Looks like it’s a randomly targeted attack and the healer was unlucky enough to get hit with it often and didn’t heal themselves quickly. Dunno why it focused so much on the healer, though.
I don’t know if this is true or my imagination, but it’s always seemed to me that Meathook chains the party member who is farthest away from him (within range, of course). When I heal CoS, I try to stand relatively close to him. Let the hunter get it!
Edited to add: According to the comments on Wowhead, he chains a random ranged target. If your healer is the only one at range, he’ll get them all. One solution is to move your healer into melee range, where of course he will be affected by the AoE.
Yup, AFAIK it’s completely random who he targets with the slime spray, so everyone just needs to be ready to move out of it.
Are you (or is anyone in the raid) running a death report addon like Acheron? I love it–I can see everything that happened to someone ~15 seconds before their death. It’s very useful for pinpointing exactly what happened (were they standing in something, did they not get healed, etc.).
Like **Skammer **said, make sure there’s more than just the healer standing at range. Anybody else in the group who has healing spells should be using them if necessary if the healer gets chained, and the tank should be using cooldowns if necessary, too.
But he wasn’t doing any discernable pattern, so AoE spells would miss.
Did you wait for him to stop moving? If I’m collecting a really big pack, I might pause now and then to let things catch up so I can TC to stay ahead of healing aggro, but then move on again.
Or, could be it was just a nubling tank. 
Yeah. As luck would have it, when I re-queued I got CoS again, so I explained what happened the first time. Tank said, “Healer needs to stand closer.”
And we did have a hunter in the second group, and yup, he got it 
Unfortunately, the only other person in the group who could heal … was the tank 
Anyway, I made it through with the second group, and dinged 80 in the process (yay! 3rd 80!) Then Svelexi mailed her heirlooms off to my priest, fed another load of Eternal Life to my tailor pally who, in turn, got busy making Moonshroud and buying Crusader Orbs and stitching together some Royal Moonshroud Robes.
Check out this sharp-dressed draenei 
Then, um, heal themselves, blow CDs, and pray the healer gets unchained long enough to throw one or two out…
Yep. That’s the time for Lay On Hands and Divine Shield, or Barkskin, Survival Instincts, and Frenzied Regeneration (shifting out to heal as a Druid tank is pure suicide).
Switching your replies around ;p
I never looked to see how geared the tank was, and of course had no idea how (in)experienced he was. A couple people in the group also said it was their first time in CoS, but I don’t recall if the tank was one of them. In any case, the tank saw what was happening to the healer and was nice about it, though he didn’t know what was causing it or how to prevent it.
And speaking as an experienced paladin myself, when you’re soloing and leveling as a paladin you find you very, very, very rarely need to stop and heal yourself in the middle of combat, thanks to the almost continuous healing you get from your judgements. Usually you gut it out and heal when the fight’s over. So going from that to a dungeon group situation, self-healing in the middle of a fight is something that’s going to take some practice.
I also discovered that trying to rez in CoS is a royal pain in the ass. I ran back after the second wipe and found the pally tank trying to rez people, and every time he’d start casting he’d get halfway through and one of those nonstop-spawning little zombies would pop up and interrupt him. One of the other DPS and I were attempting to keep the zombies away from him, but it would seem that, when one person in a group enters combat, everybody enters combat, at least within a certain range.
I have this same problem with my pally tank - I’m trying to get better, but it usually goes like this “Oh, man, I’m taking a lot of damage. Hey my health is pretty low. I don’t know if the healer is going to be able to keep me up. Uh oh, I’m almost dead. Hey! I should drink a potion, now let’s see… oh I’m dead.” I have been getting better at using Lay on Hands, but that’s got a long CD.
Yeah, it’s almost impossible to rez out in the streets of CoS unless, I suppose, you’ve got a lot of +Haste built up. Pretty much anyone who dies has to run back. Remind them that by talking to Chromie they can teleport from the inn cellar to the city, saving a lot of time.
I don’t suppose anyone has a dude on Greymane to help me chainrun the ICC 5-mans?
