On our original kill we didn’t use any special addons for this fight. However this week someone has created a very useful addon appropriately called ‘Penetrator‘ which marks everyone in the raid who gets penetrating cold with a raid marker. Combine this with GridStatusRaidIcons, which allows you to show raid markers in grid, and you have a rather powerful method of defining which penetrating cold target a given healer should heal.
I recommend using the modded version of GridStatusRaidIcons which can be found here, this version was modified to increase visibility of raid markings when used in the center icon position in grid – the normal version has rather translucent icons which can be hard to see on top of certain class colours.
You end up with something like this in grid when the raid gets penetrating cold, along with the rather pleasing whisper from whoever is running the addon 
I’m not sure how useful this is for any of Anub’s versions other than 25man hardmode, as with the other 3 versions you can pretty much just have a normal raid healing strat of ‘heal ppl when they go low’ and just win. But since the idea behind 25man hardmode is to keep the whole raid hovering on as low hp as possible – the healer assignment needs to be refined so that the 5 penetrating cold targets get a 6k+ heal (or bubble) each, in under 2 seconds. We tend to run 4 healers – either 2 druids and 2 priests or 3 priests and 1 druid. In the latter example each priest is assigned 1 raid marker to heal and keep alive, and the resto druid (in this case me) takes 2 due to max hasted, glyphed and specced healing touch being a super-fucking-fast 7-10k heal. The priests also have the secondary task of throwing a bubble at the druid’s 2nd target just to help with the first tick as that can sometimes come faster than 2 seconds and thus cause a death.
This certainly is a very nice addon, every now and then you notice it fails to put a marker on someone but this is not often and usually not a problem as the person who’s marker failed to appear just heals the unmarked guy who should have had it.
Just to confirm, only 1 person in the raid needs to have the Penetrator addon installed and activated. And this person must have assistant so they can mark – it should also ideally be the person with the least latency in the raid as this can make the difference between having marks placed instantly or after a delay. All the penetrating cold healers should then have Grid StatusRaidIcons installed to allow them to see the markers in grid. It should also be noted that the addon only uses the markers you see in the screenshot – namely: moon, triangle, circle, star and diamond. The only downside to this addon that we noticed when using it to kill anub last night was that it seems to wipe all other markers off whenever it sets new ones. By this I mean that even markers that it doesn’t use (cross, skull) appear to be removed from whatever they are assigned to as soon as a new batch of dots have their markers applied. This means you cannot use markers to identify between burrower adds for interruption and have to use positional based targeting instead – although this didn’t seem to be much of a problem for us.
The phase 3 healing in this fight is still very stressful, but this addon at least takes a small part of that away.
#1 by Sound on September 29, 2009 - 06:50
Your link for the modded version of GridStatusRaidIcons seems to also go to the Curse page for Penetrator. Would love to check it out when you get a chance to fix it. Thankee.
#2 by Cows on September 29, 2009 - 07:45
Actually it does go to the right place, but I understand what you mean. It still says ‘download penetrator’ at the top but just underneath it just comes “GridStatusRaidIcons_mod_by_Colraw”. Thats because the modded GridStatusRaidIcons is a file under the Penetrator addon’s list. If you download it from that page you will get the right thing
#3 by sulliwan on October 1, 2009 - 12:33
What on earth makes people spec and glyph healing touch for this fight, you can get the exact same job done with nourish equally well. Nourish without hots up heals for around the same amount on average as glyphed HT with nearly 25% lower manacost.
Only reason I could see for HT would be if your noncrit nourish hits for lower than the penetrating cold tick but that is unlikely.
#4 by Cows on October 1, 2009 - 15:50
Main reason is that with nourish you can heal 1 person fine, with healing touch you can do 2. Even in haste gear nourish is at best around 1.15/1.2 seconds cast time which means you need ~2.4 seconds to use it on 2 people. Glyphed and specced healing touch is around 0.67 seconds in haste gear which means you only need less total time to heal 2 people – thus healing the 2nd before he takes a tick.
You need to get those heals off before 2 seconds pass because the first tick on PC tends be 2 seconds after it appears on grid.
The mana is a non issue as you run in regen gear and wont really go oom even when giving your innervate to someone else.
So yeah if you’re only healing 1 guy in your healer setup then that’s fine. If you’re trying to min/max the healers then HT spec/glyph is the best.
I go with what works for me and my situation, all I can do is advise based on successful results I’ve had with my specs/gear/scenario.
#5 by sulliwan on October 1, 2009 - 19:39
If you’re spamming nourish, you got basically 100% NG uptime, so it’s the exact same casttime as glyphed HT. The second HT will land a bit earlier than the second nourish though, that is true, however I doubt grid takes 1 second to update the debuffs.
#6 by Cows on October 3, 2009 - 14:35
2nd landing quicker is the idea, the 2 second mark for the first tick isn’t grid update or anything. The first tick of the dot is usually 2 seconds after it’s applied rather than 3.
