Heroic Naxxramas with Two Healers

by Trouble on January 26, 2010 under Experiences

Healers? We don’t need no stinking healers!

Last night we did a preliminary run at Naxxramas with minimal healers. First off, here is the WWS if you want to see it. Overall it was pretty fun and a lot easier than I anticipated. Naxxramas is really just not that hard and last night proved how easy it can be. We plan to do it again next week with a different healer composition and taking it a bit more seriously. This week was mostly a test run. Here was our raid composition for most of it:

  • Healers: Shaman, Paladin
  • Tanks: Feral, Death Knight
  • 2 Mages
  • 3 Warlocks
  • 3 Hunters
  • 3 Rogues
  • 3 Warriors
  • 2 Balance Druids
  • 1 Shadow Priest
  • 1 Ret Paladin
  • 2 Elemental Shamans
  • 1 Enhancement Shaman

This wasn’t our ideal composition or set of players because we were missing a few people to absences and accidentally being saved to Naxx. Next week we’ll have an additional Mage and DPS Death Knight and sub out some of the people who were playing off-spes. Overall notes:

  • The only fight we couldn’t easily do with two healers is Sapphiron, perhaps Kel’thuzad.
  • Even with two healers we can do most fights with minimal (1-3) or no deaths.
  • Fewer healers actually makes a number of fights easier because it allows you to bypass phases.
  • Finding enough DPSers to fill up a raid with two healers is hard for us.

We’re ramping up to start practicing Naxxramas speed runs in a couple weeks and using minimal healers will be a key to completing the instance in record time. All things considered, we’ll probably run two healers until Sapphiron and use three for Sapphiron and Kel’thuzad.

For the WWS rankings, I’m not using what they actually report. WWS has a lot of inaccurate parses on there. I went through each boss and manually checked for legitimate parses that beat ours, mostly based on kill time. This isn’t difficult when most of the kills are ranked #2. For the majority of parses where we’re ranked #2, our lovely sister guild Might on Turalyon is the one beating us. Hopefully we can change this next week with a better raid comp!

Spider Wing

  • Anub’Rekhan - We focused DPS on Anub and and blew Bloodlust at 75% or so. No deaths. We killed him about five seconds before the first locust swarm. Ranked #2 on DPS on WWS. (1 min 7 secs)
  • Faerlina - Focused Faerlina and ignored the adds (our usual strategy). No deaths. Ranked #2 on WWS. (1 min 6 secs)
  • Maexxna -Ignored web wrapped people and burned her. We went through two phases. One person died on the wall. #2 on WWS. (1 min 17 secs)

Plague Wing

  • Noth - Moonkins decursed. We beat him by about 5 seconds to the first teleport. No deaths. #2 on WWS. (1 min 21 secs)
  • Heigan - We killed him a few seconds after he teleported for the dance phase. A few people got the spell disruption debuff, we’re still not used to the new range on it. No deaths. #5 on WWS. (1 min 37 secs)
  • Loatheb - We took a break from our two healer funtime to do Spore Loser. We brought in a Holy Priest to do it. We can easily do it normally with two healers and will do so next week.

Construct Wing

  • Patchwerk - We set the goal of killing him in under 1:40 and wiped a few times trying to do this (we wiped purposely due to not meeting our set DPS goal, not due to healing issues). We ultimately weren’t able to reach this with our less than ideal raid composition and we settled for a slightly longer kill. No deaths. #2 on WWS. (1 min 56 secs)
  • Grobbulus - His kite path wasn’t ideal for the casters and we lost some DPS due to movement. We’re planning to correct that next week. No deaths (I think). #2 on WWS. (2 mins 42 secs)
  • Gluth - We killed him before the first decimate. Our Death Knight tank and an Elemental Shaman did the kiting. The Feral Druid and a Fury Warrior tanked Gluth. No deaths. #5 on WWS. (1 min 37 secs)
  • Thaddius - Thaddius was pretty messy due to some very weird (or just plain bad) threat during phase one. We had three deaths due to agro pulls in phase 1 and didn’t wipe it for some reason. Next week we’ll fix this and get better numbers. We got them all battle rezed eventually. #5 on WWS. (3 mins 0 secs)

