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Your Shaman's Ascendance + Healing Stream Totem and Healing Surge spam (maybe with his elemental channeling Reinforce/Empower on him) is roughly the equivilent of a healing cooldown too if you can get your Shaman to keybind Ascendance (facepalm).

Your Shaman is not keeping a healing rain down for the melee either which would help ease the healing a lot.

In a twisted way, rain of blades is much easier on heroic than normal since he only has one stack of the debuff ever.

On normal, I was on a monk (who counts a melee), and we three healed. I had melee, and the other 2 healers each had a group of ranged (we split our ranged into 2 sides). We had people assigned to use personal damage mitigation cooldowns on specific rain of blades. Iceblock, deterrence, dispersion, etc.

I haven't actually done the fight on normal on my priest. As a general note, having 2 priests in a ten man raid makes the fight easy on heroic. (The shadow priest and I take turns mass dispelling the quickening. We CC all three trappers. Kill menders, boss time, kill warriors, boss time, repeat until boss dies. Atonement is amazing here.)

02/01/2013 04:53 PMPosted by Alashe

Have you had it expire before he actually casts it?

Yes. It makes my guts not care for Wind Lord. From one of the DBM authors (mysticalos), for people who haven't seen it:

"I find no problem with them. his abilities are highly variable. ALL of his abilities are on cooldowns and not precise next timers. this means that they are highly variable. for example. the tank debuff only has a 20 second cd, but he may wait as much as 30 or 35 seconds before casting it. We do not control this, blizzard does. all we can do is provide a timer that says "he won't be casting x ability for next 20 seconds". wehther he casts it right away or waits a while is beyond our control. the better boss mods get the more variable blizzard makes boss cds to counter our delopment. They still want RNG to keep players on their toes to prevent everything to just be a hardcoded planned sequence of events where you are prepared for every ability the split second it happens."

I suppose this wouldn't bother me quite as much if one of my two healers (in one of my raid groups) wasn't a pally, whose raid cooldown didn't work at all for this mechanic.

02/02/2013 02:59 PMPosted by Nzete

In a twisted way, rain of blades is much easier on heroic than normal since he only has one stack of the debuff ever.

Heh. This might explain the huge number of people who post in these forums who are always like "zomg, RoB is so easy. Spirit shell + totem = win"

02/02/2013 05:54 PMPosted by Taymage

In a twisted way, rain of blades is much easier on heroic than normal since he only has one stack of the debuff ever.

Heh. This might explain the huge number of people who post in these forums who are always like "zomg, RoB is so easy. Spirit shell + totem = win"

Yeah, we actually routinely heal through it with no raid cooldowns at all. My strategy when I hear Spirit Shell is down or got eaten by a Wind Bomb is to palm the corner of my keypad that has all my throughput cooldowns on it and then start frantically mashing Beacon swap DL -> Eternal Flame as fast as I can.

(It would probably help if we could get the raid to stack, but there's about a snowball's chance in Hell of that actually happening without someone blowing the raid up in the next Wind Bomb.)

Yeah, apparently there are lots of groups that get the whole "stack" thing to work, but that sounds like a nightmare to me. And frankly it would likely require a night of wiping for everyone to figure it out.

Edit: also, when we get a call that spirit shell isn't happening, frankly, the reason several of us are alive to kill the boss is because of two hunters using deterrence, and a mage either iceblocking or cauterizing / temporal shielding + eating a warlock cookie. (The other people tend to die, at least not infrequently).

02/01/2013 12:44 PMPosted by Sellys

In phase 2 we tend to spread out around the boss, and I've assigned the priest and shaman to each heal 3 people while I handle the tank and 3 melee with a combination of Light's Hammer/BoL/and healie goodness.

A few things (this is from a tank's perspective, my offspec is Holy and I have healed this fight too, but in 25).

1. Why are you worrying about the tank during Rain of Blades? The little blades are dodgeable and deflectable (aka ranged parry), and they hit like wet noodles on a tank. The tank should need ZERO attention during RoB. ZERO. I think my health drops maybe 15-20% tops during it, usually a lot less. Sometimes I end a RoB at 100% HP with no heals or just lingering HoTs on me that were put there before while I was tanking.

2. Heal clothies first, they'll get hit the hardest.

3. You can use Hand of Protection on one of them (or two, if you have Clemency). It'll make the target immune. Best used on clothies.

4. People should use personal cooldowns or healthstones for ones that you don't have a healing CD for. (ie: Die by the Sword for warriors)

Thanks everyone, hopefully this will be enough suggestions to get this to a more repeatable state. B/c the currently "ZOMG PLEASE DON"T DIE THING" is not the way I prefer to do things. >.<

1) It's not so much that I worry about the tank, it's that I leave my beacon on him and he gets what he gets. Which you're right is enough to keep him up.

