Baleroc Encounter Guide: Strategy, Abilities, Loot

• Be mindful of the Shards of Torment positioning in melee range and position around it.
• If on heroic difficulty, be extra careful when you have the Tormented debuff to prevent it from spreading.

• This fight is all about balancing between two healer squads, one squad stacking up Vital Spark while the other squad keeps the tank alive.
• Stacks of Vital Spark last 60 seconds; this duration will be reset after Vital Flame is activated, allowing you to easily keep and maintain your stacks.
• Do not overdue the stacking. Be vocal with other healers about when you need to swap (when you are starting to struggle to keep the tank full health).

• Remember that you can dodge, parry, and be missed by attacks made during Inferno Blade and Decimation Blade; using avoidance gear and actives here is powerful.
• Be mindful of the Shards of Torment positioning in melee range as you will die immediately if you get the Tormented debuff.

Baleroc is a very straight-forward fight that is mostly a gear check, only have a few mechanical responsibilities for players to manage during the fight. The main mechanic the DPS will be dealing with are the Shards of Torment that spawn throughout the room. At least one player must be standing next to each Shards of Torment, if a shard is alive with no player nearby, it will begin to cast Wave of Torment, wiping the raid. Players standing near the Shards of Torment will be debuffed with Torment, applying a stacking damage-over-time Shadow debuff that quickly applies multiple stacks. Have each player soaking the Torment debuff use their personal defensive cooldowns to survive as many stacks as possible before swapping out with another player. Once you move away from the Shards of Torment and your stacks of Torment fall off, you will be debuffed with Tormented, increasing all magic damage taken; this debuff requires you to rotate multiple raiders in for soaking duty for each Shards of Torment as they spawn in and prevents tanks from being able to soak.

Torment also has a second effect that healers must take advantage of to keep the tank alive during this fight. Each time a player debuffed with Torment is healed, that healer gains 1 stack of Vital Spark for every 3 stacks of Torment on the target. These stacks of Vital Spark are crucial to this fight, as they can be activated by healing any target with the Blaze of Glory debuff (the tank in this case), turning them into Vital Flame for 15 seconds and increasing healing done by 5% per each Vital Spark stack.

You will need to have your healers focusing on 2 frequently alternating jobs: healing the tank and building up stacks of Vital Spark. Have a couple healers focus on keeping the tank alive early on while the rest of your healers focus entirely on spam healing the players with the Torment debuff, quickly gaining stacks of Vital Spark. When a few Blaze of Glory stacks have gone out, the tank will be taking much higher Physical damage and your current healers will start to fall behind on healing. This is when you alternate healing assignments; the healers that have been getting stacks of Vital Spark will now take over tank healing while allowing the other healers to get their stacks of Vital Spark. This is the back-and-forth flow of this fight for the healers as they will need to constantly balance maintaining and increasing their stacks with keeping the tank alive and healthy through the numerous near 1-shot abilities Baleroc uses.

Every 10 seconds Baleroc will use Blaze of Glory on his current target, increasing their max health by 20% and physical damage taken by 20% per stack; Baleroc will also gain a stack of Incendiary Soul each time, increasing his Fire damage dealt by 20% per stack. Periodically throughout the fight Baleroc will infuse his blade with either Inferno Blade, adding Fire damage to his auto-attacks (damage increases with Incendiary Soul stacks), or with Shadow, replacing his auto-attacks with Decimation Blade.

Since Baleroc will gain a stack of Incendiary Soul each time he uses Blaze of Glory, the Fire damage he deals with Inferno Blade will quickly start to ramp up to lethal amounts. To survive this, your main-tank will need to take as many Blaze of Glory stacks as possible to gain the increased maximum health; this does however mean the tank will be taking increased physical damage from Balerocs auto-attacks and will need to be healed up more with the increased health pool. Lastly you will need to deal with Decimation Blade, which deals 90% of the tanks maximum health each auto attack. With Decimation Blade dealing damage equal to maximum health, the tank with high stacks of Blaze of Glory will take extremely large amounts of damage due to their massive health pool; luckily during this time Baleroc has 100% reduced attack speed, and these attacks can be dodged/parried/miss and so on.

Decimation Blade can be handled in one of two ways, either with a single tank and simply being sure you will always heal that tank to 100% health between each Decimation Blade auto-attack, or you can choose to 2-tank the encounter. With 2 tanks, have your off-tank start the fight off tanking Baleroc until they have 3 stacks of Blaze of Glory (or however many it takes for them to reach 250,000 health). Then have the main-tank taunt Baleroc back and take all future Blaze of Glory stacks for the health buff. Then, every time Baleroc uses Decimation Blade, the off-tank will taunt and take 90% of their health each swing. This is much easier to heal as the off-tank will only have a few stacks of Blaze of Glory, giving them a smaller health pool that can be easily healed back full right away. We recommend starting out with 2 tanks until your healers have a strong grasp on the Vital Spark mechanic.

On heroic difficulty, Baleroc will use Countdown on two random players, connecting them with a beam of fiery light. After 8 seconds if these two players have not touched to break the connection, they will explode for 85,000 Fire damage each, wiping the raid. The Tormented debuff will also now spread to nearby players, requiring whoever has this debuff to spread away from everyone else until it completely expires. Lastly, Vital Spark requires 5 stacks of Torment to gain a stack (up from 3 on normal).

Achievement	Description
Firelands	Defeat the bosses in Firelands.
Firelands Guild Run	Defeat the bosses in Firelands while in a guild group.
Heroic: Baleroc	Defeat Baleroc in Firelands on Heroic Difficulty.
Share the Pain	Defeat Baleroc in the Firelands without allowing any member of your raid to suffer Torment more than three times.

Baleroc is just one of the seven encounters present in the Firelands raid of Cataclysm. If you would like to learn more about the others, please see our other pages for the raid below.