After a two-month hiatus, I returned to the game last night. Thankfully, there were no patches to download, or addons to update. Everything worked the way it’s supposed to.

I queued for a random heroic while heading to an armor merchant to repair. After about 3 minutes, our group was ready. To my dismay, it was Halls of Reflection.

Halls of Reflection

The instance itself is interesting, and when you’re fortunate enough to be grouped with a solid party, it’s a lot of fun. Conversely, just one bad player can make the dungeon a miserable failure.

Our group consisted of a druid tank with about 41k buffed HP, a hunter, mage, and paladin for dps. The highest DPS player, the paladin, was hitting about 3200 DPS with the lowest at about 2900. My memory told me to be worried but the spectacular play of the group taught me otherwise. They were fabulous.

We went with the LoS method, which requires everyone but the tank to tuck themselves around the corner so that, if/when they pull aggro, the enemies will have to run through the tank to get to them. The strategy works well most of the time but eventually the party will have to move from the corner and the tank will need to have secured aggro on the ranged mobs by that time.

There were a few scares which were all caused by me getting stunned at bad times (as opposed to the good times to be stunned?). Guardian Spirit saved the group at least once.

No upgrades dropped for me, but the tank got a decent weapon. I got the satisfaction of enjoying a challenge with a great group of players.

My next random run was Halls of Lightning.

Halls of Lightning

Upon entering the instance it was clear that it would be an easy run. The tank, who’s name was Onetokill, was a paladin with 50k health. The DPS was pumping out an average of 5500 DPS. They were all part of the same guild (Reckless Abandon). There wasn’t a single challenge throughout the entire run, and Loken was killed in 20 seconds.

Pit of Saron

PoS is another challenging instance that requires a half-competent party. The party consisted of a warrior with 42k health, a shadow priest, and two hunters. Once again, luck was on my side. Everyone was polite and could play their class well.

Garfrost was easier than I remember. Either he was nerfed, or our team did a great job getting behind boulders to remove debuff stacks. Hint: If everyone is topped off and you have the global cooldown to spare, you can and should remove stacks with Dispel Magic. It makes the most sense to do this for the tank and melee DPS, since they’ll generally have a further run to hide behind boulders.

Krick and Ick were a joke. I’ve yet to see a party wipe on this boss. If you move away when they go into “Pursuit” phase, keep moving when they lay bombs, move out of slimy puddles, and move away from poison nova then there’s no reason for anyone besides the tank to take damage.

The trash that leads to the gauntlet tunnel is widely regarded as the most difficult part of the instance. I agree. They are spread apart, making it difficult for the tank to establish aggro, and the casters destroy whatever they hit.

The gauntlet was annoying, but we made it without a problem. In fact, one of our hunters disconnected before the cave, so we were forced to 4-man the cave and Tyrannus.

Once again, no gear upgrades for me, but it was another successful and enjoyable run. It feels good to be back.

Last night a friend and I decided to do H-CoS  just for the hell of it. His name is Zikthar and he’s a great paladin tank. I’ve grouped with him many times before, including when he’s invited me into his guild Naxx runs.

It’s unbelievable the difference a great tank can make over a sub-par one. We breezed through the instance and got to Infinite Corruptor (the timed boss) with almost five minutes left to spare.

Something worth mentioning: this was the first 5-man I did as holy spec in about four months. I was a little tired of Disc, and wanted to see what holy was like with some upgraded gear. It’s definitely a different feeling, since you don’t have that cushion that strong bubbles gives you. But with replentishment and Blessing of Wisdom going, I didn’t have to worry about mana and could toss out big heals whenever I wanted. Guardian Spirit is damn awesome, especially with the glyph, even though I only used it once (and it wasn’t consumed).

For those interested in attempting the timed run, here are a few very general tips:

• Buff yourself with mana regen scrolls/food/elixers. Take Blessing of Wisdom to help with regen. None of the bosses hit particularly hard, and you won’t have much chance to drink so you’ll need mana to regen as you run.
• You have to move very quickly between the waves of mobs at the beginning. One mishap can make the difference so make sure you know where you’re going and stay together.
• A single death isn’t the end of the world. Get the player rezzed and buffed quickly.
• When Arthas tags along, there are periods where he allows you to rest and you have to talk to him to resume. Talk to him immediately.

