Healing Dark Animus
This is yet another tricky dispel fight, with the added concern that you can easily kill your fellow raiders with an ill-timed dispel. Consider yourself warned!
Aside from the golem management (which any raid guide can explain), the biggest killer on this fight will be healer mismanagement for dispelling Matter Swap. This is definitely the fight to bring your best dispellers and leave the bad ones on the bench.
You need to ensure you are keeping the raid above 90% health as much as possible during the first phase incase they are chosen for Matter Swap. You should be able to do it with 6 healers in 25m, but you can add a 7th if needed, since it usually isn’t that much of a DPS race.
The second part of the Matter Swap is the dispelling. It is a magic effect, so all the healers can dispel it. But it must be dispelled halfway through its duration, with about 5-6 seconds left before expiring. Too soon or too late, and you can easily kill one of the swappers.
If healers don’t dispel properly – or at all – you WILL lose raiders. Link dispels after a wipe, especially with Matter Swap deaths, so everyone can see who is and isn’t getting dispels. You can also figure out if someone didn’t dispel at the correct time that resulted in a death, to troubleshoot the problem and fix it. Revival will dispel the matter swap effect, so monks need to be very careful about when they revival, ensuring no matter swaps are out, unless it is at the time it would be dispelled – this is especially deadly on heroic.
Ensure healers are spread throughout the room. It may sound obvious, but you can easily end up with all the healers on the same half of the room, especially if they aren’t assigned to an add. The common excuse will be that “so and so was out of range” which is why they weren’t healed or dispelled. But ask your raid to do /range 30 or 35 and ensure they have a healer in that range.
Anima Ring is the only other major raid damage, but just CD through it in the final phase. It is intense but manageable with CDs.
Watch DBM or BigWigs timers and avoid casting during Interupting Jolt.
Notes for Heroic:
Most strats involve using hunter and warlock pets to tank the little golems, so be sure your healing bars can display pets. Things can go sideways very quickly at the start, and you need to be fast to save people who suddenly find themselves with someone else’s golem.
Anima font is a near one shot mechanic, you must move to avoid getting hit. Many people barely notice it on normal or LFR mode, but it is pretty significant on heroic.
Interrupting jolts hit hard, and will require a pretty significant healing CD and damage reduction rotation. Be very careful you aren’t caught casting during the jolt, as the spell lockout from casting can really hurt the raid team, especially if it was your CD turn.
Dispelling can be handles a few different ways. Some guilds use warlocks or feral druids in bear form to soak matter swap to keep damage to a minimum. Be careful you don’t dispel right before a jolt, because that is a death sentence.
Hotfixes
June 4, 2013: Massive Anima Golems will no longer target the same player with multiple Matter Swap debuffs.
June 4, 2013: Monk’s Revival ability will no longer dispel the Matter Swap debuff.
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 Dark Animus:
Other resources:
WowHead Boss Encounter Page
WowHead Loot Drops Page
Icy Veins Guide
MMO Champions Guide
Video Guides:
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.