Healing in lower Karazhan

With jagerbombz and Anna's sage words of wisdom ringing in my ears, Kam stepped into Karazhan as healer for the first time. Oh gods.


Luckily Kam was paired with a fairly uber resto druid and had at least seen the fights before, so I knew what to expect. Still, it was a nerve-racking experience.

• Attumen. The approach to Attumen was fine and the fight itself was very straightforward. Kam was assigned to heal the Off Tank and during the mounted phase did pretty much nothing except cancel heals.
  
• Moroes. The trash before Moroes was interesting; the packs required spotting which AOE-capable DPSer would be pulling the threat and tanking (hint: Boomkin), then earthshielding them and keeping up a mixture of healing wave, lesser healing wave when they took lots of damage, and chain heal when others needed a top up. Crazy boomkins.
  
  
  The Moroes fight itself was the stuff of my nightmares - the garrottes do 360 damage per second so frantic chain healing and lesser healing wave was needed to keep everyone alive. The off tank was garrotted but didn't call it out, so he suddenly died. Luckily Moroes was almost dead and was swiftly killed.
  
• Opera: Big Bad Wolf. The trash up to Opera was again fine, the Boomkin had an earth shield and Kam's full attention for the packs. The Wolf fight itself was fairly straightforward - following the guides above Little Red Riding Hood got an earth shield and lesser healing wave spammed onto them. Generally they survived too, which is always nice (sorry Honeydew).
  
• Curator. The approach to Curator was not smooth, more like mildly lumpy. The raid was unable to cope with 3 of the Ghastly Haunts by the back door - a single Haunt does a load of damage, never mind 3. We were also unable to cope with 2 packs of arcane creatures in the Menagerie at once. As you can tell, there was much ninja pulling.
  
  
  The ninja pulling included the Curator himself, who attacked a player who strayed too close, causing us to hastily form a U shape and Ablaze the mage to sling on what arcane resistance gear he could to soak. Healing on the Curator was very mana intensive - DPSers were taking damage from sparks and the melee who were chasing them took the brunt of it. Luckily chain heal is an awesome spell and with druid HoTs on everyone we managed to kill Curator.
  
• Maiden. After the heart-attack that was Curator, the raid moved onto an easier target, most illegally it turns out. Somewhere in our long forgotten raid forum lies a post describing how Maiden is to be left for the second or third raid night, but we erm forgot about that.
  
  
  The trash up to Maiden only became tricky when the Phantom Guardsmen summoned two Phantom Hounds which promptly attacked the healers. Kam still uses a shield so he has a decent amount of armour and can tank a hound for a while, our resto tree druid isn't so lucky and is quite squishie; I had to be alert for her taking damage and be ready with the lesser healing wave to help out.
  
  
  The Maiden fight itself proved tricky; during the Repentance stun we had an earth shield and druid HoT on the tank, but it was not enough to keep him alive, so a few wipes resulted. Eventually we got the tank to drag maiden over to us to break us out of repentance so we could carry on healing and the Maiden was killed.
  

The loots were the Dragon-Quake Shoulderguards, an improvement over Kam's old PvP shoulders, plus some loot no one wanted for off spec. Healing Karazhan is scary!