My guild's 4th 10 man team is currently working on Heroic Baleroc. I play the role of a holy paladin, have been since before Wrath, gear is rather decent for little experience in heroics (378), and above all else - I love my job.
Our first few attempts were a bit scattered-brained which is not uncommon given that none of us are veterans of heroics in Firelands. But as we started on our second day, I began to realize how quickly the life of certain melee depleted over a period of seconds. Both our DK and Rogue were not only debuffed, but soaking a shard as well (does that make any sense?) because initially, our RL thought it would be a good idea to have melee stacked behind the boss. Thus, the constant exchanging of the debuff and it just refreshing through countdown or contact all over again. I blamed only myself, because I was literally supposed to keep those shard soakers alive and as soon as either the DK or Rogue pick one up, dead. I spam FoL on them, just because it's literally the only fastest heal other than shock/WoG that will keep them up before they're dead within seconds. I never have a problem keeping an spriest solo-soaking alive, but I imagine it's because he hardly has the debuff on him when he soaks and he's smart enough to actually call out when he does have the debuff so the warlock (back up) can pick it up instead + CD usage.
I just can't think of anything else it could possibly be. I toss a sac on those two melee just in case, press AM, blow CDs, whatever I can to keep them up. But to no avail. Literally after about 5 seconds, they're one shot.
And yes, I make sure to help with decimation blades to not only top the tank off but ignite my vital flames, then go back to stacking sparks. I don't stay on the tank for too long and time my biggest heal to hit right before deci blade strikes. Not only that, but our RL became so unfaithful in both me and the druid that he switched to healing as back up on his shaman, so he was on the tank the entire time, leaving both me and the druid to spam the hell out of the soakers. I just don't get it. Is it something I'm not doing? The druid isn't? I don't feel three healers is even necessary as our DPS surely won't make a kill quick enough before the enrage timer, so we need to juice out as much as we can. And our healing is perfect, we collect our stacks (the few times we do manage to keep those melee up or pray the lock replaces one of them because of debuff) very quickly (about 100 on my part after first shard, 90 on the druid's) and the tank is never in danger of dying, we are on our game when it comes to watching for deci blade and topping him off immediately. I really feel confident knowing that my beacon + HoT's thrown on the tank during heavy periods of damage will sustain him and when we did try two healing for the first few attempts, there was no problem.
Not only that, but another thing I'd like to ask is.. will my Lay on Hands be more beneficial to save and use for later in the fight, so the ret paladin can just LoH the first decimation blade if necessary? I don't see the ret pally's LoH getting any stronger than his health pool, but I have seen LoH's cast at an average of 600 - 700k hit heal. I tried bringing that up with my RL, but he dismissed the idea immediately and insisted the ret pally use his LoH later in the fight if necessary.
Our positioning is melee on boss, with the four/five point V around the boss for ranged and healers (in which case twice they put me completely out of range of the other side, I had to constantly ask to be bumped to the middle ground with the druid healer, not entirely stacked, but close enough so we won't have to move much if we both get countdown and so that we both are in range of everyone.
Also, I know being in range to diminish the countdown link without transferring tormented is possible, but never has a melee ever been careful enough to provide that, let alone realize instantly he needs to leg it to the healer. I don't mind running and tossing my instant casts, or utilizing that radiance button for speed boost but regardless, I'm doomed to get tormented.
I just don't know what to do anymore. We are literally wiping to the mere fact that those specific melee players simply cannot live through a debuff and soak at the same time, we hardly get him past 50% and the RL has to constantly be suggested what I feel are common sense notifications (such as the priest being a very valuable shard soaker, even though he's insisting to keep him on back up now even after every successful solo-soak he's done).
No logs. I'm pretty disappointed with that, the RL said he didn't want our fights recorded because he didn't want to give our guild a 'bad name'.
I....are you saying that melee have the tormented buff(the one with the soul link icon) and are taking a shard? Thats....really bad, they can't live through that and aren't supposed to.
You cannot heal through someone soaking a shard when they already have the debuff. It's not your fault at all. It's just not going to happen even if you had a raid full of nine healers on that person. After a few stacks, the debuff will cause the shard damage to one-shot the person.
If your RL is telling the melee to stack and just spread the debuff, he's an idiot and a terrible raid leader.
LoH seems to scale up enough to be useful at any point in the fight. I don't play a Paladin, but ours generally saves it for the mana with the glyph.
