Healing Ulduar - Ignis The Furnace Master

The sequel of my first Healing Ulduar - Flame Leviathan & Razorscale tips post, today I'll talk about Ignis The Furnace Master.

As always, Holy Paladin point of view on these fights, mostly from a 10-Man raid perspective.
About 10-Man, I don't think they are harder than 25-Man, as they were for Naxx at least at the beginning. Clearly some fights like Kologarn are much easier in 10-Man than 25-Man. But being a paladin, I do feel paladin healing being more and more pushed back to the single MT healing niche (and we are really good at that). Most Ulduar fights are really mobile, and require positioning and movement through the whole fight. You can also combine to that the amount of raid damage that can be pretty high on some bosses (XT, Kologarn, ...). From my point of view that makes a paladin the worst healer class for 10-Man, but that's still the raids I do, so you'll probably have to endure a few rants here and there, 'cause you do know I like to say when I don't like things :P

Anyway, enough with the talk, here is the Ignis guide.

On the way to Ignis, Furnace trash mobs

Your first challenge will be the trash mobs to Ignis. Don't take them lightly or you will wipe a lot on them, even though the flame tornadoes have been strongly nerfed since day one of the live.
The two giants have a stomp/silence unlimited distance aoe. If your healer are silenced, you'll wipe. So position your tanks at the limit of the pillars, and keep 2 tank healers out of line of sight from the giants. It is that simple, but don't do that and you'll never kill them.
Then you have pairs of mobs patrolling.
The constructs are fairly simple, they have a small frontal fire breath attack (turn them away from your raid), and they have a charge (it's more a glide animation which is fairly ridiculous) that will randomly hit someone for about 4-5K.
The fire elementals regularly create flame tornadoes that will target someone and push him back in the air. If you are pushed back, you will take a large amount of fire damage about 5 or 6 hits for 3K, if you were not at full life, or if you're hit by two tornadoes (or the first one send you into the second one) you will die. Only instant casts can be used while in the air, but if you have health stones, or instant heals, use them. The best here is to have as much distance as you can between the 2 elementals (pull them back to the ramp for space) to avoid double tornadoe hits, and when you see a tornado going your way, just run (or blink, or warlock circle teleport ...). As a healer, keep your instant heals for tornado victims (you if needed ;p) and still keep a close look on your tank.

Ignis the Furnace Master

For a description of Ignis abilities, you can check wowhead. I won't comment on the strat, everyone guild has sort of its own views on Ignis positioning. But one thing never change, you'll have one MT (moving Ignis around) and one OT for the adds (running between add pops and waterpools).

If you are healing the main tank, the damage is fairly regular, if you have more and avoidance tank though, when he's moving Ignis (or moving around him) after a scorch is put on the ground damage can spike a little, take care. Keep your cds for the moment several adds are up. If your add team ever miss a shatter, Ignis damage could reach +45% for a short time, which will hurt the tank. Usually when Ignis reach 10% guilds stop killing the adds too to burn him down. As he gains +15% damage for each add up, be ready for pumping out heals on the MT during these last % of Ignis.

If you are healing the off-tank, try to discuss with him and chose one pool, it will be his shatter pool to which he will bring all adds. Then find your spot so that you can always heal the OT, be out of the scorch flames, and have the least amount of movement to do (especially if you're a paladin ;p). The OT won't take too much damage at first, but he will when the add is melting (fire aoe) and if our "add buster" dps even shatter the add too soon, the OT will take the 15K explosion damage. To avoid a wipe on that losy move, always have your OT life capped when he brings the add to the water pool. Healing the OT on Ignis means switching to him at the right time to have him life capped when it can be necessary. You will be helping with slag-pot heal and potential raid damage the rest of the time.

Whole raid damage is low during this fight. But there will be slag-pot victims. Ignis will regularly take one character from the raid, never the MT, and not the OT (*if* he is hit by a non stunned or cced add at this moment). This character will be put into Ignis slag-pot and will endure 5K fire damage per second for 10s. Obviously they will require healing, quick and fast healing. A paladin is perfect for healing slag-pot targets. You also should know that you can cast spells when into the pot, you just can't target Ignis. Any class that can cast heals should heal themselves when in the slag-pot.

As a paladin, I usually use Beacon of Light on myself during this fight, I'm most of the time healing the OT & the slag-pot victim. If I ever end into the slag-pot I can just OT/MT/raid heal and that will heal myself too. I'm also always at full life in case I get add aggro when they pop, or have to move through a scorch to reach my target (the OT has to move a lot in this fight). I try to keep Sacred Shield up at all times (as always). And keep Judgement of Wisdom/Light on Ignis (not on the adds ;p) as much as I can.

XT is next in line for these small guides. I wish you fun in Ulduar, even though nerfs have really toned down everything up to the watchers, it's still much more enjoyable than Naxx.