Thursday 29 April 2010

Sarfang Heroic Down!

So last night on the last gasp we finally got Sarfang down on Heroic 10 man in ICC. The extra 5% buff helped us out as it was a close run thing and was preceded by 2+ hours of solid wiping on the bugger.

Now our problem on this being a strict 10 man guild is there are in total on the raid team 13 people. Three of those are healer Me the tree of Awesomeness, our Disco priest who is usually our tank healer and our resto Shammy who heals his ass off and doubles as hard core dps. All the other team are tanks or dps with various offspecs.

Can you spot the missing puzzle piece in this kids? Yep we don’t have a holy pally (well we do but its one of the tanks offspec….) and for this fight it really really helps to have a bomb healing holy pally that can heal two people at once with Bacon.
The reason for this is that Mark of the Fallen Champion is unavoidable and you will get at least two before he is dead. Also it hits like truck if you take your eye off the person with it they are going to die this also get worse if they have boiling blood on them as they are then taking additional damage. If the marked person dies its game over as Sarfang will heal and the enrage will hit.

So to tackle this we had to run with two healers to meet the DPS requirements. Our Resto Shammy went Enhancement leaving our Disco priest and yours truly to heal the fight. As our Disco priest isn’t ideally suited for raid healing he took the tank and I got the raid along with whoever got the mark.

Talk about having to use all you talents to get through this healing the marked person is basically like healing a tank with a crap health pool who is taking about 50% of their health damage ever 2 seconds. I was running 3x stack lifebloom, Rejuve, Regrowth while throwing in Swiftmend and Nourish when I needed it. I was also dropping Rejuve on raid members who got boiling blood in any gaps I could find. Even then it was still too much when two marks hit as I found if the marked person got a boiling blood as well the damage was overwhelming and I couldn’t keep up on two targets.

After some review a nefarious plan was hatched. Basically once the second mark hit our tanking pally as soon as he didn’t have agro from the boss popped a Divine Intervention on the Melee that was Marked. This essentially took the mark out of the fight for Three Minutes and left only one mark + the raid for me to heal.
Obviously this also killed the tank but a quick battle Rez from yours truly (in between everything else J) got him back into the fray ready to taunt off the surviving tank at the correct time.
Last try of the night and it went to the wire! The fist mark landed on our dps warrior, which was good as its physical damage and he’s got lots of health/ armour so healing him was a bit easier. The second mark hit our rogue so he got a DI from our pally tank who I promptly battle rezzed.
Then we were into end game with the last 10% and one dps out of the fight. Mana was running low and a 3% a third mark appeared I was healing like a madman running blooms on both marks along with every other healing spell I could squeeze into a GCD. The last 1% went on for an eternity with me watching about fifty different things at once then he finally dropped and we completed the Storming The Citadel Achievement on heroic!

Also while all this healing and tanking shenanigans was going on our esteemed ranged DPS team were killing off blood beasts who in heroic can really move and also cant be allowed to hit anyone.


Overall it was the sweetest kills I have had for ages against the odd and using every trick and talent in the book with the team we had to get the kill in. I have never healed so intensely in my life and it showed to me how 10 mans can really push you use your toon to the maximum with all the talents they have to get a boss down especially as druids are normally raid healers and don’t have all the OMFG bomb heals and damage mitigation buttons that classes such as pallys have.


Zetter

3 comments:

Kae said...

Congratulations! Sounds like a pretty epic kill... excellent work to your team on your creativity with the DI!

We've usually done it with some 2 of a resto druid, holy priest, or resto shaman, where the two healers share healing duties on everyone (I roll hots on tanks and marks, co-healer tops them off). I found it less stressful than Heroic Marrowgar, but certainly still difficult... cuz indeed, a 3rd mark or a dead mark is a wipe at this point in 10strict!

zetter said...

To be honest it was Barmy and so far the hardest fight we have had in ICC.
Oddly enough we found Lord Marrow fairly easy once we sussed out a tactic. Generally we just have the tanks stack in one location during bone storm and the rest of us in another area and he merilly bounces about between the two without putting too much hurt on us.
I spend most of the raid hotting upeveryone during bonestorm and regenning mana during the non bonestorm bits.

Next stop is probably Sindy as Putricide looks like a nasty prospect :).

Zetter

Faster said...

Nice post Zett matey, yeah, that was such an intense fight, everything down to the wire like you said with not a single mistake by anyone - for us strict 10ers, without a doubt, that is the most finely tuned fight we've done to date, and what a feeling on the kill! Awesome heals :-)