We run a two healer and one tank setup. Three heals would be safer, but this is how we're used to doing it from when we progressed on this fight re-nerf. The tank is a Prot Pally, the two healers are a Druid and a Pally. Both healers start on the Spriest who soak the entire first shard. Druid leaves up Lifebloom on the tank, Pally puts his Beacon on him. Between that and a tight cooldown rotation, the tank is able to survive through the first shard with minimal healing. From here, The Druid switches to the tank and keeps him up until the end of the second shard. At this point the Pally and Druid switch. The Pally should have around 150+ stacks at this point, and stays on the tank for the rest of the encounter. The Druid stays on the shard soakers for the rest of the encounter.
Pallies, when properly played, will actually gain mana while healing the tank. Ours does. The Druid is able to hang on healing the shard soakers. With the nerfs, Druid won't run out of mana.
Going back to your questions...You do know that you don't gain stacks while your 15s healing bonus is proc'd? You can't help out on the tank then immediately go back to gaining stacks. You should have your healers doing one thing or another at 15s intervals.
Cancelling Countdown without spreading Tormented is possible, but highly unlikely. We ignored that possibility when we were progressing on this fight. We just called whoever the debuff was going to spread to, and rearranged crystal orders based on who ended up with the debuff. If a healer got it, we usually accepted it was going to be a wipe unless we got lucky with healer throughput cooldowns being available. Expect Countdown to spread Tormented. Do NOT expect your raiders to be able to reliably not spread it. We've killed the fight many times, and have worked on it for much longer, and we've seen it not spread maybe twice.
In summary, I think your Raid Leader is a completely incompetent retard. He's wasting your time by having a position of relative authority and not properly looking into how to do fights. Tell him to actually look up how the mechanics work and tell him to learn how to use Combat Log parses. If he took even one look at the incoming damage of players with the debuff soaking shards, he would immediately know that it's NOT possible to heal through it. Unfortunately, he seems to prefer remaining ignorant and delusional.
I'd either find someone replace him, or find a different guild.
Considering that your guild's "4th 10man group" is working on it, i would assume the previous 3 groups have accomplished it, and you had to come to MMO-Champion to ask about it? How about the people on the other groups or the ones on your group who are on alt chars?
Just found it amusing, and i apologize if its considered 'abuse' or what not.
On the subject, any class can hold the shard for the 'regular 12-13 stacks\seconds, with no issues on the healers. Some classes are better due to personal cooldowns (shamanistic rage, divine protection, anti magic, barkskin, wtv). The only reason where they might be getting one-shot is if they grab a shard whilst having the Tormented Debuff (which chains upon contact on heroic mode), so, just sort some method to the 4 soakers at melee. We do it on 25, so, all the melees stack on the right leg to 'force' the shard there, and upon its spawn, all of them go to the left leg, leaving the assigned one. As soon as he hits 12 stacks, he moves to the back\right to the opposite side of the 'safe melees'... and they just rotate at each shard, without chaining the tormented debuff. With 3-4 melees it is a lot easier, lot more room to stand.
It's very important to not spread tormented debuff. My guild prefers using only 2 melee, that gives them more room to spread out. It can be done with 3 aswell ofc.
I know it's not the main problem here, but why is your dk blood specced and why is your lock destro? If he can pull off good enough DPS as destro fine, but both affliction and demo does a lot more DPS. He doesn't need to be destro for replenishment either as you have a resto druid/ret paladin, and shard soaking is just fine with just Soul link.
If you got the healing part covered there's no need for 3 healers, especially when you're concerned about the enrage timer.
About the LoH, having the tormented debuff makes your healing 50% weaker. Say your ret paladin got 150k health raid buffed (just throwing out a number), you can assume his LoH would hit for somewhere around that amount. However if he got tormented his LoH will heal the tank for around 75k, which is a low amount for a tank late in the fight with Blaze of glory stacks.
Use LoH when it's needed. Don't sit on it thinking "I need it for later", cooldowns are made for using, but it might not be the best idea to blow LoH very early when a few FoL could have kept someone alive instead.
I'd like to advice to always have the DPS move to the healer when they get countdown. It hurts having to move while trying to heal and might very well cause you to not be able to keep up. If a soaker gets countdown with you, either have someone else take over while he/she moves, or you quickly running in.
http://bossblueprint.com/world-of-wa...?img=1Z0CkCee0
This is somewhat like how my guild is positioned. It's not exactly the same, I apologize for that, I'm a bit tired. The healers are positioned in the middle, with a range of about 35 yards from the tank. The ranged are spread around us, and the melee on each leg.
