As I mentioned in my last post, Shadowgarde took on Magmaw in our first official guild raid. We spent a solid hour and a half working on him over 7 or 8 attempts, but we finally got him down. It was quite the thrilling finish as well: Our tank died at 13% to a Mangle so we had to either kill Magmaw while he was chained, or else it would more than likely be a wipe. Everyone stepped up the DPS, and even the healers started throwing all they had at the boss. Magmaw died just at the last instant and we had our kill.
We did a single tank strategy on this fight, which put the pressure squarely on the healers to keep the tank alive. Our healing team was myself, another Paladin and a Holy Priest. For the most part, we were able to keep the team alive long enough to hit the enrage timer. The strategy also called for the healers to stack with the Melee, which kept it much simpler and really allowed us to focus on the job of healing, and not dodging Pillars of Flame and those awful Lava Maggots.
I took my own advice and had a guildie craft the Elementium Stormshield for me before the raid began. It felt very good to be fighting with a shield again, as opposed to a book. I'm not sure how much of a difference it made, but it certainly gave me a tiny bit more confidence having a shiny purple equipped.
All in all, my pre-raid jitters were completely unfounded. I think I did just fine.
LESSONS
After the raid I took a look back at Recount to go through the numbers and analyze how I did and found a few things:
- I learned that you need to save your log quicker if you want to upload it to World of Logs. Oops.
- Either Recount doesn't handle our Illuminated Healing Mastery properly (which is likely), or our mastery is completely and utterly broken. According to Recount, in a 9 minute fight I had one single solitary shield that absorbed 2121 damage. That simply cannot be right. I wonder if I need to get an upgraded version.
- I gained back a total of 244000 mana. Mainly from Seal of Insight as you’d expect, but I also got from Divine Plea, Glyph of Divinity, Corrupted Egg Shell and a Mana Potion. Being able to recognize the slow damage period (which is fairly obvious in this fight) so you can slow your heals, hit Divine Plea and regenerate your mana is very key. I managed to hit Divine Plea three times in that fight and my Corrupted Egg Shell at least twice. Due to the healing reduction, I am reluctant to hit Divine Plea as often as I’d like, but I certainly can get better with using the Egg for mana regen. It's a two minute cooldown, and I could have used it at least twice more.
The Innervate from the Druid and the Divine Hymn helped as well, of course. Mana was my foremost concern for the entire fight, but I ended up managing it pretty well, I thought. Blizzard wanted to make it matter, and they certainly have suceeded.
- Right now I do not have Lay on Hands glyphed to reduce the cooldown. However, if Raid Boss fights are going to last this long, I'm definitely going to change that. I could have used it twice in that fight, and it would have been extraordinarily useful a second time around.
- When you have a mechanic that requires everyone to bunch up, Holy Radiance is godly. It ended up being my #2 heal after Beacon of Light. I only remember popping it 5 or 6 times, but it ended up accounting for 16% of my overall healing. Also, the Speed of Light boost saved my bacon in this fight three or four times when I was required to get out of the fire.
- 53 Holy Shocks in a 9 minute fight seems a bit low. Ideally, you could squeeze in 90, plus whatever Daybreak procs you get. I need to improve on this.
- 21 Flash Heals and 9 Divine Lights. I'm actually surprised that I managed to do with that few Divine Lights.
- Only 16 Judgements. Wow, it really felt like more. If I was Judging on cooldown, I could have done 67, returning more than 150000 mana. That’s a lot of mana left on the table and while you can't expect to perfectly judge every time it's available, I can definitely do better than this.
CONCLUSIONS
It is hard to draw any real conclusions from a single raiding night, but I think that I can say two things: my healing style is not yet as efficient as I would like it to be, but I am ready to raid.
Bring on the bosses.
Looks like we both had fun with Magmaw this weekend. My kill was similar, the tank died as we started an impale phase and we went all out, with me spammming my 3k wraths, but we managed to get him down.
ReplyDeleteI made sure to use a Potion of Concentration (22k mana over 10 seconds) during an impale phase because, well, what else is there to do?
I like your idea of putting the healers with the melee, it would make things easier on them. On a related note I dodged pillars (for the most part) all night, and it isn't a guaranteed death. I saved myself once as well as another healer with a clutch swiftmend while airborne.