I lost the roll on the drake but I wasn’t too worried about it.

OK, I’m about 5 Guinesses deep, so forgive my brazenness, but this H-UK run makes me wish I had gone to bed when I had the opportunity. Since I’m in no shape to attempt to construct sentences, I’ll put it in list order:

• I PUGed the group, because I need badges for the heirloom healing mace. 9 more badges to go.
• I was invited and summoned, which is a great start.
• The tank is a DK with 21k health, which negates said great start
• The stupid shaman is in a rush. Before every pull she makes sure to chatter “Go go!” I asked her if she happened to be in labor. She didn’t respond.
• The tank died once because the shaman loves to pull aggro to show how awesome she is with her 1.7k dps.
• The tank died again because I was in the middle of commenting on how it’s weird that a Super Healing Potion would drop from an 80 heroic instead of a Runic Healing Potion. This was a dumb move on my part. Thankfully, we didn’t wipe.
• The shaman is now commenting on how badass she’s doing by posting the damage meter and mentioning how she’d do even better if she didn’t have her healing glyphs equipped. I think I won’t heal her again.
• This Guiness is going down smooth.
• The tank left the group to “pick up his wife” right before the second boss. So I’m writing this post as we wait for him to get back.
• The shaman and someone else are “LOL” emoting every 4 seconds. I want to kill myself.

PUG life.

Update: The group wound up being nice. Although it was a long run, most of them seemed like good people that I’d group with again.

Mal'ganis the Regular

A few nights ago I was toying around in Ironforge, trying to get my new sidegrade weapons enchanted when I received an unexpected whisper from a complete stranger: “Hey, wanna heal cos reg? We’re ready to go.”  Normally I’d decline, since I gave no indication that I wanted to heal anything  (I wasn’t in LFG or anything), but since I enjoy CoS and would have spent the next two hours gathering Lichbloom otherwise, I decided to give it a shot.

They sent the invite and I immediately noticed that people weren’t on the same continent, let alone ‘ready to go’ as stated in the whisper. “That’s ok”, I said to myself as I hearthed to Dalaran, ran up the stairs and through the portal to the Caverns of Time. I went into the instance, got my Arcane Disrupters from Chromie, detected all 5 plagued crates, and rode to the gates of Stratholme…all before anyone in my party got through the portal in Dalaran.

Here’s one of my pet peeves… if you want to do an instance, be ready before you get invited/send invites. Grab your reagents, water, potions…whatever, THEN join LFG or begin inviting, and head to the summoning stone. Don’t sit in IF and duel rogues until other players summon you. If you’re a party of four and just need a healer, get to the instance. Likewise, if you’re looking to join a group, don’t expect a summon just because you’re the missing piece to the magical puzzle; don’t be so egotistical. Accept your invite, head to the stone. If they summon you before you get there, congratulations, you’re in a party with courteous people.

I was worried that, by the time we started, Culling of Stratholme will have aged and become regular Stratholme.

A few things worth mentioning:

• The tank was choosing a mob, and just tanking that mob. He didn’t use Thunderclap or Shockwave, thus aggro from the other mobs was spread evenly throughout the remainder of the party. Since this wasn’t heroic, I was able to bubble tank while keeping the other four tanks topped off.
• Meathook almost always chains the party member furthest from him. I never knew that. So I inched up past the warlock and let him eat the chains.
• Arthas was our 6th tank, although he can’t hold aggro very well. When I healed him and his mobs B-lined to me, I had to make sure they walked through the unsuspecting rogue’s “Fan of Knives” and hope it was enough to pull aggro onto him.
• If the tank doesn’t listen to your request to keep Mal’ganis turned away from the party then it becomes a mobile fight. You have to continue moving behind the boss while AoE healing the shadow breath that the party is taking in the face.
• Despite the fact that I don’t need a single item from regular CoS, and was pulled in to heal at random while I was enjoying some leisure time in Ironforge, my participation did not warrant a “thank you”. Now that I’m thinking about it, I should have thanked them for allowing me to pleasure to heal their party. I can be selfish sometimes.

