Nightbane

[Bolty]

A quote from Gurgthock of the Elitist Jerks guild:

...doing this fight with 3 pure healers (me, holy priest, resto druid) and no shadow priest is still really, really painful, and people who say that some other fight in Kara is harder than Nightbane are insane. After a 25% wipe simply because all three of us were completely and utterly OOM with all timers burned, I popped a Resto flask, on top of Mageblood, Mana Oil, and Sporefish. I used 4 Super Manas, dropped Mana Tide twice, had Mana Spring down at all other times, and was on the verge of running OOM right as Nightbane died. I had like 23% overheal and the other two main healers had no more than 25%, so inefficiency wasn't the problem. (And if you look at my Armory profile, you'll see that it's not being undergeared, either.)

This is a fight where stacking healers = win.

This is stupid.

For a group with only 2 dedicated healers (Priests) and 2 feral druids, we found beating him to be impossible. There just wasn't enough healing, period.

For the first time in our Karazhan group, we may have to stack the raid and force someone to sit out. Our typical group runs with:

2 Priests (holy)
2 Druids (feral)
1 Warrior (prot)
2 Warlocks
1 Mage
1 Rogue
1 Fill-in (varies, but never a Paladin cause there just aren't any)

This has had no trouble clearing everything steadily up to Nightbane and Ilhoof. Each week has had progression with new bosses down. But Nightbane seems tailor-made for a Paladin. We could survive flying phases no problem, but our healers would be gasping for mana - and when one stopped to try to regen, someone would die.

I think it's a combination of the lack of a shadow priest and the lack of a paladin. The biggest advantage of a paladin is that besides their natural longevity and efficiency, they also will basically get their mana refilled from the healing they receive while eating blasts.

With just a druid, shaman, and priest, I was the one eating the blasts, and healing myself through them. That made the air phases extremely taxing, and would leave me hurting for mana going into the next ground phase.

Also, we're going to need heavy consumables on the main tank (flasks, ironshield potions, etc). Sorry, Tal.

I just think it's ridiculous to read of groups bringing 5 dedicated healers to Nightbane and then crowing about how "easy" he is. That's not easy; that's broken. Half your raid is healing?

Tips welcome.

-Bolty

[Artega]

Am I the only one amused that Alliance can't find paladins?:)

[Bolty]

Just to elaborate, now that it's the "morning after" and I'm not as aggravated...(but I still am)

This fight isn't hard. We have it figured out, but still can't do it, which is why it was so aggravating. It's the first encounter in Karazhan that had us give up and move on due to group composition.

Ground Phase: thanks to our sexy Dwarf Priest (me), we have Fear Ward for ZOMGEZMODE ALLIANCE. Fear Ward does trivialize the ground phases by removing the sudden chance of Nightbane wafflestomping anyone but the Main Tank. We were running with 3 healers (why not 4, with 2 feral druids? See below). If any of those 3 healers took a break to try and regen, got too close and got feared, or had to move for a Charred Earth, the Main Tank could bite it (and did).

Still, it's simplistic and a steady drain down to the flight phase, mana considerations aside.

Flight Phase: this is where it all falls apart (of course, since it's the "hard" part). It's a controlled chaos. We all run to the inner wall and group up near the Main Tank, so that no one winds up too far away from Nightbane and gets Fireball Volleyed. Whomever is selected for Rain of Bones moves to the outer wall. Skeletons spawn and the Main Tank/feral druid corrals them. This is why we couldn't have four healers; we found the additional feral Druid was necessary to keep the skeletons off the healers, especially since we're running with two squishy Priests. The skeletons hit Priests for over 1k a smack.

When the Smoking Blasts hit, if it targets a Priest and that Priest also has aggro from the skeletons, good night; they crumple like wet paper. If not, the damage is healable; the stacking fire DoT gets dispelled. But it all costs a ton of mana. The three healers are forced to heal:

1) The Main Tank, tanking the skeletons
2) The feral Druid, tanking the skeletons
3) The Rain of Bones target
4) The Smoking Blast target (which changes, because we don't have a Paladin to stay on top of healing aggro)
5) Anyone else who decides to get wacky and take more than zero damage during the phase (grr, lern2bandage)

We'd get through the first flying phase and I'd be down to 2k-3k mana. Ok, I can shadowfiend, pot, etc, and maybe stay in it, but the feral Druid that's healing is just bone dry - meaning we're down to 2 healers, effectively.

