Gara'jal the Spiritbinder

[oscarucb 1]

Great guide, but we found one important piece of missing information:

On heroic, there are three severer of souls adds which must be quickly killed for the banished tank to survive. Two of them can be nuked by dps, but one must be handled solo by the tank. The add which the tank must solo is reddish in color This is apparently the only way to distinguish it from the other two adds the dps are helping with, and this is crucial information for the tank to lay into the right mob in the spirit realm.

[Murmuur 0]

Hey, I just want to say that I disagree with the part that says you should take 2 healers for 10-man heroic. My group (with an avg. ilvl of around 495, which just finished progressing through normal ToES) killed him just fine running with 3 healers. This also kept us from being gimped by having one healer with Frail Soul and another with Voodoo Dolls when we've had to go into a totem.

I find this way a lot more straightforward and easier than 2-heal (which requires you to pay attention to the Banishment timer and waiting to go into totems, and perhaps even off-healing).

Edited February 4, 2013 by Murmuur

[Fel 42]

Hey, I just want to say that I disagree with the part that says you should take 2 healers for 10-man heroic. My group (with an avg. ilvl of around 495, which just finished progressing through normal ToES) killed him just fine running with 3 healers. This also kept us from being gimped by having one healer with Frail Soul and another with Voodoo Dolls when we've had to go into a totem.

I find this way a lot more straightforward and easier than 2-heal (which requires you to pay attention to the Banishment timer and waiting to go into totems, and perhaps even off-healing).

The guide recommendation for 2-heal was made at a time when most guilds progressing were nowhere near ilvl 495, and thus the capability to 2-heal the fight (very manageable) vs the capability to 5-dps it (VERY tight enrage timer, such that if you do a little search, you'll see that the first few guilds to down the fight had to class-stack to manage it), made 2-healing the sensible recommendation.

Speaking from the 2-heal perspective (having started from an ilvl value when this was 'non-optional' for most groups), but having tried both, it's barely more complicated. De-synchronizing totems from voodoo early on (by delaying initial totem entry by ~ 10 - 12 secs) makes fight management much easier on all fronts and allows you to monitor 1 timer, with no pressure to decide who goes down (you have 15 secs to pick 2 dps at random), and no pressure on tanks during banish (since DPS are already down there).

The only real difference is that using a 2-heal, you will have to contend with one, maybe two (if you are unlucky) totems that have no healer. Again speaking from experience, this is a comparatively trivial matter.

[Krazyito 521]

The two healer approach was suggested during a time where very many players were under geared and were consistently hitting enrage. Now if you have all the normal modes on farm and have higher item levels. (Think about when this was first released and a few good weeks later that the average ilvl was to 485-490)

If you have stellar DPS and can afford to bring in a new healer, that is great! But for most, this is still a DPS check and they need to have 2 healers.

Edit: Seems Auracle beat me to it.

Edited February 4, 2013 by Krazyito

[Vlad 411]

I'd just like to elaborate a bit on what was said by the above two posters (who are both correct). We write these guides early on, when people are first progressing on the encounters. Therefore, it is only natural that they are written with a "worst-case scenario" in mind, which generally means that damage taken is treated as being extremely brutal, and the DPS requirements as extremely stringent.

Now, if you go into the same fight with a higher gear level than what is intended for "progression" on it (such as item level 495 on a fight that was attempted by everyone who killed it early with item level 490-491), you can afford to do a whole lot of things that raids killing it early never could.

We face somewhat of a dilemma here from a guide-writer point of view in this situation. The way that have handled this historically has been to ignore any strategies that bypass parts of the fight or make parts of the fight trivial by way of overgearing. We generally feel that if a raid is over-gearing the fight to the extent that can afford to deviate from the "optimal" strategy, they can also just as easily execute the recommended strategy. The main reason that we do not cover this type of subsequent developments is because we just do not have the time to do so. In an ideal world, we would accommodate all of these different gear levels and adjust the strategy accordingly, but for the moment, we are just trying to cater to the bulk of people who need the guide, and those are probably the ones that are hard-pressed to kill it. Finally, another constraint that we face is that we always try to make our guides as supple and easy to read as possible, and part of this means not clogging them up with a great deal of information that just gets in the way and is not of interest to most readers.

Thank you! :)

[Guest Chugsworth]

As a warrior tank I enjoy using Intervene on cooldown when the other tank is the voodoo doll. Paladins can use .. Hand of Sacrifice??? for similar effect. I would encourage paladin healers and DPS and warrior DPS to consider this as well. At least in normal mode you should be able to take the hits and prevent much damage to voodoo dolls (obviously skip this if you are a voodoo doll).

Also, I've had it suggested (but I've never seen it) that for low ilvl 3 man heals you can have the healer who has just come out of the spirit realm do whatever DPS he can until the buff ends. The two other healers should be able to manage raid damage while the buffed healer is able to put in enough damage to help beat the enrage. Obviously some healers are better for this than others and it may still not be enough to beat enrage depending on the raid dps.