I’ve been running with the same warrior tank, and mage for the past two weeks. We’ve had some great dungeon runs together, including finally getting around to clearing heroic Halls of Lightning, but we’ve also been in a few complete disasters for groups.

This particular Old Kingdom run was of the “disaster” variety.

All of our problems were in fighting the first boss, Older Nadox. He’s the first boss, a huge Nerubian undead spider. To sum it up, the fight goes like this:

After about 20 seconds of tank-and-spanking he spawns waves of non-elite adds. Every 45 seconds or so he (and the non-elite adds) go immune and a “Guardian” spider is hatched and makes its way towards the party. In order to make the boss attackable again, the Guardian has to be burned down. Rinse and repeat until the boss keels over.

The problems lie entirely in the fact that the spiders are constantly aggroed by the healer, and when they go immune they cannot be attacked, thus AOE tank damage tools do NOTHING to pull threat back onto the tank.

Our strategy as I’ve done it before was to have me (the priest) stand right next to the tank so that I’m in Thunderclap range. This worked ok…until the Guardian appeared. I was able to survive maybe two Guardian spawns but always died before the third. The swarms of insects were too much and I was unable to get a cast off. After the fourth wipe I threw on arena gear to buff my stamina as well as reduce the CD on my Psycic Scream spell by 3 seconds. I went PvP mode with bubbles, and fears, while using Fade whenever possible. It still wasn’t enough.

The three of us who started the group talked over voice chat trying to figure out what the problems were. We deduced that there isn’t enough dps to burn the Guardians down fast enough. Of course it’s easy to blame others but we couldn’t figure out any other explanation. The faster the Guardian dies, the quicker the tank can Thunderclap/Shockwave and pick up the adds again. The longer the Guardian is up, the more spider adds spawn, and the more cooldowns I have to blow to try to stay alive.

Our tank inspected the rogue in the group and said: “The rogue has great gear”. I wanted to see how “great” it was and inspected him myself.  Sure, he was in purples..LEVEL 70 purples! He was rolling in almost complete Merciless Gladiator’s gear, which explains why he was getting out-DPSed by the tank. The hunter was in only slightly better gear and was only doing slightly more damage than the tank.

In a way I blame Blizzard for things like this. I liked that in Burning Crusade we had to do a little bit of dungeon grinding in order to earn our heroic keys. Not only did it force people to learn the dungeon fights , but it also passively upgraded their gear since they picked up regular level 70 dungeon gear while grinding. In Wrath, people were doing heroics a week after launch. There’s almost no purpose of going into regular 80 dungeons if you can PuG a group that’ll carry you through heroics. Thus you’re stuck getting random dps in greens.

Edit (3/26/2009): An alternate strategy that I tried later with success (and different dps) is for the healer to stand further way from the boss, directly next to a mage or other dps class capable of AOE. This way a) the spider spawns have to walk all the way over to me which buys time, and b) a mage can one shot them with a single Arcane Explosion.  During the “normal” phase, the mage will AOE all adds off of the healer, and let out one more explosion just before the Guardian hatches.  When the Guardian is up, the mage dps’es the hell out of it since he can’t do anything about the adds while they’re immune. Then, the second they are attackable again, he does the explosion to kill the few that spawned.

Earlier this week I queued LFG looking for a few heroics when I got a whisper asking if I’d like to heal for the final two bosses of 10-man Naxxramas.  Now I hadn’t cared much about doing Naxx at that point, but it was a shot at 3 badges, and some decent loot, plus it was early in the evening so time wasn’t a factor. I accepted his offer.

I knew where Naxx was, but wasn’t sure how to get into it. I figured out that you have to fly up into it from the bottom. The “waiting room” contains a summoning stone, and four portals. I believe, but am not positive, that these portals all go to the same place, but I just followed our group.

The first boss was Sapphiron. I’m not going to go nuts with strategy but I’ll sum up what I found important from a healer’s perspective.

