So we finally have Jaina down—a while ago actually—and it was quite the adventure. I believe we ended up with around 360 wipes, a bit more and two complete resets of progressing (three, if you count the one day of the reset we “killed” her).
The fight is quite the adventure, though phase one—especially with the nerfs—feels somewhat boring. Sure, there is a lot that can go wrong there and one does need to remain concentrated and most of our wipes were probably due to phase one fails but it still doesn’t really feel satisfying somehow. Especially as a healer, I got basically assigned to being a worse damage dealer since the healing requirement is so low. I did get to mind control Jaina’s minions off the ship though, so that was a plus.
The first intermission is the first really tricky part as a healer, since you need to keep a good eye on your group so they don’t die while also focusing on the rather significant amount off ground effects going on so you don’t freeze. Consequently, I belive our healers were the most likely to be frozen in our tries, though that did iron itself out quite well by the end and people getting frozen was more the exception than the rule.
Phase two begins with something of a bang for healers, since all the stacks you gathered in the intermission will keep on ticking. This was also where I got my first chance to do some proper healing as a discipline priest who is somewhat reliant on there being something to damage for my healing. So cooldowns are used and stacks get reset and the group gets to be somewhat stable for a while. After that phase two is in general moderately safe, there are some critical timings with the stack resets and Siegebreaker Blasts where we do use some additional cooldowns, but in general it’s pretty steady going.
The second intermission, in other words the wall and rescuing Nathanos, is mostly also pretty easy going. There are some quite high stacks going on when the intermission starts, but those calm down rather quickly and as a healer I don’t have to concern myself too much with the wall damage and Nathano’s health—or rather, the health of Nathano’s ice block. Consequently, this usually ended up being the place we used our mana potions in order to have as much mana as possible going into phase three which is where the healing requirement for this fight really is at its highest.
Now, phase three. It’s kind of chaotic, especially as a healer that needs to keep tabs on not just the fight mechanics everyone else is dealing with but also cooldowns and making sure they come at the right moment and don’t overlap too much. Since this phase should be quite short if played correctly—it becomes unhealable at some point, so there is something of a damage requirement—most of the healing here is covered by cooldowns which does mean that using those cooldowns at the correct time to maximize their value becomes more important than otherwise. It does make the last phase really stressful not helped along by it being, well, the last phase so it’s the one you get the least practice with but it is also a nice culmination to the fight and does feel fun.
That is in general a good way to describe the fight: fun. Sure, the first phase isn’t overly intersting from a healer point of view but even then I got to mind control people off of a ship which doesn’t happen often. The rest of the fight has a rather good pacing as well, keeping you on your toes pretty much the whole time since small mistakes rather quickly build up to big problems. It’s a really nice change of pace from Uldir and I hope the coming raids will be as good as this one.