Baleroc

[Stompyomouf]

Assuming for 10m we have 2 tanks and 3 healers, how would you recommend we handle the 6 person rotation of the crystal? I see the posts about 1 tanking, and our healers are probably going to be a Druid, Disc/Holy priest (he could do either), and a shammy. Do you recommend we 1 tank it or try and have one of the DPS take the entire duration?

[Narina]

Some tips we learned that really made this encounter a breeze.

1 tank this fight, if you do the healing methods i mention there is just no reason not too.

Set up your 3 healers as follows: Healers A- On whoever has the most stacks of torment until a Decimation Blade comes down. B- Heals the first torment person, then the tank until healer A has desired stacks C- Starts on boss, then switches to torment people after first crystal.

For the very first crystal you want to get the stacks REALLY high on the first dps to take torment. This is ideal if you have a shadow priest (dispersion glyphed). A shadow priest can take an entire crystal himself, have him disperse at 19 stacks (as soon as it hits 19). With 2 healers dedicated to healing him spamming quick heals (to gather stacks) keeps him up. A healer CD helps a lot too, such as Pain Suppression. If you use another class have them get to 18 stacks before switching. This will get healer stacks up REALLY QUICK. Our two healers healing the shadow priest on first crystal both got to 80+ stacks.

Healers can use big heals early because they should stack torment so high they are just using low cost spells from then on.

Just to give you an idea: a spriest taking the entire crystal (25 stacks) with a disc priest (me) gathering stacks. I penanced at 6 stacks/15 stacks/24 stacks on the spriest, used regular heal until he was at 11 stacks, then spammed flash heal in the middle (I used Pain Supression at 14 stacks, he dispersed at 19 stacks). I had 80 stacks after first crystal. Our pally said he gets to about 85.

Then I switched to healing tank while our resto druid and pally got some stacks. Pally switched to tank for Decimate Blades. I healed (at 80 stacks) until the pally got to 150 stacks, then he took over on tank and I went back to stack gathering. At the end of the fight I was helping again on Decimate blades, but otherwise the pally never had issues.

[Mahananaka]

Couple of people have gotten a few things wrong about the Vital spark stacks. First of all as it works currently its 1 stack gained per 3 stacks of torment the target has. Thus healing a person with 9 stacks of torment only = 3 stacks of vital spark. Secondly druids don't have any special powers on this fight that make them stronger because it requires direct heals, thus hots do not grant stacks. Though the direct heal part of regrowth and the bloom of lifebloom are considered direct heals as usual.

From a druid perspective the largest annoyance of this fight is having to pull your lifebloom off the tank. While you have your healing buff active you cannot gain more vital spark stacks. The buff lasts 15 seconds from when you first direct heal the MT, and cannot be refreshed early. However if you accidentally use direct heal .1 seconds after your buff goes away you're basically committed to tank healing for another 15 seconds, it cannot be removed early. Thus our group found that the person healing the tank was best to call swaps on heal targets that way you maximized your buff stacking. Lastly when your 15 second healing buff falls of you regain your vital spark stacks you had.

Also there seems to be a lot of confusion in 10mode on the tormented crystals. Each crystal will deal 30 stacks. The debuff lasts 40 seconds. There is 5 dps to rotate, and there is like 3-5 seconds of downtime between crystals. This means the first person will start their 40 second timer and then 4 other will take 10 stacks each = 40 seconds of real time + 3 second gap between crystals means the first person is ready to take stacks again 3 seconds before s/he needs to be. Which means the "Alpha" person will tack the first stacks of the first crystal and will be ready to take the final stacks of the second crystal. The "Beta" person will take the second set of stacks of the first crystal, and will be able to take the first stacks of the third crystal. The only purpose to going higher than 10 stacks is to help healers get an early lead on vital spark stacks.

[Narina]

Druids definitely seem to be at a disadvantage in this fight. We run druid/disc/hpally and the druid was much slower in gathering stacks.

I have to disagree with the poster above about the torment crystals though. They definitely gave off 25 stacks for us during the encounter. We had a spriest take the entire first crystal (max 25 stacks), 2 dps 12/13 stacks switch take crystal B and C, then back to spriest with dispersion up. Without a spriest you could use a 4 person rotation, we just used 5 because it made dispersion off CD again. Again, I HIGHLY recommend letting your first torment taker get to at least 18 stacks to help healers, beyond that you can do 12/13. We were comfortable with 2 people splitting the stacks, but I read some guilds prefer having 3 dps split the crystal. Seems like that would slow healers down a good deal to me though.

[Stompyomouf]

Well we got him on the first night, thanks for all the advice.What worked for us on 10m was 2 tanks, 3 heals. The two tanks allowed us to be able to heal the decimation tank in one cast after about 30 decode of stack building. We rotated the healers so that there was always 2 on torment and one on the tank with vital flame.I can see the one tank strat being easier on 25m thou and I think we will try that.

