[10] 2 or 3 healers. And why.

[Panzerdin]

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[Raive]

A series of different strategies and unfortunate events. As well as player switching and a half hour break, and having to clear trash like 3 times. Was our first night of attempts on him and we didn't do any PTR raiding so I really don't think our time was all that bad thank you.

[Corpsicle]

It's better to go with 3 if you got them, maybe one dual specced DPS. Most fights are considerably simpler with 3.

This is what we've found. Our 10 man is going in mostly blind, none of us were on PTR although we do follow some of the videos and strats posted. We use a Holy Priest and a Resto Druid all the time, and have one more priest that is dual specced Shadow/Holy. I think he's spending about 75% of the trash as Shadow and 50% of the boss fights as Holy.

Having the extra buffer just makes learning the fights a lot easier. We never would have beat Ignis with out his healing.

[Falibard]

Typically 2 with a dual spec for 3 when needed. It so happened that we had a 4th dual spec for Ignus and were able to down it pretty easily by just throwing more healers at the fight.

[Splug]

I'm also an advocate of two healers, with an off-spec third option being ideal. Several of the encounters demand damage at a certain level to keep up with add spawns, and bringing more will end up offsetting the healing requirements by enough to justify running fewer healers.

-Splug

[PsiVen]

We used 2-3 healers, the 3rd being a dual spec druid resto / feral. Basically it's important to be flexible, and the more dual spec options you have the better off you'll be.

Kologarn may require 3 in some situations but usually you'll be fine with 2 since DPS on the right arm will break grip almost immediately.
Auriaya "hard mode" (the one in the meta to leave all the adds up) demands 3 healers as they will be continually interrupted by the feral defender. Normal mode and nine-lives attempts can probably get away with 2.

Hodir depends, but use 3 if you need to as his enrage timer is very generous. If you execute the fight perfectly there's very little raid damage and a well geared healer can probably solo heal it.
For Thorium hard-mode he was resto and DPSed in the arena until p2. 2 healers would have a hard time keeping tanks up as he hits very hard and UBS needs to be taunted away in <1 second.
Freya is not much of a DPS check, so may as well take 3 healers to keep things stable.
Mimiron deals quite a lot of raid damage and pretty much demands 3 healers.
Vezax is doable with 2 healers, maybe. But I wouldn't recommend it. We got him to 19% with one healer dying early and the remaining two were very much OOM when the clouds ran dry.

[Teneb]

We've found that two healers and an additional resto shaman works the best for us. Most fights seem to have high and low damage phases or abilities and the shaman dps's or heals depending on the phase.

[Corpsicle]

We've got two prot paladins, one with holy offspec, myself with ret. I say offspec, but the offspecs are really well geared.

None of us had any PTR experience in Ulduar. We generally start with her going holy for three healers and myself prot, but on every single boss so far we've concluded "two healers is enough for this, we need the dps" after a few attempts (admittedly, so far we have only seen and cleared The Flame Train, Fat Iggy, Razorscale, Lil' Deco, Ko-daddy, Idiot Council, Crazy Cat Lady, and Big Mama (freya). It isn't enough to survive in Ulduar, it's generally more important that you stay ahead of events, and for that more dps is desirable. Still, a third healer helps a lot with seeing what you're up against. Yay for dual specs!

Personally, I think giving the bosses ridiculous nicknames is of more help than an extra healer

Yes, this synergy works very well for us. We do need both of our prot pallies tanking when the DK tank isn't available but we have been very fortunate to also have a well geared shadow/holy priest who is able to swap over to healing as well.

Having 2 full time healers and 1 to 2 dps that can either stop dpsing and heal mid fight in 'emergency' situations or can swap to healing spec/gear out of combat before a fight has been very beneficial in learning the encounters.

[Markoh]

We do 2-3 depending on the fight. My 10 man has a holy pally and a resto druid as the main healers, but the third healer will be either the shadow priest going holy, the elemental shaman going resto, or me going holy. With Potentially every class of healer and every class of tank it makes switching to the strength of a boss much easier. Dual spec has been amazing for 10 mans, and to a lesser degree 25s.

[gattaca]

We cleared everything up to Freya last night with 2 healers... with the exception of iron council, where we had our ele shaman swap to resto for some extra raid heals. That fight is brutal...

[Salamandra]

I don't know what people are talking about when they say that Iron Council needs 3 healers. Damage output didn't seem very high to me... Vexaz on the other hand has somewhat ridiculous melee damage for a 10-man boss on which only 1 healer can realistically heal at a time.

[ulushnar]

I base my recruitment around needing two tanks, three healers and five dps for a progression raid. Our DPS is all amazing enough that we can still nuke through enrage timers, but having breathing room for things going wrong has turned a potential wipe into a first kill on a few occasions.

Once we have the content on farm, then one of the healers can go DPS if they really want. But I'm curious how many of the "lol you only need two healers" crowd have 25-man-geared tanks and healers at their disposal.

[Mozen]

This thread is making me feel bad.

We go in with three healers, and we're getting stuck for the second week in the Antechamber.

On the Council, our off-tank always dies. Always. Every single time.
On Kologarn, our main-tank always dies. Always. Every single time.

We've wiped so badly that we don't even want to try Auriaya.

[Belloc]

Tonight we did FL, Razorscale, Ignis, XT-002, Kologarn, Iron Council, Auriaya, Mimiron, Hodir, and Thorim hard-mode with 2 healers.

Our elemental shaman helped out during frozen blows on Hodir, but I don't think he was casting heals on any of the other fights.

For learning these fights the first week, we used 3 healers. Second week, we only used 3 healers when it was absolutely necessary. Tomorrow we might use 3 healers on Vezax, but I'm not sure.

[pedal2000]

3 healers on our first kills last week of XT/Razor.
We'll probably stick to that in the future.