We started the fight by half of the going left, the other half going right. I was responsible for keeping my half of the group alive, and we’d all chip in to keep the tank up. The first thing that I noticed, and it took me by surprise, was Sapphiron’s “Frost Aura” which is a constant stream of damage (1,200 damage every second) to the entire raid, all of the time.  So I began the fight in a panic because my party’s health was dropping rapidly. I started bursting out with Prayer of Healings, and Circle of Healings to get caught up and I wound up depleting quite a bit of mana.

The next spell that I noticed was his Blizzard. It’s not hard to avoid, but if you get caught in the middle it can be a pain because of the slowing effect.

He does a drain life to a random pary member. This has to be de-cursed by the appropriate classes because not only does it deal massive damage, but it also heals Sapphiron.

And finally, his most deadly move…

When he flies up into the air, we had to group back together at the door. He’ll shoot 2 frost bolts which will “ice block” two party members.  You have to get behind those frozen players to “line of sight” the boss. His next spell is a nasty flame breath thing that will one-shot anybody who is not sheltered behind an ice block. Once this is over, go back to your position and repeat.

We wiped the first time due to too many of my party dying, but we got him the next time.

An important change that I made the second time around was casting Prayer of Mending on myself and letting it bounce to each party member close to me. Since we’re all taking damage every second, PoM bounced all 5 times, and when it critted I often got a free flash heal to hold me over until the cool down was up again. Prayer of Mending saved the fight for me.

Luckily for me, he dropped Circle of Life ring and I won the roll. Cha Ching.

The next and final boss that we faced was Kel’Thuzad.

I’m not going to get into the details of the fight because I don’t know them all that well. As a healer, the most important things for me to remember were to immediately stop what I’m doing and flash heal the hell out of the player who gets “ice blocked”. They take about 22% of their maximum mana every second for 4 seconds which means that they’ll die if they’re not healed within four seconds….and even less if they aren’t at full health when they get blocked.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that it’s a long fight. I popped shadow fiend very early so that I could use it later in the fight.

When wiped the first time but got him down the second. Not bad consider it was a few players’ first times in Naxx.  He dropped Helm of the Lost Vanquisher and Hammer of the Astral Plane.

I definitely could have used the mace as it’s an upgrade to Titansteel Guardian, but I had already won the ring on the previous fight so I passed to another priest.

Tonight I partook in two very successful PUG runs.

The first run wasn’t exactly a PUG since it was with the same tank that I ran with a few nights ago but the dps was from the LFG channel. I’ve honestly never run with a luckier player than this guy. Counting tonight, I’ve been on four heroic runs with him, and three of those runs have resulted in him getting an epic tanking weapon from the last heroic boss. Granted, him getting a tanking upgrade is just as valuable to me as me getting an epic healing item, but damn it’d be nice to get that “epic” achievement for myself.

The first run I did was heroic Culling of Stratholme. We decided to try for the timed run for the mount. I had my doubts because, as well as this tank is geared, he’s not completely familiar or comfortable with this place, and to make that 25 minute timer there isn’t much margin for error or delay, especially with the tank. He whispered me when we started that he “might need some guidance”.

The group consisted of a balance druid, enhancement shaman, fury warrior, protection warrior, and myself. Our first few pulls were fine. The mobs themselves were easy and went down relatively fast. My mana was fine except for a pull or two where the shaman pulled aggro and wound up tanking the mob himself. But I noticed that there was just too much lag between the end of one fight, and the tank running directly to begin the next.

The bosses went down quickly and dropped nothing of use to the group. By the time we got done the 10 waves and were reunited with Arthas there was only 12 minutes or so left. By the time we were done with the next boss, we had just 4 minutes. So we wound up not hitting the timer, but we moved VERY fast through the instance and with no problems at all. And even though we didn’t get to the bonus boss, we got the quickest 3 badges I’ve ever gotten…part of the reason for my love of that place.

While we were in the gaunlet, right as Arthas gives his final “Let me know when you’re ready to fight the final boss” talk, the balance druid bugged and DC’ed. The warrior didn’t notice this and began the encounter.

We 4-manned heroic Mal’ganis. It really wasn’t too hard except for the fact that the tank didn’t turn him away from the party enough so we occasionally got hit with his flame breath thing.

After we killed him, we looted and the warrior nabbed the shield. While doing that the druid logged in and got snippy with us for not waiting for him, as if we did it on purpose. He was ineligible for a badge. Poor guy.

