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Ammeli of Defias Brotherhood (EU) has kindly offered to share a video of her guild Ubiquity downing the Illidari Council of Black Temple. Because I’m obviously not familiar with this fight, I asked Runycat of Unbearably HoT for her ever fresh and unique perspective:
The Illidari Council is a retardedly long fight that subjects the raid to randomly thrown centers of AOE that, inevitably, kills the people who aren’t smart enough to run out of it immediately. Basically, it’s a 15-minute long fight that taxes your mana. There are four members of the Council: a Paladin, a Priest, a Rogue, and a Mage.
Mage: The fight is initiated (in our case) by a Mage who gets BoP’d and blinks up to the platform (and then everyone else grabs his or her target). The Mage tanks the Mage mob, similar to what you’d see for Maulgar. The Mage tank also needs a dedicated healer. The Mage Councilman will randomly cast Blizzard and Flamestrike all over the entire area, and if you don’t get out of those areas immediately, you WILL die. It’s something like 4000 to 5000 damage a tick.
Priest: Generally tanked on the platform by a Warrior and flanked by basically anyone who can spell interrupt (Rogues, Elemental Shamans) her Circle of Healing. She will occasionally cast Divine Wrath on an individual on the raid, and it essentially destroys your health (generally speaking, you watch your timers to see who gets it so that you can spam heal them).
Rogue: Total loser who is tanked by anyone in the middle of the room. He periodically vanishes and applies a poison debuff to various individuals. The poison ticks a little bit and then “blooms” in one fell swoop that brings your health down by about 75%. These people need to be healed immediately. Once he reappears from Vanish, the tank needs to go chase him down ASAP before he runs around and kills clothies. Occasionally, the Rogue will get BoP’d by the Paladin right out of Vanish, and the tank essentially needs to be like OH SHIT and blow all threat generating cooldowns (Taunt, Challenging Shout/Roar).
Paladin: Tanked off to the side by an intrepid Warrior tank who definitely needs at least two dedicated healers. His judgements need to be spell reflected or the tank gets smacked around; additionally, that tank needs to kite him out of all the AOE (Flamestrike, Blizzard, Consecrate).
This all goes on simultaneously, and all the members share health. That’s pretty much it. Intensive raid healing. Blow cooldowns early on because they’ll be up again by the end (Innervate, etc.).
Ammeli describes her role in this fight as, “12 minutes of main tank healing along with a Priest.” She finds the fight to be taxing on her mana as it’s the only fight where she finds herself needing to chain pot.
From the video, you may notice a couple of different things:
- Extensive use of Healing Touch
When I asked Ammeli about this (being surprised at how much it’s used), she explained that the nature of the fight requires the healers assigned to the MT to deal with a lot of spike damage. While she still continues to roll Lifebloom she also uses the tried-and-tested method of pre-casting a Healing Touch (Rank 10) and interrupting it if it proves unnecessary. - Spell Icons Popping up in the Middle of her Screen
This is from an addon called Ghost Pulse (or Ghost Cooldown Pulse). It essentially flashes the icons of spells and items whose cooldowns have elapsed and are ready to use again. I was so enamored with this idea that I installed it myself for last night’s ZA run. I found it especially helpful for keeping track of my Swiftmend, Nature’s Swiftness, and Innervate cooldowns.
Thank you, Ammeli, for being willing to share this video with the rest of us, particularly those of us who may never see the fight for ourselves! Also, thank you for not subjecting us to a horrible, speed metal soundtrack (I love the music chosen for this video).
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
/cry I love you, ty for everything.
council is one of my favorite fight in BT, and one where resto droods can really make a difference.
I personnally will use healing touch combined with nature’s swiftness only.
I use regrowth a lot during the fight and will use rouglhy 5 mana pots and 2 innervates. its usually me and a priest on the paladin tank and i still manage to use a lot fo rejuv on poisoned people and the ones that get hit by the aoe. I keep a rejuv, lifebloon x3 and a regrowth on the MT at all time and swiftmend is around 10% of my total healing for the fight.
ToL is out of the question due to the aoe, you have to constantly be ready to move/jump out of the aoe the entire fight, another reason why droods are perfect for the fight.