We're boned (pun intended).

It seems odd to me that Blizzard would design an encounter this way. Without an enrage timer, you could just bring 8 healers, one tank, and one DPS to slowly kill the skeletons. It's Molten Bore all over again. Sure, the kill would take half an hour, but wiping would be almost impossible.

So the very fact that if we had a Paladin and a resto Druid along with our 2 healing Priests, we'd be standing over a Nightbane kill makes me upset. It's bad encounter design on Blizzard's behalf, in my opinion. Ilhoof and Aran seem much better designed, real skill-based encounters, while Nightbane is pure snore. Bring more healers and it's trivial.

If it weren't for every guide I've read calling for Paladins and other statements from the likes of Gurgthock saying how the fight is insane without 4 healers (or 3 healers and a shadow Priest), I'd agree maybe we need to lern2play, but I know that's not it. I've read of gimmicks like launching a snake trap right before a flight phase, making Nightbane target a snake for Rain of Bones instead of a player, but that screams "exploit" to me.

-Bolty

[Tal]

Am I the only one amused that Alliance can't find paladins?:)

I believe you missed the point of the post.

[Tal]

Also, we're going to need heavy consumables on the main tank (flasks, ironshield potions, etc). Sorry, Tal.

I'm off wed morning so I'll be scouring for Gromsblood and the like. Not sure when I'll get a chance to fish for stonescales.

[TheDragoon]

To add to what Bolty said, we tried to somewhat simulate the use of a Paladin for being the target of the Smoking Blast by having the tanked out feral druid (me) deshift and spam heals as soon as Nightbane takes off. This usually made me the target for Nightbane when he starts firing, then I would shift to bear and be taking ~700 damage per tick rather than the normal ~1650 if he is targetting a healer. The only drawback to this is that when I shifted I could no longer heal. Thus, I'd eventually lose aggro to another healer and then he would start blasting that healer. I think this really helped out at the start of the phase because I could both eat his blasts and tank a bunch of skeletons, but when he shifted off to target one of the actual healers, then things got a lot harder.

As Bolty says, this whole deal would be mostly trivialized by using a Paladin to eat all of the blasts while still being able to heal and perhaps tank a lot of the skeletons (via consecration). But since we do not have any Paladins available to us, things are a lot more difficult. As such, we are basically left needing either another tank (so I could help heal) or another healer or two. It is very unfortunate that this fight requires so much more healing/tanking than most of the rest of the instance because you just don't have much leeway in a 10 man instance to bring people just for one fight unless you're stacking the raid (which we really don't want to have to do).

[Treesh]

A quote from Gurgthock of the Elitist Jerks guild:

...doing this fight with 3 pure healers (me, holy priest, resto druid) and no shadow priest is still really, really painful, and people who say that some other fight in Kara is harder than Nightbane are insane. After a 25% wipe simply because all three of us were completely and utterly OOM with all timers burned, I popped a Resto flask, on top of Mageblood, Mana Oil, and Sporefish. I used 4 Super Manas, dropped Mana Tide twice, had Mana Spring down at all other times, and was on the verge of running OOM right as Nightbane died. I had like 23% overheal and the other two main healers had no more than 25%, so inefficiency wasn't the problem. (And if you look at my Armory profile, you'll see that it's not being undergeared, either.)

Tips welcome.

-Bolty

He mentions 25% overheal as a good thing? I'm sure your group Bolty has done better with the overheal numbers than that, but have you checked mana efficiency and HPS as well as the overheal numbers? I thought the whole point of having set raid groups was to get to know each others' behaviors and anticipate their reactions to situations, but with having a set raid group, you really should be able to get below 25% overheal, even with stacking HoTs doing strange things.

