Well, we’ve now rescued Valithria in both 10 and 25 man. We ended up stacking holy pallies for the 25 man, including a few people that weren’t expecting to come in, and as there are several other healadins in guild that may see the fight in the weeks coming, I thought we could all benefit from a post explaining how to best prepare for this fight.
First off, you will want to reglyph to Glyph of Seal of Light in place of Glyph of Seal of Wisdom for this fight, and then run Seal of Light. This will add a flat 5% to your healing, which is considerable. I recommend carrying a stack of these two glyphs so you can swap them out before and after this fight, and if you need some made, just get a hold of me, my paladin can get you the hookup, free of charge.
You will want to flask spellpower for this fight. From what I’ve seen, haste food is best here, over spellpower food. I also have tons of this food if you want to hit me up for a stack. Carry haste potions as well, and again, hit me up if you need some. I will be bringing extras for all future 25 man attempts that I attend, so if you do happen to forget, don’t be shy about asking me for some. You should also beg Focus Magic off a mage.
I have a second action bar set up just for this fight. You won’t be able to set Valithria as a focus, since it gets cleared every time you go into the dream world, so you will have to heal her the old fashioned way. My action bar consists of:
1. my judgement macro (as you need to keep you judgements of the pure buff up 100% when healing),
2. a /target valithria macro,
3. Holy Light,
4. Holy Shock,
5. Flash of Light,
6. #showtooltip /cast [target=nazli] hand of freedom macro so I can clear slowing effects from frostbolts without having to untarget Valithria,
7. #showtooltip /cast [target=calmrain] beacon of light macro so I can help with some tank healing, and
8. haste potions.
Change names in those macros as necessary, and change your set up to however best suits you.
My cooldowns (wings, div. illumination, bubble, so forth) are all bound as usual.
First off, while it might seem like a good idea to beacon the dragon and heal the raid, she doesn’t seem to get crit heals correctly this way. I try to throw a beacon on a tank instead to help out with the non-portal healers, but remember that your focus should always be on healing the dragon. I pretty much only refresh the beacon when I’m on the run to a portal and unable to cast a Holy Light, and Holy Shock is on CD.
When the fight first starts, beacon a tank before the pull (ideally coordinate this with the other holy pallies, if any), drop a judgement on something then just start spamming Holy Lights on Val. You have a while til the first portals appear, so get yourself as close to OOM as you can. When she summons portals, they appear as green dots that will sit there for a little while before becoming enterable. As soon as she summons them, stop casting and run to one to claim it. Only one healer can enter a portal and they disappear pretty quick once they become enterable, so you want to get right on top of one fast. All jump healers should be marked, which will make it easy to not steal portals from each other (and hopefully to help dps keep from standing on top of our god damn portals. Yell at them if you have to).
While you are running to a portal is a great time to Holy Shock (and FoL if an instant one proc’d), refresh your judgement buff, and if you have time, hit your beacon macro. One you are standing on your green dot, go back to spamming heals until it becomes clickable. I usually let the cast I’m in the middle of finish before clicking the portal to take it, towards the end it’s worth not interrupting that heal. If you have a frostbolt hit you as you take the portal, make sure you hit your hand of freedom macro or cleanse yourself, the slowing effect can not be on you in the dream world.
(Also remember that you can cast spells while flying around in the dream, so don’t be afraid to cleanse your fellow jump heals should they be slowed or gut-sprayed, or to heal yourself if you took a hit before you entered, so you don’t drop too low from the fall damage when you leave the dream. I also got sprayed by an abomb once as I went into a portal and had to cleanse and heal while flying to keep from dying to the debuff.)
When you are in the dream immediately hit your spacebar key and go for the closest cloud. You want to be fast so you don’t lose stacks, as if you lose your stacks, that attempt will fail, almost guaranteed. There is a trick to getting these clouds that will take a couple tries to get the hang of, as it can be hard to judge just where you are in relation to them. I have luck with always trying to pop them from underneath, and wiggling through them with your strafe keys can help too (thanks Bury for that tip!). You will find what works best for you.
