FINALLY

In a fit of good timing, my guild finally downed Anub'arak on ToGC 25 last night. We even did it with 25 attempts left, meaning we were able to procure a nice, shiny chest for our efforts. A bit late, but only two weeks into ICC, so I'm pleased as punch with this progress. It also means we get most of Christmas week off since we don't really have content to push!

I have mixed feelings on Anub. With the way our strat played out, I didn't really have much to do during p1 and p2, then my assignment ramped up to the mega-stressful in p3 (I got the fun job of healing two penetrating colds so we could add an extra DPS). I went Disc as there really isn't any point to going Holy for Anub'arak except possibly for the access to Guardian Spirit and Body and Soul (cover for kiting mistakes, on p3 tanks, etc).

Tank healing Anub'arak is easy, to be honest. It's a spam fest. So, I'm not going to talk about that (plus, I don't have experience doing it on 25!). The real terrorfest of Anub'arak, and the one that healers get the least practice on, is p3. On Heroic, the idea with P3 is to keep the raid's health as low as humanly possible, since it is a massive health leech (rather literally, dropping a tank for that fight if you have an unhittable add tank is something like adding a DPS or two to the encounter above the one you may have brought instead).

This is generally managed with making the heals for the raid consist solely of Healing Stream Totem, Vampiric Embrace (though with the change our spriests stayed at least half health -__-), and Judge of Light. It's not especially fun to watch the bars sink like that, but you get used to it after awhile. Now, the main danger to keeping the raid this low is Penetrating Cold. It's one of those fun, random target debuffs that hits five raid members at a time, doing 6000 frost damage (unmitigated by resist, etc) every three seconds. The important thing about this it doesn't tick until three seconds after its application, so healers have to make sure PC victims have enough health to soak a tick before the tick happens. How to heal PC is pretty much the hardest part of the encounter from a healing perspective.


Base suggestions:
+Make sure you have a raid information add-on like DBM that is able to put raid marks on Penetrating Cold victims. This is pretty crucial.

+Assign healers to each mark. Most healing specs can only reasonably heal one PC mark. Disc priests are the only exception, but covering two is still very difficult (basically you have three seconds to target and throw out two GCDs). Try not to have tank healers assigned to a mark. (We used six healers, with myself covering two marks as Disc, so that amounted to two holy paladins on tanks then four healers [resto druid, two disc priests, and a resto shaman] on marks). Druids have to respec and reglyph in order to cover PC, so be nice to them.

DO NOT attempt to free heal this or give healers group-based assignments. If you get three marks in one group... well you can start to see the problem. There may be another way to do this, but the mark strat is the only one I've ever heard of, and it works very well if your raid can execute it. It also helps analyze p3 deaths and who is underperforming, which is sadly important as every p3 wipe enrages the rest of your raid. This is annoying as you will wipe many more times to bad interrupt timing on Burrowers or bad ToT/MDs on them or bad kiting than you will to P3. People are just starting to get antsy.

+Make sure that your raid unit frames can filter out raid marks. For example, my Vuhdo (which I think my entire raid's healing core switched to!) only displayed my two assigned marks Square and Moon. Grid can do this as well. Xperl cannot (this ends my experience with raid frame addons). This makes things a little hairy if a healer dies and their marks need to be spotted, but it is such an increase in reaction time that I still suggest doing it, especially if you're attempting to cover two marks.

+Use front loaded healing spells on your mark if possible. For priests, this generally means using PW:S regardless of spec. Even a Holy's PW:S should be enough to mostly mitigate the first tick. Holy may consider switching to the Gylph of PW:S just for the extra healing done.

+And, obviously, don't use multi-target smart heals. This includes PoM.


Healing Two Marks:
Healing two is difficult. You have three seconds to locate visually both PC victims (and sometimes your raid frames will lag a touch to spite you), then use two GCDs to make sure they don't die. PW:S is perfect for this, as glyphed it provides a touch of healing, and is large enough to completely absorb one tick. With enough haste, it also has a one second GCD with Borrowed Time active. In my Disc gear (a sort of gross hybrid of specific Disc pieces and my Holy gear), I have 550 passive rating, which amounts to ~2.1 seconds of casting in 3 seconds.

Do NOT attempt two marks as Holy. It is technically possible, but the timing is so sensitive, and partially reliant on things like SoL procs that it will not have a high, consistent success rate. It is also very difficult if you have a lot of lag, as high latency means that you see marks a touch later, and it all goes to pot.

The rotation for healing both is actually pretty easy: PW:S both marks, then alternate Flash Heal between the two. You can use Penance, but you'll have to interrupt a tick or two to make sure your marks both survive. I found it easier to just Flashspam.

The hardest part of this job is the reaction time. This is even harder in terms of getting practice in. For this, I have a few suggestions:

+First and foremost, keep your cursor in the exact middle of your raid frames (third person in group 3). This way you only have to cross two groups at most instead of a potential four or five.

+Do NOT use any other GCDs on ANYTHING during p3. Healing two marks is impossible if you are in the middle of a GCD when they appear. If you do have to/want to use a GCD on something (DoT the boss, use Shadowfiend, use a CD on someone) wait until PC has just ended. Just tunnel vision the hell out of those raid frames.

+Spam your shield button over your second target during your GCD until it actually fires.

+Do the fight on 10 man and cover both PC marks during p3 if your raid comp has enough passive heals to keep everyone's health low enough. This is decent practice, but don't get cocky if you find it easy on 10s. With only 10 people it is less people to visually process so it's easier to trim down reaction time, and you have less mouse travel distance to deal with.

+Practice shielding both targets during p1's PCs. This way you get the practice of scanning 25 people and reacting to both targets, and you can tell if you "failed" as you can see if they took damage. This is the only way you can practice the specifics outside of p3, and it does help it become quicker and more automatic. The hardest part of doing this is hitting both people before the initial tick. Healing them through it afterward is a more automatic rotation.

+Hope the PC hits a tank or a spriest :P

In the interest of full disclosure, over the course of ten PCs to be healed, I had two deaths, one to a slightly slow reaction time, one to just not getting a final heal or two. So, don't feel terrible if you miss one or two. There is some natural attrition rate in Anub first kills anyway. It's only if you miss around half consistently that you start to reconsider your assignment. It's my great shame that I didn't do it perfectly, but not bad for a first kill I guess.