Healing Chimaeron

Well I don't really post a whole lot of "do this to heal" type posts, but this one may get a little into that sort of situation. I'm going to write a bit about the Chimaeron fight in Black Wing Descent.

My raid group seems to have this great ability to learn fights quickly, but whats more than that, it seems like after spending a few wipes on a fight, if we wait and come back to it another day, everyone's performance has improved exponentially. It really seems like people spend time figuring out what they did wrong in those attempts, and deciding how to fix them, outside of raid times. The reason for me pointing this out is because for Chimaeron we spent probably five wipes one night on him, didn't seem to be making much headway on him, infact we only got him clost to Phase 2 once, and realistically it was probably a fluke. However, the next night we finished off our farm bosses, went in there, and on our fourth attempt pushed him to phase 2, got him to around 3% and our fifth attempt downed him. I'm going to talk a bit about how we handled that fight, and the huge changes from our first night to our second that made the big differences.
So I am sure everyone has seen the tankspot videos, so you know the basic strategy (spread out, keep everyone between 10-15k hp, group up, heal like crazy, rinse and repeat), so I am going to cover how I healed it as holy, and the few tricks that the raid as a whole did to make it better.

First: Let your most comfortable tank healer do that job. We actually swapped it up a bit to have our holy pally raid healing and our druid tank healing on the first night, because we had heard the way those classes healed this worked best. This was a HUGE mistake I think. Yes the theory is good, but our druid isn't used to tank healing, and our pally isn't used to raid healing, so they were both a little uncomfortable with it. We could have put in another dozen attempts until they were both comfortable, but why do that when realistically it still works fine the normal pally-tank, druid-raid set-up.
Second: This fight is the perfect example of how Blizzard wanted healing to be in Cata. Triage, with everyone doing what they can. That means that, especially on the Feuds, rogues should be using recuperate, dps druids and priests shoudl be using their big heals (take turns!), pallies of all stripes should be using holy radiance, and anyone else should be using bandages. That's right BANDAGES! so get that first aid leveled you slacker mages!
Third: Click that Lightwell! I actually told my raid not to click it until feuds, that's because I can keep you above 10k fine without you clicking it, but getting 10 people from 1 HP to 110k+ is a little harder.
Now, those are the main points that we found, on to the Holy Priest tips!

Prayer of Mending is AMAZING! on this fight all the way through. While every guide out there will tell you "use PoM on CD" this fight it is especially important. During the normal non-feud Phase 1 this will allow you to skip healing one of the toons that gets hit with his slime, and during feud, will keep bouncing constantly, giving you a TON of bonus healing.
When I am running to stack up my quick rotation is: Chakra, PoM (puts you into the proper aoe chakra state), drop your shiny healing pool on the stack point, start running, casts circle of healing while moving, then Prayer of Healing rotation between groups (no need to restart that HoT from the glyph if it hasn't fallen off, so that means if you are in a 10man group 1 - group 2 - group 1 - etc.), and PoM and Circle of healing on CD. Using this rotation I was getting insance amounts of aoe healing during this phase. If you notice that for some reason that pesky mage is way lower on health then anyone else, a flash heal will get them healed up fast and with Serenity, won't really waste any raid healing time.
During the "top up to 10k" part of phase 1 I have been using flash heal, my mana seems to allow for this, and it's still sometimes a little close if I have two ppl to heal up. Our raid has been splitting the groups between two healers, however a better arrangement may be "I have priority for group 1, you have group 2, but if there are 2 in the same group, I will take the person higher in the raid frames, you take the lower" this will allow both healers to use mana efficient, but slow, casts. This wasn't an issue for us because our dps is so high that we had no mana problems  (our dps was averaging around 15k on our attempts).

That is about all I have to say about that fight. It's important to remember that while this IS a healing fight, everyone in the raid should be doing what they can to help out, as the gear gets up there this fight will likely be a joke and the bandages/dps-radiance/dps-tranquility will probably not be neccessary, but unti then: Yell at those dps till they level their first aid! (ps. this fight is a TON of fun!)