10 man Normal Baleroc

[Couladin]

We are a casual 10-man raiding guild that got to 3/7 FL normal yesterday. Our 4th boss is Baleroc. We spend some time on him yesterday and we feel he is very doable for us. Best attempt to 40%.

What we where wondering about is which tank would be best for the fight. Yesterday we had 3 players with tank spec. We tried the 1 tank strat. First we used a pala. The decimation strike killed us every time. In our last attempt we used a bear beceause his avoidance is much bigger. I'm the 3rd tank, a DK.

We where thinking that probably Bear or DK would work best. Avoidance versus Self healing. Our question is what would be the best way to go. As a DK I can heal a % of the damage dealt to me which is a lot when the first decimation strike has landed. That can help the healers a lot, but is it enough?

Our Bear has a lot of avoidance. He even managed to avoid all 3 decimation strikes when the boss hit, but in the 2nd series we still wiped.

Avoidance is more based on RNG, but we also don't know if the DK would work. What do you think? Is there a "better" tank for this specific fight and if yes, which one?

Furthermore, we used 4 dps to soak the crystals in pairs of 2. They switched at 15 stacks. I'm wondering is that is to much. If we shouldn't use all dps and switch at 9 stacks. What do you think about that?

Thanks for the advice!

[Quinafoi]

Decimating Strike is a 90% healing reduction debuff equal to the duration of his swing timer. Switching tanks won't help if you get hit twice in a row because even a Paladin's Lay on Hands is completely worthless, only the healers can actually provide significant healing.

Why are you using a single tank strategy on normal mode. While this may be what some heroic mode groups use in order to get sufficient DPS to kill the boss in time, it isn't necessary in normal mode and you make things harder for your healers than it has to be.

Each shard does 25 stacks. If you swap at 9, then you would end up with 9A, 9B, 7C ... 9D, 9E, 7A ... 9B, 9C, 7D ...
This rotation results in a different combination of DPS taking each shard. Additionally, it has the person that started one shard being the person which ends the next shard. This is not significant amount of time for their damage reduction cooldowns to become available again. Also, since you are only going to 9 or 7 stacks, healers will only gain 1-3 applications of Vital Spark per heal and the vast majority of that would be less than 3. You greatly hinder the rate which your healers gain stacks and are thus which is the exact opposite of what is necessary in a single tank strategy, in fact a single tank strategy is actually more likely to stack classes which tank take full shards (Shadow Priests in particular) in order to maximize the amount of stacks of Vital Spark healers gain. If I were to burn all of my mana casting as GCD locked I would gain around 39 stacks maximum using a method like this. Splitting it 13 and 12 I would gain around 56. Having a DPS like a Shadow Priest take the entire Shard I would end up with well over 100. I can only afford to do a hard burn of mana once a fight, if I heal efficiently I would get no where near these numbers. Every 20 applications of Vital Spark is an additional 100% healing done to the tank when converted to Vital Flame. So splitting a shard in half almost adds an additional 100% healing over splitting it in thirds.

When it is all said and done, it doesn't matter what tank you use. If they are hit two times in a row, the tank can do nothing about that, only healers can.

Your strategy as you have approached it is not viable. Healers will never be able to have sufficient stacks of Vital Spark to properly execute a single tank strategy. The one thing necessary to a single tank strategy you are also trying to reduce which makes it completely unviable.

1. Switch to a two tank strategy. If you reduce the total health of your Decimation Blade tank then healers require less stacks of Vital Spark to heal them. This allows you the ability to split shards more frequently or always.

2. Since shards stack to 25, you want to split them in half with the DPS which can survive better going first. The first person goes to at least 13 (more than half). Ideally you'd like the first to go to 15 because that is one step higher (every 3 stacks means it generates more stacks of Vital Spark for the healers) though it isn't absolutely necessary. Hunters, Shaman, Rogues, and Mages you typically want to either not use (have as a fifth person backup) or as second in the rotation (taking fewer stacks). Other classes will generally have some form of mitigation and would work at reducing the magic damage with Shadow Priest being the most extreme case.

3. Work on your healing assignments to maximize stack gains.

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Click the link to this quote and it will take you to a different post I've already made on the subject.

[swelt]

In our alt raid, I solo tank this on my DK and feel well suited to it:
- Inferno blade is trivialised by using Mirror trinket in combination with Anti-Magic Shell
- Decimation blade is made a lot less scary by using both Dancing Rune Weapon and Vampiric Blood (glyphed of course), which gives you a high chance to fully avoid the blades and +40% healing received if they do get through

The things to be careful of, as a DK:
- you keep up diseases OR have someone else to apply those debuffs for you. Ideally the latter, so you don't have to waste runes that cold be death strikes. Although the special blades demand a lot of attention, his regular damage is quite capable of killing you.
- 2 of the same blades in a row. 2 Inferno blades is not really a problem, AMS should be back up and you could complement it with bone shield or even IBF. 2 Decimation blades in a row probably warrants some kind of external healing cooldown (+healing received like guardian spirit/glyphed PW:Barrier or healers personal +healing CDs/Trinks).

As Quinafoi alludes to above though, this is also very much about the healers and what they are doing. If they haven't got a good strategy for handling their healing, and aren't executing it well, it won't make any difference what the tank is doing. It's certainly worth considering the 2 tank strategy. If you do that, using the DK to soak decimation (with DRW/VB as described) is a good choice. That does require that your healers react quickly and pump big heals to the other tank when decimation blade comes... Depending on your healers, they may actually prefer the single tank strat as it is less complex (but demands higher throughput).

[Couladin]

Thanks for the advice! We can work with that. Tonight a new and fresh raid. I hope we make it to Baleroc (was our 4th boss on the list).

[Quinafoi]

The nerf to Baleroc was quite significant. Like the 25% decreased attack speed during Decimation Blade but they didn't alter the duration of Decimation Blade result in there only being two Decimating Strikes instead of three. The shards do significantly less damage so DPS was easily able to go to much higher stacks, went to 20 without even droping below 50% health at any point myself with only Barkskin and Moonkin Form damage reductions. And with the 25% nerf to his health you effectively need only like 90k DPS to beat the berserk timer where as you used to need 115k. The nerfs hit this encounter hard.

[Couladin]

We downed him yesterday. We used the 2 tank strategy and together with the nerf it was a breeze. It actually was to easy now if you ask me. We would have liked to down him at least once before the nerf, but hey.

The only problem we had was with the crystals. As soon as the rotation for the dps and healers was okay we killed him. 4th try if I'm not mistaken.

Thanks for the tips again!