Benea

It's a judgement call for healers. I usually am not a full time tank healer (I heal the raid, then tank) so I heal the tank and keep an eye out on the raid that's in range, usually I'm aware of what they're doing, if they're cursed, or burning, then I switch to heal them rather than the tank. I've stood in doomfire before (temporarily since that stuff hurts) and popped healing trinkets and spammed bind heal to keep the tank up. All of our healers have done that, and as long as you're sure that you're not looping the fire (for example run across a doomfire wall to get to tank healing range, NOT running back to tank healing range while the fire is following you), it's fine. You have to be darn sure you're not going to die while you do that though =p

With the group strategy, we usually have 2 healers (1 heals tank, other heals group and tank), 1 decurser, and 1 shaman (if you have enough to go around). You run as a group unit from doomfire, or at least each group member must be within decurse and heal range of their other group members. You get airbursted together but shouldn't be a problem if people are good about the tears. If people are good about kiting hardly anybody will have doomfire anyway and thus won't be half life during/if any airburst happens. You can survive people dying as long as 1. they die one at a time 2. it's not the tank that died. The only dangerous soul charge is the one with the silence, all the others are healable/recoverable. If a decurser dies, the decurser on the groups next to them can cover them easily. We don't really clump tightly per se, it's more like a loose clump (you can still tell each group apart but we're not close enough to pinch each others behind =P ) We did it last night with quite a few new people who've never been to arch, they did pretty much exactly as we told them and they did fine. edit: I forgot, our melee group is usually 3 melee, 1 resto druid, 1 shaman in this fight. Druid heals and decurses the melee. We give the melee group tremor totem priority so they don't get doomfired every time Arch fears. Also, if you start having problems with the fire going up the back hill (behind your tank) and looping all over creation, you can tank him pretty much where he stands initially (maybe a few yards closer to the back hill but not a lot). Another note is that if you hit trees you get this delay in falling closer to the ground, your tear effects fall off...and you fall to your death. Watch out for the damned trees =P

Arch note I'd consider the most impt: Doomfire will pick a target, follow that person, then randomly switch to another person. It will usually switch to someone close to that person, and if no one is near the last kiter/target, it will switch to some random person who might be on the other side of the field and the fire will loop around everywhere =P We used the 5 group strat, 4 groups separated, melee group behind arch (take care not to be close to tank or tank might get airbursted when melee get it). If you get doomfire, turn 180 degrees and run in a straight line away from arch. Don't strafe, don't stop running away until that line of fire has stopped moving. Most mistakes happen with seeing the fire next to you following another person, and not moving, or running away, then seeing the fire transfer to another person, you run back to position, in which case the fire will probably transfer to you again and you've now looped it back to the raid. This fight is about movement, falling damage nublets, decursing, and keeping yourself alive. Mages should never die in this fight, ours were just blinking to the ground >< Undead priests will never get feared in this fight (between wotf, pvp trinket, and fear ward) so they can cover the tank with hots once the fear timer is up, and during fear they have to tank heal. Levitate and feather fall is nice, but keep in mind, if you are burning to doomfire, or decursing was slow and you still have a curse while airbursted, the damage will break your levitate, and you will die from the fall damage. Just practice with the tears, then augment it with your levitate/feather fall. Holler if you have any questions, and good luck

For strictly pve, I suggest a priority of healing > spirit > stamina (but focus on all 3 when able). You will accumulate intellect naturally. Mp5 stacking priests died with the advent of patch 2.4. Also, your talent spec make me die a little inside =P

Unsolicited 2 cp: With 8 healers, and depending on the class composition, I'd assign 2 healers for raid healing (preferably resto druid or priest), the rest to MT/OT primary and secondary to raid. The paladins are always on MT/OT, everyone needs to stop healing the raid in general at 7-8 growths and just concentrate on the MT/OT. I usually end up as the unfortunate holy priest to heal the whole raid (since we run dps heavy at times), and I run laps around the room hitting everyone with hots The raid in general needs to learn to take as little damage as possible as stated by someone above. If you get 2 ticks with cave in, you get yelled at by me ^_^ (since you're usually dead). For shatter, a good way for me to avoid damage, is to turn on friendly name plates--if you don't see them on top of your raidmates, you won't die. You can move while in the air direction wise, so having the camera distance placed on max (under video or interface options I think) helps a lot. Oh yeah, what usually gives us trouble is the silence. At high growth numbers he hits really hard, and the timer for the silence is fubar'ed for us for some reason. We just try to stack up the hots when the timer gets close on the MT/OT.

From my experience and by no means a hard rule, I'm sure lots of other combinations are possible: From attunmen to curator: 2 tanks or 1 pure tank/1 hybrid tank is ideal (feral druids <3), 2 healing spec'ed healers minimum, 2 healing spec and 1 hybrid healer (shadow priest, enhance/elemental shaman, sorry no lolretpally ;p) is ideal, the rest dps. Past Curator it becomes a little more unforgiving and depending on the strength of the dps, you might have to take another hybrid healer with you.

/unlurk Once I get a tank I can usually fill the group pretty quickly. I'll hit you up sometime. /lurk (Be forewarned we don't usually do things the usual way, for example, we pull packs from the ogre room in SL regular and aoe them. Or aoe most of regular SH...) P.S. Are you revered anywhere in bc factions?