Thsi fight was made for us.
A few things:
First of all, I was ridiculously amused that you actually used my summary, nevermind that you used it almost word-for-word. Thanks for my little moment of bosskiller-fame, there.
Additionally, I am continually perplexed at how often HT is still utilized while using a ToL build. For Council, we always have a druid assisting MT healing, but he’s also currently specced for massive, haste-driven, down-ranked healing touches–our current tree druid focuses almost entirely on raid healing. That being said, the real strength of a resto druid in this particular fight (barring restrictions based on raid makeup, available classes, etc.) is topping off the raid. Leave the MT healing to the paladins and priests. When I was resto, I ended up running all over the room dodging AOE so that I could make sure everyone taking damage had the appropriate HoT (a Rejuv + Swiftmend is particularly kick ass for mitigating the poison damage, p.s.). It was pretty mana intensive; I always used at least one innervate and generally used a Super Mana potion every time it was available. I do find it pertinent to note that this was A) before the SPI changes B) while I had a strange mish-mash of haste/tree gear C) before I dropped Boar’s Speed onto my boots.
Boar’s Speed is really helpful as a tree, period. There are a few fights in both BT and Hyjal in which being movement impaired (LOL DRAGGIN’ UR ROOTS AROUND) would get you killed; thus, running around as a tree isn’t conducive to living. If you’re geared and specced for ToL then you realize how insanely mana inefficient you are (or used to be, pre 2.4) out of ToL. Yeah. Throwing Boar’s Speed on the ol’ boots gives a little spin to your roots and allows a movement speed much closer to normal, much more acceptable for quickly ducking out of AOE.
Yeah, that’s about it. I also don’t think I could deal with having anything ELSE flashing across my screen during a particular encounter; X-Perl provides a convenient “Cooldown Timer” that nestles in the upper right hand corner of my screen and lets me know when all the important shit is ready to rock. Then again, this is the person who still hasn’t fixed SCT properly.
Hey everyone, hope you like the vid. This Council fight is especially long, as we lost like 5 DPS to the “the people who aren’t smart enough to run out of it immediately” thing. Guess we got rusty.
, other than that, hope you enjoy it, i´ll be posting more and more REsto PoVs on my http://www.filefront.com/baerinho page, jsut uploaded Illidan, Kalecgos i just need render.
That Ghost Pulse add is nice. I tried it out, and I like it.
Fantastic article, and video as well.
I’d contribute something more but I’m mesmerized by the music in the vid! What are the names of those tracks? 
@ Slipper: The 1st Track is “Moby – Extreme Ways(Bourne Ultimatum Remix) from the Bourne Ultimatum Soundtrack, the 2nd song is “Feist-my_moon_my_man_boys_noize_remix”
Thx for the positive feedback btw
Hmm, you seem to have left out the Mage, Nethermancer Zerevor. He’s quite uninteresting from a healing perspective, though. The mage tank (such as myself) will spellsteal his Dampen Magic, which cuts down the incoming damage to the mage tank to quite manageable 1881 dps (at most). While the mage tank will occassionally get hit by the rogue’s poisons, Flamestrike or Blizzard, the Dampen Magic also works on them, so there isn’t any major damage spikes you need to worry about. As long as your mage tank is awake, one healer is more than enough to keep him alive. Since the mage tank will be wearing stamina gear, you even have time to dodge the occassional Flamestrikes, Blizzards and Envenoms.
We manage 1st kill last week. Foking nice fight
Best for healers, to show their skillz 
Isn’t the Illidari Council a perfect example of a fight, where resto druids excel with rolling 4×3 Lifeblooms on all four tanks? With a potential of 4000 HP/S ticking every second, stabilizating tanks health pools instead of using precious time for spamming HT ?
In theory yes BUT, that would mean you would have to stay in the range of all for tanks, while flamestrikes, consecration, Holy Fires, Blizzards, and the Rogues attacks out of stealth will harass you all the time(staying in such an AOE is about 4000dmg/tick, so staying in range of all the tanks is quite impossible.