It really does suck to not have a paladin or a shaman or a shadow priest in your raid group Bolty and not seeing the fight yet, I can't help with specific tips, but having "only 23% overheal" on a shaman in a raid is nothing to be pleased about. You can expect a jump in overheal from five mans to raids, but that much?! In five mans, solo healing, Mogo has between 5% and 9% overheal and between 6 and 8 hitpoints healed per mana spent (I don't remember the hitpoints healed per second though) now. If I'm not solo healing but still main healing, the overheal can go up above 10%, but generally not higher than 15% depending on who is "backup" healing and how hyper active they are with healing. Mana efficiency generally drops to right around 6 though because I don't have to use chain heal as much. I will shamefully admit that there was a Botanica run where somehow I hit 30% overheal for the entire run and we didn't actually kill Warp Splinter on that run because my healing was just that far off the mark that run. I do wish I had remembered to look at my numbers after our last Karazhan run to see just how far up I jumped since Dunar and I don't usually get to heal with each other often and both of us admitted that our timing was off the entire run, but even in the old raids, 25% overheal was not an acceptable number (except for specific encounters and granted, this may be one of those encounters).

But, that's more about what he quoted and really doesn't help you and your team Bolty. I just had to vent about a shaman being happy about "only" 23% overheal.

Edit: And yes, Mogo's profile on the armory right now should have her in her healing gear, depending on how quickly they update the page after logout.;) If you see The Oathkeeper in her weapon slot, it hasn't updated yet.:)

[TheDragoon]

I didn't look at the numbers for our run, but I can understand why they might not be as nice as possible. Nightbane tends to kill the tank in a matter of seconds so you're better off healing too much than too little. There isn't a whole lot of room for error in healing so I can see where the overheal might not be as great as one would hope.

This reminds me that I should really try and get forecast working on my computer, again (it was bugged out last time I tried). :)

[Bolty]

It really does suck to not have a paladin or a shaman or a shadow priest in your raid group Bolty and not seeing the fight yet, I can't help with specific tips, but having "only 23% overheal" on a shaman in a raid is nothing to be pleased about. You can expect a jump in overheal from five mans to raids, but that much?!

Well, yeah.

I don't really know what my overhealing was during the short set of Nightbane attempts (about 2 hours) before we realized it just couldn't be done with our raid makeup. But the healing game has really changed in TBC.

Originally I had thought that Cleoboltra would be semi-powerful in PvP with people as fresh 70's until itemization once again started diminishing her power. This was completely and utterly wrong, as damage has continued to outpace healing by ever-increasing margins even with poorly geared 70's. The new Stamina itemization was supposed to help correct this, but it doesn't.

In heroics and raids, bosses will routinely smack around tanks for large chunks of their hit points, which is impressive considering how many more hit points they have compared to pre-expansion. Nightbane can and does smack poor Shalandrax around to the tune of 7,000 to 9,000-point crushing blows. As a result, you need several healers spamming max-rank large heals on the target to keep him vertical. You obviously can't wait for the tank to take damage and then heal him; two crushing blows in a row can kill him in 2.0 seconds. Don't even get me started on Prince Malchezaar, where he has a move that allows him to score 3 hits on a main tank in less than one second - I forget what the move is called, something like "Thrash" - which can obliterate 16,000 hit points in a flash.

As a result, you will occasionally drop a 6k healing bomb on your main tank, with 100% of it being overheal. That can seriously skew your numbers.

Healing just hasn't scaled well. You need to heal for a heck of a lot more than you had to pre-expansion. When I'm using max-rank greater heals on a rogue, something's up - pre-expansion, that would only ever be even considered if a rogue was at 10% life, since it would be gross overheal otherwise.

One of the nasty side effects of all this is that healers generate a lot more aggro than ever before. This is readily apparent in heroic mode dungeons, as tanks on some pulls will need 5,000 or more healing within seconds of a pull. Blizzard buffed Fade on Priests for exactly this reason - it just wasn't good enough - but with the incredible fragility of a Priest in the expansion, I find myself hitting the pavement time and time again. What am I going to do, not heal? When heroic trash hits as hard as raid bosses, having a tank lose aggro to me is an instant wipe.

