Baleroc, the Gatekeeper - Defeated 24/07/11

[TeaLeaf]

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[TeaLeaf]

Short fight tactics, will be updated once live versions appear...

Only one phase currently.

-This is primarily a healer fight. The tanks health will continually rise, while his damage taken will as well.
-Have DPS stand close to the crystals that Balerog spawns. Rotate so that the damage doesnt become too high.
-Healers healing the targets with crystal debuff stacks (use fast heals for more stacks!) gain a stack of a heal buff, which increases healing done to tank. Keep this buff up & stacking so healing the tank doesnt become impossible (the tank can have above 1mil hp by end of fight).
-If you get hit by countdown, simply move together. Do NOT run in to players with Torment stacks or they will spread.

[TeaLeaf]

http://25man.com/firelands/baleroc

[TeaLeaf]

Nice guide here:
http://www.icy-veins.com/baleroc-detailed-strategy

Also Tankspot's Guide:

What's up everybody and welcome back to the Firelands raid guide. My name is Lore, and I'll be guiding you through the 25-man Normal version of the Baleroc encounter.

Baleroc is a one-phase encounter that seems very complicated at first, but once you've gotten the jist of what you're supposed to be doing, everything else just kinda clicks into place. You'll need 2 tanks, 6 healers, and a healthy mix of melee and ranged DPS. You want no fewer than 6 of either to make things as simple as possible.

There are three main mechanics that all work together on this fight, and they're all fairly difficult to understand without first understanding the others. So bear with me as I work through these - everything will make sense at the end.

Let's look at the tank's job first. The primary mechanic for tanks to handle is a debuff called Blaze of Glory. He'll stack this up periodically on whichever tank he's currently attacking. Each stack increases the amount of physical damage you take by 20%, but also increases your maximum health by 20%. On top of that, whenever he applies a stack of Blaze of Glory, regardless of who he applies it to, he also buffs his own Fire damage by 20%.

He'll also occasionally use one of two Blade abilities: Decimation Blade makes him attack much slower, but each attack will do either 250,000 damage OR 90% of your health, whichever number is greater. Obviously, if your health is under 250,000, that's a 1-shot, so you'll need a few stacks of Blaze of Glory to survive it. When he uses Inferno Blade, his melee attacks deal Fire damage instead of Physical damage. Basically that means that instead of dealing with the increased physical damage from your Blaze of Glory stacks, you're now dealing with his own increased Fire damage.

The easiest way we found to handle these mechanics was to have two tanks: one who would only handle Decimation Blade, and another who would tank the boss the rest of the time, including during Inferno Blade. The Decimation Blade tank should pull the boss and only take enough stacks of Blaze of Glory to break the 250k mark. At that point, the other tank taunts and holds onto him. Whenever Baleroc uses Decimation Blade, our Decimation tank taunts, eats the Decimation Blade hits, and then the other tank grabs it back immediately as soon as Decimation Blade ends. This way we have a tank with very high health to be able to survive Inferno Blade, and a tank with much lower health to reduce the amount of healing required for Decimation Blade.

On to DPS. The mechanics that the DPS and healers will manage on this fight are very closely related, so bear with me if some of this doesn't seem to make sense until I get to the healer section. DPS will be the ones managing the Shards of Torment. These are the little pink crystals you see from time to time. He spawns one shard in melee and one shard at range, usually pretty close to where someone is currently standing. You can tell where a shard is about to spawn by the purple pillar of light that appears.

Once a shard is active, it'll latch onto whoever is closest and start stacking up a debuff called Torment. Each stack of Torment does an increasing amount of Shadow damage. You want to let this stack up as high as you possibly can, for two reasons. One is that it helps out your healers, and I'll explain why in the healer section. The other is that as soon as the Torment effect wears off, you get a debuff Tormented. It reduces the healing you do by 50%, which is why healers can't take Torment, and it also increases the shadow damage you take by 250%, which is not only why tanks can't take Torment, but means that you can't take it either until the debuff wears off. It lasts just long enough that you'll only be able to reliably take stacks every 3rd shard. It should only take two players to handle each Shard, so that's why you want at least 6 DPS in melee and 6 DPS at range. Oh, and if you try to just outrange the Shard, it starts AOE'ing the crap out of your raid, so make sure you manage Torment properly. We found it easiest to just set up a simple rotation and have everyone pay attention to when the guy before him starts taking Torment. Make sure you're using defensive cooldowns such as Divine Protection and Dispersion as well - it helps a lot.

As a side note, although the dungeon journal states that you can pass the Tormented debuff to other players by getting too close (that's the one that makes you take extra damage), that wasn't happening for us in our kill. As you can see, we're all just kind of hanging out in melee. Some of us have the debuff and some of us don't. It's possible that that mechanic only occurs on Heroic mode.

