Feel free to scroll down and watch Conquest’s kill video as well as read the comments I had on my own performance.
As Priests, we have it easy. There are so many simple tools we can use to heal this unique encounter. I’m going to break this post down by spells and healing techniques.
Best advice I can give you about healing through Chimaeron is to not panic. The first couple of attempts, my eyes were glued to my screen. I imagine every healer who sees this fight for the first time feels the same way. Its simply overwhelming and you experience this feeling of helplessness washing over you as you watch the rest of your raid plummet.
But don’t worry. There is a light at the end of a tunnel.
Assignments
I recommend raids start with 7 healers on 25 man (3 on 10 man). This early in the end game, I think that having that extra healing GCD is going to be a must.
2 healers on the tanks
5 healers on the raid
Assign each healer to 1 group. Make sure those groups are relatively close to each other so that healers can spring AoE heals when needed. I’d drop a Prayer of Healing after a Massacre to elevate them past 10k and keeping them in the safe zone. You’ll want your positioning to look something like this:
As you can imagine, the + symbols represent the raid healers. The blue circles represent where their groups should be. The two groups near the top are for melee while the two near the bottom are for ranged. I’m the one right in the middle. The green circle represents my approximate AoE healing radius.
Also note that I didn’t draw this to scale. It’s an idea of how I wanted our groups to array ourselves.
On a side note, check out Boss Blueprint if you want to create your own boss strategies and tactics. It’s how I created this one.
Phase 1 (Triage healing)
You have 4 spells at your disposal when trying to keeping your group alive.
Get in this Chakra state. The instant heal is a life saver. You have about 5 seconds to heal affected players up past 10k health otherwise you risk them dying to a Massacre or a Caustic Slime.
Your fast heal will get plenty of action and work on this encounter. I’ve seen players frown at using such an inefficient heal. But guess what? This is one of those encounters where its warranted. You can’t spend your time worry about mana efficiency here. If you’ve gotten to this point, then you already know how to manage your mana, cooldowns and spell usages anyway. Besides, its not like you’ll be chain casting Flash Heal on the same player repeatedly. All you need is just one. In most cases, only one player in your group will be below 10000 health.
Heal
Yes, it is a little slow to use. I’ve developed a habit where I would just continue chain casting Heal on myself or another player in my group even if they didn’t need it. Why? Because there’s a 20% chance that my Heal will land on a player in my group who is the target of my Heal. If I’m casting Heal and a Caustic Slime strikes my target, I can simply let the heal go through and it will get that player above 10000 anyway. Just be prepared to switch to your assignments within your party.
Work that Mastery while you’re at it!
Great spell to have if both you and another player in your group have been hit. One cast will get you and your target to safety. I’m not seeing this spell used often enough.
Phase 2 (Brute force healing)
Group up and unload your biggest AoE healing spells.
Identify the members in the raid who do not have personal cooldowns they can use to survive. I got into the habit of Flash Healing that player and a second player before casting Prayer of Healing on my own group with help from Serendipity. As a Disc Priest, you’ll want to do the same with a shield into a hasted Prayer of Healing (due to Borrowed Time).
Stack the healing circles on top of each other for maximum effect.
Yeah.
No brainer, eh?
You’ll want to coordinates Hymns and Tranquilities across the raid. If you have a Disc priest, find a way to weave in their Power Word: Barrier. I find that the first Feud can be healed through without cooldowns. But any Feuds after that are best done with rotating cooldowns. If you’re just learning the fight, I suggest going with using 2 cooldowns per Feud. As your raid gets geared and stronger, you can drop down to 1 per feud.
Phase 3
Your healing spells are useless. Switch to Smite mode and go to town. You deserve it.
Keep this spell in your back pocket. It isn’t exactly a heal, but it does buy time for your raid to take down Chimaeron when you Life Grip the target he is chasing to a safe area in the room.
Conquest Video
In this video from my perspective, I’ve been assigned to group 5 (The all healer group). I’m using Real UI (and you can read up on my thoughts on this UI compilation on NSUI). Note that my group 5 is the last row not necessarily the farther right column.
Things you shouldn’t do in a raid
You’ll notice I make a number of key mistakes on our first kill.
Open bag, find mana potion: I started using Real UI recently as an experiment on compilations. I completely forgot to ensure my Mana Potions were on my bar. So what did I do? Open up my bags, find my potions, and click on them.
Have the character sheet open: In the biggest example of healer tunnel vision in the HISTORY of tunnel visioning, yours truly fat fingers the character sheet. I must have left it up for a solid 2 minutes or so before I realized I had it open. My eyes were that glued to my raid frames. Even my raiders are perplexed as to how I left my expanded character sheet up taht long.
Remember your DPS spells: Yeah, I had to rearrange my keys. Once we hit the final phase, you’ll notice I kept trying to cast Holy Word: Sanctuary. I forgot what I had Smite bound to and it took me a few seconds to remember what keys they were. Whoops.
Need specific advice on your own individual play or on your healing team? Feel free to leave a comment or question here.
For a different perspective, check out a blog entry by Kae from a Resto Druid perspective. If you’re a blogger and you’ve written a blog post on Chimaeron as well, let me know and I’ll add a link straight to yours.
I notice you use a number of spells for the slime (non-group up phase).
Prayer of Healing in its current state is ridiculously awesome in this fight and cheaper in spell costs to most of the spells you listed above. We have 2 priests (holy) and both of them can keep 2 groups each above 10k using PoH alone during the slime phases (5 seconds between each slime & a PoH cast is roughly ~2s with current haste). We do have a backup healer to watch the 2nd priority groups for both priests in case of lag/etc but most of the time they are unnecessary.
To do this though we take a few minutes before the fight to make sure the target of the PoH is the center of the group being targeted (spread out within 30 yards).
Not too interesting in terms of spell usage but very efficient.
^ should mention that sometimes PoH will not heal for 10k before its hot (glyphed) but the incidental healing from other sources (totems, shadow priest, etc) makes up for it.
Glad to see a 25-healing perspective for this one. While you can GENERALLY tell people how to up the ratios, the room placement is always trickier ^^ I did write up an overall 10-man strat on this one a couple of weeks ago (http://www.jadedalt.com/2011/01/14/chimaeron-normal-10-man/).
Archangelism priests never forget where their Smite key is 😉
Good perspective and clear video, but it is very difficult to get a sense for it as a healer because of the way your raid frames display health. Aside from your mouseover target, how can you see who’s health is where? Percentage displays for 25 people seem too difficult to fully read at a glance.