Blackwing Lair

While I was traveling last weekend, my guild killed Razorgore the Untamed in Blackwing Lair for the first time. So when the guild went to BWL again last night, I took my Horde priest to go with them. I don't really like the Razorgore fight, the healing isn't all that challenging. As a priest you just stand there and pray that the crowd control works out and nobody messes up. After a couple of tries we succeeded. Yay, my first Razorgore kill! On to Vael.

Now Vaelastrasz the Corrupt I found more interesting to fight. You only have 3 minutes to bring him down, but you have unlimited mana to do so. You are constantly receiving fire damage, and when you get to the top of his hate list he turns you into a bomb, a bit like Baron Geddon. Now the conventional wisdom says that a priest should cast Prayer of Healing, Fade, and shield himself. I did that for 4 tries, and found that the disadvantage was that it was hard not to pull aggro from Vael that way, because Prayer of Healing heals a lot of points. And I never had time to deal any damage to Vael, which was annoying when we wiped on the 4th try with Vael at 1%.

So I decided to try something new: I spammed Holy Nova. With my gear Holy Nova heals about 300 points per group member and second, not that much worse than the 420 health per group member and second I get out of Prayer of Healing. And the big advantages were that Holy Nova doesn't cause any aggro, I didn't need to Fade or shield, and I did some damage to Vael with it. Not a huge amount, but every bit counts. I had to occasionally cast a Greater Heal on a group member who got more damaged than the others. But other than that the Holy Nova strategy worked like a charm. Not only did we kill Vael, but me and most members of my group were among the last ones standing when he did.

So my guild had their first Vael kill the week after the first Razorgore kill. Rumors that Vael would take us another couple of weeks after Razorgore is down turned out to be unfounded. My personal impression was that the Razorgore fight is more about crowd control skill, while in the Vael fight the fire resistance gear plays a prominent role. Well, I got over 200 FR without the shamans FR totem, so standing right next to Vael and healing a melee group wasn't a problem.

I didn't get any loot, but that wasn't a problem. The tier 2 armor dropping in BWL isn't a huge upgrade from the Molten Core tier 1 set, it basically only has a bit more healing bonus. It would be nice to get 3 pieces, because the set bonus of the Transcendence set is much better than that of the Prophecy set. But it isn't that I'd feel gimped if I "only" ran around in Prophecy. The non-set items that Razorgore and Vael drop are all worse than what I have, or just too minimally better to spend my DKP on them.