We have them on farm since December, and its still one of the fights where you can wipe quite easily, be it to random holyfire+rogue on you deaths, Hunters Arcane shotting the Dampen Magic of the mage before your magetank can spellsteal it(happened twice to us…). We simply keep one healer per Add tank, 2-3 Healers on the Paladin Tank +2x raidhealers(and the one healing the rogue tank is 50% of the time also raidhealer(rogue is vanished for half of the time)
Overall its one of the more challenging fights for healers,
but wait till i upload Kalecgos and Brutalus. If we lack mages to decurse, and i need to decurse AND heal, Kalecgos is by FAR, and i really mean FAAAAAR the hardest fight i have ever encoutnered in this game for myself.
Dear sprouts,
yes, the Council is a fight where resto can shoot a massive amount of healing.
In fact, me and my colleague perform a superb task here.
Btw, i’m really dazed when someone is speaking od HT… We NEVER use it at the Council, and in the whole BT.
Usually i’m healing the rogue tank in the left side of the room, keeping an eye at the priest tank near the entrance, mainly healed by a pally.
To smooth spikes I use Regrowth over the two guys, and recover easily spamming Lifebloom/Rejuv over the second tank when the rogue vanish. I can spot sometimes toward the rest of the group spamming single lifeblooms, easily avoiding AoE damage.
Thats all, absolutely no needs of HT; 2 Innervate (sometimes one to a priest if in need) and 4 mana pots (sometimes the unvaluable Night Dragon Breath is a must).
Cya,
Nevelatte – EU – Crushridge
@Shalkis
That’s weird; I swear I mentioned something about how we have a mage tank…the mage. We do the the BoP/blink trick and then have all the other tanks pull their respective targets to their respective positions.
@Ammeli
If you’re having the occasional hunter Arcane Shot issue going on, I recommend doing what we do: don’t put any DPS on the mage. Our DPS is focused solely on the paladin and the priest, and since they all share health, they all go down pretty damn quickly. We keep the mage over to the far left, rogue in the middle, priest up on the platform, and paladin to the far right. It’s been working out pretty well for awhile now. I’d also have to agree that Kalec is a very unfriendly resto-druid fight. Our Moonglow healer has a far easier time of it than our tree. We had to delegate all decursing (primarily) to the mages; our druids decursed when they ABSOLUTELY had to, but beyond that, it was too much to take him/her away from healing. I got to DPS, lulz. It’s a pretty fun fight for a feral druid who isn’t tanking; I get to wreck meters. How do you stack your dr00ds for Brut? We just have them healing burn victims, and it works out amazingly well.
@Keeper
Well, since you only really need one healer on every tank save the paladin tank, I’d say that the necessity for rolling blooms on each tank is usually unnecessary, especially since there’s a lot of raid spike damage going on; sort of blows your timers. I do think that it’s especially useful to make sure there are rolling HoTs on the paladin tank. There still should be absolutely zero reason to use HT unless it’s in conjunction with NS–or if you’re specced for Dreamstate.
Wow. Well, whatever works for you I suppose, but I can’t believe that you’re using a druid for this on IC unless you have an over-abundance of druids.
I stand in the centre of the room and I can roll on three of the tanks at once, and sometimes the rogue tank too although he’s running all over the place. When the rogue tank is out of range I cat pitch in a rejuv/lifebloom for raid healing, or put a rejuv on one of the tanks along with the lifebloom stack. WWS from IC last night records me having done 875,000 effective healing over almost exactly 10 minutes which is ~26% of the total healing done and there’s no way you’re getting anywhere close to that throughput by primarily focusing on a single target and cast-canceling HT. On top of that I’m much more mana efficient – I can innervate and use the occasional potion if I have no shadow priest, and with a shadow priest I give him my innervate and I can pretty much keep healing indefinitely.
Ailetha, you win at Raiding but sadly fail at Humanity. Try harder to not come across as an arrogant, elitist asshat and people might read further than your first “l2p”.
I’m not really sure what to say, as I didn’t really read through all of the comments. I had some of the comments highlighted to me through a private message on our boards, and the only question I have is, “ARE YOU SERIOUS?”. Resto druids rock the kalecgos fight, and TOL rocks the council fight. Learn to move. There is a reason your guild just downed IC. If you can’t move out of AOE in TOL form, please delete your toon and make a nightelf hunter. You should not be playing this game. Also, without giving away our WWS Parses and our setup and strats, we have a priest and druid heal the MT. The druid in TOL form. If you can’t keep the MT up with just your hots and regrowth, I repeat DELETE YOUR TOON, and roll a nightelf hunter. This site is normally very good for information, but this thread is full of garbage and any end game raiding druid who would say this information is spot on is retarded.
