Introduction
There are two main aspects to every world of warcraft fights, to which the other aspects are subordinated: survival and damage. In its basic form, survival is linked to HPS and is about keeping your health above 0, while damage is about DPS and beating certain thresholds. Usually, you focus on one or the other - trading off survival for dps and vice versa. However for less straightforward fights dps and survival interact in a more complex manner.
I've divided my explanation into parts for an easier read, but during each section I will explain how it interacts with others. I will first give the requirements of the fight. The second part will be about gear, and how to balance it around healing and damage. The third part will be about survivability, and how to maximize your healing output. Then comes strategy, and how to minimize your damage input. I'll end with damage, and how to optimize it when having to deal with all the previous requirements. And during that time I'll take examples from Kil'jaeden.
Healing interactions
Requirements
Kil'jaeden is a ridiculously high-damage fight. He will chain cast
Armageddon (circles on the ground), which deals between 590k and 620k damage over 30 seconds (depending on soaking). With
Aspect de la tortue having a 144 seconds cooldown (with talent), there are many moments where you will have to heal through 2 consecutive armageddons, which can still kill you easily on the slightest miscalculation, and sometimes 3 armageddons. The high point is 1M8 damage plus 60K from
Détonation de flammeffroi (circle around character) and
Flammeffroi focalisée (beam), spread over 1min40. In term of pure numbers, that's 18.6K hps needed over that time. Note that the month before, I considered pushing 10k hps to be extremely hard as a hunter for the solo of Mythic Desolate Host. And in that situation, the 60k may not seem like a lot, but it did all the difference. Icing on the cake, even when I turtled, It wasn't easy to be full health for the next armageddons.
Then there is the boss health issue. He berserks at 14min30, but you can survive about 30 seconds. And you can't damage him in transitions. But he had enough health that if I went absolutely full survival, I would die from lack of dps (or I thought I would, as explained in the conclusion).
Interesting Healing Interactions
Guérison spirituelle and
Courroux bestial: this is a technique I used for the first time, using
Courroux bestial. Now, one of the best azerite traits hunters have is
Brouillard de rage. It increases agility by a lot: therefore, it increases pet healing by a lot too since spirit mend is based on attack power (13%/stack, I had 2). Sadly, Bestial Wrath doesn't also increase pet healing by 25%, even if it does increase the healing from most of the hunter's base abilities (just not those that actually heal). It's worth mentioning because a similar ability -
Aspect de la bête - does increase spirit mend by 30%, so remember that sometimes spells have effects that are not listed in the tooltip. Anyways, it was important to delay healing for BW in order to heal more - unless it would delay too much. Finally,
Aspect de la Nature probably increases spirit mend crit chance by 10% (just the direct healing, not the HoT). But that's not a given - for example, since it increases crit chance of specific abilities, as well as "melee and ranged crit", I don't know if it increases the crit chance of, say, Impassive Visage. And other spells cannot crit, such as potions (not sure why, but I tested with a lot of them) or Exhilaration (% based healing).
