Loatheb looks slightly complicated but after a few tries becomes easy to understand. It requires people to look outwards and pay attention. You only need to have one tank on him for the entire encounter.
Gimmicks
Everyone gets a 16 second debuff that reduces healing by 100%. After that, you have a 4 second window to heal players up before the debuff gets reapplied.
Secondly, something else that makes this fight that much easier is a different debuff called Fungal Creep. There are going to be periodic mobs called Spores that will spawn. When you destroy them, they give 5 players the Fungal Creep debuff. It increases your critical chance by 50% and your spells cause no threat. The Spores die relatively quick and should take no more than 4 spells before they spontaneously combust.
Positioning
Set up shop on the central platform.
Healing Makeup
Matt’s group:
- Resto Shaman
- Holy Paladin
- CoH Priest (me!)
You’ll definitely want an AoE healer for this fight. Try to time your heal around the warnings that appear. We tasked the Paladin to do nothing but heal the main tank on this fight. The Resto Shaman would heal group 2 while I was parked in group 1. The mechanics to Chain Heal has changed slightly so that if you target the initial player with the spell, it will only jump to other party members instead of going raid wide. With the Glyph, it will bounce to 4 targets total.
3 seconds before the debuff wears off, light up a Prayer of Healing. You want to time your heal so that it lands just as it wears off and it sets you up for 2 or even 3 Circle of Healing taps on the 2nd group.
What about the debuff phase?
At this stage, all you need to worry about is wanding and doing DPS. Keep an eye on your mana. Be sure you don’t DPS more than you have to. Your Power Word: Shield will still work. Don’t hesitate to throw that up there whenever you get the chance on your tank.
Changelog
9/23/08 – Original post
New blog post: Healing Naxxramus – Loatheb (10 man) http://tinyurl.com/4xq4gn
Chain Heal and CoH are both “smart” heals now unless there is some sort of bug. They should be targeting the lowest health members, regardless of group #.
OK.. Just did the plague wing, spider wing, and raszuvious last night. Two healed this with me (a disc priest) and a resto shaman. We both had our fair share of lvl 80 blues, with the shaman still wearing a piece or two of lvl 70 BT gear.
Prayer of healing really made this fight trivial. With my haste it’s about a 2.5 second crit. When i saw my DBM show that theres 2.4 seconds left on the necrotic plague, i’d target the lowest player who needed a heal (usually the tank) and line up a flash heal or greater heal, depending on how low he was. The crit buff was great. I’d proc divine aegis on most of my party after the prayer of healing.
We basically had the entire raid stack on the boss and moved him to each spore. As long as the tank has a decent threat lead in the beginning, and everyone gets hit by the 50% crit/no threat debuff, then you’re all set.
Keep the shield’s flying and you’ll be fine
I went into this fight as a Resto Druid (approx. 1300 healing) and had another Resto Druid and a Resto Shaman. What we found worked best was having me solely on the warrior tank and the other two healers do raid healing. It is certainly doable if you time the final “tick” of your lifebloom to go off right as the debuff wears off, and time your nourish spell appropriately as well. I have my Nature’s Swiftness as a macro attached to my Healing Touch which works great for this fight when you need an instant big heal. Of course, you can also time your Healing Touch cast time to coincide with the small window of time where heals aren’t reduced.
As a holy paladin this is how I find you get the most out of your healing in this fight:
About 5 sec before the “4 sec healing window” is up I judge light on boss and put beacon of light on the ranged layer with currently has the lowest health.
I start casting a holy light about 1.5 sec before “4 sec healing window” on the melee with lowest health (reason I wanna cast it on a melee is the glyph of holy light effect). I follow up the holy light with a holy shock on whoever needs healing mostly and finish off with a flash of light on another target that’s low on health.
Once you get familiar with this fight theres plenty of time to help dpsing as well, at least getting off a consecration and a holy shock on the boss between the healing windows. This is if you can spare the mana for it of course.
An interesting update for 3.0b is to deal with the CoH nerf for holy priests. I always use the following cycle:
– PoH (precast)
– Holy Nova
– CoH
By healing your own party with Holy Nova first, you “send” the CoH heals to other members unless your party members still have low health after PoH+HN.
This has proven _extremely_ succesfull.
Also, the glyph of Prayer of Healing is totally worthless in this fight, from what I can tell. I have yet to see it heal once. I assume the HoT only ticks after 3 seconds.