heal problem. Do you have a WWS or similar report?

[Terra]

What suggestions or strats do you have for this fight? (Or other fights to come that we may have issues healing?)

Re this: Be prepared to hand of sacrifice and guardian spirit ALL of your tanks on the initial pull with Auriaya and spam heal until the first 4 cats are dead. Be prepared to do it again in rotations on Mimiron.

[Amallthia]

We use three tanks, two swapping for every two debuffs and the other on adds and ready to pick up the boss if one of the other tanks dies. Eye beems have been an issue, I wont lie, healers have been getting hit by them in the early attempts. Focusing too much on the raidframes and not enough attention being paid to income lazers. Now that we have become more comfortable with the chaos of the fight the gaze is not as *much* of an issue. We are also having issues with the gaze hitting our melee (when we have plenty of ranged ready to kite.

And ty for the suggestion about the breath and the tank.


*edit: because I suck at typing and working at the same time*

[Worry]

I have healed this fight twice as a resto druid. I gear for spell power, int and haste, and run a pretty standard raid healing build.

A few points -

• the breath will go off if Kologarn's aggro target is not in Melee range. (See below)
• the person with the eyebeam should always TURN and run straight back to the wall, then run along the wall. No strafing, backing up, etc.
• a couple of HoTs and a few direct heals tossed in will keep a grip target alive... don't sweat the grip damage

Our major problem with this fight has been the add tank. We DPS the right arm and leave the left arm 100% alone. We often have a little bit of chaos just after the arm goes down due to the elementals all being on the arm tank, and the shockwave from the left arm.

We emphasize healing on the add tank at that time, ensure DPS is slow on the elementals until they're rounded up and top up the raid post-shockwave.

Your elemental tank cannot use an AoE taunt if he's out of melee range of the boss because he'll taunt the boss who will then breathe on the raid.

We rarely have mana problems... we usually have "elemental tank out of range, got lazered, shocked and died" problems. If you're going OOM your raid is taking Too Much Damage and you're Probably Doing It Wrong.

I hope that helps!

[Tobius]

What exactly is going wrong?

Eye beams - people need to learn to move out of.

Stone Grip - add this as a debuff to your Grid, having it show who has Stone Grip before they start taking loads of damage makes it much easier. Remember they will die anyway though if dps isnt fast enough on the hand.

Left Arm - we just heal through the left arm damage, its a lot but should be manageable.

Tanks - make sure you have a couple on Kologarn to swap after a couple of debuffs. Have another tank for the adds and tank them out the way somewhere.

[Ciderhelm]

As Worry said, the most likely cause of a breath on the raid is if the Rubble tank uses an AOE taunt ability.

[Amallthia]

Thank you guys for your suggestions. I have spent alot of time reading up on the fights in Ulduar, but it is definitely a help to hear it from people who have been in the fight. I will try to present them to my raid tonight and hopefully they will be open to the information and we can get him down

[Cookie]

You could try taking 6 healers and dropping a holy paladin for someone who can aoe heal.

And looking at your gear, your mana regen is a bit low, so that , coupled with the fact that you run 5 healers, could explain the mana trouble. Personally I think around 600O5SR is the minimum mana regen for Ulduar for a holy priest. Try using a regen trinket and bringing a resto shaman for mana tide.

It's possible that after having overpowered regen, your healers aew not used to the nerfed one, and have terrible mana management, so just need to learn to heal better.

On our kills, we've used Disc + holy paladin on tanks, a disc priest to heal/shield the raid and heal the gripped people, and a combination of holy priest/resto druid/resto shaman on the raid. I don't think healing class setup is that important since we've downed him with 4 single target healers and 2 aoe healers once.

[Amallthia]

We tried again last night for almost 3 hours before the raid lead called it and took us to Vault. This post is more or less to let off some steam about the situation last night. If any of my officers see this and have a problem with it. I don't really care. I have given this guild my all from day one when I joined a year ago and want nothing more to help us progress in anyway I can. I'm at the end of my rope.

I didn't think we were actually going to run it since at the start of the night we only had two healers signed up (three have left the guild in the last week). But after getting a Shadow priest to go holy, a ret pally to go holy, picking up a shammy and a WAY under geared guildie (priest), we started the wipe fest.
The under geared priest was wearing 2/3 quest blues/heroic blues. He maybe had two purples from Naxx. He has very limited experience in 25mans and was disc that night. He has potential, but should not have been in that raid.

