Our first kill of heroic Baleroc.
I haven’t been posting, I know! But I’m still here and still playing and still druid healing and still GM of a 10-person raiding guild. We’re now 6/7 in Firelands heroics, thanks to the nerfs. We’d have reached this stage eventually, I’m sure, but we got there almost immediately once the content got nerfed.
The vid above shows a typical first kill. Baleroc is a fun fight on heroic. It requires close coordination and communication among raid members, because the link mechanic means that the Tormented debuff gets spread around randomly. I wish I could record our Mumble conversation as well as the game footage here, just so you could hear how it worked for us.
This particular kill is easy to repeat. We’re still capable of wiping on heroic Alysrazor, but we one-shot Baleroc the week after killing him the first time. Once you get the concept, the kill is just a matter of smooth execution. So if you’re still working on Firelands heroics, give this guy a shot! He might be easier than you think.
We’ll be pulling Ragnaros on heroic this week. Nobody on our server has a heroic kill of him yet, and the top guilds have been working on him for a while now. I don’t think much of our chances. About half the raid really wants to put in the time, though, so we will be. I confess that normal-mode Ragnaros has become a bit of a snooze-fest. I say this even though we’ve been two-healing it and I’m the healer who has to scurry around keeping the raid healed up.
Heroic Shannox kill vid & tactics. Here are my notes on the fight.
In Shannox heroic, the dogs cannot be killed. Instead you must juggle them and minimize the damage they do while steadily DPSing Shannox down.
Crystal prison traps will all be used to trap Rageface and reset his stacks. The Shannox tank must be ready to kite the boss around to make sure she/she & the Riplimb tank drop Rip stacks regularly. If you have a rogue around, have him or her disarm immolation traps when possible, to reduce the chances Rageface will have the Wary debuff when you need to trap it.
One ranged DPS is assigned to manage Rageface. This person must be able to hit with a crit when it starts face-raging. Have a backup assigned for when this DPS gets raged. This player will also be the person most likely trapping the dog in the prisons. Right after each rage is a good moment to do it; with that timing the dog will not be raging immediately after coming out of a prison. The healers should pay extra attention to this player as well.
Choose the area you’ll be fighting in. Set up two markers. Left side and right side. Or near the hills, near the road. Whatever your landmarks, have two spots for the raid to shift back and forth between. When the dog is trapped on one side, everybody shifts to the other to maximize his travel time. Swap back. When Rageface is chasing you normally (not raging on you), kite him so he does as little damage to you as possible.
Keep doing this until the boss hits 35% or whatever it is. Pop heroism and burn while continuing to do the shuffle.
I found this fight much easier to heal than the normal mode: the tactics are all about limiting damage taken. There’s more steady tank damage and there’s some nasty burst damage from the loose dog, but the raid isn’t taking as much as it does when you kill dogs with the usual normal-mode tactics. If you find this fight too nasty to heal, it’s probably because you’re not managing the dogs well enough yet. You want to minimize the damage, not heal through it. (This insight was the key to solving the puzzle of the fight for us.)
As usual for us with heroic-mode bosses, our first kill netted a boatload of hunter loot. Our hunter felt this was fitting, since Shannox is a hunter himself.
The video soundtrack is Ulrich Schnauss, “Nobody’s Home”, from the amazing Far Away Trains Passing By.
We finally killed Ragnaros last night. Here’s my video of the fight.
If you watched the 3% wipe video I posted last week, you’ll notice that this pull is messier. (For one thing, I fat-fingered the start-recording shortcut and missed the first few seconds of the fight.) We lost our bear tank in phase 3 when he stood in a meteor landing spot… not for the first time that night. He’d wandered into the fire zone on an earlier pull, victim of tunnel vision. Fortunately I was right there and I had a brez and we got through the rest of it. The key for us was learning how to handle meteors.
As our hunter Serix said, that was the slowest 10% of a boss’s health ever.
This kill followed a miserable time on Alysrazor, who is the boss that gives us the most trouble in the tier. Our holy pally & I usually two-heal that fight. This week he’s on vacation, so I was paired up with our new discipline/holy priest. She was completely new to the fight and there’s a learning curve there. You have to move properly to stay out of fire & think about how you’re going to handle the Gushing Wound debuff on your tank. And then you need to blast out the AOE healing on that initial phase in the cycle. If you ask me, Alys is the healing fight in T12, not Baleroc. Alys is the one that makes me think & plan & plot. And our disc priest had a hard time of it.
The thing I noticed that was by accident, we’d given her the tank who was taking the most damage (our warrior was taking noticeably more than our bear and our pally when they tank it) and we’d assigned the pair of them to the side of the zone with the annoying terrain. So she was new to the fight, healing a tough assignment, and learning to move on ground that made it difficult to move. Now I know this and can plan better in the future, but it made for a series of frustrating wipes. And I’m not yet perfect on that fight and can lose my own tank target (doesn’t help when he stands in fire again cough).
Upshot: We wiped more on Alys this week than on Ragnaros. Final result: Leafie now has the Eye of Blazing Power. However, I’m not sure I like it. I think the internal cool down is a bit long. It’s providing about 3% of my healing, judging from last night’s logs, and I’m not hurting for mana just now, so I’ll continue using it along with Jaws of Defeat. I need to investigate the Molten Front trinkets, now that I almost have access to everything there.
Majordomo dies for the first time! Here are my notes on how we did it. I will assume that you’ve read the basics about the fight.
The fight is about controlling how often and when Staghelm switches forms. He has two major forms: scorpion (does a high-damage aoe cleave; in this form when the raid is clumped up) and cat (leaps on random targets leaving a flame pancake; in this form when the raid is spread out). The attacks come faster every time he repeats them, so you will eventually be forced to make him shift. Every third swap he does a special that depends on which form he’s switching to. The scorpion -> cat special is flame orbs & it’s particularly difficult to handle. Your goal, therefore, is to make that special happen last, and ideally to have the boss die while he’s still in that phase.
You’ll want strong AOE healing. Our team was holy pally, resto druid, resto shaman. It was significantly harder on the attempts where we had a disco priest instead of the shammy.
Scorpion first. Pop Heroism/BL/TW almost immediately, because this is your best shot at uninterrupted DPS. Take 8 cleaves. Have a plan for raid cooldowns on the last two, which will come very fast.
Cat form second. Spread out fast before healing up after the 8th cleave. Have the raid position itself in a circle around where the boss is tanked. Take 7 leaps. The problem with trying to push an 8th is that the 9th leap might come while you’re still trying to move into the center. It might happen even after 7, so move in as soon as you see him start the leap.
The next transformation will proc the special. People should run out, explode, and run back in again as quickly as possible. Don’t run out early. Nine people should be enough to soak the cleaves; 8 is dicy. Try to push it to 8 cleaves again if you have the cooldowns to heal it. 7 cleaves is fine.
Repeat until he procs the scorpion -> cat special. Have a plan for pairing up & swapping off on the flame orbs. At least 1 healer will need to help on this. Healing can get painful. Our plan was to have him die in this phase if possible, and if not force the transformation to scorpion as soon as the orbs went down.
We didn’t quite manage this, as you can see. We started falling apart a bit when the flame orbs came out. We got through the phase, however, and he died only a few seconds into scorpion form.