2) Why do clothies get hit harder? It's not mitigated by armor is it? It looks like it's just 50k a hit, 13 hits over 6 seconds.

And now back to the stacking up thing. How exactly do you work that? I get the advantage, but it seemed when we tried it our healers spent too much time moving and not enough time healing. Do we just need to time it better?

It seems like a really good idea in theory and a rather dicey proposition in practice.

It is mitigatable by armor, thus clothies get hit harder. On top of that, it can be dodged/parried, and while melee dps won't have a huge amount of those generally, they'll have a lot more than your clothies who have no parry and no dodge while casting (and why wouldn't they be casting).

Something that helped my group out: Wind Bombs do not get thrown during the Rain of Blades cast (either the wind up or the actually damaging channel), and for a short time after due to cooldown. Having everyone run in as it's starting and out when it ends can help the healing burden, though obviously one person messing up and eating a Wind Bomb ruins the plan.

You're priest is holy for the fight? No...no..that is bad.
Atonement healing and spirit shell are amazing this fight, there is no good reason to go holy unless your priest just fails as disc.
Tell your priest to stack the spirit shell blanket on the raid around 15 seconds before rain of blades CD comes off. And during rain of blades? Remember that this is the only period people are taking serious damage, you only need to survive it. Atonement healing is amazing for this, because of the 100% increased damage and how potent it is at smart healing can be a life saver for rain of blades.

In phase 2 we tend to spread out around the boss, and I've assigned the priest and shaman to each heal 3 people while I handle the tank and 3 melee with a combination of Light's Hammer/BoL/and healie goodness.

/

This is bad too. Priests can't just heal 3 people, they're effective at blanket healing the raid. A properly played disc priest can nearly single heal this fight, thats how strong they are.

2) Why do clothies get hit harder? It's not mitigated by armor is it? It looks like it's just 50k a hit, 13 hits over 6 seconds.

And now back to the stacking up thing. How exactly do you work that? I get the advantage, but it seemed when we tried it our healers spent too much time moving and not enough time healing. Do we just need to time it better?

Yup, armor works on it. It's like a bunch of little melee attacks flying out at the raid. Thus, the tank is practically immune (lol, 50k reduced by armour to less than 22k, then reduced further by active mitigation, AND they can dodge, parry, and if shield tank block it!).

The melee DPS shouldn't be hit too hard.

-DPS Warriors have a lot of armour, and worst case they can throw on a shield and pop shieldwall for the last one or one you don't have a CD for.

-Rogues can pop Evasion for one, and I think Feint works on it too.

-Ret Pallies can either throw a shield on for 6 seconds, or glyph Divine Protection and get -20% damage every Rain of Blades. Plus they can WoG themselves to heal up a bit. Or go flat out immune. As holy, you shouldn't be taking much damage either because you're holding a shield. If you're full health as holy, you won't die from it.

-Feral Druids can go bear for 6 seconds if you're really having trouble healing. This will lower DPS so hopefully they won't have to. But they have fairly high dodge as do rogues and won't be in huge danger.

RULE #1: Heal mages, warlocks, and priests ASAP. Next heals go out to Shamans, Druids, and Monks (of DPS or healing variety). But really, it's those dress wearers that are screwed.

I really don't think it's mitigated by armor. Here are three links showing damage for the same rain of blades for three people: Me (a plate wearer), our warlock (clothie) and our shaman (mail).

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/z8nn7x6btsxc60mk/xe/?s=8220&e=8234&x=spell+%3D+%22Rain+of+Blades%22+AND+targetName+%3D+%22Sellys%22

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/z8nn7x6btsxc60mk/xe/?s=8220&e=8234&x=spell+%3D+%22Rain+of+Blades%22+AND+targetName+%3D+%22Havocc%22

http://worldoflogs.com/reports/z8nn7x6btsxc60mk/xe/?s=8220&e=8234&x=spell+%3D+%22Rain+of+Blades%22+AND+targetName+%3D+%22Phazers%22

All three people took 45k hits (except for one where the warlock took 45001 for some odd reason).

02/04/2013 08:41 PMPosted by Sellys

I really don't think it's mitigated by armor.

Nor do I. I get hit for 45k each hit every time.

Its definitely not mitigated by armor. However, it can be parried, so melee, particularly strength dps, will tend to take a lot less damage by parrying some of the blades. A WW monk with the fists of fury glyph is essentially immune to rain of blades, between fists of fury and touch of karma. Die by the sword also provides immunity, but it available much less often. I'm not certain whether it can be dodged or not.

But, most rain of blade deaths I'd say are caused by people not using defensive abilities at all for rains that don't have beefy cooldowns running. Most every spec can at the make it so that they don't need any healing to survive at least one rain. The raid just needs to be communicating about what will be available since the timer varies a bit, but it tends to happen slightly less than a minute apart in phase 2.