Alright healers, it's your turn. Thankfully, your mechanic is a bit simpler to explain, now that we've laid the ground work. Every time you heal someone who currently has stacks of Torment - that's the DPS debuff we were just talking about - you stack up your own debuff called Vital Spark. This is a good thing. You get one Vital Spark for every 3 stacks of Torment on your target, which is why DPS should be stacking it as high as they can. Note that you only get stacks by using a direct heal - AOE heals won't give you anything.

Now, why is that a good thing? Well, as soon as you switch over and heal someone with Blaze of Glory -- that's the tank debuff that increases their health and damage taken -- your Vital Sparks turn into Vital Flame, which increases your healing done by 5% for each stack of Vital Spark you had for 15 seconds. As soon as Vital Flame runs out, you get all your Vital Sparks back, so you can continue building it up from where you left off.

This is how you keep up with the tanks' ever-climbing health pools. As long as the DPS are managing Torment properly, there should only be 3 people taking damage at any point - the current tank, and the two DPS with Torment. So, you can split your healers into groups of 2. At the start, one group should be healing the tank, and the rest should be healing the DPS with Torment to stack up Vital Sparks. Around the same time the DPS do their first Torment swap, the healers should rotate; the two that were healing the tank should start building stacks of Vital Spark, and one of the other groups should move on to the tank. That'll activate their Vital Flame debuff. As soon as that falls off, or is about to, healers should rotate again. The group that's just been building sparks should move over to the tank, and the previous group should begin building sparks again. From then on it's just a matter of rotating every time the current tank healers are about to lose their Vital Flame debuff.

And that's basically the entire fight! Let's do a quick recap. Tanks, one of you will be holding the boss for the majority of the fight, while the other gets just enough stacks of Blaze of Glory to survive Decimation Blade - that's at least 250k health. Make sure you stay away from the Shards of Torment - you really don't want that debuff.

DPS, organize yourselves as much as you see fit and make sure you're handling Torment properly. Remember, you want to hold onto it as long as possible so that the healers can build stacks faster - use your personal defensive cooldowns!

Healers, set yourselves up into groups of 2 and rotate between healing the tank and building up Vital Sparks. And make sure you're watching closely for those purple pillars of light - it doesn't matter how many Sparks you've got if you catch the 50% healing debuff from standing too close to to a Shard.

[TeaLeaf]

Other purloined info.

There is only 1 shard on 10man. As far as I know all other mechanics are the same. Use a 3-healer rotation instead of 6 healers in groups of 2 (or just 2 healers alternating if you can get away with it).

Trash in front of baleroc isn't that hard. Just keep your char away from baleroc, because you will get hit by little adds spawning from vulcanos knocking you back.
Setup: 2 tank, 3 healers and 5 dps

Keep in mind that the shard will always spawn in melee range at the boss. Using the tol barad trinket with any other self defensive cooldowns to handle the torment helps healers A LOT.
For example a DK with his anti magic shell can stack up to 20+

Somewhat the Decimation Blade is definitely the harder to heal blade from what our healers said for most of the fight. Due to having to put out 234k+ healing between the hits. Its very very slow between attacks I think it was like 5 seconds between hits.

I found that there is some luck to it. Not that its ever not doable but the fight is significantly easier the less decimation blades you get. I had an attempt that I got it back to back as the first 2 blades and it sucks. The reason, every time I tanked the decimation blade I took 1 extra stack of Blaze of Glory (comes between first and second hit). So at the end when I had just under 400k health I was very hard to heal during decimation blade. Haven't tried a fast taunt swap in the middle to avoid but it might be possible but would take good timing.

In the last 15% of the fight the the MT had so much health and was taking so much dmg that he just became very hard to heal they said. Basically the dmg the MT takes scales slightly faster than the healing buff the healers get. I believe this is also cause when I'd get an extra stack during decimation blade, the boss would deal greater fire dmg but the MT wouldn't have the benefit of the extra health. Our Healers started having troubles at 23 stacks on the MT. I was up to 6 stacks at this point as the OT. He was taking 330k hits during normal periods (no blade active).

TLDR; yes similar to chimaeron but also different in other ways. I had a 1;30 second period I didn't even have to touch the boss as the decimation tank.

Our Holy Paladin was having trouble last week with the Vital Spark stacking and we were at a loss as to why he wasn't gaining stacks like our other healers. I read something during the PTR about Beacon interfering with Vital Spark application if a Paladin healed a player with Torment and a tank with Blaze of Glory at the same time. Is this still the case? Is this working as intended and should he not place Beacon on the tank? Or am I completely misunderstanding the mechanic?

[TeaLeaf]

This looks a very doable fight.  Good fight for AMS?