Almost immediately after leave the Caverns of Time, I saw that a group was looking for a healer for heroic Utgarde Keep. I find Utgarde Keep to be the easiest heroic, with CoS being a close second, so I figured I might as well go for it.

Our group consisted of a paladin tank, shadow priest, death knight, rogue, and myself.

Before we started, I buffed the party, threw a scroll on myself, and grabbed a food buff. I normally don’t potion up while starting an instance just in case a group sucks. I like to “feel out” the party first. But if there is a group that I have confidence in, I happily take both elixirs, a food buff, and a scroll to make sure to pull my load.

The paladin gave me kings. I asked politely to give me wisdom instead. He either ignored me or didn’t see my message. No problem. The pulls were easy, I had enough mana to spare. A few pulls in I asked again for wisdom and he threw a cheap 10-minute version on me. Ok, I guess, that’s fine. I always make sure to have enough regeants for my party, but if he wants to apply a ghetto buff every 10 minutes then that’s his choice.

We downed the first boss, and started clearing more trash. My buff expired. I asked again “Can you refresh wisdom please?” The prick shadow priest snapped back with “We have two priests…your mana bar has been full this whole time while you had kings.” I responded: “I haven’t had kings, I’ve had wisdom. Extra mana never hurts.” He said “It hurts me.” Just being a dick, basically.

Although the run was a breeze, I didn’t feel the same way about the group after that. One asshole ruined the run for me.

I could have done the run with no buff at all, but more mana back to me means quicker pulls, which means we get our loot and the hell out of Dodge quicker. I don’t understand how taking a split second to buff you healer for mana regen could be a bad thing.

Anyway, we killed Ingvar relatively easily, considering the fact that tank and death knight ate the dark smash. Again, no loot for me but I left with 3 badges and another person on my ignore list.

I did heroic VoA for the first time tonight, and after three attempts we finally got Archavon down.  The first two was the common problem about there not being enough dps and Arch enraging and wiping us. It’s about time that an encounter is based on the dps instead of just the healers and tanks.

Unfortunately he dropped nothing for me except the two badges of valor, or whatever they’re called.

I’m not going to go into much detail, but the fight is fairly easy. Being a healer, I don’t know exactly what he does, but I know when to expect damage and of what variety. Just be ready to blast off a Circle of Healing, followed by a Prayer of Healing after he does his AOE. Then he rains stone shards down on a random party member…that guy will need healing.  Avoid the dust cloud and that’s pretty much it.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand…hating pick up groups.

I’m jonesin’ for a bunch of both regular, and heroic Culling of Stratholme runs because I need a trinket from regular, and the helmet from heroic, along with possibly the ring if there aren’t other caster dps in the party. So I joined the queue for both regular and heroic CoS.

After 10 minutes I got whispered. The exchange went something like this:

Him: Spec?

Me: Holy.

Him: Mana?

Me: 16500.

Him: Spell power?

Me: 2057. Look I’ve done this place plenty of times but it’s up to you.

“You have been invited to a group.”

I don’t mind being politely questioned about my spec and stats…I certainly understand the pain that could come with a bozo healer; but this guy was a rude schmuck about it. But I went along away because if he’s willing to screen that hard, he must have something going.

I examined the party and saw that there were only 3 people including myself. The others were a warrior, and a lock. The warrior had 19k health with fort. Crap. Guess we still need a tank because those numbers aren’t going to cut it in heroic anything.

We added a 78 death knight, and a 78 warrior…this warrior had even less hp.  I immediately asked: “Is this for regular?” Amazing. I got grilled for stats to do stupid regular CoS. Don’t get me wrong, regular is fine with me, but don’t make me take a half hour interview.

It wasn’t long after that I learned that the 78 death knight is going to try to tank this thing…not only that but he “doesn’t mark” because his mouse only has one button so he can’t right click to use symbols. Lovely. I knew this group was going to be a failure but I gave them the benefit of the doubt and tried to do it anyway.

The tanked backed into the first pull, and nearly got killed even with me spamming greater heals. It was sort of like healing a tank in heroic Shattered Halls with minimal CC. I pulled aggro, along with the usual zombies that pester me. Somehow we managed to survive, albeit it took over half of my mana.