Same for a lot of your toolkit, really, as Pally and as pretty much every class. When I’m running around doing dailies, I barely think about the buttons I’m hitting. Slap on a Seal and glyphed Blessing of Might, then pop Reckoning, Judge, Crusader, Exorcism when Art of War procs, and it’s usually dead by then. Maybe a Divine Storm if there’s a bunch of enemies.
In dungeons, you’ve got 5 people plus pets to buff every 10 minutes, fights are long enough that you need to be constantly jumping between abilities to keep DPS up, watching meters for emergency Cleanses and heals, be ready with Divine Shield and Lay On Hands if things go south, and on and on. Oh yes, and no Reckoning, unless you want to get squished. I’ve really only started to become comfortable with my rotation, doing about 2k DPS reliably, and I still forget to pop Avenging Wrath on bosses. I’m not even ready to think about incorporating Hands just yet. Maybe when I start learning Holy.
I’m not sure how to tell you this, but, that’s really a healing robe, if I’m not mistaken Haste is far more valuable than Spirit so for a mage you want Merlin’s Robe(and the Bejeweled Wizard’s Bracers). 
Yeah, but the pattern for Merlin’s Robe was a hell of a lot more expensive
I got put in heroic CoS for the first time the other night and this worked out well for me by accident it seems, our tank was running around so much and I was worried about getting lost I stuck to him like glue so much that I was melee-ing between heals after a judgement. Note to self pay more attention what drops and next time do not choose Greed for the Drake, sigh……
Also got put into Violet Hold for the first time last night, the fight that has been discussed here before with the orbs? Well the tank didn’t move so we wiped once, those orbs pack quite a punch. Second time was Ok though the tank died I kept everyone else alive just long enough to dps him down.
Grats on your third 80!
IMO that’s the most difficult boss in VH. Unless you’re very overgeared, the key is to have the tank kite him around the room and have the ranged dps/heals stay ahead of the tank to avoid the orbs. It’s a little bit tricky.
Burning Dog Legion dungeon run tonight: Shattered Halls. We’re starting to tackle the top-tier instances from BC now: after SH, we have Black Morass, the three Tempest Keep dungeons, and Magister’s Terrace. I’m looking forward to the next few weeks because I never got to do any of those before WotLK came out.
Easily the most difficult boss in the classic Northrend instances - the only other one who’s remotely tricky nowadays is the final boss/vehicle fight in the Oculus.
That’s been the case since, oh, some time in vanilla. Raids actually used to have dedicated rezzers–people who would stay out of combat so that they could rez people as they died. Now, if you’re in an instance or a raid, AFAIK you’ll enter combat any time anyone in your party does, no matter how far apart you are.
FWIW, though, as long as the cast starts before the rezzer enters combat, if you can keep the cast from being interrupted, it should go through. (I think? Maybe?)
Learning when to blow your CDs is one of the hardest parts of becoming a really good tank. It’s getting easier now that we have more of them on shorter timers. Shield Wall was always a big problem for me, e.g., because it used to be on a 30-minute cooldown, and it was linked with my other two big ones (Retaliation and Recklessness). When it first dropped to five minutes (currently two minutes with the talent and the glyph), it was really hard for me to remember to use it.
You don’t use your Greater Blessings? Or are you talking below the level where you get those?
Haste *is *better than Spirit for a Mage, objectively speaking, but Spirit isn’t useless, especially if you have Molten Armor glyphed. If they aren’t both available, the Royal Moonshroud Robe is still better than the T9 chest.
No.
(From bitter experience, spriest dpsing Halls of Reflection when the heals went down. We got through that wave, but the next one arrived, put me into combat, and interrupted the res spell, before the res went through.)
Tom is right, that’s the problem with rezzing in CoS too: you can get out of combat quickly enough, but even if you start a rez as soon as combat ends, a new zombie will engage you before you’re done and interrupt the spell. Maybe, if you’re really stacked with +haste, you could get it off in time, but I know I can’t.