[ugadal]

Hello all,

Regarding Blaze of glory, I'm wondering about the +20% health/damage increase, is it additive or multiplicative ?
Practically, does the tank's health go as such : 200k-240k-280k-320K-360K-400K .. or 200k-240k-288K-345K-414K-500K...
(example numbers for a tank of 200K), this turns into a dramatic difference after 2 minutes...

From my own few down experiments(3) I'm in favor of the second hypothesis, since our tank had ~500k health after 1 minute, right prior to second lame, that would mean 5 blazes of glory / minutes. It seems that the two tanks strategy urges the decimation-tank to stack 3 blazes in roughly 30 second, until the first lame ends, so to say in agreement with the 5 blazes/min rythm hypothesis.
I'm definitely lacking combat logs for this event.

Personally I'm in favor of testing the 2 tank strat, just to allow healers of getting ahead and start healing a "fresh" tank, but I'm wondering about the inferno lame, already 3 times buffed and applied on a tank not buffed.

Concerning Method's HM down, do you understand what happens to their tank at roughly 7'50 ? his max health is at 1.3M and suddenly raises to 3.5M; then he dies...

[Bemxuu]

I had a question regarding Decimation. If it really does damage unmitigated 90%hp/250k damage, doesn't that meant that it is a good idea to have a hybrid bear/cat to tank in bear form during the D. Blade phase and shift to cat afterwards? You don't need any stamina on gems/enchants due to Blaze of Glory and you would appreciate all the agi gems/chants for the dodge. Sound like hybrid bear/cat for me.

[Mwawka]

Druids definitely seem to be at a disadvantage in this fight. We run druid/disc/hpally and the druid was much slower in gathering stacks.

I have to disagree with the poster above about the torment crystals though. They definitely gave off 25 stacks for us during the encounter. We had a spriest take the entire first crystal (max 25 stacks), 2 dps 12/13 stacks switch take crystal B and C, then back to spriest with dispersion up. Without a spriest you could use a 4 person rotation, we just used 5 because it made dispersion off CD again. Again, I HIGHLY recommend letting your first torment taker get to at least 18 stacks to help healers, beyond that you can do 12/13. We were comfortable with 2 people splitting the stacks, but I read some guilds prefer having 3 dps split the crystal. Seems like that would slow healers down a good deal to me though.

If you play it right given you have a spriest, the druid should actually be at an advantage. We used a warrior with chained and overlapping cd's to get the first shard to 25 stacks on one player. Healers were disc/shammy/druid. Being the druid was actually fantastic for this fight. We had the shammy heal the tanks through the first shard with the priest and I built stacks. We hit BL when the first shard spawned and I popped tree form and SM then Nourish to 9 stacks of torment. I pre rejuv the two tanks and warrior so I get speedy nourish for most of this part of the fight. Then at nine stacks, pop ToL and spam Regrowth til the end of the first torment. This gets me to between 90-100 stacks which is all I need for the rest of the fight and the disc priest was getting between 60 and 70. At that point we both switched to tanks and shammy switched to shard healing. We then rotated dps on the shard at 8 stacks of torment.

I was oom at the end of the first shard, but popped innervate and never came close to running out of mana for the rest of the fight as for the most part I just rolled LB and spammed nourish. Took target switching out of play for the healers and simplified the fight. I'm quite sure we could have easily done this same strat with one tank, but we played with two to be safe.

[Migol]

Question, does anyone know if Ardent Defender/Guardian Spirit work against Decimation blade, IE as insurance in case your healers can't heal the soak tank up fast enough?

[Grakzul Slaughtbringer]

Migol : I do not know for those specific spells but Shield Wall doesn't mitigate the decimation blade.

My guild killed him fir the third time yesterday, I was tanking him for the first time. They usually bring a DK tank and fight him with only one tank. But healers were unable to keep me alive as a solo tank. They just couldn't top me between two decimation blades hits. This was kind of frustrating because my ilvl is 369, so not a gear issue, and I manage my SB cooldowns quite well.

So we brought a second tank, did exactly as explained in the video guide and killed him immediately with ease. Not sure doing Baleroc with only one tank is useful as it becomes quite unpredictable for the healers. Maybe in a few weeks with a raid in full Firelands stuff...

[Calleana]

@ Migol- Ardent defender definately works to save you from a death. We found a consistant method for the decimation blade was a slight variation on the 2 tank strat.

If the Druid OT got hit by a decimation blade MT taunted and took the next hit (for the first decimation blade I used Ardent defender as I didn't have enough Blaze stacks). This gave our healers enough time to heal the druid back up to full.

[bigredslayer]

I'm quite sure we could have easily done this same strat with one tank, but we played with two to be safe.

