Mimiron and more.

Long time no see!

Topics Today: Mimiron, some various thoughts on shaman healing in Ulduar and the MMOUI Minion.

There wasn’t a post on my site for quite a long time, simply because I haven’t been raiding or done much WoW related stuff. Reason number one was because by mid-June, the house of my family has to be empty and ready for the new owner. So there is quite a bit of moving stuff around, throwing old stuff away and cleaning up to do. Secondly, my RL is not working as indended. And last but not least, when I had time to sign up for a raid I didn’t make it into the line up.

Yesterday I was raiding again and we took down Freya, Ignis, the Iron Council and Mimiron. We ended the evening with three tries on Vezax, which is indeed a fun encounter.

Freya and Council are both very simple encounters. If everyone in the raid knows what the kill order is, which mobs have to be handled which way and when to move out of AoE or out of the raid, those two bosses won’t stand in the way of a dedicated guild for a long time.

Now Mimiron is a different story and I think this guy will slow down raids, especially those who already struggled to bring down bosses earlier in Ulduar.

The only thing that makes Mimiron difficult is that there is a lot of stuff around that has to be watched at the same time and most errors lead to a dead raidmember or a wipe.

Phase 1: In this phase Melees have to watch out for mines and run away from him as soon as he casts his Shock Blast. As a healer, you have to closely watch the MTs health. For Plasma Blasts our priests do a Guardian Spirit Rotation. Ranged DPS and healers are split up in three groups, one Priest in every group of five raidmembers. This positioning is important for Phase 2, we just found it easier to go to our Phase 2 positions at the beginning of the fight so that everyone knows where to stand the second P2 begins. 5 yd distance to the next person is crucial so Napalm Shell won’t affect more than one person. Even if there is fire on the floor, you do not need to move out of the fire, it is just an animation that won’t do any additional damage. Heal everyone affected by Napalm Shell in your range (putting the debuff into your Grid center icon is a good idea). If a lot of melees get hit by Napalm Shell, cast chainheals of even NS + CH (the damage is nearly as bad as KT ice blocks).

Phase 2: This is why grouping up is important. The boss fires randomly into the raid putting heavy pressure on the healers. PoH and priests are excellent for this task, Chainheal isn’t to bad either. CH is fantastic for keeping up melees. If the VX-001 casts spinning up, move behind him as soon as possible, as this is a 4 sec preparation for his Laser Barrage, which you absolutely have to avoid. The cannon will slowly turn CLOCKWISE into firing position, so you have to move behind him anti-CLOCKWISE, or you will die a pretty silly dead (really, I tried it). If a red glowing mark appears under your feet, move away! In Phase 2 you can really go all out healing, Phase 2 to Phase 3 transition leaves enough time to let replenishment tick for a good time or for priest to get a mana regen hymn going.

Phase 3: Healers have to be assigned to the aerial unit tank and to the kiter of the assault bots. If all mobs are under control, you shouldn’t have to heal that much. It is time to let the mana fill up, top everyone off and wait for Phase 4. Just don’t let tanks/kiters etc die and don’t stand near exploding bomb-mobs.

Phase 4: This is all three phases combined without the ground units from phase 3. Main priority is to keep the tank and the Aerial Command Unit (warlock-)tank alive. Apart from that, try to do as calmly as possibly every routine you have learned from Phase 1 to Phase 3. Try to stay as organized as possible and not bring to much chaos into the raid.

Now to conclude my post some random thoughts about resto shaman healing in Ulduar.

We do a pretty decent job I have to say. Many fights are extremely Chainheal heavy with the additional Riptide or LHW spothealing in between. This is why I’m a little bit sad, that LHW has so few talents to improve its throughput and no spotheal friendly glyph. LHW glyph is still strong, but as it is ES dependent, not really an option for raidwide spot healing.

Healing way is a great tool for our single target healing duties with HW. Every resto shaman who picks up a MT or OT healing job from time to time should pick up healing way. For spot healing it is just too slow, with a quick HW on a tank to support tank healers being the notable exception.

I also like the way Chainheal works for group healing, rather slow cast with very high HPS, very different from the Holy Nova/CoH burst a Holy priest can provide.

My mana regen if fine as well, even without the Water Mastery Glyph. I did try out the Healing wave glyph which was great fun. But as the glyph is useless whenever you don’t heal with HW I switched it out for Mana Tide glyph. When we can start farming the content and mana isn’t an issue I will try out the Healing Stream glyph for pure output reasons.

And on a very different note: I’d like to point you guys to the WoWInterface Forums, where the state of the MMOUI Minion can be checked, WoWinterface’s very own Addon Updater. Nearly all addons I use are hosted on WoWInterface and as I have to keep them up do date on three computers, I’m looking forward to a good updater. Preview picture of the alpha version here.

That’s it for now. I’d love to hear how you guys are doing in Ulduar so far.