I generally try to clear a quarter of the room, then turn around to grab the cloud respawns behind me. This seems to limit competition for clouds. It is possible to share clouds, but you have to be right on top of the other person(s) to do so, so be careful if you are trying that way. You should aim to get at a minimum, 5 stacks each portal phase, but 6-8 is better. (This will be easy on 10 man, or on 25 if it’s an attempt with only 3 dragon healers. 4 healers gets crowded, so be on your game.) Try to snag a cloud right as the phase ends, too, to give you a cushion on time until stacks fall of at the beginning of the next portal phase.
As soon as you land, immediately begin spamming heals. Don’t worry about position or anything like that, just heal heal heal. I like to try and land on top of Dreamwalker when the dream phase ends, if I can manage it, so that I keep myself healed just with splash heals from Glyph of Holy Light. When the green dots appear, then you can move and repeat the above.
Towards the end of the fight you will have 30 odd stacks. This is when you want to pop your CDs (wings, 2set t10 divine illumination, trinkets, etc). The last 10% of her healing should happen in the last 20 seconds or so of the fight, and there is a point at the end when you want to skip the final portal and just spam heals. Save your haste potion for the end when bloodlust falls off, as you will likely hit Holy Light haste cap with both. If you’ve done all this correctly, you should be rocking the heal meters and watching a green dragon fly away.
Incidentally, if you are in the dream when the rest of the raid wipes, you can just fly to the door while the dragon respawns and save a repair bill/buff stuff.
Hope that helps everyone! This is my favorite encounter at the moment, and it’s our chance to shine, so be ready to go in there and rock some meters.
Naz
EDIT:
One other important thing I forgot, for this fight, you should equip and make good use of the 245 libram from triumph emblems, in lieu of the usual heroism emblem libram. This will up the spellpower of your Holy Lights a fair amount. Don’t bother with the 264 libram (if for some strange reason you actually wasted the frost emblems on it) as the ramp-up time for the spellpower effect isn’t worth it in comparison.
Also, I should probably mention that this is ironically a fight in which a FoL pally pretending to be a HL pally would perform very well. However, I don’t feel that it is worth it to respec down the ret tree just for this fight, as bubblesac can still be handy to pop if you pull healer aggro, or even just to help the raid through those last moments of the fight when the waves get a little overwhelming. Though if you are drowning in gold and want to regem to spellpower just for this fight, don’t let me stop you.
EDIT 2:
Jeez, this is going to end up long if I’m not careful. I forgot one other aspect of the fight, auras.
Fire resist is a good aura to have up here to mitigate blazing skeleton raid damage. However, since the raid doesn’t benefit from our aura while we are in the dream, it is best to have a ret pally or someone run it. Similar logic holds for frost resist aura and frostbolt raid damage.
So, as long as there is a ret or even prot pally able to cover fire resist aura, it’s best to have the healadins running concentration aura (so you don’t get much pushback when trying to heal, especially towards the clusterfucked end of the fight), and then either fire resist or frost resist aura, if no one outside of the healing pallies can provide it.
This does mean that aura mastery most likely be much use in this fight. One setting where it might be useful is if there are two portal healadins, one running conc aura and one running fire resist. The latter could then pop aura mastery if a blazing gets a little wild during a phase where said healer is out of the dream (remember, aura mastery is off the GCD so you should be able to use it without breaking heals).
I mentioned this above, but I generally don’t bother with divine sacifice in this fight except to pop it along with my bubble if I pull healing aggro towards the end of the fight when there are more adds up. Even so, I still don’t think it’s worth the respec (as it is for druids) to drop this talent just to grab 5% more crit.
Naz
LAST EDIT I SWEAR: If you are bubbled, you can’t take portals, and if you bubble inside the dream, it takes you out of it, similar to black holes on Algalon.
