hey guys I'm Jordy and this is your Guide to the massive gatekeeper to Ragnar Ro's Fortress the tank destroying balok you are forbidden from my Master's domain Mortals I enact my Master's will I am he who bars the gate now outside of the big man himself Balck is absolutely the hardest boss in Firelands and it will take some time for you to learn the Cadence of the fight but this guide will be incredibly helpful in teaching the soakers and healers how to do the mechanics and should allow you to skip a lot of wipes all right Balck is a one-phase fight featuring shards that put up a debuff that must be soaked and some tank destroying mechanics that need to be managed for this fight I recommend you Flex up to six healers for Prague the DPS check will be tight this way but it should mitigate a lot of your issues early on so we go with six until until you're more comfortable all right let's get into the mechanics ballok has about 196 million HP on heroic 25 and has a pretty Titan rage timer of 6 minutes so your DPS need to really pump to finish him off in time on PTR in near perfect tier 11 B we often reach the enrage and finished to off just after with some kiting so pump hard okay first we'll talk about the shards of Torment on 25 man these things spawn in p pairs one in ranged and one in melee always near a player now these crystals are brimming with dangerous energy and need to always have a player standing nearby soaking the energy that it emits which looks like this because if they don't they will explode and wipe the raid the crystal always picks the player closest to the center of its hitbox and for every second a player soaks the Crystal's energy they get a stacking debuff called torment taking increasing Shadow damage over time these crystals stay up for about 25 seconds so you're looking at managing 25 or 26 ticks of Torment on your Raiders per Crystal we found that unless you have a cool down which we'll talk about in the walkthr your soakers shouldn't take more than 12 or 13 Stacks or half the ticks per Crystal as any more than that and you'll find that they become unhealable from the amount of damage that the crystal is putting out the general Strat is we assign people in pairs to soak these one person standing on the crystal for the first half of its duration and a second swapping in for the second half with healers paying careful attention to them as their Stacks ramp up now complicating this and there are a few complications here is that once a player has soaked the torment debuffs and a new player takes over that first player will get a new debuff called tormented increasing their magic damage taken by 500% and reducing their healing done by 50% for 1 minute this means that outside of a couple specific instances once the soaker moves off the Crystal and is relieved by the new player they want to avoid soaking again until their debuff falls off because of this we have a rotation of three pairs of players to soak six in all that is in charge of handling these things additionally if you have the tormented debuff if you walk near any other players you will give them a fresh tormented debuff it spreads so it's critical that you move out of the group and away from anyone else until your debuff falls off and once it does you move back into the raid with everybody else if the raid gets hit with a tormented it's almost assuredly a wipe so pay attention to your debuffs and move out once you got it all right so that's the shards of Torment well mostly there's a healing aspect of this that we're going to go over but before we do that we'll quickly talk about what the tanks are dealing with when ballok hits his current Target he'll put up stacks of a debuff on the tank called Blaze of Glory increasing the Tank's HP by 20% but also increasing physical damage taken by 20% you'll find your Tank's HP really grows on this fight often times to over a million HP or more additionally whenever balarac applies a stack of blaze of glory on the tank he himself gets a stack of incendiary Soul increasing his fire Damage Done by 20% so tank HP goes up boro's damage goes up healers are crying because their HPS won't keep up but we're going to solve that in a second in addition to blaze of glory balarac has two tank busting mechanics which he'll pick from every 45 seconds seemingly at random there's some discussion that he's supposed to go back and forth between these two but we found it was kind of random on the PTR either way the first is aply named Inferno Blade balo's weapons light up with flame and he starts Trucking the tank with fire damage for 50 15 seconds this thing hurts hard and requires your tank to use some defensive cooldowns to survive it's critical that the tank plans their cooldowns for this as without one they're likely to die the second Buster mechanic is decimation blade balo's sword swirls with Shadow energy and every 3 seconds he'll swing at his current Target and hit them for 90% of their Max HP reducing them to 10% unless the target has less than 250k Max HP because then it'll just one-hot them this can be dodged or parried but cannot be resisted we'll talk about how to deal with this in the walk through but outside of Dodge and Parry cooldowns you won't want to pop anything reducing damage taken like ibf or Shield wall as this ignores those abilities all right so that's a lot of stuff the way to counteract all this ramping