Healing Valithria: a story of fail
Valithria Dreamwalker is supposed to be a healer’s dream. We get to shine and prove our worth! Damn you, DPS and your e-peen!
Well, I’m thinking of dusting off my feathers and going critchicken for the fight, because so far I suck at healing it. When we started our 10-man tries last night, strategy was pretty fuzzy to me, but the other dragon healer had already done it and the RL explained in detail, so everything sounded just fine. Keep HoTs up on the boss, go in portals and get stacks, collect loot.
Hah. As if.
First off, of course Valithria doesn’t show up on Grid. However, thanks to Keeva’s awesome guide, I was prepared. Or at least semi-prepared – I didn’t know we were going to do Valithria that night, but I have Quartz so I just enabled the appropriate module. Now I could see my HoTs, but healing a boss portrait instead of my nice green rectangles was still annoying – not to mention that the portals made me lose my target. Another macro, another try, lots of frustration over refreshing HoTs (did I ever mention I hate stacking Lifebloom?), anyway I was starting to get the hang of it.
Except not. I was flying around and hitting green clouds… but apparently I wasn’t, because my stacks were still pitiful. I still don’t understand what animation I should see, because my tree sure looked like she was hitting things… I could probably get 4-5 stacks tops in a portal. Come out, frantically try to target the dragon again, mess up my rotation and Nourish too soon… then miss the next portals. Or get the portals, but lose the stacks before I got in. Or just after I got in. The other healer had 30 stacks or more; the most I managed was 8 (and it was by accident).
[This should be a picture of me in the portal. However, I was too busy failing to hit the clouds, so I didn't have time to take a screenshot. Use your imagination.]
Now, it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. Playing in 3D on 2D screen is hard, and this kind of fight has always been weird to me. I can’t see if I’m above, below or on the same level with the clouds/dragons/orbs of death! To make things worse, it was already midnight, on a Thursday evening, and I was tired even before I started raiding.
To make a long story short, we manage to wipe at 99% a few minutes before the raid end time. We pushed on (even though it was 1 a.m.) with the other dragon healer doing all the work. I was told to stay out of the portals if I didn’t need mana, because I was getting her clouds – erm, I seriously doubt my 2-3 measly stacks were getting in the way – and help with raid/tank healing (our raid healer was a very nice but undegeared shaman who was struggling).
Our best attempt after that 99% was a 90%, by which point (1.30 a.m. already) I wanted to strangle someone. Probably myself. With 2 dragon healers with proper stacks, it would’ve been a breeze. So I’m sitting out tonight, partly due to tiredness/work, partly because I’m sure that any other healer with half a brain can probably manage the bloody stacks better.
My only hope is that we go to Valithria on Sunday evening for our 25-man. Getting proper sleep before the raid might help.
This post has 3 comments
February 22nd, 2010
I feel your pain … this fight on heroic is a nightmare (but it can be easy if you have a pally and a shaman healing who can stack the clouds) : /
February 23rd, 2010
I don’t even want to think about the heroic version, but I figured out what I was doing wrong: you need to stand in the cloud for a bit in order to make it explode… I didn’t know that :/
March 14th, 2010
I have never seen any good explanation of the dream state and green orbs. I know for a fact this is probably one of the most misunderstood mechanics of this encounter largely due to the poor level of information disseminated by healers who blog, many of whom have or haven’t actually figured out how they work for themselves before blogging. I consider myself one of those healers who refuses to advise others how to get green clouds because I can’t for the life of me understand how they work. I, like you, feel that I get stacks largely by blind luck or accident.
Even more frustrating is that the RL and raid blabbemouths are typically tanks or dps who have no clue how the clouds work and will espouse all kinds of misinformation. I was actually told several times that a Priest has an “easy time” in the dream state because we can aoe “dps” the clouds to get them to explode. Misinformation and wipes later everyone hates our healers for clearly not knowing how to do this fight. Not exactly the “healer dream fight” if you ask me.
The internet is full of mixtures of PTR and live strategies with most of it PTR. I can’t understand why PTR strategies aren’t deleted especially when they are confirmed to be wrong. At this point I don’t believe anything I read.
I have no clue what causes a green cloud to explode. I fly right through them and sometimes they explode instantly and sometimes not at all. I can fly right up to one and wait, and anywhere from 1-4 seconds later it will explode. There seems to be no reasoning.
Yet I know for a fact that one of our healers knows exactly how the clouds work. It’s just one of those things you have to learn and it can’t be explained. After only 2 dream states she’s at 20 stacks on her way to 35 and I’m lucky to have 7 or 8. I noticed the same pausing trick. Get close and just wait. Still, I feel like I’m not getting as many portals as I can.
Even more frustrating on this fight than getting green cloud emerald dream stacks is after getting stacks on the second run through you drop back into the real world with only a handful of dps left. Or they are so pathetically overpowered that you can’t heal Valithria at all you have to try and get the raid back to health.
I