Late Night Math: Pets, Beacon and Heroic Yor'sahj

Apotheosis (A-25m-2/8HM, seeking casters and a resto shaman! </shamelessplug>) got Heroic Hagara down as a server-first and our next target is Heroic Yor’sahj the Unsleeping.

Assuming holy paladins are in the mix, a popular healing strategy is to beacon the tanks and heal the pets in the raid, because heals from Beacon of Light do not stack Deep Corruption and pets don’t receive stacks of Deep Corruption.

The question came up, the other day, about whether or not a hunter should use a Tenacity pet, who has the Blood of the Rhino talent. Would the lower DPS be worth 40% extra healing to a pet and then, ostensibly, 20% extra healing to the tank through Beacon of Light?

This was a popular strategy back on Valithria Dreamwalker. You would park a turtle or some other Tenacity pet with the same +healing talent basically on top of Dreamwalker or right next to her and you’d heal the pet for extra healing done. Unfortunately, this stopped being viable eventually when they fixed Blood of the Rhino to only affect the pet and no copied heals from that (ie: Beacon of Light).

But that was back in 3.3. Did 4.3 mean this was somehow working again?

I bothered Daey to get on his holy paladin, Saerani, while I was on Kurn and we experimented with him beaconing me and healing my pet. The first pet he healed was my cat, Whisper, who has no +healing talents at all, being a Ferocity pet.

So you can see here that Daey hits Whisper for 55355 (crit). This bounces to me for 27677, which is just half of that heal. (Yeah, I miss 100% Beacon transfers, too!) The same with the 27672 hit, that gets me for half — 13836. That is totally expected. This is the control for the experiment. Now let’s look at Daey healing my bear, Fozzie.

First, note that the non-crit heal hits for 40,102. Based on the heals Whisper got, it’s clear that Fozzie has the Blood of the Rhino talent if it hit him for a 40k non-crit.

But then you see that the heal to me was only 14322.

MATH TIME.

14322 x2 = 28644 x 1.4 = 40,101.6 = 40,102.

So the original heal size, without the Blood of the Rhino bonus was 28644. With the 40% extra healing, we get 40,101.6 (rounded up to 40,102). If this +healing did transfer through Beacon of Light, we wouldn’t see me being healed for half of the original heal’s size. We would see it be half of the final heal’s size. The final heal was 40,102, so we would be looking for 20,051 as the heal that I got. But alas, I was only healed for 14,322.

Let’s see how this holds up with the next heal.

Fozzie is healed for 71865. I get healed for 25666.

25666 x2 = 51,332 x 1.4 = 71,864.8 = 71,865

Yup, same deal.

So it’s quite clear — Blood of the Rhino does not transfer any extra +healing from the pet to the Beacon of Light target. As such, on the Heroic Yor’sahj the Unsleeping encounter, I do encourage you to beacon the tanks and heal the pets, but don’t gimp your hunters’ DPS by forcing them to bring a Tenacity pet to the raid. Their regular pet will do exactly the same thing a Tenacity pet will.

8 Replies to “Late Night Math: Pets, Beacon and Heroic Yor'sahj”

  1. Oh there’s no need to complicate things. We never needed to beacon-the-tank-heal-a-pet at all (and we didn’t have H Hagara down… :P).

    Purple never coincides with a big damage color ooze, so
    Depending what addon you’re using, you can keep track of the stacks of Deep Corruption on everyone. Just assign your healers such that,

    1) nobody use HoTs (Holy radiance is a raid-wiper);
    2) each healer is assigned to heal a specific group (Paladin A only on the tanks, Paladin B only on group 1, Disc Priest only on group 2 etc).
    3) If and only if someone needs help quickly, whoever’s helping out will *need* to yell on vent with a ‘I’m doing 1 heal on Hunter A!’
    4) Word of Glory does not adds to the stacks, nor does LoH. Paladins make a very good ‘oh sh!t’ raid healer with WoGs. Blessed Life is also good to get for this fight as well

    Other than that, purple ooze shouldn’t be the one that gives your raid the most problem.

    IMO the green+red ooze is by far the most awful and almost all our wipes were from it. All survival CDs should be blown (although I’ve read from somewhere that no 2 green+red would come in a row but I can’t be 100% certain).

    Good luck!

  2. Belvaran, my guild is only progressing through the (heroic) encounter (so far we only managed to reach enrage once) but we never had green+red as we always kill green when red is present.

    There are two combinations with green+red (black+blue and the “traffic light”, i. e. black+yellow) so it’s possible to get green+red twice in a row if you don’t kill them.

  3. It might be different in 25, but in 10 man at least, the ‘pet heal’ strategy is not applicable in my opinion. If someone is using it on 10s, please enlighten me!

    When we have the purple and the black blob up, which is on 2 of the combinations, we often end up with the Forgotten Ones aggroing on ranged dps and healers, such that there are always plenty of people needing heals.

    When we have the purple and green blobs up, ranged and healers get acid damage, so again, plenty of healing required on those 2 combinations.

    A final consideration; if you are saving the Mana Void for a tougher combination, I’ve found that as a Paladin, even with glyphed DP and a mana pot, my mana is pathetically low, and I simply do not have the mana to spam anyone with Divine Light, never mind a pet.

    Our best attempt last week was a 2% wipe on Enrage, so the healing we have got under control. Just need to find a bit more dps.

  4. I believe the general consensus is to kill yellow then green/black. I heard some guilds try to leave yellow+red instead but it’s insane to heal through.

    Mana void—I think most people just leave the first void up and then hymn/DP/etc to get some mana back while having a DPS to handle the void down to 20% and kill it when the next void comes up and drains all your mana. Works well for us. If your mana is low you might want to purposely leave 3 holy power up in case you need an emergency heal somewhere.

    Speaking of having 3 holy power, it’s nice to remember when purple ooze is active on the boss you can gain a charge by shocking the boss (or adds) to gain 3 charges quickly to heal someone (like i said earlier WoG doesn’t add to the purple stacks, however shocking a player does)

    Oh and another piece of tip that I believe most know already is that the green acid AOE only hits ranged, never melee. So when it’s the dreaded red+green, melee can always stack at the boss while ranged try to stay as close to the boss as possible while keeping 4 yards from another. Also hunters can range-hit the boss even at its feet.

    Once you get the hang of it, it’s almost as easy as heroic morchok.

    Good luck!

  5. I need to add that hunters cannot stack at boss during red+green….they can, however, stack when it’s red+something else but green~

  6. Got him down last night!
    With black red green yellow, we kill green. Each to their own on that one I guess. Nice tip about using Holy Shock, must try that one.
    A really enjoyable fight to heal in my opinion.

  7. Nice! Congrats!

    You may also want to gain holy power by crusader-striking if you have the spare time during purple oozes…although personally I am doing fine with just shocking the boss in between of my big heals to my group. I usually have time to help out with WoGs and even a big heal on the other group (I warn my healing partner of course if that happens)

  8. Healing a pet to xfer the 40% bonus via beacon DIDNT work in WotLK either. If it did, heal the pet would have been the way you’d heal a tank in raid all the time (since Beacon was 100% xfer back then). Beacon always transfers the heal un-modified, so healing a blood of the rhino pet or a feral/rogue with +healing received bonuses would pass the heal on without the bonus.

    The reason why you parked a pet (note specifically close to Valithria) was because of 1. 100% Beacon xfer and 2. Holy Light glyph. Although the splash from the glyph seems small, it IS a splash based on the increased healing done to the blood of the rhino pet and it was a considerable amount with stacks.

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