tips for heroic Blackhand balcony?

[olddriver]

So our guild plans to try heroic blackhand this week.
The problem is, we do not have any one of those ideal classes like boomkin or ret for p2 balcony. We only have 4 melee dps, 2 dps warriors and 2 rogues, or maybe 3 dps warriors if our monk tank can join us.

As one of the dps warriors, I will be assigned to go to the balcony. The first time I checked wcl about blackhand fights, I found that some Arms warriors did a quite good job on the balcony. They did about 2 million damage to the iron soldiers. So I tried Arms on normal blackhand. Well the result was not quite good. I could not get the last hit, thus victory rush was not always available, and rage was a problem.

Now I check the wcl again, I found that it could be too hard for you to have good ranks if assigned to balcony.But I still want to get some advice from you guys about the balcony fight, about the talents and specialization.

Thanks in advance

[Fog]

As arms all you do is apply rend on as many as you feel you can, kill some and jump down, really. A good combo, so you don't lose too much single target damage is Bloodbath/Dragon Roar. Just try and time them for balcony use for max output up there. But it also depends how well the others do.

I'm on balcony duty as well, but they die so fast I just go fury and WW the shit out of them if they are somewhat clumped.
I use the interrupt glyph as well to gain abit of damage. Can't say I rank at all on that fight on balcony, but I do 30k+ on average.

Waiting for our 2nd boomkin now so I can focus boss next week!

[Deleted]

We had the same problem.
It's not "optimal" but it's not really a problem, either. Sure, a warriors DPS will not be as high but that doesn't matter - what matters is what is the best for the guild to get the kill.
We do not have any balaced druid either.
We killed him on HC and we went like this: 2x fury warriors, a rogue. And maybe a retri I don't recall. Only Melee DPS anyway.

Remember that P2 is not really a DPS rush fight. Sure, optimal DPS will obviously make the phase shorter and is always a good thing - But even so it's not a DPS rush phase, it's all about doing everything the right way and not failing shit. (espesially ranged with marks and seig tanks).


I ran as bloodbath with dragon roar.
Kill went smooth and fine

[Deleted]

What range do you have? I'd strongly suggest not sending Warriors up

[Stoic]

I do both boss mode and balconies.
Typically when we have our full comp I don't go up but when someone dies, or someone doesn't show I will go up (well because I don't have to train someone new on "ERMAGERD HOW DO I GO THE DIRECTION I WANT TO GO IN SMASHES?!?!". When I am up there I find that Fury is slightly more reliable. I run with Dragon Roar and Siegebreaker if I'm doing balconies (due to having Vial I always run Bloodbath because the times line up). I lose out slightly overall on my AM potential but a Siegebreaker crit can basically 1 shot one of those snipers. Use your SieBr, RBs on single snipers, use DR and WW/RBs on 2-3 snipers.
When falling into P2: hunter and lock jump to balc and ambush the adds. (Tank solo soaks the 1st smash)
2nd Smash: Balc group goes up = easy clear.
3rd Smash: demo lock takes the place of 1 of the melee going up (plead for this to be you). When the adds spawn; stun and wreck the adds with Chaos Waves. (I add a Dragon Roar for good measure).
We start burning down boss after 3rd balc
So 4th Smash we help share the smash hit but jump back down immediately (or even better get punted into the wall)
Start p3 and go full riggnaros mode on anyone idiotic enough to get punted off the platform.

[olddriver]

What range do you have? I'd strongly suggest not sending Warriors up

We have 3-4 warlocks, 3 mages, 2 hunters and 2 shadow priests.

[Deleted]

We have 3-4 warlocks, 3 mages, 2 hunters and 2 shadow priests.

I'm only pulling ideas out of a hat because we've been lucky enough to have a DK and Boomkin go up everytime but when we went up the problem of the adds dying wasn't too bad, it was keeping people alive.

I'd suggest making use of the Priests, presuming your Hunters are BM then I wouldn't bother although if you can send one up as Survival that may be useful, Mages I'd keep down for the Siegemaker (although 2 hunter Killshots are pretty useful for that too...)

Maybe something like both priests, 1 rogue and 1 Warlock? Rogues can Feint the Smash, Priest can disperse and generally have a fair amount of healing when up (VE) and Warlocks are pretty tanky from what I hear.

If you've got 16 DPS I presume you're 5 healing and 2 tanking? Also, if you're sending a Disc up (would suggest Resto Druid or Disc) tell the Spriests not to shield themselves

[apoe]

Arms is not necessarily good for balconies. For our raid, adds die really fast and rend will be useless to cast because it will only tick once or twice.

Also, damage number on adds can be misleading. If an add has 10k health left and you execute it for 300k, most of that damage is actually wasted. It's good for those spots where two adds stand next to each other though (SS execute will one shot the other add).

In my opinion, arms does have one advantage in this fight. The sub 20% execute damage of arms can shorten P3, which is arguably the most hectic part of the encounter (especially if you get lucky procs and chunk off almost half a million health per execute).

[Bigbazz]

We started sending Warriors up, then ended up not sending the Warriors up. Not sending the Warriors up seems to be the winner, send your Shadow Priests up there or have a Hunter go SV and do it if you dont have Boomkins. Warriors are best when they have zero responsibility boss dps on this fight, Warriors are just a bit poopy on this fight.