I wasn't too confident when the RL tossed out our healing assignments; disc priest (geared), shammy, and holy pally on the three 3 tanks, two holy priests on the raid as well as the under geared disc priest... I linked a meter to RL and made some suggestions after the first two wipes. I felt like the under geared priest, if he *had* to be here, might work out better if we had him healing grips and a tank, and to have the other disc priest switch to his Holy main spec to heal raid with us. After some silence the RL told the healers to look at our raid frames, telling us that he had spread the priests out in different groups to help with the raid healing... For a second time we told him our PoH was no longer group dependant. They then send the priest to respec holy.
Before every pull we were told that the "Healers better step it up this time..." Through every fight we were not very nicely told to "bring the raid up faster" or to "get on our game". After the wipes we were scolded and told something along the lines of "that the raid heals are just not working hard enough."

At this point I am receiving whispers from the other healers either telling me they are trying their hardest, trying to figure out what we can do better, and expressing their frustration of being blamed for the fails. I am whispering a few of the officers (begging as nicely as I can and trying not to step on toes) that the under geared priest needs to be replaced. "Just inspect him, he should not be here healing the hardest aspect of this fight. Even your alts are better geared and skilled for this." What I get in return is, "You expect us to give up the chance of receiving loot because we come in here on our alts to get a boss down? How is that fair?"... No it is not, but you know what, I would do it in a second if it meant success for the guild and everyone else.

I usually do not speak up much in raids, suggestions are not very welcome, unless you are a class lead or officer. But at this point I don't care. I start asking the priests to try different strategies. I ask the three others to call out "hymn" before a smash where we know the raid is going to suffer alot, and we will rotate to keep the raid up.
Our pulls are attemps are better but not by much.

Finally, they pull in a resto druid (geared!) to replace our under geared priest. We make three more attempts and get the boss down to 19% before wiping (tank healers are oom and too many have died from the gaze or adds). We give up.

I'm at wits end here. I wouldn't be surprised if I get the /gkick should an officer from my guild read this. Which is really sad since all I am trying to do is help with the guilds progression, but all my attempts have been met with deaf ears or hostility.

I guess all I am looking for here is some love and a little support now

(oh to cookie, I know my mana regen is a bit low, but with raid buffs, flask of 38mp5, and 16mp5 food I sit on about 22k mana and ~700mp5oofsr, which I am never in...)

[Cookie]

It sounds like your raid is sucking on everything from gear to strategy. But you shouldn't have been judging the disc priest from the healing meters, it doesn't show unless you have recount guessed absorbs installed. Most of the disc priest's healing should be from shields, not their healing spells, and they're fairly decent raid healers on fights like kologarn because aoe damage is predictable- just penance the gripped people, poh after aoe damage, and keep shields up on everyone in between, and flash heal when necessary.

But 700mp5 O5SR with raid buffs for holy is still painfully low, not "a bit" low. Even in my disc spec and gear, I have more than you -.- If your mana regen was enough, you wouldn't have gone OOM, and I'm suspecting your other healers have poor regen as well. Try regeming your gear, and get a regen trinket. You'll notice a huge difference in how long your can sustain healing for. Currently, I think your regen makes you undergeared for Ulduar, but you can easily improve- just switch your spellpower gems for spirit ones, spellpower is useless if you don't even have the mana to cast anything. You can easily heal through all the Ulduar bosses with over 2000 +healing unbuffed, but anything below 600O5SR regen for holy and 300-350mp5 unbuffed for disc is not enough.

If 3 tank healers are OOM, then it's definitely a healer issue, although I think your dps and tanks are at fault as well. The dps people are probably adding to the strain on the healers by taking unecessary damage and making the encounter longer with low dps. If people are failing at eye-beams, they don't need healing.


Though the attitude of your raid leaders calls for a /gquit anyway imo. They should be figuring out ways to get the boss down, not worrying about getting loot.


EDIT: Why do you not have inspiration? o.O The damage reduction from it means a lot less healing to be done which equals to mana saved. Your comment that you're never out of 5SR makes me ??? as well.

