Sunday, January 27, 2008

Healing for Fathom-Lord Karathress

Fathom-Lord Karathress in Serpentshrine Cavern is LOKI's current progression target. If all goes accordingly, he will drop, as my husband says, "like a drunk cheerleader" tonight. My game plan for healing is as follows:

8 - 9 Healers are recommended. We tried him with 8 and so much DPS died that we hit the enrage timer, so tonight we are going to bring 9. I believe we will be able to do him with 8 healers sooner then later.
Ideal Healer Breakdown:
Paladins: 3 (2-6)
Priests: 1 (0-3)
Druids: 3 (2-5)
Shamans: 2 (1-5)

Healers will be prioritized/assigned as follows for the start of the fight:
PHASE 1: SHARKKIS AND HIS PET ARE KILLED
You want all of your healers to position themselves between their respective tank and the center of the room. This will make switching to later assignments faster, and will make healing the healers easier on the, well, healer healers.
Healing the Tidalvess Tank: (The Shaman) He hits hardest and his spit fire totem is a bitch. You should already have your best geared tank on him. You want three of your best healers. I am going to assign (1) our best shammy, (2) our best resto druid, and (3) our second best Pally (Initially I thought a priest would be good here as well, but they just seemed to take too much damage from the spitfire totem.) You want a great single target healer to stay on the tank, hence (3). And you want chain heal and HoTs to help keep up all 3 healers during spitfire.
Healing the Main Tank/Karathress Tank: One awesome pally healer - Your best pally healer. Hands down. They will be alone healing the tank to begin with. He won't be taking too much damage off the bat, but you still don't want to screw around and put someone not awesome on him. As the fight progresses he will get assistance from other healers so he can go all out, as he will need, in the beginning.
Healing the Sharkkis and Pet Tanks: (The Hunter and His Pet) Best remaining pally or shaman. A shaman is nice (since the raid will start out clustered around these adds) or a pally is nice (since Sharkkis and his pet will be doing moderate damage to, most likely, your least geared tanks). As long as you put a good healer her, they should be able to keep them both up alone. Sharkkis and his pet will go down first, so whomever you assign here does not need to deal with two targets for long. It is important that they are a pally of shaman for their higher durability, which will come into play later.
Healing the Caribdis Tank: (The Priest) A good remaining healer, preferably a shaman. This healer will be healing this tank to quiet some time, but the priest does not hit hard. A shaman is preferred because they can assist with interrupting the priest's heals with earthshock if the melee interrupters are all frozen from tidal surge. Any chain healing will also heal said interupting melee without extra effort. Also assign your ninth healer (shaman if the other isn't one) here, if you are bringing nine. (I hate to call them your worst two healers. But possibly your healer who hasn't gotten lucky loot drops, or maybe someone brand new to the guild or fight. I will assume all really bad healers have already been /gkicked.) Since the priest will stay alive for so long, it doesn't hurt to have some extra mana and a pair of eyes here.
Healing the Raid: Everyone is taking damage. DPS can bandage, pot, and healthstone, but your healers won't have time to heal themselves, so someone else needs to heal them. The raid and healers will be spread out in the four corners of the room, so a shaman would not be the most efficient here. I am going to recommend a a druid, since they can run all around the room while healing. They should prioritize raid healing as follows: MT Healer> Tidalvess Healers> Self> All Other Healers> DPS. ***Do what you can to keep everyone in the raid above 50% in case they get shadow bolted, however, DPS really needs to do this themselves.*** And whatever you do, don't stand in the spitfire totem range.
Healing the Tidalvess Healers: Preferably a priest.The three Tidalvess healers are going to take a lot of damage from the spitfire totem in waves. If they all stop to heal themselves at the same time, the Tidalvess tank is going to die. Have one healer stand out of range of the spitfire totem and focus on just healing the three Tidalvess Healers until Tidalvess dies.

PHASE 2: TIDELVESS IS KILLED
After Sharkkis dies, his healers is reassigned:
Healing the Main Tank: The pally or shaman. Karathress will gain The Best Within ability once Sharkkis is dead, so a second healer needs to book it on over the the MT and help out that best pally you already have there. Karathress will be hitting harder. One healer could do this, but there is no reason to take the risk. It is important that this extra set of heals has high armor (pally or shaman) for the next phase.

PHASE 3: CARIBDIS IS KILLED
After Tielvess is down, his three tank healers and healer healers are reassigned:
Healing the Main Tank: The shaman and pally. Karathress is still Best Within-ing, and now the MT and his healers are all within spitfire totem range. Your tank will probably opt to kite Karathress every time he drops the totem to get out of range, so this will mean you will be doing some running back and forth. As long as you stay max range from the extreme ends of the kite zone (toward the middle of the room of course) you shouldn't have too many problems now that the MT has 4 dedicated healers. These healers will be taking lots of damage from spitfire totems, which is why they really need to all be paladins and/or shamans. It will just be too hard to keep up a druid or priest standing in range while Caribdis is being killed.
Healing the MT Healers: The priest and druid. There are four slightly squishy healers that will periodically get hit by a wave from spitfire totem. Have two healers ready to keep those four up while the kiting is going on. In between waves they can assist with general raid healing. Obviously, these two healers should stay out of range of the spitfire totem.

PHASE 4: KARATHRESS IS KILLED
After Carbids is killed, his tanks one or two healers are reassigned:
Healing the Main Tank: If only one healer, or the non-shaman healer. Although there are already four healers on the MT, put one more there for good measure, especially since mana will be getting tight at this point in the fight. At this point it matters less if this healer is squishy since the spitfire totem will be DPSed down as soon as it is dropped.
Healing the Raid: If their is a remaining healer, preferably a shaman. If you have 9 healers, you raid is more likely to stop DPSing down spitfire totems and just DPS Karathress so you can beat the hard enrage timer. If you only have 8, they will hopefully have time to DPS the totem down. If you arn't DPSing that totem, one more dedicated raid healer will help keep the raid, which is being spitfired and tidal waved, above 50% until you can drop Karathress.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

About Amy

I've been playing WoW since Easter Sunday 2005, coincidentally the same day I became engaged to my forever husband and tank Chad, aka Yakra. I have held the roles of druid class officer, healing role officer, and general secretarial type officer in two guilds. Currently, I am not playing WoW. When I'm playing, my blog, like my life, is casualcore PvE healing focused. (I love gear math!) When I'm not playing WoW... well, I can't quite tell you what this blog will be about since I have never blogged while not playing WoW! Expect to see reflections on being a married WoW player and on just being married, stories from my other RP adventures (LARPing and table top), and accounts of my life's most meaningful activity: teaching chemistry.





Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

E-mail icon created at Nexodyne