As soon as I sat down to drink, the group started running to the next wave. I had to get up and run with just over half of my mana bar full. Again, this pull was a near-death experience with every person in the group including myself pulling aggro off of the tank. I’m not even convinced he was frost spec’ed.

The 4th pull, the one right before Meathook, resulted in me being beaten down by an elite goul towards the end of the fight, while the tank says: “Damage Meter?” I said: “Screw the god damn damage meter. I’m getting chewed up back here.”

The DK pulled Meathook when I had about 10% of my mana…not only that but the lock pulled aggro off of her first dot ticks alone. She went down quick…while I used Guardian Spirit on the tank, then popped Shadow Fiend. I spammed 2 greater heals on the tank, then a Circle of Healing to try to fill up the party’s health from the previous pull, when Meathook went after me.

He killed me and I quit the party.

I wish my guild would get some players to 80 and wanting to do some heroics. I must say that the last few days I’ve met some great people through PUGs, but it’s groups like this one that really spoil it.

Last night I was fishing in Ironforge while browsing the LookingforGroup channel in case  something caught my attention.  There was a warrior who had asked a few times, politely and in the right channel, if a healer would join his group for heroic Violet Hold.

I’ve healed HVH before, and although it’s stressful and I loathe one boss in particular (the Void Walker boss), I decided to take a shot and run it again.

Most people get a nasty taste in their mouths from the thought of PUGing heroics.  Some flat-out refuse. But not many players in my guild have made it to level 80 yet, so I don’t have a choice.   About 80% of my runs have been very good.  The bad ones were mostly because of under-geared tanks, and one run in particular was because of an under-geared healer who had been accidentally using DOWNRANKED versions of all of his healing spells since the mod Clique doesn’t upgrade the spells automatically : /

Anyway, the VH group consisted of a protection warrior, two rogues, a fire mage, and myself.  The first wave of pulls were easy, and I barely had to drink.

Zuramat the Obliterator

We made it to the first boss, and before we know who the boss was going to be, I knew who the boss was going to be, my buddy…Zuramat the Obliterator.

Zuramat the Obliterator

Zuramat is a void walker and often regarded as the most difficult boss in the instance, but I think he’s just misunderstood.  He’ll come out of his portal, and down the broken wall where the tank can engage him. This is a stationary fight. His key abilities are:

1) He summons “void spawns” every few seconds that shoot shadow bolts at people. The spawns will continue to accumulate and bolts at the entire party. By the end of the fight, if the adds aren’t dealt with (I’ll explain how in a second), there is MASSIVE AOE damage and can stress a healer enough to turn his hair gray.

2) He puts a spell on himself called Shroud of Darkness.  When a player attacks him while Shroud of Darkness is up, the player will receive a debuff that decreases healing received by 20%.  This means that if a tank/dps hits him 5 times in a row, they can’t be healed anymore.  This ability is deadly because then player CAN’T be healed through the shadow bolts until the debuff is off.  When the boss puts this ability on himself it’s important for the DPS to STOP ATTACKING.  It has a two second cast time so the DPS will know plenty in advance when it’s time to stop attacking.  Note to fellow priests: We can dispel the debuff on our party members so if you see it stacking it’s probably worthwhile to do that. In a perfect WoW world the DPS would follow simple, easy instructions and would never get the debuff but if you’re PUGing you’ll probably be dispelling.

3) He channels a spell called Void Shift to a random party member that is a small DOT but also allows the player to target and thus destroy the adds that are hurling shadow bolts.  This is VERY important. Some groups choose to ignore this and prefer “burning down the boss” but it makes for an unnecessary headache.

Our party went the “burn the boss” route, hence the 6,000 void spawns that were launching shadow bolts into our faces. Healing through this is not easy at all and I highly recommend reminding your party members to take your time, leave the boss alone, and burn down a few spawns when they get Void Shifted. It’ll save everybody time, mana, and repair money in the long run.