It's stimulating, and more challenging, yes, but ultimately it's less fun. Pre-expansion, if I pulled aggro off a tank in an instance, it was an "ok, Fade, that didn't work, shield, self-heal until he taunts it off, I'm good" situation. Now it's "ok, Fade, that didn't work, oops I'm dead". It was amusing to get crit by a trash mob in heroic Slave Pens for 11,280 yesterday. I guess. Think of what 4-5 of those do to your main tank in the first 2 seconds of a pull and explain how he can hold aggro against the 8,000 healing I need to dish out to keep him alive in the first 10 seconds. Either your tank is superman, or you wipe.

In a raid environment, you have healers stepping over each other to keep the tank alive while you watch his 13-17,000 hit point bar fly back and forth like Einstein using an abacus. Overheal's the end result.

-Bolty

[Warlock]

I'm not up to Nightbane yet (we're working on Aran) but I can confirm that even tanks can take a lot of damage very quickly. I have 22k armour and 14k+ hitpoints (depending on buffs) and it only takes a little lag from my healers to mean a run back. If my first hit gets parried or dodged and therefore I don't hold the mob it's healer pate as well. I remember my priest taking 23,000 damage in one hit (non-crit) while doing heroic underbog.

[Kevin]

And how different is this from Twin Emps where a tank could take a single hit for 80% of their life? Queue and cancel shouldn't have changed that much and that is still one of the best mana conserve methods there is. How is it different from other Naxx fights were the same things could happen?

Sure if the healer gets aggro they are much more likely to die but I still can't see it being that much different from stuff that people already learned in raid healing or were already practicing in 5 mans. Yes, on harder hitting mobs in 5 mans I anticipated damage, I would queue and cancel if not needed. That meant I pretty much always had a heal 2 seconds from landing since most of the big heals took 2.5 to cast and you would cancel with about .5 seconds left and start casting again. A healer should pretty much never wait for damage. I thought that was pretty much accepted practice by now. That still means you'll end up with a heal that you don't cancel that was overheal from time to time but I don't see it as that different from the tanks perspective. It's much more dangerous for the healer to pull aggro (that's any healer as well, a paladin in full healer gear isn't going to have 11,280 health and while the hit won't hit that hard a 7520 hit (60% mit vs your 10% mit) on the pally could still very well be a one shot as well if they pull aggro or the 8773 it would hit the shaman for or the 10K the druid took in tree/caster form).

There are more auto-reactive heals (HoTs, earth shields, prayer of mending) than before but yeah they still don't matter.

I don't know I'm not convinced that healing has changed that much. Be proactive not reactive and stay tight on the mana. Tight on the mana is harder since as you mentioned you don't get to downrank as much, but my paladin had 7 different heals hot keyed before I'm sure he still will so that I can still hit closer to the target, even if I have less opportunities to do so.

Dunno, I'm getting much closer to that content, maybe it still is different from that, but it doesn't seem it's going to change much for the healer other than if you get aggro and the fact that there are more situations where that is more likely, that you are more likely to be dead now.

[Mirajj]

In one of our more notable wipes to Romulo and Julianne (pre-nerf), Anadrol took roughly 17k damage in 2 seconds (Gotta love the Deathnote mod).

On our last Gruul attempt, didn't Maulgor one-shot Anarem, as well?

TBC isn't a good place to be a healer concerned about overheal.

[Kevin]

In one of our more notable wipes to Romulo and Julianne (pre-nerf), Anadrol took roughly 17k damage in 2 seconds (Gotta love the Deathnote mod).

On our last Gruul attempt, didn't Maulgor one-shot Anarem, as well?

TBC isn't a good place to be a healer concerned about overheal.

And on Twin Emps I saw Seiki and Anarem get 2 shotted as well. A one shot has nothing to do with overheal.

But when you hear people say the healers are running out of mana, being concerned with overheal is the first place to look, if you can and I admit that you simply may not be able to (but then again top guilds used to say that you couldn't worry about overheal on Twin Emps either or tanks would die and I saw that proven wrong), in so that you can up longevity.

