Raise your hand if you’re a Holy Paladin who loves healing the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter! It might be hard to tell, but I have both my hands raised right now. This fight was built for us. We’ve spent an entire expansion being teased for our overhealing. With the stroke of an encounter designer’s pen, a goofy property of our healing arsenal has become our strongest asset.
And this was a messy heroic kill.
The risk, of course, is that we get complacent in this fight. It’s possible to ignore the details and spam holy light and finish the encounter. This would be a crying shame because the mechanics of this encounter give us an opportunity to optimize our throughput. It’s our turn to minmax our HPS.
I won’t get into the basic details of the fight, the following links do that.
I’ll assume that we’ll be assigned to heal Valithria and that we all already know to keep stacks up and maximize healing time. This post will wander through the laundry list of tools we can use to boost throughput while mashing a button.
Stats
We’ll start with the stats to stack to boost the throughput of spamming Holy Light.
- Haste is our highest priority. We need about 33 haste rating for each 1% increased casting speed. No matter how much spell power we have, every additional 33 haste rating gives 1% more throughput. We have enough haste once holy light’s cast time hits 1 second. That could take quite a lot of haste, depending on raid buffs and cooldowns.
- Spell power is our next priority. Holy Light heals for ~5166 + (spell power x 1.66). The more spell power you have, the more you need to get a 1% increase in throughput. At 3000 spell power, for example, you need about 60 spell power for 1% more healing. At 4000 spell power, 71 for 1%. This is why we prioritize haste.
- Critical strike rating is OK. Heals only get a 50% bonus if they crit, so crit is relatively less valuable. We won’t be stacking it, but it’s better than nothing. At level 80, we need ~46 crit rating for 1% additional crit chance. That’s ~92 rating for a 1% increase in throughput.
- Intellect is less OK. Divine Intellect and Blessing of Kings inherently buff int on gear by 21%. About 138 base int gives 1% crit, or a .5% throughput gain. With Holy Guidance, talented and buffed, ~24% of that 138 base int is converted to ~33 spell power. As above, at 3k spell power that’s another ~.5%. So 138 base int gives us ~1% increased throughput. Sadly, this relatively low priority is at odds with our usual PvE strategy of stacking int.
- MP5 is worthless in this fight. Each stack of Emerald Vigor gives 200 MP3. That’s 333 MP5. After the first entry into the emerald dream you should have infinite mana.
The truly ambitious can use this stat priority to maintain a second set of gear that is gemmed and enchanted for throughput. Personally, I don’t bother. These priorities mostly inform our decisions of consumables and trinkets to bring.
Consumables
Given our preference for haste, some consumables jump out. [Imperial Manta Steak], [Elixir of Lightning Speed], and [Potion of Speed] are the big ones. [Elixir of Mighty Thoughts] appears to be the guardian elixir to pair with lightning speed to bring the most throughput.
[Flask of the Frost Wyrm] is also great, especially if you’re working on the fight and are wiping or happen to have a raid comp with all the caster haste buffs.
[Potion of Wild Magic] is an alternative to the potion of speed if you’re going to be at one second holy light casts when stacking cooldowns, as is likely.
Trinkets
Not many of us have trinkets that are great for throughput. Most have some form of trinkets that primarily give int or mana. Furthermore, a great deal of caster throughput trinkets are keyed on doing damage rather than casting spells, rendering them useless for us. Some example trinkets that can work include [Scale of Fates], [Talisman of Resurgence], [Pandora's Plea], or even [The Egg of Mortal Essence].
Trinkets with “Use:” procs that can be synchronized with cooldowns are particularly valuable.
As ever, trinket selection greatly depends on what you’ve had access to. Personally, I run with the dynamic int/sp duo of [Talisman of Resurgence] and [Pandora's Plea].
Glyphs
[Glyph of Holy Light] — The glyph healing does far more than 10% in this fight. It’s not uncommon to see glyph heals that do 50% of the holy light’s heal. It is critical to make sure that she’s being healed by the glyph. This means keeping your beacon on her while parking your target, most likely yourself, close to her.
[Glyph of Seal of Light] — We don’t need the regen from the [Glyph of Seal of Wisdom]. We’ll be using seal of light for the throughput buff.
Meta Gem
[Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond] — This meta is weaker than it might first appear. It’s not a 3% overall healing buff. It’s a 3% buff to the 50% increase to the 50% of our heals which crit, resulting in a .75% overall healing increase. That is still stronger than the drop of intellect and trickle of mana from the more conventional [Insightful Earthsiege Diamond].
Libram
[Libram of Veracity] is perfect for this encounter. We have infinite mana and are spamming holy light.
Cooldowns
They should go without saying, but to be thorough we’ll mention Divine Illumination (with the T10 2pc bonus) and Avenging Wrath. They’re both on a three minute cooldown. At the least we want to pop the cooldowns as the fight starts and then again once we have enough stacks to blow heroism and heal her up to full. How long that could take depends on the raid. If it takes long enough, be ready to pop the cooldowns again in the middle of the fight.
Teamwork
This is where the fun truly begins. Lots of our fellow raiders can significantly increase our healing throughput.
- Shamans: Heroism, Wrath of Air Totem, Totem of Wrath (ele), Improved Moonkin Form
- Priests: Divine Hymn, Guardian Spirit (holy), Power Infusion (disc)
- Druids: Tree of Life (resto), Improved Moonkin Form (balance), Moonkin Aura (balance)
- Paladins: Improved Devotion Aura (prot, holy), Swift Retribution (ret)
- Warlocks: Demonic Pact (demo)
- Mages: Focus Magic
- Hunters: Blood of the Rhino
Work out in advance how these cooldowns are going to be used throughout the fight. I heal the fight most often in 10-player heroics with a disc priest and resto druid. I prepot, blow cooldowns, and get PI at the start of the fight. From then on my friendly neighbourhood priest hits me with PI every time it’s up and I come out of the phase. Except when we’ve called for heroism on the last portal exit. In that case the priest channels DH during heroism, all cooldowns are popped, and we heal her up to full.
Blood of the rhino deserves special mention. It’s a tenacity pet talent that offers a huge increase to incoming heals. Some of us will recall the early days of beacon’s testing when this increased heal was transferred directly to our beacon. They nerfed that almost immediately. As researched by the hunter community, the buff does increase the healing from the glyph of holy light, which is a huge portion of our healing in this fight. If you have a pet to spare, it might be worth parking a tenacity pet next to val and spamming it with your heals. Personally, I haven’t tried this.
I left out the typical raid buffs like Blessing of Kings and Arcane Brilliance. They’re useful, as always.
Putting it all together
(123K + 66K) / 1.1s ~= 170K HPS o.O
When you combine all of these little buffs with a good number of stacks of emerald vigor you end up putting out some seriously ridiculous numbers. It’s a rip roaring good time. Make sure you give it a try before WoW moves on to the next tier of content.