Heroic 25 Anub'Arak Defeated!
Posted by thideras | Filed under General Information
The strategy is now posted, click here to view it!
After 4 weeks of attempting to kill this ‘bug’, we have finally defeated him!
Overall, this fight requires perfection. Usually, if one person dies, the fight is over. This means that DPS, healing, tanking and the strategy itself has to be impeccable.
Now to cover healing. Ever since I was a little sapling, I was told to keep everyone at full health to win fights. The Anub’Arak encounter completely flips that teaching backwards due to his leeching swarm. In the Heroic 25 man version, it leeches 30% of their health every second on every raid member. Not only does it damage us, it heals the boss. If we were to keep the raid high in health, we couldn’t kill Anub’Arak within his enrage timer. We have to leave everyone around 1000-2500 health. That is easy to do, right?
There is another part of the fight I haven’t covered, [Penetrating Cold]. He casts this debuff on 5 raid members at a time and the spell does 6000 damage every 3 seconds. That means we have to get those 6 raid members from 1000-2500 health to more than 6000 health in less than 3 seconds. I initially thought that Nourish (or possibly Rejuvenation and Nourish) would heal for a lot and be do-able in 3 seconds. I was completely incorrect. With just over 500 haste, my initial Nourish cast is 1.27 seconds. Even with the 3 second window, I’m unable to keep one person from dying to Penetrating Cold.
Why Thideras? The healing lead uses an addon called Penetrator which gives marks to raid members with the debuff. It can only mark it as fast as his latency, which gives a very slight delay for it to be processed by his computer, sent to the server and sent to our systems. We then have to locate our specific mark (each of the 6 healers has their own mark to heal) out of 25 people and heal them. I found that the inherent latency with marking combined with my reaction time, people die.
I know that other guilds that killed him used Restoration Druids with a Healing Touch build combined with the Healing Touch glyph. At first, I rejected the idea as silly but quickly saw why it was being used. I incorrectly thought that the glyph reduced the casting speed of Healing Touch by half; which would have brought it from 2.1 seconds to 1.05 seconds. Another Druid corrected my mistake, telling me that it instead reduces the cast time by 1.5 seconds, regardless of haste. Using this build combined with the [Glyph of Healing Touch] brought my Healing Touch spell down to 0.87 seconds; much faster than Nourish. Even though this lowered my Healing Touch cast below the Global Cooldown, this allowed me to beat the 3 second limit by around 1.5 seconds. I use this build as my offspec to save re-speccing bills later.
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If you wish to download the video, click here!
If you wish to see the combat log for the kill:
My EHFS combat parse
World of Logs combat parse
As always, feel free to speak with me in-game (Thideras on Shadow Council) for questions regarding the fight or anything Druid.
The strategy is now posted, click here to view it!
Upcoming Restoration Changes – Patch 3.3
Posted by thideras | Filed under General Information
There is much excitement to be had with the upcoming patch and Restoration Druids are no exception. First, let’s start off with changes made exclusively to us:
Rebirth cooldown has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
To be honest, I don’t see the reason as to why this ability had its cooldown halved. With the 20 minute cooldown, you had to choose carefully who you used it on as it wouldn’t be available for a few fights or attempts. This change trivializes that decision and I’m sad to see it go.
Rejuvenation: The base duration on all ranks of this spell is now 15 seconds.
Previous versions of Rejuvenation are now are 15 seconds instead of 12 seconds. If you are level 80, this won’t affect you.
Gift of the Earthmother now increases your total spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10%
Our current spell offers a 20% faster global cooldown when using certain abilities (which equals 20% haste). This now means we need more haste to have our GCD capped at one second. I don’t have exact numbers as of right now, but I’ll update this post when I do.
Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation: This glyph allows for the druid’s haste to reduce the time between the periodic healing effects of Rejuvenation.
The changes to GoTM amplify this glyph. Assuming that we have enough haste to reach the GCD cap, the spell would last 10 seconds instead of the normal 15; a hefty throughput increase. I would suggest having a stack of this glyph along with the glyph that you replaced. I’m sure that some fights will favor our “slower” Rejuvenation heals and some will favor more throughput. If you run with two Restoration Druids, this will help lower the overlap and increase healing done; although, I’m not sure how much other classes will appreciate this change.
New healing Relic: The periodic healing from your Rejuvenation spell grants 32 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 8 times.
Compared to the old relic, [Idol of Flaring Growth], it is a slight upgrade that gives an extra 22 spell power. Some may still favor the old idol as it only takes one to two ticks of Rejuvenation for the full effect.
Druid T10 Restoration Sets Released
Posted by thideras | Filed under Restoration
Icecrown Citadel, the final battle to stop the Lich King, will be upon us shortly. Along with the release of the new raid instance, new gear sets will be released to aid us in killing him and anyone who stands in our way. Before hastily entering IC, we need to evaluate the new gear that will be available to us. At this time, we do not know that stats that will be on the gear, only the set bonus.
2 Piece (Restoration): The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
The 2 piece allows our [Wild Growth] to tick for the initial heal instead of diminishing over time. To see how much this will increase our healing throughput, please check the theorycrafting page in future; I need to run some numbers. See below for an update
4 Piece (Restoration): Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.
This is quite an interesting 4 piece bonus, and I don’t see it being extremely useful. “Why Thideras?” you ask? 2% chance is low (roughly 1/50 ticks will proc or 10% per each Rejuvenation cast) and raid members must be stacked up or near someone else that does not already have Rejuvenation on them (this also assumes that the one receiving the extra Rejuvenation actually needs the heal). I see it being situational at best and, assuming it doesn’t get changed, not worth getting all 4 pieces for the set bonus alone.
Update (10-17-2009) – It seems the “0% less over time” may be a place-holder for a number. I would have to agree since Wild Growth’s initial heal carrying through all the ticks would be a little too much healing for a 2 piece bonus.