Military Wing

  • Razuvious - Our first attempt we tried a crazy strat where the feral tanked Razuvious himself. This ended horribly when he took a 70k unbalancing strike. For the next attempt we subbed in a priest and did it the traditional way. No deaths. #8 on WWS. (2 mins 18 secs)
  • Gothik - Easy fight, timed, little advantage gained by using reduced healers. WWS isn’t accurate for this since it only counts phase 2. Dumb fight to bother with benchmarks on anyway.
  • Four Horseman - We initially thought this might be challenging with two healers but I was assured it wasn’t a problem. We used one healer in the front and one in the back. We worked our way around counter-clockwise killing each of the horseman in turn. Turned out to be fairly easy. No deaths. #2 on WWS (2 mins 17 secs)

Frostwyrm Lair

  • Sapphiron - We brought in a Holy Priest for this and did it with three healers. It was challenging and peoples’ health dipped very low, but we managed it in one try with one death. We all stood on one side and did our best to avoid Blizzards. Moonkins decursed. Due to the insane speed there was only one air phase. #1 on WWS. (2 mins 35 secs)
  • Kel’thuzad - We took four healers due to loot concerns, not because we needed them. I know we can do it with three and two may be doable. We also had an additional tank but this was also probably unnecessary. #39 on WWS. (3 mins 26 secs)

Conclusion

Overall a fun night if a bit boring due to excessive planning time prior to bosses. I’m used to burning through instances with no down time so having to wait a couple minutes to plan an approach grates on me a little. It shouldn’t be a surprised that I’m more looking forward to the speed runs. I do like pushing ourselves and challenging ourselves. Blizzard’s achievements will never be able to truly push us so we’ll have to keep coming up with our own challenges.

Let us know if you have any interesting ideas for next week or the speed runs to follow in the comments section! We’re always looking for creative ways to optimize an instance run.

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20 comments

  1. Timothy
    01/26/2009
    1:05 pm
    I'd like to hear some comments from your healers about how challenging this was. Would it be possible to hear from them about their strategy or healing assignments?
  2. Trouble
    01/26/2009
    1:11 pm
    I'll see if I can get some commentary for them tonight. For reference, the healers were Lokh (Paladin) and Tiderath (Shaman).
  3. Senju
    01/26/2009
    1:41 pm
    That’s just freaking awesome, very impressed with 2 healer Patch.
  4. Krashtork
    01/26/2009
    2:23 pm
    That's extremely impressive, how many healers do you run with when you're progression raiding?
  5. Trouble
    01/26/2009
    2:26 pm
    We adjust to whatever the zone requires. Sunwell was mostly 8. We did 7 in Naxx. We'll use the minimum possible usually.
  6. Touchwood
    01/26/2009
    4:44 pm
    Hey Trouble, you've written a few pieces about your recruiting process in the past but I was wondering if you could make a recruitment "mega post", if you will. I'm mostly interested in what kinda of questions you ask that aren't part of the application itself. How much of their raiding history do you ask them to divulge? How many of their former GM's do you speak to? Are there factors of their RL that you take into consideration, regardless of whether or not it effects their ability to keep in line with your raiding schedule? Actually, I suppose you could just answer those questions individually, instead of laboring away on some mega post. <_<

    Anyways, keep up the good work and congrats on those parses. We're going to be attempting a two healer Patchwerk ourselves this reset, not entirely set on the comp though.
  7. Trouble
    01/26/2009
    4:47 pm
    I've been mulling over some sort of multi-part guild recruitment/leadership/management series. I will definitely do it, but it's more a matter of when and what topics I cover in it. It'll be up here at some point though!
  8. Touchwood
    01/26/2009
    5:04 pm
    I'm sure that there are tons of players out there who'd appreciate it, myself included.There are a few posts and "guides" scattered around the guild relations forum, but they're generally too wide in their scope or don't apply to hardcore progression.