#7 by Sheshonk on October 5, 2009 - 21:11
Just happened upon this blog looking for a mod better than DBM for PC markings, I like it.
To add my 2 cents, I’ve been running the regular Grid Raid Icons from curse. The only thing you need to do is go into the status, hit the color option, and bring up the opacity with the slider. Its defaulted to something silly like 50%, but you don’t need the mod’ed version to make the raid icons more visible on grid.
#8 by Mystz0r on October 14, 2009 - 10:22
Hi there,
Interesting post! How many healers did you use, 6 or 7?
#9 by Cows on October 14, 2009 - 14:59
I believe it was 7
#10 by Amajan on October 19, 2009 - 23:39
The reason a druid would wan\’t the Ht spec above nourish is the faster casting time. On our tries, i use the hb spec. This means i have about 0,6-0,7secs of casting – and therefore, being GCDcapped (duh), i have an extra 0,4 secs to move to the next target and prepare to heal. useally, it takes me around 0,5 to 1 sec to move the mouse to the next target, depending on how far i have to move my mouse to reach my next target. This gives me alot lesser downtime, than my 1,2sec nourish would give me.. cause 0,6+0,5+0,6 =1,7secs untill i\’ve healed the next target with HT – and 1,2+0,5+1,2 = 2,9 secs, before i\’ve healed the second target. – This being best case. GCD is not an issue when healing on p3, since you can\’t heal the next target instantly anyway (no, you can\’t…) – so includeing the time to move the mouse (here 0,5 secs is a bestcase. i\’ve seen myself hit almost 1sec of moveing – though, that was when i was still a newcommer at the fight) with a 1sec movement: HTspec = 0,6+1+0,6 = 2,2secs. Nourish spec = 1,2+1+1,2 = 3,4 secs, wich is the same as a death. Therefore the HT spec is quite viable, if are assigned to more targets – or to back up your mates.
#11 by Pal on October 21, 2009 - 00:29
Hello, great addon for dealing with the encounter! As far as casting time, whether you go nourish or HT, both have a cast time. Hopefully you are moving your mouse to the next target once you hit the heal button, not waiting for the spell to finish and then moving the mouse. Clique is a great tool here, assign whichever spell you prefer and then hit the raid icon assigned to you. Who doesn’t like whack-a-mole when lives are at stake?!?
Ultimately glyphed HT allows you a bit more reaction time/latency, as it will land about .2 seconds sooner. Due to GCD your 2 HT will also land .2 seconds sooner than a GCD capped pair of Nourishes.
The best argument against glyphed HT that I’ve heard is the opportunity cost of speccing HT, all the other talents that are designed to boost so much more of your healing. Still doesn’t make HT specs wrong, just costs you more. To each their own.
#12 by Marw on November 3, 2009 - 19:59
I was wondering what happens if the next wave of PC debuffs are coming before the previous ones are gone. Sometimes you see 10 PC debuffs for 2secs or so (rarely but still happens so now and then) cause PC cd is shorter then the duration. Penetrator just marks the next wave of PC targets then?
#13 by Cows on November 3, 2009 - 20:21
Hmm sounds like lag – every now and then I’ve seen maybe 0.5 sec where the new set seems to ‘overlap’ but not as long as 2 sec. However it shouldn’t matter as far as the addon and people’s hp is concerned. We try to keep everyone at around 50% hp when they have PC – so if you get an overlap of 2 seconds with the new PCs the addon removes the marks on the old ones and replaces on the new ones. But since the old ones have at most 1 more tick of PC to go, they should already be at around 50% hp so 1 tick wont kill them.
#14 by Derek on November 4, 2009 - 20:11
It’s because the cooldown anub has for the ability is 15 seconds while the penetrating cold debuff lasts 18 seconds.
#15 by emc on November 18, 2009 - 17:43
Cows – Forgive me for all the questions – The guild I’m in is working on P3 right now and I wanted to get your advice on a few things.
(1) Are you still using Penetrator? (2)Have you tried healing it with Nourish? (I’m switching to HT tonight) and (3) Lastly, how many healers do you have and how many are healing the targets?
#16 by Cows on November 18, 2009 - 21:39
1) I think we’re using dxe now – but it does the exact same job
2) very early on yes, but quickly switched to ht as I heal two targets. Ht and glyphed rejuv is king here.
3) 7 healers, 4 on pc and 3 on tanks. 2 paladins and a shaman on tanks, me on 2 pc targets and 2 disc priests and a shaman with one each for the rest.
#17 by Ceejay on December 14, 2009 - 04:30
Does the Icon order stay the same for each PC?
#18 by Cows on December 14, 2009 - 11:01
No, each pc is randomly given a raid icon – so what we do is assign healers to always heal a specific icon (or two). It’s not completely foolproof though as sometimes it bugs and you might get a Pc with no marker.