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MOMMY!!!!

Yeah, this one is rough. By far the roughest healing of the three wing bosses in ICC. (We took a few cracks at Sindergosa, she’s not that bad.) Going into the fight, I underestimated it. I knew there was an aura, I knew there was a good amount of other raid damage going out, but I figured it couldn’t be that bad. A bit tougher than the Twin Valk’yr encounter, right?

Errr. No. Right out of the gate, it’s a mad dash for survival. The healing actually gets easier as the fight goes on, but right off the bat, there’s no crutches, no assist, no ramping up. You’re just dropped right off the cliff.

The standard damage aura in this fight is about 4k every two seconds. This is more than your Rejuv alone can handle. So it’s going to require a combination of Rejuv+Wild Growth on cooldown+Nourish or Regrowth. (Regrowth is better, really good because of the long HoT, but the extra casting time will hurt.)  As well, both tanks will be taking full damage due to the Blood Mirror ability that matches all damage done to the tank onto the off-tank.  That’s a lot of “base” healing right there.

She doesn’t have that many other damaging abilities, but they’re an effective icing on the cake. Swarming Shadows is a more powerful version of Lord Jaraxxus’s Legion Flames ability. Even if a person kites it correctly, they’ll still be taking a significant amount of damage from the dropped flames. So they’ll need extra healing.  The other main ability is Pact of the Darkfallen, which is one of those abilities that ticks until the affected players come within X yards of one another. The big thing about this one is that the Pact damage is AoE damage, so as the players are running towards one another, they’ll damage any player they get close to. A Wild Growth is very good here to overcome this damage.

Every two minutes or so, she’ll walk to the middle of the room and launch into a Bloodbolt Whirl. This launches Bloodbolts at people in the raid, and damages them and the people around them for several thousand. If players are bunched up, this can add up fast, and either kill them outright or put you so far behind in the healing you may not be able to catch up. If you have a Shaman in the raid, a tremor totem will help immensely in dealing with the fear that comes during this mini-phase.

You do have one thing on your side. The main DPS mechanic is spreading “bites” throughout the DPS in order to maximize the DPS buff in order to beat the enrage timer. A side effect of the bites, is that players who are bitten will heal themselves for about 15% of the damage they are doing. It’s not quite enough to overcome the aura damage, but it sure helps. So as the fight goes on, the healing does get easier.

I suggest using your Innervate when you are at about 70% mana or so,  which will be very early in the fight more than likely, so that you may be able to pop it twice during the encounter.

The healing is tough, but once you’re ready for it, it becomes more manageable. So don’t take it lightly. Hunker down for one of your biggest challenges yet.

On a side note, out of the leaked information that MMO Champion has up for the Cata alpha, the only changed talent tree they seem to have is Resto/Balance Druids. Now all this stuff is rumored/Alpha, of course so it’s due to change. But it seems like how they’re going to make Lifebloom really viable again is by providing a talent that would allow Nourish to refresh the duration of Lifebloom.

Let me just say this. Oh, how do I approve of that. It’s a nice, elegant, FUN, mechanic. We still get “punished” if it falls off, but all the same, if you’re tank healing it should be easy to keep up. It’s far too early for a full preview (Expect them frequently once it hits beta), but it’s looking good IMO.

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