[Binari]

Biggest tip I can give is to find someone else to go up for you, even when I get assigned I "accidentally miss it every time"

[olddriver]

- - - Updated - - -

I do both boss mode and balconies.
Typically when we have our full comp I don't go up but when someone dies, or someone doesn't show I will go up (well because I don't have to train someone new on "ERMAGERD HOW DO I GO THE DIRECTION I WANT TO GO IN SMASHES?!?!". When I am up there I find that Fury is slightly more reliable. I run with Dragon Roar and Siegebreaker if I'm doing balconies (due to having Vial I always run Bloodbath because the times line up). I lose out slightly overall on my AM potential but a Siegebreaker crit can basically 1 shot one of those snipers. Use your SieBr, RBs on single snipers, use DR and WW/RBs on 2-3 snipers.
When falling into P2: hunter and lock jump to balc and ambush the adds. (Tank solo soaks the 1st smash)
2nd Smash: Balc group goes up = easy clear.
3rd Smash: demo lock takes the place of 1 of the melee going up (plead for this to be you). When the adds spawn; stun and wreck the adds with Chaos Waves. (I add a Dragon Roar for good measure).
We start burning down boss after 3rd balc
So 4th Smash we help share the smash hit but jump back down immediately (or even better get punted into the wall)
Start p3 and go full riggnaros mode on anyone idiotic enough to get punted off the platform.

Thanks we applied the same strategy, but it seems sometimes our hunters and warlocks couldn't figure out which side to jump. But if they did right, the balcony phrase was very smooth.
And siege breaker is really good on the balcony.

- - - Updated - - -

Thanks for your replies guys.
Some of our party members could not join us tonight for personal reasons, so we had a party of 14. We had about 15 tries and got dismissed.
It turned out the balcony stage was not that difficult. Our warlocks and hunters leaped at the ending of phrase 1, and our DK tank went knocked for the first balcony, and then melee dps.
I put on the glyph of victory rush which worked fine for me. If I get the last hit perfectly, I could take down about 4 iron soldiers and leave the balcony with about 40% hp left.

We had minor issues on phrase 1 aoe stage. The small Demolition did heavy damage on to me. We will discuss if our tank need to pull blackhand forward during the aoe phrase. There were also some issues during phrase 2 for ranged dps and healers. I could not spare my attention to find what happened to them during the fights, but I think our RL will find solutions for that.

[Tavii]

I've played shadow priest a bit, and I would say they are very strong to throw up there. Have the priests rock cascade and apply SW:P to everything, they'll have plenty of devouring plagues to throw around and absolutely melt the adds.

As far as playing warrior up there? Make use of your movement abilities, and if you can try to take the adds farther away from the others. If you can look for groups of 2-3 and make use of some meat cleaver, really does a lot against those adds if you can get enough GCDs in for a couple of them.
I really don't recommend playing Arms on this fight, unless you just want to try it out, but keep in mind your overall damage outside of execute phase will be much higher as fury IMO.

[Deleted]

Is you have some Balance druids, huntards etc, they will rape the shit out of the soldier.
As a Warrior they better should let you 100% on BH, you'll be top ~5 Damage on the boss.

You don't have to sacrifice yourself doing a crap job, while the casters are leaching on the big tank ...

Send the Casters : AoE / DoT they jump, that took ~10s MAX. Gg.

Meanwhile : Slice Slice !

[IndyBart]

Can somebody please explain why Boomkins do so well on the balconies? What abilities are they using or dots are they applying that make them so appealing to send up there?

[Furiacki]

Can somebody please explain why Boomkins do so well on the balconies? What abilities are they using or dots are they applying that make them so appealing to send up there?

Starfall + Moonfire (Sunfire)

EDIT: to ellaborate, starfall hits all targets within 40 yards when glyphed and moonfire/sunfire is instant cast, has decent initial damage, applies a dot, and has no cooldown.

[Astynax]

Just levelled a warrior, have done BH as lock & ret, but havent geared up the warrior to raid yet.

Is heroic leap usable to get on the balcony from P1 to P2 drop transition? I've used leap before to prevent taking fall damage but not sure if the "no path available" error comes up w balcony jumps.

As for your situation - get some DoTs up, use sweeping strikes good to go! Dont think victory rush is that big of a priority. They dont have that much health and should die in a few hits

[Deleted]

Is heroic leap usable to get on the balcony from P1 to P2 drop transition? I've used leap before to prevent taking fall damage but not sure if the "no path available" error comes up w balcony jumps.

In Theory it could work, if you get yourself placed far enough to the east to be in range, but I haven't tried it myself, so cant be sure

[Deleted]

It most likely would not work as there will not be any valid path from the point directly under you to the balcony, and you might be too far from the ground for it to path at all.

[rystrave]

In Theory it could work, if you get yourself placed far enough to the east to be in range, but I haven't tried it myself, so cant be sure

It most likely would not work as there will not be any valid path from the point directly under you to the balcony, and you might be too far from the ground for it to path at all.

It doesn't, I tried last night