Ulduar – Very first Impressions

Razorscale down

So yesterday I set foot into Heroic Ulduar for the first time. Surprisingly most of my Addons still worked fine or had updated versions already. As expected, a huge part of the guild showed up to see the new content and sadly no more than 25 raiders were needed. But we plan to raid most nights of this raiding ID, so I guess sooner or later everyone will have his turn.

Entering Ulduar felt as epic as the blizzard trailer promised. I think the instance looks great, even if I’m not that much into the HoL/HoS artwork (sholazar basin or grizzly hills instance for me please thanks bye).

So we all entered our vehicles and got on our way to Flame Leviathan. I was a passenger on a demolisher and shooting down things from the sky was fun. The boss fight itself was pretty easy as well. Shoot at the boss, ignite the tar from choppers and shoot some raiders onto the Flame to destroy turrets (I’m not even sure if that’s necessary) and collect loot.

Next we engaged Razorscale. The fight is pretty basic if you remember what raiding is about: don’t stand in the fire! Also heavy healing is needed to bring everyone up to full health when hit by a fireball. Chainheal won’t do wonders, because people might spread out to avoid chain lightnings. As soon as people spread out and you’re healers are on the top of their game with keeping everyone at 100% to prevent unlucky fireball/fireball fireball/chain lightning combos, phase 1 is pretty easy. When you get him to 50% he will land on the ground and stay there but stack a debuff on the tank and the incoming fire damage is a good time to burn some cooldowns.

Up next was Ignis. Most PTR tactics talked about just off tanking the Iron constructs. But without shattering any of them our tank got one-shot twice. We then assigned two tanks to heat up and shatter Constructs. I did heal a bear tank and he died two embarrassing deaths. Mostly because he was standing in the fire, but I felt like my ES + LHW/Riptide combo was really weak, HW did a better job but not by much. I guess I might be switching out my LHW after all.

As a healer, the most important thing is to watch your bossmod or the castbar of Ignis. Whenever he casts Flame Jets, you must stop casting before his cast ends! If you fail to do so, you get a 8 seconds silence debuff and people will die. Save your riptide for the moment you’re thrown in the air and start bringing the group (or your assigned healing target) up as fast as possible with your chainheal the second you land. If you get thrown into his hot pocket, let the other healers know and keep yourself alive.

After some time we had to give up, because tanks kept dying and people were oneshot on Slag Pot animation (bug obviously). Blue posts confirm that several hotfixes for Ignis are on the way or already live.

We ended the evening by a visit to XT-002. If you haven’t engaged him yet: turn on ingame sounds before doing so.

As a healer two abilities are to watch when learning the fight: Light Bomb and Gravity Bomb. The first will damage the target and everyone nearby, so yes, spreading out is required and chainheal is sad. Whoever is hit by Gravity bomb has to get away from the raid as soon as possible. The bomb will create a gravity well that sucks people in its range and deal tons of damage. The range of the well is 20yd, 10 yds only for the light bomb.

This didn’t work so bad, but spreading out makes healing through Tympanic Tantrum extremly hard (120% dmg over 12 seconds). I guess on your next try we will form some camps, heal through light bomb damage, have people move out with gravity bomb (remember solarian?) and AOE heal through tympanic tantrum.

There are also adds to control and his heart you can beat on (or kill, but then you’d enter the hard mode), but seriously, I was busy enough with healing and didn’t pay that much attention.

That’s it, how my first night in Ulduar went. I’m still not sure if I’ll ever write up something like healing guides for shamans for specific encounters. Honestly, I think there are already tons of excellent tactic guides out there, and adapting them to your class and some common sense should be more than enough. But when I’m more comfortable with Ulduar fights I might highlight some shaman specific things that might help every resto shaman new to the instance.

Looking forward to seeing more encounters, hopefully not as fast as those crazy ensidia guys.