Hint for Kalecgos, keep your group up and your rogue up. Lifebloom ftw. It blooms just as you get back to the first person in your group. Jesus, a thread like this isn’t what I wanted to wake up to.
Meanee
Pure-Antonidas
@Ailetha: I try to avoid censoring any (non-Spam) comments that come across here, but I no longer even flinch at clicking the delete button when it comes to your “contributions.” If you need so desperately to tear others down, get your own forum for doing so. I won’t tolerate it here.
@Meanee: While I can’t speak to how “our” guild does things (my guild is no where near Black Temple), I think that Ammeli’s guild’s strategy is obviously working for them. They did, after all, complete the encounter. Perhaps you and your guild have found something that works better for you, but I don’t think people should be rerolling Night Elf Hunters. (And hey, what is your problem with Night Elves? ^_^) I’m not sure if Ailetha’s vitriol has encouraged others to feel like random insults are somehow okay here, but they aren’t. Please feel free to share your constructive critique without them, though. =)
A few things, because apparently people don’t know how to read properly before spewing off crap:
Phae posted this “article” to give people a little bit of a different perspective since there are a lot of folks who’ll never make it into BT, period. While I don’t necessarily agree at all with the strategy utilized in the video, they did down Council, and who are we to patronize them for that?
Secondly, I myself was speaking from experience; we had far better luck on Kalecgos using CoH priests than we did with restoration druids–that’s how we did it. Whether that means our druids aren’t as omg-super-awesome as whoever you’re playing with, great, so be it, but that was our strat based on our general raid make up. When I complained about movement speed in ToL form, apparently everyone glossed over the fact that I said Boar’s Speed helps out with that.
And for the record, Sing hasn’t had any trouble with Kalecgos or Brutallus, for that matter. We’re working on Felmyst right now too, and I’m sure by the time the week’s out, her corpse will be slung over the banner on our main page. Grats, you’re not the only ones who know how to succeed. Get off your high horses and realize that the people here are speaking from experience, whether or not it’s the same “experience” you might have too.
And I’m a feral druid. I tank.
Ohohoh havent seen so much drama here, and i dont really feel well causing it….
One thing this discussion shows is how flexible we resto druids are at what we do
Me maintank healing on council has several resons that might work for our guild and myself, and mot for others, you never know, but here are few reasons behind our decision to put me on the Tank:
-Might be cause we have some nubcakes, but we felt that a lifebloom might be to slow to raidheal since the dmg to the raid is kinda “spikey”, so we always have shamans chainheal to keep up the raid.
-over the Time of raiding through whole TBC content we(and i guess every guild) establisahed some kid of routines, and when we started i was still raiding on a mage, leaving us without a resto druid, so shamans did the raidheal(or priests with CoH in fights like Bloodboil) and we stuck with that(i started raiding on the Druid about 1 week after kael was down.
-abundance of Paladins, we never ever have enough Paladins, leaving us with other choices to heal tanks
-it works for us, simple as that, we killed Council like 6 months ago the 1st time, and you sitck to what works.
Oh, and @ Runycat:
WE realyl cant “stack” anybody for any fights, as we only take whats there(about 11 active raiding healers, whos there joins(we riad”only” 3 days a week, very casual guild).
For Brtualus we go with me in tree stacking HoTs on tank and Healing Burn, soaking groups done by Spriest, try to have many Shamans/priest with Armor Buff on tanks.
And yes, Kalecgos fight is brutal “if” i have to decurse. Luckily we have kinda enoguh mages so i dont have to worry that much about it.
Just my two cents to throw in here…I know it’s opinion, but I think you’re severely hampering the utility you get from your druids in this fight by going with HT. When I heal this fight, I am primary healer for both the rogue and priest tank, and keep a LB stack up on the Pally tank as well whenever I can keep him in range. We have a COH priest devoted to raid healing who helps pick up the heals on the rogue/priest tanks if it looks like I need it. I stay in ToL the entire time (and I haven’t gotten around to Boar’s Speed yet). I generally finish the fight with around 70% of the healing on the priest/rogue tanks and 35% of the healing on the pally tank.