But since I've only been in Kara once and only 1 heroic I obviously have no idea how the game plays. Just like I was told that tanking and healing in MC would be completely different in 5 mans when I first went in there and it was close to the cutting edge content and I didn't heal or tank all the differently (I did tank different because it was easier to tank since I only had one mob to worry about and more rage but none of the fundamentals changed it just meant I had rage to use on things on things like HS) and I only had to heal differently because other healers didn't trust me. Then I heard that the the tanking and healing game were completely different in AQ40 and it wasn't. The same fundamentals still applied. Then I heard that tanking and healing in normal TBC 5 mans was different and it wasn't. So forgive me when I hear that it is completely different yet again when everything else that was completely different in the past was very minor adjustments if you paid attention to game mechanics.

Hunter DPS is much more different in TBC than healing or tanking is because steady shot is a different timing mechanic than the old aimed shot cycles.

But yes there are still times where you don't need to worry about overheal. You generally didn't on the mage for AoE pulls, you generally didn't where the fight wasn't going to be 10+ minutes and HP per S was more important. But then again that only mattered until gear caught up or if you didn't want to burn as many consumables. TBC seems to have flattened the end game gear so that you can't outgear stuff as fast, but getting better at mana conservation is still one way to get rid of using as many consumables. But yeah it may not be possible.

They may have done something as stupid as have 5 healers and make the fight last longer or get a tank up to gearing levels that you can't reach yet. I'm not saying I'm not wrong in this case, but generally in the past when I heard this stuff I never experienced it.

[Bolty]

Dunno, I'm getting much closer to that content, maybe it still is different from that, but it doesn't seem it's going to change much for the healer other than if you get aggro and the fact that there are more situations where that is more likely, that you are more likely to be dead now.

That was my point, Gnollguy. Healing like that only used to be required for the biggest, toughest, raid mobs in the game (1 target). Now, a pack of trash mobs in any heroic instance will require massive healing on the MT, and it is very very difficult to hold aggro on 5 mobs when thousands of healing aggro is rolling in.

Imagine if, on Razorgore, every one of those Legionnaires and Dragonkin could one-shot a healer. Good luck, tanks.

-Bolty

[Tuftears]

A healer should pretty much never wait for damage. I thought that was pretty much accepted practice by now.

Yeah, and Cleoboltra is the one who taught us to do pro-active healing, but... The problem isn't that healers could be saving a bunch of mana, the problem is that the healers are burning a lot of mana keeping people alive under Nightbane's Scorching Blasts in the 'flying' phases.

Now. The odd thing is that Scorching Blast is physical damage, thus mitigated by armor. I'm guessing it's bugged. Maybe they will fix it to be fire damage (and thus resistable), making this a fire resist fight.

This is going to sound like an odd idea, but also... How much armor could you shoehorn onto a priest or druid, through consumables?

Let's say your average priest has 1k armor. Ironshield potion adds 2500 and lasts for 2 minutes. Elixir of Major Defense adds 550 for 1 hour. A Scroll of Protection (V) adds 300 armor for 30 minutes. An Elixir of the Mongoose or Greater Agility adds 25 agility (50 armor), an Elixir of Mastery adds 15 agility (30 armor). You could, stretching a point, take some R.O.I.D.S (25 agility, 50 armor). You could get to 4400 or so armor in this manner.

That changes your mitigation from... 13.6% to 41%? That changes those initial 4.5k hits to about 2.7k which seems slightly more manageable.

But wait. If it's physical damage...

Do Limited Invulnerability potions work against it?

If so, you should get hit with zero physical damage from each of his Smoking Blasts for the 6 seconds that it's active, leaving only the cleansable fire DoT. Cooldown is 2 minutes, and uses the same timer as Ironshield so you'd have to pick one or the other.

Then it's a matter of timing each phase of the fight to take at least 2 minutes, so cooldowns are up for the next fligiht.

[Kevin]

That was my point, Gnollguy. Healing like that only used to be required for the biggest, toughest, raid mobs in the game (1 target). Now, a pack of trash mobs in any heroic instance will require massive healing on the MT, and it is very very difficult to hold aggro on 5 mobs when thousands of healing aggro is rolling in.

Imagine if, on Razorgore, every one of those Legionnaires and Dragonkin could one-shot a healer. Good luck, tanks.

