Healing Baleroc 10 man

Our guild has changed our Baleroc strat a couple of times according to raid composition and in the spirit of switching things up. Our first few weeks we killed him as I outlined here with one tank, three healers, 4 soakers. The last few weeks we’ve been two-healing it, so I thought I’d briefly describe that.

Strategy

Raid composition:

one tank (druid)
two healers (paladin, druid)
seven dps (three melee, four ranged – but it doesn’t really matter)

Roles:

six crystal soakers
two healers on the tank at all times after the first crystal
noone assigned to the crystal soakers (will explain that below)

Our crystal rotation:

Crystal 1: Shadow priest takes the entire first crystal
Crystal 2: three soakers (D,E,F) taking 8 stacks each. And from then on:
Crystal 3: Shadow priest + two others (A,B,C) taking 8 stacks each
Crystal 4: three soakers (D,E,F) taking 8 stacks each.
Repeat 3 and 4 till Baleroc is dead.

So for the first crystal, we use our shadow priest to soak the entire first 27 stacks or whatever it adds up to. This is a fairly common strat. He gets Hand of Sacrifice at about 12 stacks, and disperses at about 19. From then on we use a normal rotation of 6 dps. Doesn’t really matter who, and we have a spare for if things go wrong.

Our heal rotation:

On the pull:

We used heroism/bloodlust/timewarp a few seconds after the pull.
BOTH healers spam the shadow priest using their fastest stack building heals.
Once the first crystal is over, both healers now heal the tank for the remainder of the fight.
The tank may have to use cooldowns (dodge trinkets, self heals etc) in this first crystal phase.

After the first crystal:

From now on, the crystal soakers only go to 8 stacks. I cover the healing for this by spraying WG ocassionally and RJing them. This is enough to have them topped up again by the time they are ready to soak again. Make sure they undesrtand that they won’t die if they tank 8 stacks, but if they try to go more they will, as they don’t have a dedicated healer. (Note that our holy pally is helping to heal them too, but we don’t want them getting complacent! ;-)

With both healers on the tank with high stacks, Decimation blades are not an issue, so no need to bring a second tank.

My Druidy thoughts about all of this

For me, the first crystal phase means going into tree form and spamming Regrowth. I use Jaws of Defeat at the same time to try and make this less costly. Basically, most of us druids will go pretty oom doing a full treeform spamming Regrowth.

If you are going to use this strategy, I advise practising beforehand. I know that sounds silly, but I found it really useful. You can see how your mana goes, and plan for if you need to pop innervate during the spam, or afterwards. If you need to pop trinkets and other mana cooldowns, it’s best to use them *early* as losing a GCD when the torment stack is low is better than losing a GCD when the stack is high. Having a plan in an encounter like this will help a lot. Even if things don’t go to plan, you won’t panic, and you’ll know exactly how much mana you’ll have.

My cooldowns during that spam phase look like this (click for larger view):

I have to admit wasn’t really happy with the pull depicted in that graph. I got a bit panicky when the tank got low and switched earlier than I’d like, my stack only got to 80 or so. I’ve got a stack of 91 when staying on the crystal properly. I’m pretty sure that if this was it all synced up a druid could solo heal this. Our holy pally could go ret, and still use HoS and LoH as needed. I will have a look at our Decimation blades in WoL and see if I’m dreaming… Food for thought for next week :-)