Resto Shaman vs Rage Winterchill - A Healing Guide
Posted on August 27, 2008 - Filed Under Guides, Healing, Raiding, Shaman
This is one in a series of posts covering resto-shaman-specific information for tier4 and tier5 Burning Crusade boss fights. It will NOT be a boss kill strategy, rather a list of tips and tricks for your friendly neighborhood shaman to make these fights run a little more smoothly.
Previous guides for Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, SSC, and TK: The Eye can be found here.
Welcome to Mount Hyjal - where the bosses are bad and the trash is… different. Your raid has likely killed 3/4 and 5/6 in tier 5 - possibly even downed Kael and Vashj as well. Likely, Rage Winterchill will be your first steps into tier 6 content.
Winterchill is a Lich - a powerful undead sorcerer corrupted from a previously living body - often a necromancer. This fight will be as much about learning to manage the trash as it will be about actually working on the boss, so be prepared to be patient.
Winterchill Basics
- First - a moment about the trash. All of the trash in Hyjal is done gauntlet style. You have between 90 seconds and 3 minutes (depending on the wave) to complete each of 8 waves before each boss. The waves of trash get harder as you get closer to the boss, and as you progress deeper into Hyjal. If you wipe on the trash OR the boss, you start the entire event over again. (The only exception to this is Archimonde, who has no trash, and therefore resets like any other boss)
- As soon as you kill the last mob in wave 8, the boss will spawn.
- The Winterchill fight has only one phase - it will be consistent from beginning to end.
- Rage has a 10 minute enrage timer - this fight is technically a DPS race - can you kill him before he picks off too many of your raid members to go on?
- As expected for a powerful sorcerer, his melee attacks aren’t too scary ( around 3K on plate), but his spell attacks are NASTY
- There are two major attacks that you’ll need to watch out for:
- Icebolt - instant cast on a random target, hits for 5K or more, and has a freeze debuff that ticks at 2500 damage per second for 4 seconds. This. Thing. Hurts. Healers with a fast cast time spell (paladin flash of light, priest flash heal, shaman lesser healing wave) will be assigned to target Winterchill and watch who HE’s targeting like a hawk. Just before he icebolts, he’ll briefly target the player intended for the spell, and the bolt-healers will then spam quick heals on that player.
- Death and Decay - 10 second, 20 yard AOE centered on a random raid member. It deals 15% of max health as damage every second to any player in range. Yes - that means 150% of max health over 10 seconds. If you stand in it, YOU WILL DIE. It looks like little patches of faint red mist on the ground (you may have to turn spell effects/distance up to see it). Because of this ability, the raid must be spread out to minimize the number of people affected by Death and Decay at any time.
- He also does a frost nova that will hit melee. It’s pretty trivial.
Group Considerations: Nothing special on this one. Go with your standard group - but be aware of totem range. Hyjal is a BIG place, and Death and Decay means people will be scrambling.
totems, Totems, TOTEMS!: a Frost Resistance totem is nice to help with the Icebolt damage, otherwise, whatever is appropriate for your group
Earthshield: The tank.
Heroism/Bloodlust?: Either when called for or at 25(ish)%. There is some validity to using heroism early on in this fight, if your raid has a tendency to lose people to Icebolts and your tank doesn’t have a TPS problem.
Don’t stand in the: Death and Decay. Really. Don’t stand in it. It can be hard to see, so watch out for it (raid warnings are good!). If you see it, don’t finish casting. Don’t drop a totem. Pick up your shiny blue arse (or your brown/green one, if you’re a horde sort) and MOVE.
Shaman Friendly or Unfriendly: I’m going to go with unfriendly on this one. Lesser Healing Wave is mana intensive and not very healing efficient, making it the least good choice for an icebolt healer - but shamans also often start having some haste gear around this time (through gems and Z’A gear), which can help your LHW be the first heal to hit an icebolted person. Chain heal is nice for taking care of frost-nova’d melee, but that’s not going to be a big issue. Because of Death and Decay, you’ll have a hard time keeping everyone in your group in range of the totems, and you’ll have a hard time using chain heal effectively.
Fortunately, he drops some tasty mail healing bracers. Woo!
Other stuff:
- This boss, like the other bosses in Hyjal (except Archimonde) is linked to the trash. If you wipe on the boss, you get to do the trash again.
- If you die on the trash waves, and it’s earlier than wave 6, you can run back from the graveyard and save some healer-mana in between pulls.
- Be very careful with healing aggro before your AOE tank has a chance to really nail down the mobs. If you drop a big chain heal that hits three people, you may have an abomination in your face.
- If you have a PVP trinket, it WILL remove the Icebolt debuff, as will a paladin bubble.
- Watch for Death and Decay on the melee - he will do it, and chain heal is really nice for keeping them alive until it goes away.
- Winterchill also drops the Time-Phased Phylactery, a quest item in the Black Temple Attunement chain, which you should do, even if you don’t need the attunement, for the Medallion of Karabor - Shadow Resistance is VERRA NICE in some of the later Hyjal fights, and absolutely *essential* in Black Temple.
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5 Responses to “Resto Shaman vs Rage Winterchill - A Healing Guide”
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Actually, they hotfixed it relatively recently, and the PvP trinket no longer works on the Icebolt.
It is still useful for Archimonde though!
A very nice guide to see considering we are starting Hyjal in my guild within the week….
.. and I’m a Resto Shaman….
.. and I often lead healers …
.. and I am also a RL…
Thanks a bunch!
and btw, I will be linking the strategery page in my guild’s raid healing forums if that’s alright?
Absolutely - I’m more than happy to have people link to the various guides. That’s why they’re there! And, aside from some shaman specific stuff, they’re pretty solid for other healers as well (at least, that’s what I’m going for!)
You might also check out “Filling in as Healer Lead” (though most of it you probably know if you’ve done it for awhile)
The PVP trinket doesn’t work for Rage anymore? I’m pretty certain it worked for our raid this past weekend. I didn’t get icebolted myself so can’t say for certain, but I’m sure I would have heard many outraged cries if it failed for everyone who got it.
Great post Anna
One thing I might add is that if you are using a rogue or two to Distract Rage (I think the ability is called Distract) to give people more time to mana up etc before engaging the fight then make sure you have pulled up any totems from the trash waves so he doesn’t aggro on to them.