Okay, not really. But it felt like it.
Baleroc, the 5th boss in Firelands, is a healing fight. Healers heal DPS who are standing by shards. Healers get a buff from this when they heal the tank with THEIR debuff.
Lots of rotations, lots of swapping targets, lots of “omg omg omg” moments.
I’m pretty sure that, in the 18 wipes that led to our kill on Try 19, every member of the raid group, those in the raid and those out of the raid, had probably thought “omg, I’m going to find where Kurn lives and wring her neck with my bare hands.”
Healers too? Healers ESPECIALLY, I’m fairly sure.
It was a long raid night. Every spare moment I had, I was refining the strat with the healers, I was explaining stuff, I was double-checking reasons for deaths…
And people were antsy as fuck. I love my guild, I really do, and I don’t blame any of them for being all “GO GO GO”, if they aren’t healers. There was a LOT of downtime. Usually, we’re in the mid-40% for “active” in the three hours of our raids, but Thursday night was brutal with just 32.4% activity. We spent under 60 minutes actually fighting stuff. Granted, we have a 7m break, we ended 10m early, that sort of thing, but MAN, it must have sucked for those who weren’t doing a whole lot aside from waiting for the damn healers to finish refining the strat.
It also must have sucked for my healers.
We tried three main strats:
1) Heal every group for 30 seconds. (Tanks/melee/ranged) Problem: First Decimating Strike would almost always kill the Decimating Strike tank if there were no healers with Vital Spark/Vital Flame on him — which there generally wouldn’t be for DS if it was at the start.
2) Heal every group for 30 seconds, but offset the first swap by 15s or so. So after the shards come out, heal people for that first duration (assuming a 2 person/shard strat, which we had going) and then swap to your next group. The problem here? We got HOPELESSLY lost and confused once the DPS had the whole rotation thing figure out and we had no idea who to heal for the second round and it was like “crap, this is just too confusing”. I honestly think this is the best method, but I absolutely need to write everything down longhand before the fight if that’s the case. I got confused with times and durations and it also got weird with shard spawns.
3) Ultimately, we pulled in a 7th healer (we’ve 6-healed everything thus far in Firelands) and he was our buffer. He started out on the tanks with me and another healer and we went back to the 30s duration for everyone without any offsets. Second pull with 7 healers = dead boss.
I still think everyone was thinking… oh, how did Jasyla put it? That’s right, “uncharitable thoughts” about the healers, about each other and particularly about me because they could almost certainly figure out that my talking to the healers is what was taking forever. And the healers were probably not fond of me for changing the strat drastically a couple of times.
But, the boss died. The guild is 5/7. We got the Share the Pain achievement without trying. And we learned a LOT about how best to work the fight. I feel good about the kill, considering we had an OS tank tanking (but he was a Blood DK so it was almost better than our regular tank lead tanking it!) and considering it’s the middle of July. Summer slump? HAH. Two new bosses in less than a week! (Now I’ve jinxed us. Sorry, Apotheosis. :P)
So, while it was a challenging night, a long night for all, it ended with a kill and hopefully people will forget that they briefly daydreamed about tracking me down and killing me in my sleep. Or worse yet, intercepting and poisoning the rotisserie chicken I order on a regular basis. (Even more dastardly, the healers probably would have poisoned PUDDING if we didn’t get him down!)
Mutiny! There’s only one response to that.
Avast ye mutinous scallywags, or off the plank you go!
Or it would be the response if Apotheosis was a pirate ship instead of a guild. :P
We killed him on our first night seeing him, that’s the important part. It should make any uncharitible thoughts fade quickly.
Grats on the kill!!!!
The Baleroc fight is definitely a fun one. Although it is a healer fight, it does give the DPS a responsibility of making sure they also can manage the soaking dmg and not dying from staying in too long.
I enjoyed the fight immensely. In the 25 man format…it sounds a lot more painful (10 man – less people, less management). More managment of healers and DPS in crystals >< As Jasyla mentioned 1st night of attempt and you downed him!
As far as people getting grumpy and annoyed? they are taking on content that is new and for progression. They should expect wipes, and strats will change. Not trying to be a jerk but if people are getting that annoyed…maybe they need to take a chill pill? (Though, when my raid heads back to Alysrazor next Tuesday, I am sure I will have "uncharitable thoughts as well lol)
@Jasyla – this isn’t a pirate ship? Hrm…
@Kurn – I was never mad, ever, not an uncharitable thought in sight. I was worried that everyone was going to hate us forever and ever but like…they don’t know man! hahah seriously, that was complicated and I’m glad we have nice patient raiders. It was just funny that after a raid review thread of “we need to pick up the pace” we…slowed it way down lol. But that’s the nature of the beast, right :P
Grats on the kill :)
Yeah, it’s pretty frustrating for the healers too. The weirdest thing is if you made a spectator video of our first Baleroc kill it just doesn’t look that exciting.
Oh, before you hurt yourselves patting each others’ backs: Majordomo will make you tear out your hair.
Good luck!
If you use vuhdo to heal… I’m sure most other grids have options for this too but… Adding torment and tormented to your debuffs makes this fight considerably easier. Especially as a raid leader it let’s u have a clear view of who is dying and why. Hope this helps for repeat kills.
Iron is right, Vuhdo didn’t come with Torment set up, so making that very conspicuous helped me get stacks faster than the other healers.
What ended up happening in 10 for us is, I got stacks way faster than the other 2 healers, once I got around 120 or so, I stayed on tanks full time so they could try to catch up on stacks. I wonder if getting 2 or so super stackers would work on 25 as well.
Congrats on the kill! I think for me the most frustrating element of the Baleroc fight is what was frustrating on Chimaeron – as soon as anything goes wrong, people start yelling that the healers are doing it all wrong, and telling us what we -should- have been doing. People who have never, ever healed. I had three separate people whisper me to tell me I ‘should have’ gone holy over disc until finally I yelled at them all in vent. The tank would give this huge ‘oh look, the healers failed AGAIN’ sigh every time we’d wipe or, especially, when he’d die to a decimation blade. It was so, so demoralizing, and so aggravating. I don’t treat the DPS poorly when they don’t get an add down in time, or we wipe at a low percentage and they ‘should’ have squeezed out some more DPS. I wish healers got the same treatment. (This is not the same guild with which I raided during T11 raids – so it’s an entirely new set of people doing the same old ‘Chimaeron thing’.)