    I never viewed occupying a leadership position in a raiding guild as a particularly difficult task, until I became an officer. Funny how that works. That said, I also underestimated how confusing and complicated issues can become. Up until I became an officer, I could simply work hard at anything in this game and succeed. Now, I'm faced with obstacles that I can't "effort" my way through. No amount of hard work makes up for experience or knowledge. I've certainly learned a lot, but sometimes at the expense of my raiders. Safe to say, I'd much prefer sage advice to trial by error.
  9. Newmembar
    01/26/2009
    10:25 pm
    It would seem to me a fairly straightforward interaction. You would ask things that directly affect gameplay\attendance\reliability issues of course, to solidify and reiterate their app. Other than guild and game related questions, the best course of action would be to get to know the person for who he is, not for what he can give your raid. What he can do for the raid is important, but if you're running a small roster, you want him\her to feel accepted among the ranks.

    It's a case of getting the dirty work out of the way. Put very bluntly what you expect, and what will happen if they don't deliver.
  10. Tumpys
    01/27/2009
    1:39 am
    Lokh is a beast. :)
  11. jedimax
    01/27/2009
    5:52 am
    Oh my god !!! You (rather the healers) made my day. This are the kind of news, that gives you motivation, to set new goals.

    We are at the moment in the progress to get all content done with 6 healers.

    I would like to see a guest-post in this blog by the 2 wonder boys ;)

    It's a pitty that my pc crashed and now i am waiting for some new hardmore, looking forward to play my disc-priest more than ever.
  12. Psychomidget
    01/27/2009
    12:36 pm
    Now... do 3 healers while going for the sapphiron achievement :D
  13. Trouble
    01/27/2009
    12:47 pm
    No problem! We can't prove that we get the achievement though because everyone has it. =D
  14. Shanii
    01/27/2009
    5:22 pm
    Just wanted to tell you that I really love your blog. I'm raidleader since more than three years and your blog is so much help for me.

    One thing I would very much like to know is: how are the responsibilities shared among your officers?

    Very impressed by your 2healer Naxx Run btw!
  15. Trouble
    01/27/2009
    6:10 pm
    We currently only have two officers; myself and the GM, Bazz. Over time we've continually reduced the administrative overhead for the guild so that we can focus on the things that really matter. I hate to say this, but it's nearly impossible for us to find people we consider qualified to lead Fusion. Our requirements are so broad that very few people actually meet them. We look for people who have the charisma and people skills necessary to earn respect and get people moving as well as the motivation to lead and that's just a very rare quality.

    As far as administrative stuff, don't track attendance, we don't track loot, we don't track barely anything. We have such a small raid force and such high requirements that anyone who isn't meeting them sticks out like a sore thumb. We spread out the loot evenly and everyone gets their share and since it's such a small group it's very easy to do. Most of our raiders are driven people that have the initiative to get themselves motivated to perform so there's less burden on us to keep people motivated. We motivate people with broad scope measures like speed runs and gimmicks like this two healer Naxxramas.

    Between the two of us, we basically share the responsibilities that remain. We're both involved in interviewing people, we both help lead raids, we both address issues with members. We lean on our members a lot as far as strategy and analysis. We have a number of members capable of doing these things and very often it's done in public during raids as we learn fights so that we can brain storm ideas and hash out solutions.
  16. Flex
    01/28/2009
    8:40 am
    WTB that guild, serious, ~95% attendance, setting up goals way beyond the achievements and trying to stick to them, etc. Grats guys
  17. Nidaba
    01/29/2009
    12:51 pm
    I don't think Sapp with the 100 club achievement would be that bad, assuming the dps don't stand in blizzard. Our dps this week was significantly lower than last week, despite the same 3-healer / 1-real-tank comp, because a lot of dps just blindly ate blizzards ... over and over.

    We ended up losing 2-3 melee and 3-4 ranged due to healing concerns because we just couldn't keep up with the incoming damage. If everyone gets out of blizzard fast, it's very very doable. 2 holy priests, 1 holy paladin = win. PoM bounces are the key, obviously.
  18. Psychomidget
    01/29/2009
    4:48 pm
    It's not that difficult but we were using the guilds old 40 man strategy where half the raid goes on each side of the room. Needless to say, our priest was a CoH machine :)
  19. yamakasi
    02/04/2009
    3:45 pm
    wtb more posts... one of the few things i enjoy when i'm at work is reading this site... stop slacking =)
  20. some dude
    02/19/2009
    12:35 pm
    Make it interesting? Try splitting your raid into two and run two 25naxx simultaneously. See who finishes first. Might be difficult on fights like Thadd.

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