Abolish Disease may not be the ideal choice

Right. So a guy who plays melee classes (preferrably plate) decides to do a post about a healer spell. We all remember (that can be the royal we) about my single time healing in normal Nexus. It was not pretty. A bit like this, really:

However, for once I feel vaguely qualified to talk about a topic that is very dear to me. In todays case: The abolish disease spell.

More specifically, the Lich King fight.

I mentioned this before (Sockpuppet.. yay!), but I usually get to tank the Shambling Horrors and kill them with the plague of doom. Shame the damage is not counted for me on Recount - several million damage to the protection warrior would be a nice change for once.

Now if you are unsure about the mechanics, I can recommend all sorts of links - how about this one. They do make their lives unneccessarily difficult with this positioning, but ah well. At least all the abilities are touched upon and it has shiny images.

Our topic today: Necrotic Plague.

The necrotic plague bounding around the platform is what is required to kill some of the adds. It does 50k damage (10 man - 100k in 25man) per stack every 3 seconds. That also means you don't want it on a player for more than 2.95 seconds or so (2.99 if you really don't like them). Whenever the plague gets dispelled it jumps to a new eligible target in range - and range is small. So what the guide (and me) suggests is that you run close to a horror, have it dispelled off you, make it jump onto the horror and then watch the horror die messily a bit later.

The plague gains a stack whenever it jumps off a target naturally - two possible things can cause this:

1) It lasted for the full 12 seconds on a shambling horror,

2) It killed the target.

Yes, technically you can kill your offtank to gain an extra stack, however it is generally preferred to use the ghouls and horrors for having more stacks.

Also, of course our buddy Arthas does not just cast one, he will occasionally infect a new player with the plague just to make sure we have a fair chance to finish off his minions.

So .. what does that look like? Something like this...

The muddled mess on the top left side is the melee group. They are all doing their best to beat up the Lich King. A tank is also holding all the ghouls in position (all the ghouls? almost!) and merry AoE commences occasionally when people feel like it. The healers and ranged dps are grouped up in the bottom left corner. Only a leap away from the shambling horror (shown here in it's unenraged state).

Same image with more marks. All sorts of addons told me that I just got infected. And my debuff icons in the top right tell me it's 8 stacks. Oh nice. 400k damage inbound in 3 seconds and counting.

This is the point where one of our healers presses their "cure it now" buttons. And we can just hope it works. Mainly, because of this:

Note the "attempts"? Yeah.. they don't like us.

At first I thought there is hope, because of:

No attempting here, right? It's all going to be fine, right? Nothing can happen right? Notice the shaking and the edge and the slight insanity here?

Well.. it turns out that the "person" casting the spell is a level 83 boss. And of course all dispell mechanics have a chance to fail against effects cast by a higher level. Now this is where the melee-plate-dps shines through - I have not the foggiest idea how to ensure a dispell against higher level targets. Spell hit? Spell penetration? Lucky shake of the dice?

At least the official forums have no better answer either, but they confirm that "yes, Abolish and Cure Disease can fail and then people will die".

TL;DR:

If you rely on spells to cure the disease on the Lich King fight you might end up with dead people. Make sure the cure actually went through - when in doubt, trust the little green blinking light on your heal addon and cure again!