Zabery

About two months ago our 10-man group got the server-first Herald of the Titans achievement,  much to our surprise.  We managed to get it on the last pull of our fourth hour of attempts.  We were less than a minute away from wiping the raid as the hour-long timer expired.

As part of my effort to return to blog posting, let’s look at healing this as a holy paladin.  Here are my recollections of the fight, two months later.

Bring a strong healing team.

This sounds silly, but I can’t stress it enough.  The tanks will be taking extreme incoming damage.  You won’t be able to keep them up by yourself by spamming Holy Light.  You won’t have spare cooldowns to top up the raid between spikes of tank damage.  We got it done by bringing my holy pally, a shaman who was speced mostly for tank healing, and a resto druid.

Gear up.

The achievement is a bit gimmicky, to be honest.  There’s no way we could have done this with gear that is actually only available from 10-man content.  Almost all of us had ilevel 226 gear from regular 25-man Ulduar in almost every slot.  Even with that, it’s still a challenging fight and you’ll be cutting it very close.  Every little bit of oomph you can bet by bringing your gear up to the limit will be needed.  Here’s a link to a wowhead search that is a decent starting point..

Heal from melee.

You’ll be chewing through mana as you throw Holy Light around the raid.  I found it most comfortable to heal from melee for the huge regen from Seal of Wisdom procs.  You need to watch out for Cosmic Smash targeting melee near you, but you don’t have to worry about gimping your healing with Divine Plea.  Be very careful getting into position, though.  When you pop out of the black holes don’t go running all the way back to Algalon in one go.  Stagger running with Holy Light casts.

Be very careful with the tank switches.

The tanks will be taunting off each other as they reach a given number of stacks of Phase Punch.  Do everything you can to see this coming.  Use DBM to get timer bars for each application, use Grid and GridStatusRaidDebuff to see the stacks, and have your tanks call out on vent.  The taunting tank will need to have heals incoming before they taunt.  I found it most comfortable to throw up Sacred Shield on the new tank a few seconds before the taunt, start spamming Holy Light on the new tank, and only move Beacon of Light over once the new tank has aggro and the other healers have buffed them up and started hots.

Use a variant of the 52/17/2 “bubble” holy/prot spec.

You’ll be healing from melee so you’ll have nearly infinite mana.  The regen from the crit talents in the retribution tree aren’t very useful in this fight, and even less so now that Illumination’s regen has been cut in half.  The duration and absorption buffs to Sacred Shield from 2/2 in Divine Guardian, however, are enormous in this fight.  The damage reduction from 3/3 in Improved Righteous Fury is also very valuable.

Embrace Sacred Shield’s absorption.

Don’t be fooled by Sacred Shield’s relatively low position in the list of healing you do with each of your spells.  Look at some parses and calculate how much of the tank’s incoming damage it absorbs in a fight.  It can be on the order of 5%.  Think of it as a tank survival cooldown that is always up.  Since we have so much regen from seal of wisdom, we can use trinkets and consumables that give spell power and buff the absorption even further.  Get the T8 4pc bonus if at all possible, it’s just incredible.

Target melee to make the most of the Holy Light glyph.

The tank will be catching the stream of holy lights from beacon. Our goal is to target the holy light cast at a raid member with the lowest health who has the greatest number of people near them.  This maximizes the splash healing from the [Glyph of Holy Light].  If you can, ask a melee class to always try to be within 8 yards of the tank so that the tank can catch the glyph’s splash healing.  This is especially useful after the raid’s health is cut in half as a Collapsing Star dies.

Aura Mastery is worth the cooldown.

The raid has two significant sources of damage which can be resisted by our auras: shadow damage from dying Collapsing Stars and fire damage from Cosmic Smashes.  Either resistance should be buffed by Aura Mastery every time it’s up just before the incoming damage.  In our case we found it most beneficial for our shadow priest to use Prayer of Shadow Protection while I ran Fire Resistance Aura.  The cosmic smashes were easier to predict than coordinating with the DPS who were killing the stars.

Use Divine Sacrifice to iron out difficulties.

In a perfect world, we’d pop Divine Shield and Divine Sacrifice such that the latter’s duration covered the most incoming damage.  That’d mean just as Collapsing Stars die or as Cosmic Smash hits near melee.  Those tend to happen when the raid is in a comfortable rhythm, though.  After a few wipes you’ll have a feel for when you tend to lose people.  Pop divine sacrifice then.  Maybe it’s on tank switching, maybe it’s bad luck as a star dies just as a cosmic smash lands, or maybe it’s while people are getting back into position after being phased.  Whatever it is, use Divine Sacrifice to give the raid a little more breathing room when it has the most trouble.

Enjoy it!

This is my favourite fight in WoW. We’ve pulled it a ridiculous number of times and I still get excited as the initial effect kicks in. Have a blast with this, it’s fantastic content.

Finally, a personal note. There are very few things in WoW that I’m not embarrassed to be proud of. Getting this achievement with our 10-man group is one of them. Dusty and Jace have said it before me, but I’ll say it again: you guys rock.