It has come to my attention that on the PTR, there is no longer a requirement for every member of a raid to have their Magister’s Key to enter into Kara.

Why, oh why are people complaining about this?  Here’s a quote from the Blizz Forums

Screw people and their alts. If you wanted to help out players and their alts, you’d make things account-wide. (Including Badges.) Removing the Kara requirement just means that as a whole, we’ll see three times as many crappy guilds recruiting for Kara and what few good players there are being snapped up by them. 

I mean seriously, the good players will not stay in bad guilds for long. It just doesn’t happen. If I were to for some reason, leave the guild of which I am an officer, and join another guild only to find out that it is made up completely of people who cannot play, I’d /gquit and find a real guild.

People don’t look at the larger picture. As soon as RotLK comes out, Kara will be about as useful as UBRS is now. It’s a nice place to grab some XP, but does anyone take it seriously anymore?

One quote I found rather poignant was this one.

people will be farming badges after 2.4 where is the best spot to do this?

It strikes a chord, but it’s still not exactly right. Sure, My alt will have a great time running through Kara with the A team, gearing up and getting free badges every week, but Would it be that difficult to run 5 instances before Getting into Kara? I think not.

So, why, if not the easy badge farming is Blizz making this change? The same reason that they removed the SSC and TK chains, and they’re removing the MH and BT attunement. Get more people into the content that they made, before it is obsolete.

How many millions of players never got to see Naxx? They don’t want to make that mistake again.

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This is the first in my series of Healing Strats, I’ll most likely be doing one of these posts once or twice a week, so as not to bore you with weeks straight of nothing but healing strats.  For people who use this. please post feedback to see if it’s working for you! Please!

High King Maulgar

High King is the first boss in Gruul’s lair. He’s one of two, the other being Gruul himself. The fight is rather daunting the first time you come up against him. Even after reading strats and watching videos it’s a hard fight to get right the first time. So, You’ll probably wipe a few times before you get the pull right.

That’s not really our concern though, Our concern is what to do once you’ve gotten the boss and his adds pulled. High King comes with 4 adds, which all need attention in some way or another, which means some sort of “tank” healing for 5 targets, and raid healing as well. Let’s go over the adds and their tanks really quick, so we know what we’ll be healing.

Krosh Firehand
Krosh needs to be “tanked” by a mage with at least 10k HP, who will spell steal Krosh’s Flame Ward Shield.

High King Maulgar

A single tank with at least 15k HP.

Kiggler the Crazed

Either a Druid for Polymorph immunity or 2 Hunters switching off.

Blindeye the Seer

A single Tank

Olm the Summoner

Strangely enough, a Warlock… Enslaving a pet to do damage on the boss, and another tank class.

This tells us we have 3 conventional tanks to heal, a “mage tank”, a “boomkin tank”, or 2 “hunter tanks”, and a “Warlock tank”, plus the raid. How many healers will we need? One healer for Krosh, One for Kiggler, One for Olm, One for Blindeye, 2 for High King himself, and one on the raid. That’s 7 healers, at least. Some groups put 2 on Krosh, or Kiggler, or add a raid healer.

So let’s look at specifics. Again, this may not work for your raid group, but we’ve found it works well for us.

First off, is Blindeye. He dies very fast, and does almost 0 damage. Make sure to focus on his tank, but be ready to swap off to heal any of the other tanks or the raid. Any healer can do this job well, Any class that can heal – even if not specced for it – can do this job, but I’d only suggest a feral druid if you need to go down that route. You’d be wasting mana for anyone else.

Next There’s the Mage tank. He’ll be taking lots of spike damage. Healing him to full is a priority. We’ve gone a few different ways with this. The first option we use on this tank is a Druid. Keeping Lifebloom up constantly, with rejuv and regrowth when needed. You will need to Swiftmend after spike damage. You may even need to Nature’s Swiftness/Regrowth/Rejuv/Swiftmend, depending on your mage’s HP and your +healing. When I started healing the Mage tank I had about 1500+healing fully buffed. So anyone in Kara Gear should do fine. The second option we use is a Pally. Those huge heals a Pally can throw out fill the HP bar every time, and he can fill in with smaller heals when needed. If your guild wants to use two healers on the mage tank, a Druid and Pally are a great team.

For Olm, one healer should be sufficient. Heal the tank, and the enslaved pet. Be ready to heal the Warlock if the pet gets loose, he’ll have Aggro from the pet. A Priest or Paladin works best for us here, they have some great heals to soak up that damage.

Kiggler, is a little tougher, because he’s the last add killed usually, but a single well geared healer should be sufficient. Once again, we usually use a Pally here, but any healer can do it. Kiggler should go down shortly after Olm and Krosh, but make sure someone knows to stay nearby to help out on his tank.

Now for Maulgar. His team starts out small and grows as the adds go down. We usually start him off with a Druid and a Priest. HoTs HoTs HoTs! Lifebloom, Rejuv, Renew, should be enough for the first part of the fight, with larger heals thrown in when needed. Once Your raid has Olm and Krosh down their healers should all come to the Maulgar tank. Once Maulgar gets to 50% you’ll have to be very aware of his Intimidating shout. This’ll stun the MT, and another tank will have to Taunt him over, and you’ll have to change healing targets. One of your member should also be healing anyone who gets charged.

Last but not least, Raid healing. Chain heal FTW! This is where we let our Shammies shine. One or two, it usually doesn’t matter for us. Make sure that chain heal is hitting as many people possible.

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