Posted by Spooner | 20 Comments
Raid Comps in Ulduar
So I was wondering, as I tend to do sometimes, about the strengths and weaknesses of my current raid composition for Ulduar (10). We have two tanks (protection paladin and feral druid), three healers (holy paladin, discipline priest, and restoration shaman), and 5 DPS (ret. paladin, affliction lock, arcane mage, combat rogue, arms warrior). Running without a hunter or death knight isn’t making things impossible by any means but I’m curious to see what you folks run with and why. What exactly are the benefits if any?
Having more melee DPS than ranged seems to be making a big difference in Ulduar (more than it ever has actually) and making AOE burns (like the repair bots during XT002) a little more of a hassle. Both tanks in my group are geared enough for the fights, healers as well, and DPS (although could be much higher) isn’t having any trouble making enrage timers. So what do you all run with and why?
we usually run caster heavy with either a warrior or druid tank as MT and a pally tank as OT. atleast 1 shaman (resto works but prefer and elemental) 1 resto druid 1 moonkin 1 fire mage 1 imp shadow bolt lock 1 disc priest 1 melee (either warrior or DK) 1 ret pally. This makeup seems to be the ultimate in flexibilty and has the most min-maxing we could put together. Plenty of AoE, buffs, BL, extra heals, 3rd tank (if needed), cc, and anything else you could throw at us
But if you don’t have the warrior for whatever reason then how do you deal with reliable interrupts on Iron Council with Brundir? I refuse to do that encounter ever again without a rogue kicking/kidneyshot/arcane torrent/etc.
we run 10 man ulduar and have never had a warrior tank in the guild, we recently only acquired rogues, but prior to this we would leave our elemental shaman on Brundir with any tank and let him EARTHSHOCK all the spells .
Unfortunately our 10 man varies almost daily throughout the week. I main-tank (Feral Druid) and our OT is usually one of 2 pali’s but is sometimes a frost DK (which incidentally is GREAT for Freya trash flowers, freezing them in place and then ignoring them). One holy priest and one holy pali (although we lost our regular holy pali and are looking for a good replacement) and a resto shaman round out our healing core. Occasionally a resto druid will swap in for any of the roles. Iron council we heal through the chain’s and I have the resto shaman attempt to interrupt when possible, otherwise we all stack away and let the one OT and one healer deal with it. So far we one-shot it most weeks (depending on whether or not the experienced players all show up). For DPS we have a warlock that almost never misses, 2 reliable mages, 2 reliable hunters, a choice of ret pali’s (one occasionally OT’s), and a pair of DK’s (one again occasionally OT’s). We’re stuck with more than enough people for a solid 10, but not enough for 2 10’s or a 25. I do think your disc priest should go holy, they can put out SO much more healing and the pali should have your MT healed up just fine.
If it wasn’t for the disc. priests amazing shields and solid single target saves I’d agree with you. Though I am a little concerned for the lack of cooldowns, guardian spirit I hear is fucking ESSENTIAL for mimiron’s plasma attack and can make some of the other holy shit moments less of a danger (general V, yoggy, frozen blows etc)
Well, Frozen blows I use my bear CD’s through and with barkskin every 1min it’s not too bad. Again, we run one single-target healer (holy pali) and then two on the raid. Although resto shaman’s aren’t what they used to be in that deptartment (but we need/want the BL anyway). Mim’s Plasma is nothing to joke about and as a prot pali you’re in the worst place to deal with it, but you know that. You will need to use raid cd’s I believe. I chain my bear CD’s along with hand of sacrifice from the raid (usually 2 pali’s) and my holy priest’s guardian spirit. Even then I need the OT to taunt him off and use his own shield again almost half the time. Anyhow, phase 2 is an absolute heal-fest so how are you guys dealing with that? Phase three your healers would be well set up for, and as for phase 4, that’s also probably ok. Oh, btw, you’ll HAVE to contact me on my email about blizzcon we should really get together for drinks, I’ll have 3-4 guildies there with me.
We run with a warrior and DK tank, a holy priest, shaman/ druid, and a holy pally as healers, and then we either stack one raid as melee dps, with an enh shammy, dps dk, rogue, hunter, and typically a mage for buffs, or we stack more towards ranged, with an ele shammy, 2 mages, a warlock and a hunter.
We never use the warrior tank on stormcaller, having the DK to pull him out of runes is far more useful. We just sit the resto shammy on healing the DK, and he can interrupt every cast that goes through. One the giant dies, we have the warrior take the runecaller and tank him, and the dk still sticks on Brundir. Between the two DK interrupts and the earthshocks, there’s plenty of ways to stop whirl.
For frozen blows, we have our tank (doesn’t matter which one, they both do it) wear full frost resist gear, and the rest of the raid wear 2-3 pieces, and it makes healing the encounter a joke. To take care of frozen blows, all we need to do is just heal harder than usual, the holy pally spamming the MT, the shammy arcing CHs off the tank, and the priest exclusively raid healing. But having 2-3 pieces of FR gear reduces the damage taken by almost 1/2, and makes healing it far easier.
Firstly on Mimis plasma attack, We use a prot pally MT, and get by with tank CDs for the 1st one, and a Pain suppression for the 2nd one, and we have the dps to burn to P2 before a 3rd. On early attempts when we were getting 3, we had 2x NS blown to keep the tank up through raw healing.