[Twyst]

This looks a very doable fight.  Good fight for AMS?

Yes and no. AMS stops the application of debuffs and the mechanic of the tanking requires at least some debuff to handle The Decimation Blade. So if the other tank handles that, just like my normal role on HC Chim for double attack, then it should help if I take Inferno Blade so I can reduce the number of stack applications every 45 seconds. Note this will not reset my stacks, my stop them being applied for a short period.

[TeaLeaf]

This is next after Rhyolith, so prep up for this week.

[Azunai]

For DPS: Might be handy to set up Power Aura's (if you're using that) to show a graphical/audio warning of some sort when you reach (your max stack of debuffs) -1. Perhaps another entry that checks the stacks of the person you're supposed to take over from is handy as well. This may help clean up TS communication.

I know we tried using all 5 dps yesterday for the crystals, in a rotation of 3 per crystal, but I think it'll be much easier to use 4 dps, 2 per crystal, with 1 dps not dealing with crystals at all. These DPS will take quite some dmg near the end, *but* at any given time there's only 2 people taking damage: The tank and the person with Torment. So it's not like it would split healers' attention up that much. Doing this makes the fight easier as you don't have to constantly rethink whose turn it is, but can pre-arrange the order, and set up 2 teams of 2. This in turn may leave you more time to focus on DPS, which as we saw yesterday was what we lacked ;-)

I think a crystal lasts for 20 seconds? So 10-11 stacks each, taking into account switching time. I reckon that's workable as the damage is very predictable (order of people is predefined and no one beside that person and the tank is taking damage).

[TeaLeaf]

DPS Torment Soaking:
I ran some Fraps last night just to confirm timing:

Crystal lasts for 25 seconds
10 second gap between end of one crystal and new one appearing
Tormented debuff lasts for 40 seconds

We need 5 dps in the soak rotation
Each one needs to aim for 8.5 seconds of soaking
This means we'll never be short of an un-debuffed player for soaking and
There will never be less than a 3 second gap after buff expiring before needing to take another Torment soak and
If we let a DPS player die to Torment we will wipe as we'll have too few DPS to cover the Torment soaking (without CD use e.g. dispersion)

So, DPS have it sorted.  I'd suggest we start macroing this into channels to free up TS.


Positioning:
 now we have the mechanism down & sorted, we need to group a LOT closer to the crystal.  We just need to not be the closest unless you are the one soaking.  This will increase dps a lot and smooth healing as only a few steps will be needed, not 15 yards.


Trinket thoughts:
Mirror of Broken Images is good for tonks.
DK best for MT as most magic resistance via AMZ & Trinks etc.


Healing:
Note: [Vital Flame] will refresh every 15 seconds when healing the tank. You can allow it to refresh only ONCE during your tank healing cycle (right in the middle) stretching your tank healing time to a MAXIMUM of 30 seconds. Drop a big rolling hot/renew at the last few seconds of its duration at ~25-28 seconds of healing the tank, pump a last heal and make sure you swap off to enter the dps healing cycle. Whatever you do, never renew the buff twice as you will half the amount of stacks you build up during the dps healing cycle (you cannot build stacks with the healing buff active) and later on the tank will drop.

protip: Make sure your UI isset it up to show, stacks and duration on yourself of Vital Spark, and Vital Flame,it will tell you exactly how you build up and how much time you have to switch. (or use an addon like TellMeWhen)

Healing on this looks complicated but is really not, the only thing you need to remember is your targets in order, Tormented DPS (for a total of max 30 seconds) then tank for 30 seconds.

Note:
Serenity does not trigger Spark buff on tanks
rolling hots will continue after buff expires.
beacon does not trigger spark, can be used to continue tank heals.


Best Try last night:

16% at the enrage.  Not bad for the first few tries on the first night of a brand new boss.  We kill Baleroc this week.

[Whitey]

http://www.icy-veins.com/baleroc-tank-strategy

With the healers we have we should be able to single tank this fight.

[TeaLeaf]

Very true, worth a try me thinks.  Another one tank fight.....grrr.

[Twyst]

One tank would certainly reduce the number of unforced tank errors

But seriously, I want more 3 tank fights like HC Chim! Giggity

[Twyst]

Just a little update - there was at least 3 times when Hal missed a taunt and each time I ate Decimation blade which killed me because I didn't have 91% HP.
Given this, do our healers think it's still a viable strat as there's only 1 tank to keep up?

[TeaLeaf]

It's clearly viable as people have done it - but it's a healing issue as to whether or not it works.  I think we need to look at logs and post up what we think a healing rotation is looking like as we lost the MT at exactly the same point each time - so where in the rotation is that point, and how are we timing/managing the rotation?