ICC Field Report - On Feral Cats, Body & Soul and Putricide HC

Priest healer Zinn reporting from ICC! Putricide won't let us do the macarena anylonger...
Time for another wrap up of my recent raiding shenanigans.

Where are all the feral cats?
Love is a very lonely cat. He has since he started out playing rarely got the opportunity to play with someone else as serious about feral cats as he is (which might be because he's kinda manic dedicated about it). No one in our guilds has ever mained a feral cat (and raided) so Love has always had to have his nerdrages and hobby theorycrafting to himself. Sure, he tries to involve me sometimes, but feral druids are one of the few specs I've really never given much time to get to know. In Vanilla, feral cats weren't even a real spec (just as boomkins weren't) and so he had to go healing most of the time. In BC we lacked decent tanks and so he focused on that part during that time. It's first in Wrath he's gotten the chance to really get into feral catting, and found himself very lonely in this position. Where are all the feral cats? That is the matter for another post however. We can now rejoice that Love has finally found his match as another, very good, feral cat recently joined our guild. Now Love has someone with whom to compete every fight and best of all, with whom he can analyze fights and catness afterwards. Someone who, just like Love, loves to whine about everything that is wrong about feral cats (and yet clings to the class for some reason), muses over what was, could be and will be. Finally my ears can rest...

Wait, wasn't I supposed to head the green ball?

Body & Soul again
On another matter entirely I've respecced my holy spec into Body & Soul (among other things). I did mention it in some post some months ago, and I have always been divided in my stand on whether Body & Soul is a good talent or not. Well actually it is an awesome talent, but just as with Lightwell I was afraid it was so situational or difficult to use it might not ever get the possibility to shine. Only one way to find out, right? I specced it, along with Serendipity and removed some talents from Empowered Healing, since I rarely cast flash heals anyway (and never Greater Heal). Come to think of it I wonder why I spent talents into Serendipity? I did use it once before but removed because it didn't synch with my healing. I basically only use Flash heals when I get Surge of Light procs. The rest of the time I spend spamming renews, poms and coh. Getting a full stack of Serendipity wouldn't occur often and it would only be good for using Prayer of Healing, which I don't use that often either. Ok, I will have to go and fix that. Back to Body & Soul. The problem/good thing about it is that it requires perfect timing. I don't mind having to practice this, I'm just worried I won't even get the opportunity to get this into my backbone. Like I mentioned last time I rarely get to go holy as it is, but there are some fights where B&S is really useful. Like whoever is chased by the orange goo on Putricide HC for example. And the diseased one in the first phase of LK. And probably in many other fights too. I want to give it some proper testing!

DIE PUTRICIDE DIE!
Speaking of Putricide, he's the main reason we've not had a shot at LK hc for a couple of weeks. We have one shotted Putricide on hc. In fact we had one evening where we oneshotted every hc fight in the instance (except Deathwhisper which we did on normal, and well LK of course). It therefor feels odd that you can go on a horrible wiping streak on the same boss just the week after. It takes its toll on raiding morale. People wonder of course what has changed. And we have had a couple of new recruits lately. They're definitely not bad players, but they do have to learn how this guild handles the fight, which always takes a couple of wipes generally. But people get grumpy when something is oneshotted the one day and then causes us to wipe for three hours the next day. Understandable. When I joined the guild Putricide was currently the progression boss to kill. He went down fairly fast after my joining (totally not coincidental) and we had little trouble with him the following few weeks. Instead we could focus on Sindragosa hc, which we then eventually downed too and we went on to LK hc. And suddenly boom! We get stuck on Putricide again! Damn that old fart.

It is a tricky fight. Our troubles seem to revolve around two major issues, the handling of the disease and the killing of the oozes (which might sound kinda obvious, but it's always one of the two). Last time we did those parts perfectly though, but then we had trouble killing him fast enough in phase 3 instead. The debuff quickly goes up to doing 20-25k damage to everyone in the raid every other second, and the healers (namely me & Co) just can't handle that for very long. After all the Tranquilities and Divine Hymns have been used, we wipe. Last week we got him to 1%. A couple of times. And just yesterday to 0,4%. But we just have to go at it. Ganbatte us!

To renew... or not to renew
Recapping from last time -  did I notice any difference in the gain of 300 spellpower and what did I think of the renew glyph? Unfortunately I haven't got much possibility to use it. We haven't got to LK hc since my last post in this matter so I haven't been able to test myself against the other disc priest yet. I am mildly positive about the glyph however. I can't say I notice a huge difference, but I suppose a glyph won't be game breaking. Faster, bigger ticks are better of course, but only if you can meet two "ifs". It's better IF you can keep it on as many targets (or enough targets to still be useful) as before. Because it is a hot you really want it spread around. And it's better IF you have the mana to recast it all the time.
So let's look at these two "ifs".

Reducing uptime from 15 to 12 seconds does give 3 seconds less for me to cast it before I have to start recasting it. That means I have in reality about 1-2 less targets I can keep this up on. Will that make much of a difference? Again I have to use the evil word "depends". You're focusing your healing onto a lesser amount targets, whom will receive a little more of your healing love. Sometimes that is good, sometimes not so good, it depends alot on who else you're healing with and what you're healing. You'll still be able to keep renews on little less than half the raid at any given moment. But don't forget we want to use some gcds for Poms, cohs and Surge of Light procs too. In the end you might be able to keep renews on about 10 targets, at best. This won't differ much from what you'll be able to without the glyph.
So did mana turn out to be a problem? In the few fights I got to try holy I didn't notice much of a difference here either (that was Putricide normal, Sindragosa normal and LK normal). Mana wasn't more or less of a problem than it always is when you're holy (not a huge problem as with shamans, but definitely not non-ooming like druids or disc priests).

So what kind of conclusion can I give about this glyph? If you're healing content where continous, huge amounts of raid damage is a problem, this is a great glyph. For heroics or normal raids, where massive aoe damage is less of a problem, this glyph might be less necessary. The alternatives are Glyph of Prayer of Healing or Glyph of Flash Heal. One doesn't use Prayer of Healing that much even when it's healing intense (because of its mechanics in only healing the targetted players group), so I'd probably go with Glyph of Flash Heal in that case. I'm actually thinking Holy Nova might be a better heal than Prayer of Healing... Must look into this as well.

Stay tuned for more raiding updates!

PS. I got Love to roll a warrior tank, and he completely loves it. He's a sucker for the whole 1-man army thing, which is why he mains a druid I think.