Your focus on +healing gems and talents and disregard for sustainability/survivability and the fact that you looked to healing meters (which is a great tool yes) to make a point makes me think that you're just too heavily focused on numbers and that's keeping you from doing your job as well as your could be.

Swicth out your poh glyph too, the hot part of it just gets healed over before it gets to tick. The coh glyph is much better.

[Amallthia]

First off, thank you for your advice. I had been holding off on regemming until I knew more about how 3.1 would effect me.

Will the spirit gems help with my regen? I find in alot of fights I do not have time to stop healing for more than maybe 10 seconds. I am constantly spamming heals in raid. Stacking a few FHs to gain the haste on PoH just before a large amount of aoe dmg hits the raid, then tossing out a CoH, couple renews on the tanks, and then back to FH. Would int, int/spirit, sp/spirit gems work out better with this type of play style? Or would you still recommend straight up spirit?

I am trying to get a better regen trinket, but we are no longer farming naxx25. Our guild never back tracks, we just go full steam ahead on the new content (even if it means wiping three nights a week). We only downed 3DSarth once, and will most likely never go back to it until Ulduar is clear.

As for lasts night raid. So many things were going wrong there is no way I can place blame on any one person or group, I know I died to a few beams I can take responsibility for it. I also understand that disc priest do not show well on the meters. But unbuffed this individual is sitting at 1400sp, 15k mana, and has 425/50 regen o5sr/i5sr there is just no way they are going to be able last in this fight.

But please, if anyone has made it this far in the thread w/o getting sick of my ramblings, I really would appreciate any suggestions to improving my character and skills. ^_^

[Healixor]

We had some trouble too, there are some great tips in this thread. One more tip for the healers.

In grid add a debuff: Stone Grip
Then you can see really fast if one of your healing mates are gripped and or who you have to heal. (As disc I'm usual on the tanks, but I throw a PW:S on the ppl in stone grip. (I'm usually holy on this fight for more raw healing on the raid)).

And running oom isn't uncommon on this fight. When holy concentration procs use spirit world glass and stay OOFSR (maybe by using inner focus) that trick works allot, and additionaly you can use shadowfiend and a pot, maybe ask for an innervate.

[Cookie]

So basically your raid leaders would rather spend time wiping instead of doing something productive like gearing up people to down a boss? imo your guild is /gquit material and your guild management is bad.

More regen will help you a lot, and you don't need more than a few ticks from O5SR either. But there's a lot of ways you can stay O5SR. Only when a spell which costs mana lands do you count as being inside the 5 second rule, so do things like cancel-casting or chaining your IC procs with Inner Focus to get more ticks.

Gearing really depends on the stats you have. Basically:
Spirit should be top stat until you have enough to last the fight, after that taking any more is useless since it doesn't contribute to anything, and the +spellpower gain from it is too little. I think this "soft-cap" is at ~600O5SR
Crit should be top stat until ~30% raid-buffed. After this number, you won't get much out of it.
Haste should be top stat until about ~10%. After that, getting more is still useful, but you shouldn't ignore other stats for it.
Spellpower should be top stat until you have enough to heal without letting people die. When you've reached the soft-cap on other stats, it becomes your main one again.

Right now, I think you should gear for Spirit>crit>spellpower>haste. Spec Inspiration, it really helps. And I'd tell you to spec lightwell, since it's the highest hpm spell we have, but I'm guessing the people on your raid won't click on it -.-


If people are failing at eye-beams, get DBM or Bigwigs, they both have warnings, but BigWigs is better in that it makes the screen flash and whispers people. Or maybe your raid isn't positioned too well. Have all the ranged people spread out in a line at the back, but keep a space at the door. When someone gets an eye-beam, they just run out of the room. Like this:

X X X X X DOOR SPACE X X X X X

It's really important no one stands in the door space, or the ones kiting the beams will just run over them.

People kiting the beams shouldn't need more than a PWS. If you have problems running, get the Tuskarr's Vitality enchant or have a priest with fast reactions spec Body and Soul to shield them. But you should be getting rid of your boots enchant anyway- for survivability, Tuskarr's Vitality is better, and for regen, Greater Spirit is better.