Thanks for your Druid insight on this fight we did this fight for the first time last night with a paladin single tanking it and had no trouble using your strat! Our druid ended up doing 40k HPS on the fight!

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=2070&e=2418

[Pacans]

What happens if healer leave something like Earth Shield on tank or Riptide few second before he have to switch? Does they trigger Vital Flame? What's with Druid hots left on tanks?

[Nachtwolf]

...

If the Druid OT got hit by a decimation blade MT taunted and took the next hit (for the first decimation blade I used Ardent defender as I didn't have enough Blaze stacks). This gave our healers enough time to heal the druid back up to full.

we basically did the same..

on our first kill both our tanks (paly main, warrior for decimation taunting) had about 260k hitpoints with 2 blazes.. so we started with warrior tank on boss, taking the first 2 blazes, paly taunting taking his first blaze .. then on inferno blade paly stayed, on decimation blade warrior taunted and took first hit, paly taunted immediatly after the first hit and therefore got the blaze in between the first 2 decimation hits, took the 2nd hit .. warrior taunted back for 3rd hit and paly took over again after that...

we repeated that taunt-orgy on each decimation blade so warrior tank stayed on 2 blazes the whole fight, paly tank got much higher hitpoints than without it too ..

basically that gave our healers 10 seconds to get warrior back to full hp after taking the first decimation hit, and a few hots were more than enough to get him back to max hp before the next decimation blade

forgive me if this description is bad.. i'm a bit tired right now at work :P

[lubz]

Edit: redundant

[notyourtank]

My guild did this the other night and I want you know if you guys agree with our assesment that Hpallys have a slight advantage in this fight. We came to this conclusion after realizing that beacon healing on the tank does not start the 15 second timer so Hpally could beacon the tank and solo heal the dps currently taking damage from the crystals. This we did till I had 30 stacks (which happend very fast) Then I moved to heal the tanks while the other healers continued to build there stacks. Finally we reverted to everyone healing as normal starting at about 60% which is where we where at when the stacks where done being built to needed amounts. We where obviously running the 10 man version.

[Mystestorm]

Can one kill Baleroc before Rhyolith?

[dgdr1991]

Can one kill Baleroc before Rhyolith?

Yes, you can. We did it that way, I believe it is actually easier if you have good healers and enough gear to beat the enrage timer.

[ferdy30]

Our group started this today and are having some problems. So for the crystals we were trying to have 4 dps just rotate (this is in 10 man).
Crystal 1 spaws: Player A takes 10 stacks then Player B takes 10 stacks, then Player C finishes.
Crystal 2 spawns: Player D takes 10 stacks then back to player A etc.
Only problem is that when Player A is supposed to hop on the second crystal he still has the Tormented debuff. Are we doing this rotation wrong.

Also with druids...what is the best way for them to heal when it is their turn to heal the ppl that are taking the crystal stacks.

[Quinafoi]

You should just split a crystal in half, don't ever assign 3 people to a single crystal. Additionally, you have to wait the for at least one crystal before you take it again.

In 10 man for healing in general (assuming 3 healing) you will want to have two healers continually alternate each crystal between tank healing and torment healing while your third healer simply continues to build up stacks of of the buff in preparation for decimation blade or if the other tank healers fall too far behind (only heals when needed but ends up with significantly higher stacks). Since he no longer can pick to cast decimation blade first, extreme measures such as burning heroism at the start for higher stacks isn't really necessary anymore but could still help particularlly if combined with a DPS that can tank the entire crystal (i.e. Shadow Priest with the Tol Barad trinket).

As for general advice for a druid healer. Well if you're the person who is just generating stacks constantly and only healing tanks when necessary then you can at least keep a Rejuvenation on the active tank as it won't trigger Vital Flame. You should try to avoid using Lifebloom however on the tanks unless you are managing it very well cause if you allow it to bloom it will trigger preventing you from stacking. When you see decimation blade warning the first thing you do is cast Regrowth on the decimation blade tank in order to activate Vital Flame so that your following heals will be buffed a common mistake a druid may make is to get unbuffed HoTs up first and hit a Swiftmend that only heals for the normal amount as the first heal to actually proc the Vital Flame buff. If you're in the role of constantly switching back and forth between tank healing and torment healing then you will want to avoid using Lifebloom on the tanks because it can delay your swaping back to stacking the buff and should primarily be using direct heals and rejuvenation.

As for healing the torment itself it's really simple. Damage starts slow so slower heals like Nourish are fine, also until they actually have a few stacks you aren't gaining very much in terms of buff stacks anyway. As the damage ramps up you switch to larger and faster heals of Healing Touch, Regrowth, and Swiftmend. People who have the tendency of dying or classes with less survivability against the crystal you may want to use the first GCD or two to preplant some HoTs to assist with the increased damage they will be taking at the end.