Hi all, i just wanted to share my personal strategy for handling infest as a discipline priest in the 10 man Lich King encounter. If you are a healer that handles infest for your guild please don't hesitate to post the way you manage it. I am very curious to see how other classes/specs deal with it and even other disc priests.

Let me start by saying that i use Deadly Boss mods to let me know when infest is close to being cast. One thing i have noticed how ever is that even when the timer hits 0, there is a few seconds before the lich king drops infest on raid.

Our healer compostion: discipline priest, holy pally, resto shaman

Phase 1:
Shield entire raid during Lich King/Fordring conversation. try to keep this as close to the actual fighting as possible, i would start as Tirion screams "CHAMPIONS! ATTACK". I start with all the dps and healers, and finish with the tanks when shielding.

This first round of shields, depending upon your buffed spell power and how close you cast it in regards to when the actual fight starts, should last you through two infests; it did for me at least. Timing your shields like this is crucial to not only your other healers but to your mana pool. If your timing is perfect the first tick of the second infest should destroy the bubble negating the second infest effect and returning mana to you from rapture.

After the second infest its time to keep your eyes on your DBM infest cooldown timer. I found that shielding the dps and healers around when the timer reached 5 seconds usually worked perfectly to fully absorb the two infest effects and grant you the highest mana return.(NOTE this time is based on my personal latency and asborbed amount and may vary for other disc priests)

On a side note in between each infest i would keep my eyes on grid while tank healing to insure that going into each infest there was a shield on all dps and healers, since sometimes when not timed correctly the first few shields you cast may fall off before the second infest.

Rinse and repeat until transition onto outer platform...

Note: that during this phase i would use Arcane torrent, and Sliver of Pure Ice Use to keep mana up and flowing in.

Phase 2
Entering phase 2 can make juggling shields for infest a little more difficult. While transitioning to the inner platform i would shield the entire raid for the first initial infest. After that its all about watching your shield/weakened soul effects on any given raid member. I use grid to track who is still shielded and has the weakened soul debuff.

I found that in this phase it was much harder to set up a routine shielding time for max mana return due to everything that is going on. So i would shield 5 seconds before the infest cooldown timer was up and then keep my eyes on anyone who lost their shield due to being a defile target or having to escape someone else's defile and reshield when necessary to minimize infest damage. Anyone who lost their shield and still had the weakened soul effect when infest was about to go off would receive a pom and a renew.

Phase 3
Breathe a sigh of relief, not only are you close to getting a shiny title and some weapons but you no longer have to worry about infest. Keep shielding though because exploding spirits are quite painful.

To keep my mana up:
Runic Mana potion- saved this in case of emergency and didnt have a mana returning CD
Shadow Fiend- depending on your guild's dps you can usually get this off twice- once during the first phase trasition and once during or after the second phase transition
Hymn of hope- this one can be pretty tricky to time, but i think on our kill attempt i held off using til phase 3 when infest was no longer cast and i had a little more downtime to get the full channel off.
Arcane Torrent- use whenever up and your mana bar is not already full

Thanks for this post. Much appriciated as I'm Discipline as well. We're still working on getting him down with the same healer setup (depending on availebility we swap the holy Pala sometimes for a resto Druid), so I'm affraid I can't offer much advice yet except don't use Abolish Disease but Cure Disease (thanks Bati again, see the other LK thread).

P1-keep PoM on CD hitting the OT with it. 14 secs before fight, shield everyone, drink. Start fight at full mana and first infest is ignored. Watch timers... about every 14 seconds until infest make sure you have enough 'fresh' shields... a partial shield might help some, but that's not what you're there for. As for the Rapture procs.. unless you're not shielding the tank or OT, that is VERY dicey... I choose to help out on OT/MT. Despite what people are saying, i still go abolish disease to cleanse. If people are positioned right, there is no downside (especially on OT who might get it on/off him a few times).

Use Hymn AND Fiend at about 60-65% mana ... right after an infest. This makes your mana reset to 100% (probably a little overkill) and should be close enough to transition that you go into P1.5 with full mana.

P1.5&2.5 Shield/PoM like crazy. Love the raid ticking dmg. Watch for spike dmg.. penance away.

P2- More of the same on infest.. this is also where innervates, Mana Tide, and othery HoH should be used from your partner healers. If you've got fast reactions REALLY watch defiles... the defiles don't spread until they do dmg, so even more reason to use shields... in case you have someone a bit slow. Even a penance with a 1/3 or 2/3 DA proc will buy the person two more steps. Set up macro /targetexact Val'kyr Shadowguard /cast Devouring Plague. If you're behind on DPS follow that with a SW:P. It'll help, and you shouldn't miss the GCD too much.

P3- As has been said.. stay away from ghosts and prosper If you have fiend up again, use it on LK as early as possible... the dps will help, and can always use more mana.

That's it from this disc priest

Along the lines of this topic - has anyone managed to heal heroic 10-man lich king without a disc priest? We don't always have one on hand, and we struggle a lot on heroic with the much nastier infest. Normal is healable, but we're always losing people to infest on heroic without a disc priest, and due to the higher tank damage, I can't very readily help out either (as a paladin). Any tips would be appreciated!

To my knowledge, ALL of the Heroic LK 10 kills have been healed by disc priest/holy pally.