-Bolty

So that probably means the rest of the group has to do something different. Like you need to kite stuff from the start or frost nova at the start so that mobs can't move right to the healer as fast giving the tank more time, or you slow down some of the mobs and not others.

It doesn't change the basics of, if you don't make it through the fight with mana you either get better gear, better consumables, cut down the overhealing, up the DPS, or cut the incoming damage.

[Concillian]

This is going to sound like an odd idea, but also... How much armor could you shoehorn onto a priest or druid, through consumables?

Let's say your average priest has 1k armor. Ironshield potion adds 2500 and lasts for 2 minutes. Elixir of Major Defense adds 550 for 1 hour. A Scroll of Protection (V) adds 300 armor for 30 minutes. An Elixir of the Mongoose or Greater Agility adds 25 agility (50 armor), an Elixir of Mastery adds 15 agility (30 armor). You could, stretching a point, take some R.O.I.D.S (25 agility, 50 armor). You could get to 4400 or so armor in this manner.

Scroll of protection and pot of defense don't stack. I think all the rest of the stuff stacks though, but I'm not sure. I am quite sure about scrolls and pots though.

[vor_lord]

You could get to 4400 or so armor in this manner.

For the priests, Inner Fire adds 1580 more (untalented).

[Dynatos]

And how different is this from Twin Emps where a tank could take a single hit for 80% of their life? Queue and cancel shouldn't have changed that much and that is still one of the best mana conserve methods there is. How is it different from other Naxx fights were the same things could happen?

It's a gear differential thing. Healing gear hasn't scaled well with the amount needing to be healed.

In AQ40, the Twin Emps would hit for, what, 10k? At that time, my Druid had 950 +heal.

Queue TBC. Nightbane is hitting for 16k in the same time the Twin Emps were hitting for 10k. Sirreal/Bolty's gear is sitting around, say, 1400 +heal. That's a 37.5% increase in damage taken but only a 32% increase in healing. In fact, it's even worse, since that increase in gear is tacked on to a base heal value. But, I just got out of an exam and am too tired to punch numbers.

Oh, but guess what, we're talking 10-man raids instead of 40-man!. Now, we have 2-3 healers trying to take care of that 37.5% increase in damage output on the tank with their sub-par 32% increase in gear and also heal everyone else.

Whereas, in AQ40, we had 3-4 healers on one tank, a couple healers dedicated to keeping DPS alive, etc.

See how the problem compounds?

[Lissa]

It's a gear differential thing. Healing gear hasn't scaled well with the amount needing to be healed.

In AQ40, the Twin Emps would hit for, what, 10k? At that time, my Druid had 950 +heal.

Queue TBC. Nightbane is hitting for 16k in the same time the Twin Emps were hitting for 10k. Sirreal/Bolty's gear is sitting around, say, 1400 +heal. That's a 37.5% increase in damage taken but only a 32% increase in healing. In fact, it's even worse, since that increase in gear is tacked on to a base heal value. But, I just got out of an exam and am too tired to punch numbers.

Oh, but guess what, we're talking 10-man raids instead of 40-man!. Now, we have 2-3 healers trying to take care of that 37.5% increase in damage output on the tank with their sub-par 32% increase in gear and also heal everyone else.

Whereas, in AQ40, we had 3-4 healers on one tank, a couple healers dedicated to keeping DPS alive, etc.

See how the problem compounds?

This is spot on. The difference is really the fact that the tanks are taking the same amount of damage, but you have 1/4 the raid size. So where you still have roughly 1/3 of the raid being healers, you go from having 4 healers on one tank and up to 9 other healers taking care of other roles to 3 healers, all trying to keep the main tank vertical while trying to deal with the stupid 360 cleaves on melee DPS and trying to keep everyone up with the various AoE damage that is going on. Throw in the fact that health has scaled upwards while damage has also scaled upwards, but +healing has not, you can see where the problem comes into play.

And as Bolty stated, healers get aggro now a whole lot easier. I've watched KTM a few times and seen Bolty skyrocket in aggro because of the sheer amount of healing he's pouring in on the MT while the rest of the players are doing their DPS, it's nuts. Healers really do have some real issues now with aggro in the Heroics and in Karazhan without the proper reducers (like Salvation and Tranquil Air).