Healing Tortos
Turtle power!
This fight feels like you are constantly on the move, so plan your healing around using instants and very little stacked healing.
Plan healing CDs for Quake Stomps and they are very manageable.
The majority of the healing required outside of Quake Stomps will come from people getting hit by spinning turtle shells or by Rockfall. Rockfall (which increases in frequency after every Quake Stomp) does an AOE damage to everyone within 20 yards, so some damage is definitely impossible to avoid. But the actual falling Rockfall into the circles on the floor – circles that are avoidable – will damage a player for 50-70% (approx) of their health.
The amount of healing can definitely be reduced by ensuring your raid slows the spinning turtle shells, so raid can dodge the spinning turtles easier. You can place traps and earthbind totems on the spawn points, and then hunters and locks can continue to slow them once they start spinning through the raid.
The Vampiric Cave Bats bats also cast something called Drain the Weak on targeted players who fall below a specific health amount (350k on normal mode), which will then heal the bats up. It is important to keep those players (usually the off-tank) topped as much as possible.
Healers should use their tank CDs such as ironbark and life coccoon on the bat tank.
Because of the constant moving, there is no safe time to Potion of Focus on this fight, you will need to use a mana pot instead.
Some raid groups assign a healer to do the turtle shell kicks, since most of the damage is with stomps and the aoe can be healed up fine with a healer doing some shell kicking duty. Try and kick the shell through the bats if possible.
Turtles actually fixate on a raid member, so your raid should run to the front of the room when the first set of shells come out so you have more uptime on DPS for the first shell. Range should also avoid being at the very back of the room or in the water due to range issues (and potentially being out of range of healers as well).
If healers are pulling aggro from the bats, have warlocks set up a warlock gateway so they can use it to instantly port to where the tank is so he can get aggro on them. Just make sure lazy dps aren’t using it as a GTFO for the spinning turtle shells.
Bats are also CC-able, you can use remorseless winter and/or ring of frost on them. However, this will reset the swing timer of bats, resulting in all 12 (or however many are alive) potentially killing the boss when they all hit the bat tank at once – only use stuns or CCs if you believe your raid can kill them before the stun/cc wears off. Some tanks can also kite the bats.
Notes for Heroic:
The biggest change is the crystal mechanism, which means healers must ensure the raid is topped off after every quake stomp, as that is when the raid will be picking up their new crystal shell buff. If a raid member gets the crystal buff while low on health, no amount of healing will bring their health up until the crystal shell falls off. Unfortunately, if they are low enough, the stomp that breaks the absorb crystal shell will likely kill them.
Some raiders claim they can survive without a shield, and not need to get one. However, this requires extra healing on them when healers are already dealing with dodging rockfalls, avoiding shells and healing through stomps, so make it mandatory for all raiders to get the shield.
You must have a CD rotation for every quake stomp. You will need to have four raid CDs in the rotation before you can start going through the healer CD rotation again. Healing tide, Ascendance and Revival are excellent for this.
Rockfall hurts significantly more, and can impact the crystal shells on raid members, meaning it could break prior to the stomp being cast.
Healers tend to get bat aggro quite frequently on this fight, the best way to handle this if your raid is using the bat kiting strategy is to have the healers take any stray bats to the kiter. It can be difficult for the bat tank to be managing kiting, bats and have the added responsibility of finding, targeting and taunting stray bats.
Try to not allow any healers to stand in melee, but rather just in range of melee (aside from Mistweavers). Because the turtles target range when they are spinning, this can make the melee area on the side of the boss a mayhem of melee being tossed in the air by the shells, which can cause deaths if it also occurs during rockfall. It also makes healing on the melee even more difficult because the shells will often remove their shields, requiring them to get a new one prior to stomp.
Specific Healer Class Notes
Holy Pallies
Cast Hand of Protection on a Resto Druid so they can cast Tranquilty through Quake Stomp.
Priests
Disc is very hard for this fight on heroic, since Disc cannot really help fill the shields to full. Holy is definitely recommended. If you do go Disc, barrier melee right before Quake Stomp if they are stacked as one goes out.
Resto Druid
Ask a Pally to Hand of Protection you so you can cast Tranquility during Quake Stomp. You can also place your healing mushrooms and have them detonate for Quake Stomp. If you have a resto shaman in your raid, symbios them, that way you can channel Tranquility while moving to avoid rockfall.
Resto Shaman
Time your Healing Tide and Healing Stream to drop right before Crush is going out. If you have glyphed riptide, try and riptide the tanks (especially the bat tank) and as many other raiders as possible (without going oom) before Quake Stomp happens. You can stone bulwark totem every second quake stomp.
Recommended number of healers:
25M Heroic – TBD
10M Heroic – TBD
25M Normal – 6-7 healers
10M Normal – 3 healers
World of Logs Rankings for Healing on Tortos:
Other resources:
WowHead Boss Encounter Page
WowHead Loot Drops Page
Icy Veins Guide
MMO Champions Guide
Video Guides:
TankSpot’s Guide to Tortos (25-Man Normal)
Tortos 10 Man Normal Throne of Thunder Guide – FATBOSS
Aliena’s Guide to Tortos, 10 man normal
Blogs & Notable Forum Threads:
Have more links we should include? Comments on the number of healers or specific comps? Just comment below so we can add it.
