Spiritual Guidance: Controlling heroic Razuvious
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Need help with heroic Razuvious? Matt's here to help!
I've received a lot of emails and requests for help regarding the heroic Razuvious encounter. It's a unique encounter in that Priests have to mind control mobs in order to to tank successfully.
Unless your guild has a team of extremely experienced and talented Mages, then having two Priests on hand is a requirement to be able to do Razuvious.
The first thing I want to emphasize here is this: You don't need hit gear to do the encounter if you're a Priest on Mind Control duty.
Not every guild has the luxury of having two raiding Shadow Priests. Chances are as a healer you're going to have to get into the hot seat and do it yourself. One of my Shadow Priests took an extended break from vacation. This left us with three Priests: 1 Shadow, 1 Discipline, 1 Holy. The other Holy Priest did not want to do it. It was up to me. Here's a few tips I want to share with new Priests who have no idea what expect.
Disable your UI. I had trouble with this initially. I wasn't able to properly release my pet with the current UI configuration I had setup. I simply canned whatever unit frames and resorted to the stock UI in order to manage the MC process. It's not like I would have to heal or anything.
Break your MC intentionally. I've observed Priests who simply let their Mind Controls expire. They try to stretch that Mind Control as long as possible before the students eventually break free. Who do they gun for? That's right, they head straight for the Priest. The reason why Priests get caught off guard is because they're not expecting the Mind Controls to break after 40 or so seconds.
The MC'ing Priest has the ability to break it early. Don't stretch out the MC and let it break on its own. Break your own MC after your student has served its purpose.
After your taunt and bone shield cycle is over, right click on the portrait of the mob and release pet.
Communicate. This is where I notice the difference between good Priests and bad Priests. Bad Priests hardly say anything and expect their partner to intrinsically know. This may be okay in some guilds. But when starting out or when in a pickup group, it's helpful to start talking to the other Priest.
Key phrases:
"I got <shape>"
"Taunting Raz"
"Bone shield is off"
"Releasing <shape>"
I'm assuming that your raid leaders are marking the students with different shapes. By doing this, your tanks know when you plan to MC and when you are releasing the students.
Watch your cooldowns. The one you should pay attention to is Bone Shield. Assuming you're not using any timer or cooldown addons of some sort, you can observe the progress of the cooldown. When you hit Bone Shield and the indicator is at 50%, cue your partner to taunt.
Bring the students to the tank. We set up our tanks in such a way so that there is one on the left side of the room and one on the right side of the room. The students are divided the same way (two on the left, two on the right). When a student is done tanking, it is run over the nearest tank and dropped before snatching up a new one.
Above all, don't panic! Most Priests have never been in a situation where they have had to tank or use their MC in an encounter situation. It's going to take a few wipes and attempts to properly get it right.
Want to find more great tips for carrying out your Priestly duties? Spiritual Guidance has you covered with all there is to know! And don't forget to check out our other Leveling Guides as well as our Wrath Guides and Galleries!