Healer Tips:

• Dispel the debuff that reduces healing received.
• Encourage your party to take the extra time to burn down the adds when they have the opportunity; unless your group out-gears the instance.
• I haven’t tried this yet, but consider standing close to the tank and melee dps (since the spawns will hit you regardless of where you stand), so that when it’s your turn to target the adds, you can unleash a few holy novas hopefully taking a few void spawns down while keeping the party up.  I think I’d consider this only if the party was set on taking the adds down and not simply “burning down the boss”.  If they were insistent upon the burning method, there will be too much AOE damage happening and Holy Nova simply won’t be able to keep up.

The waves to the second boss were a bit challenging, but managable. I noticed that, in this wave of mobs, there was a group or two that did a drain life/mind flay’ish spell that would tick for quite a bit of damage.  It seemed like the target was chosen at random but I could be wrong. Just be ready for a bit of Binding Heal action.

Moragg the Eyeball Thing

The second boss we encountered was Moragg.

Moragg

This fight is pretty much tank and spank if the party follows a simple rule: Stand close to the boss. It’s a rule that I wasn’t aware of until after the fact. He channels some goofy spell that drains life depending on how far away you are. At max distance (where I stand), it ticks for a whopping 3,000 damage every x amount of seconds. The big problem with this is, as far as I can tell, as soon as he’s done with you he immediately switches to some one else. If the party is close enough then a simple renew can make the DOT negligible, just be ready to switch off to another target and not forget about the tank.

Healer Tips:

- Keep the party close to the Moragg.

- Keep yourself alive when you get the DoT.

- There is almost always somebody with the debuff so be on your toes.

The third round of trash seemed to be the most challenging. There was a point when some of the dps pulled aggro on a group of four mobs and the tank was scrambling all over the place to regain control while I spammed heals.  The dps player wound up dying, which forced me to use the few seconds break between waves to rez, and buff, and it was back to battle immediately. There were a few times that I was literally spamming greater heals on the tank while binding healing myself and another party member.

Cyanigosa, the leader

The final boss was, and always is Cyanigosa.

Cyanigosa isn’t an overly difficult fight as long as the group pays attention to a few key abilities:

1) Blizzard. She’ll summon a blizzard which has a slowing affect and can hit for about 3,000 damage per second. Needless to say, it’s important to get the hell out of the blizzard ASAP when it’s on top of you. This can be tricky for a healer because moving around and canceling a needed greater heal on the tank can result in possible death so try to keep all party members topped off.

2) She sucks everybody to her.  I’m not sure exactly what the ability is called, but get out from under her as soon as possible.  Again, when she does this it’ll interrupt any spell that you’re in the middle of casting. I was forced to use my Guardian Spirit on the tank at this phase.

3) She has a mana drain which I made the mistake of ignoring.  I believe it only takes away a max of 1500-2000 mana but on a fight where you’re constantly casting, two of those mana drains can lead to serious trouble…especially for the holy priests out there.  Make sure to dispel this when you have a free second.

4) Like almost every dragon boss fight, she has a dragon breath spell that hits targets in front of her, and a tail swipe attack for players standing behind her. The safest spot is always on either side of her.

Healer Tips:

- This fight tends to force you to be mobile. Keep Prayer of Mending dinging around, Renew on the tank, and PW: Shield isn’t a bad option for DPSers caught in a blizzard if your mana pool allows for it. Unfortunately you won’t have a ton of time to chain cast Greater Heal because you’re either forced to move from a blizzard, or you’re sucked into the dragon interrupted your cast. Circle of Healing helped me out a lot on this fight, considering the fact that we had 3 members in melee range, and when the dragon pulled us in, we were all well within CoH range and taking damage.

- I managed to bang out one or two Prayer of Healing spells but it was stressful since it’s such a long cast and feels even longer when you’re watching health bars drop for 3 long seconds until you get it off.

Unfortunately our first attempt at her resulted in a wipe which is a huge mistake.  Violet Hold is very unforgiving to wipes, and we had to start the entire run from the first wave.  Also, it’s worth noting that the bosses are still there, but they don’t drop loot the second time around. So you get twice the aggravation, but no loot to compensate.

No one received any upgrades to their gear which is too bad. I won a few random greens, and the Frozen Orb.  The most important things were the rep, experience of being there, and the badges.