We don't have the luxuary of a shadow priest, but how we do it is having a fury warrior soak the first shard (not taking it to 25 stacks, usually 20-22) with Shield wall, Enraged regen, Hand of Sacrifice and Aura mastery. The very little that is left of the shard a ranged DPS takes care of. The second shard is first soaked by the other melee (rogue/ret paladin) and a lock is taking over from him.
We have 2 reserves in case tormented is spread via countdown. The first back up is a mage, the second and very last backup is a hunter. When my guild first progressed on Baleroc pre nerf we used 2 healers (resto druid and paladin) but we 3 heal it now. It's quite boring with little to heal, but our DPS is more than enough and Baleroc is one of those bosses we prefer to just get out of the way quick, lol.
Have back ups planned, have set positions so that the healers can reach everyone and everyone knows where to stand and go back to after countdown ect.
Your shadow priest is your best soaker, from my experience a lock is good aswell, and ret paladin can glyph Divine protection. I don't know about elemental shamans since I don't usually raid with one, I can only think of passive damage reductions from talents though.
Unfortunatly it sounds like your raid leader is a bit ignorant. It's not giving the guild a bad name if your struggling on a boss. I hope any of this was helpful.
Last edited by mmoc5817da6c72; 2011-10-22 at 06:41 AM.
if you are saying that melee are soaking the shard while tormented, that cant happen. they will die. the whole basis of the fight is reworking your order so people that are debuffed are not soaking.
have your spriest solo the first shard, and the healer thats on him/her will get a ton of stacks. (we actually have both healers spam healing our spriest for the first shard. while the dk keeps himself up)
i'm not completely sure how the heals works, but you have to switch. cant have one healing shards and one healing tank the whole time. plus, if the current tank healer gets countdown with someone that is debuffed, they HAVE to switch off to shards. and while they are debuffed, the soakers have to reduce the amount of stacks they take down to around 9. this will mean 3 people per shard. your ranged will have to step in and help.
I knew that was probably the case in regards to DPS soaking a shard while tormented at the same time, I just needed it to hear from people who who have experience with the encounter. I really was just confused, because I counted on my RL to pick it up before me and say something - but he didn't ever mention that being problematic, just kept saying he has to switch to heals now because me and our druid can't seem to handle it.
We have 3 melee in our group, one being the OT DK, just have them positioned behind the boss, pulling up /range of.. 5 yards maybe? So they can't remind themselves not to trip into radius of each other? I can see countdown being a lot more easier if people remember to run around other players to meet the other side of the link.
Btw, very nice blueprint on positioning - just what I was looking for.
Also, what if the first shard (or any bad RNG shard position) drops in melee range and a ranged soaker (on the complete opposite side) needs to be the one to pick it up? Is there no way of being able to avoid the wrong person being soaked based on bad positioning for a few seconds? I feel that is one of our biggest problems as well.
Last edited by Caelistras; 2011-10-22 at 11:20 PM.
The soaker designated to pick up the next shard needs to be in a position where they WILL be able to get to it in time. This is their responsibility, provided you have a set order/priority.
The healers are way off to the side and out of the way. The three melee spread out behind the boss and shift around who's on the left, middle, right, as they soak crystals. We have three other ranged in the back in a line about fifteen yards from the melee, and the Shadow Priest kind of fits in wherever he can in between.
The melee start stacked on one side of the boss the first time around, though, just so we'll know where the first shard will spawn. As long as they move before the crystal actually appears, they won't get the debuff provided the Spriest doesn't derp and forget to run in.
To counter the problem of a shard in melee range, we always have a melee take it first. A few seconds after it spawned, the ranged who is taking over is beginning to move to the shard - the way we do it is by having the soaker move to the left or to the right so that just stepping out means the beam will go on the ranged instead. The ranged soaker's positions are decided in such a way that they don't have to spend more than a couple of seconds to move towards the shard, and the melee on Baleroc's other leg have no risk of being channeled on.
Positioning is extremely important here. You can have someone (like the raid leader, or MT) call out "shard spawning, X starts soaking and Y takes over", to help out. It can make people pay extra attention to that the shard is spawning and "I need to get to it quick", or "shit - shard spawned on me, I have to gtfo". Having good communication helps A LOT.
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We are literally wiping to the mere fact that those specific melee players simply cannot live through a debuff and soak at the same time, we hardly get him past 50% and the RL has to constantly be suggested what I feel are common sense notifications (such as the priest being a very valuable shard soaker, even though he's insisting to keep him on back up now even after every successful solo-soak he's done).
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