This is often regarded as THE druid healing fight of BC (personally, I put Akama up there too since we run it with 4 tanks). This is a fight where our ability to hot multiple tanks allows us to absolutely blow other healers out of the water, and if you’re spamming HT you’re missing a golden opportunity. It might work, but it is undoubtedly (imo) less efficient and not optimized for the fight. Druids more so than any other healer need to fill their niche roll and be utilized properly to earn their raid spots. The way Ammeli is being used, well, the ‘poor man’s pally’ argument comes to mind.
Edit: I do agree with you though Ammeli. We are even less suited to raid healing. Druids are too slow to reactively heal on a fight with this kind of burst potential that can hit anyone in the raid, so at least you’re better off with pre-cast HTs than reactive LBs that are going to take 7 seconds to top off low raid members.
Edit Again: Haha…you updated the post above me! Given that you’re short pallies to begin with the HT thing doesn’t seem nearly as bad now. But I’d just caution that people who read this guide should be aware that was a factor in determining heal assignments.
@Kalaghan:
That video was made when we had one Paladin in the raid, and he was retri
The Illidan video will be even without a pala
@ Meanee: I feel sorry for you, enjoy your travels in the world of azeroth. And please keep you secret uber strat and WWs parse to yourself, we are not worthy.
Seriously, after the first sentence of your comment I felt I had somehow been transported to the WoW forum garbage dump. One reason I read this blog often is because it is well written and constructive, you my friend have spoiled this thread with your foul comments.
(p.s.: I was able to do 35% of the healing on IC without ToL)
@ Ammeli: While I understand your strat of using HT, I strongly suggest using regrowth combined with a rejuv and/or lifebloom, the return is going to be equivalent if not bigger depending on your spell crit and will leave you with more time and mana to raid heal also.
Also, do you have 60 points in Resto to make your HT more powerful if you are going to use it?
@Falina: Seems you watched the video in stream only
I am having 3x rolling Lifebloom on the tank 100% of the fight, i keep Rejuvenation up nearly 100%, AND i use regrowth in this fight, the points of me Precasting R10 HT INBETWEEN refreshing those 3 hots(and very very rarely letting LB run out) is that only those 3 + the healing from the only other healer on the tank, in this case the priest, wouldnt be neough to keep the tank up.
So, while i understand different opinions about how a resto druid should be used in this fight, if i am assigned to heal the Maintank, and ONLY the maintank, i think i did the best possible job, stacking all hots and precasting HT between LB timers.
The only thing i noticed when watchign this video was that i wasnt using Swiftmend to its best potential all teh time
And yes, i am specced 0/0/61, and this is one of the very very rare fights you see me using HT.
Had a great time on Council myself. We killed Shahraz this week and headed right over and downed Council that night too.
Our positioning allowed me to pretty much roll Blooms on the Mage, Priest, and Paladin tanks, and use my free GCD to raid heal or assist on the Rogue tank.
I pretty much broke the healing meters. I didn’t have much trouble dodging anything and staying in range as long as other people don’t stack on you.
The design of the fight lends itself amazingly well to resto druid healing meters cheesing.
Ammeli, I don’t think anyone (well ok, most people) are saying you did a bad job. I just think that unless you were the 3rd or 4th resto druid in the raid then you weren’t being used to your fullest. Three of the four tanks are taking consistent incoming damage, and the 4th is taking consistent incoming damage about half the time. This fight is tailor-made for a resto druid to be rolling on multiple tanks and you can put out amazing HPS while doing so while remaining very mana efficient.
3k overheal to open???
3k overheal to open, yes, so i have all 3 hots stacked before i move to my position I dont care about the mana as i ahve more than enough.
Ammeli, I really liked your UI set-up. If you wouldn’t mind could you please tell use what mods/UI you use for healing?
yes, i am, too interested in your UI setup, as i recently got a new computer, and, thus need new mods, i know a few are mappy and grid, that you have, but what are the others?