And the best thing to do is have a disc priest keep shielding the raid. Rupture is bugged right now and returns mana when multiple shields are taken off at the same time, so there won't be any mana issues. And those shields will help take the strain off raid healers. If your disc priest is still spamming tanks like pre-3.1, he's failing badly.

A lot of it has to do with adapting to the 3.1 changes as well. Before the patch, I had no mana problems whatsoever and never needed to use shadow fiend or a pot, but after stepping into Ulduar, I had mana problems too, and was starting to wonder if I should start buying mana pots again. Was even spending razorscale's ground phase and Deconstructor's heart phase wanding for mana -.- But after paying more attention to my mana bar and learning manage cooldowns better, I don't need to use any mana-back ability or pot before the keeper bosses. Spent the last reset without using shadowfiend on Hodir/Mimiron as well, even though I've only picked up a ring upgrade so far, so it's definitely possible to adapt.

Good place to get healing advice: Priests - Elitist Jerks

And running oom isn't uncommon on this fight. When holy concentration procs use spirit world glass and stay OOFSR (maybe by using inner focus) that trick works allot, and additionaly you can use shadowfiend and a pot, maybe ask for an innervate.

You should'nt have huge mana problems this early into the raid, this is like going oom during Maexna -.-

[Amallthia]

Much thanks everyone for the strats and advice XD

We lost yet two more healers this weekend, two priests, one of which was our guild leader. He has been focusing on college the past month and has not been raiding. He was an amazing lead and I think that is why we have struggling so much recently, especially in the healing department. We are unsure when/if he will return to raiding but we've been told it wont be anytime soon.
I am going to stick it out in the guild, for better or for worse, and just hope the guild gets out of this "rut" we've gotten stuck in. >.<

Oh and you're right, I've tried to get the raid to use the lightwell before and the straight up refuse. The reason I receive most often is "I'm a melee/dps/tank not a healer. It isn't my job to heal myself, it is your job to heal me." -_-

[Shaiel]

Then they're complete idiots who you can't progress with. Raiding is all about cooperation and helping everyone else out. Dps healing themselves saves healers mana and keeps everyone alive. Smart dps, especially those with mitigation/self-healing are kind of hard to find. The way ulduar is....if you can't all do everything you can to help each other out you won't progress, plain and simple.

A couple other things, is there a pally judging light and do you have nature resist from either a hunter or shaman?

[Amallthia]

LoL, I agree with your points and have voiced them to certain melee DPS in the guild. My hope was that they could be convinced that it would help out our raid and could then convince the rest to use the LoLwell. No go *sigh* Maybe if using the lightwell also increased their dps they might think differently.
Yes we have at least one pally using JoL and a hunter putting up a nature resist. We almost never raid with a shammy and are lucky if we have a druid with us.

BTW, we did finally down Kolo once two officers hoped off their DPS mains and jumped on their healing alts. The suggestion was also made that we keep the third row of ground free for people to kite the beams. All ranged and heals stood in the doorway all melee further up allowed for us to kite without running other over with the beams. I also did not go oom healing it

[Cookie]

LoL, I agree with your points and have voiced them to certain melee DPS in the guild. My hope was that they could be convinced that it would help out our raid and could then convince the rest to use the LoLwell. No go *sigh* Maybe if using the lightwell also increased their dps they might think differently.

Well dead people can't top dps meters -.- But I've noticed that some priests aren't very good at positioning their lightwell either. Put it right next to the melee.

BTW, we did finally down Kolo once two officers hoped off their DPS mains and jumped on their healing alts. The suggestion was also made that we keep the third row of ground free for people to kite the beams. All ranged and heals stood in the doorway all melee further up allowed for us to kite without running other over with the beams. I also did not go oom healing it

Grats ^_^

[Amallthia]

Hehe thank you I hope we continue to see him go down.

Well dead people can't top dps meters -.-

But from their line of thinking that isn't their fault they are dead! It's mine for not keeping them up! Lol, you just have to smile and laugh sometimes at how naive people can be.

I think I will make another attempt at the LoLwell for Kologarn this Sunday. I'll put it right smack dab next to the right hand and melee, if it doesn't get used up and melee start wiping, well... tough! I've pulled out all my tricks, time for them to click a stone and heal themselves =P