On IC we have the druid OT both adds in cat gear/spec, and have the paly taunt off them once steelbreaker is dead, with a warrior assisting on interrupts.
For Hodir we only use one tank, and have the pally go Ret for the raid buffs, also because the druid is naturally better suited to resist fights.
Our raid comp is a pally MT, with druid OT, the druid does very good dps on fights only requiring one tank too.
We have taken to 2 healing everything up till Mimi in the last few weeks, running either Disc/druid or Disc/Holy double priest. Once we get to Mimi+ we have a druid which up till there has been moonkin switch.
Dps is 1 – 2 rogues, 1 warrior, 1 lock, 0 – 1 hunter, 1 moon/restokin, and 1 ele shammy.
While learning the instance we had 2 druid healers and 1 disc priest, and we found the double hots with the huge shields an amazing setup.
More recently we were working on some hard modes, and without 2 healing we would have not had the dps to meet some of the enrage timers. Deconstructor in particular was very tight, however we found it to be 2 healerable by 2 holy priests.
Iron Council is another fight requiring very high raid dps, much like OS +3, without a BL, and without proper raid buffs for either type of dps, we could not take steelbreaker down without our tanks being dead twice each and having healed him too much. Healing this fight would be best with 2.5 healers, a ele or enchance shammy would be VERY handy on this fight.
Hodir requires 1 – 2 healers, again without a bloodlust or raid buffs for either type of dps we fell short, once you understand the NPCs buffs this fight shouldn’t be too hard though.
I agree that its’ best to run Ulduar 10 with two healers and one hybrid DPS class that can switch to heals if needed. Most of the fights aren’t hard enough to require three healers. Heck, I’ve seen a holy priest solo-heal the last phase of Mimiron on 10-man.
After a round of nerfs that hit since I posted about the DPS requirements being very high for hardmodes, they extended most enrage timers to the point of not needing amazing dps at all.
We lost a hunter to comcast last night, but were confident we could carry on, and managed to 9man/3heal XT hardmode with our mage switching to pvp frost for replenishment.
If you havent tryed him yet, go for it, we required the 5dps for blow haste pots etc to get the heart in time, and it was close, but from then on in, the enrage is soo long these days you just have to keep it steady.
More to the point, the enrage timers post nerfs allow 3 healers for all hardmodes I have done, with the exception of hodir, and in his case, we would have the dps to do it with 3, but 3 healers are not required by any means.
Okay would u say that this set up is good ———–1 MT pali, 1 Warrior/DK/Druid OT(which would be best overall for ulduar 10 man) dps-1 boomkin 1-Ret pali 1-Shadow priest 1-Warlock 1-rogue and for heals Resto shaman, holy priest/disc(he duel specs), Holy pali, and a resto druid(which 3 out of these 4 healers is best for the hardmodes in this place)
If you have a druid OT then the rogue can get more DPS out of the deal and you can even have FF up for reduced armor, should help as well. A paladin MT judging light (now in 3.2 with changes) will stack with the imp. leader of the pack aura your feral druid is busting out, good shit there.
Having a boomkin and a warlock and a s.priest as your DPS core is pretty damn solid because of all that spell dmg buffing and added vulnerability to targets. That doesn’t sound like a bad setup honestly and your druid can DPS during single tank phases as a feral as well.
k thanks alot, im stepping back from hardcore 25 man raiding and im making a core 10 man raiding guild to get ulduar hardmodes down, and do the new place on both normal and hardmode once all bosses come out, for the healers what do u think i should use Resto shaman, holy/disc priest, Resto druid, and pali healer, keep in mind the resto has a very solid offspec boomkin
I’ve run 10man hard modes with a holy paladin, resto shaman, and holy or disc. priest doing the healing.
Do u think that a Resto druid could possibly take the spot of one of those classes?
probably yeah
for hard modes, you would be fine with paladin/priest/druid, especially if the priest and druid have dps offspecs.
Ya but then im stuck without a shaman for heroism
Responding to a VERY old post but meh..
This is the comp of my friend Raisa’s guild Cuties Only in 10 man they have i think he said 3 10 man groups? anyways they’re all worked out to pump out the most dps for EACH fight without forcing anyone in and out of the raid. For example the one that he is a part of is made up of the following…
A warlock (which is Raisa), a mage, an ele shaman, a boomkin druid (with feral dps offspec), a frost dps DK, a shadow priest (Holy offspec), a Resto druid, a holy pally, a Prot pally, and a DK tank.
Now the only fight that shit changes up ALOT for is on general for this group, the boomkin goes feral and our Spriest goes Holy. this is the only time that the boomkin is not main spec. (well ya know unless he wants to be a douch bag which i hear he’s good at =P)
The Spriest though is holy for several other occassions including Knock x 3, Ignis, IC Hard, Mim hard, Algalon, and Thorim hard.
The lovely part about having a caster heavy group and a DK tank who can unload with some pretty godly dps when he’s not tanking is for speed kill fights like XT and Hodir, you’ll see everyone (including their insaine pally tank) pulling over 5k dps, raisa and the mage by the end are usually both pushing about 7k
Watching him pull 10k on hodir made me shit bricks and feel like a scrub ass warlock… even though he does out gear me pretty much peice for peice haha