damage into to increase the healer's HPS in order to keep up with the DPS that ballok is putting out is with the following and let me just say if you're watching watching this guide and you aren't A Healer please send this next section to your healers it will save so many wipes I promise you just make sure they understand because it's confusing and it'll save you so much time okay hi healers how have you been we have a Healer union meeting next week at 9:00 p.m. I hope to see you all there I'm bringing cookies no not like those gross vegan brownies that The Druids brought last week I'm bringing Full f F and buttery cookies mouth watering okay sorry back to ballok baleroc is a of a fight let's learn how to do this together so that your raid leader loves you as they should because you're the real heroes here whenever The Shard of Torment soakers build up Stacks increasing their Shadow damage taken you'll see that as you send direct heals into them you the Healer will get stacks of a 60-second buff called vital Spark Now by itself this buff doesn't do anything but when you have it and you send a direct heal into the tank who's buffed with blaze of glory your vital spark will now change into a new one called vital flame so the goal here is to stack a bunch of stacks of the first one vital Spark by healing the soakers then when your Stacks are high you start healing the tank and proc it turning it into vital flame giving you crazy gigantic heals this allows you to keep up with the ramping Balck damage one thing to note here depending on the amount of stacks of Torment that the soers have each direct heal will give you more and more stacks of vital spark per direct heal so if they have less than 10 you'll mostly get a single stack per heal but if they have over 10 maybe two stacks per heal and if they have over 20 or even 25 you can get up to five or six stacks of vital Spark per direct heal so you're looking to abuse this and heal them quickly with direct heals the higher stacks of Torment that they have so that you get more and more stacks of vital spark than you would otherwise now we're going to do some specific things to make sure that those soaks are able to take up to 25 stacks of Torment themselves so you can really pump more on that in the walkthrough one last thing about this if you happen to get tormented your heels will really suffer as it reduces your healing done by 50% but you can still stack vital spark while youve got it so if it happens and ideally it shouldn't just swap to the soakers and start ramping up your buff okay healer section done hi everybody else and we're almost done with all the mechanics we've got one last Monkey Wrench in this whole thing countdown every 45 seconds Balck will apply this debuff to two random players in the raid excluding the tank that requires them to touch each other to remove or else they will explode killing the entire raid this complicates The Shard soaking and preventing tormented from spreading so if it happens and screws up your rotation you'll need to have backups ready to soak just in case okay that was a lot let's get into the walk through and see how this plays out on pull your main tank should boot in and tank balarac where he's standing turning him away from the raid we have have two raid markers for the rang about 10 yards from each other and the melee are behind the boss 5 seconds on the fight the first pair of shards go out one in ranged and one in melee now the way that I'm about to explain this rotation is just the way that we did it you can do it however you want but this worked for us and it will work for you now for the first couple sets of shards we're going to assign two specific people to soak one entire Crystal first the off tank for the first set and then the sh Shadow priest for the second set what this does is allows the healers to abuse the high stacks of Torment that they can get stacking their vital spark super super high very quickly and if done correctly you shouldn't really have to worry about stacking for the rest of the fight outside of a few edge cases now for this first pair we have the off tank soak an entire one in our case a blood DEC and when they get to about 15 Stacks they'll pop their ibf or Shield wall and tank the rest of the damage notice here I'm pumping tons of quick flash Shields into him and my vital spark is ramping super quickly now while he's doing that we have two ranged assigned to soak the ranged one Hunter one gets to 13 Stacks then moves out as Hunter 2 moves in and soaks the rest they do take some good damage above 10 so watch them but priority should be to bomb fast quick heals into the off tank as he's soaking to get those Stacks High I've gotten up to 65 five stacks on this first soak which is crazy high and helps put me way ahead early into the fight after this first set the off tank won't soak like this again as he'll be pretty busy now the second sets of shards go out the raid moves away and now our shadow priest goes in to soak the ranged one the shadow priest does the same thing that the off tank just did letting his Stacks grow super high and right after he hits 20 Stacks he'll pop dis ver verion which needs to be glyphed to reduce the cool down and then soak the final five or six Stacks here you see me pumping heels into him and I get over a 100 stacks of vital spark after only two sets of shards from this point I could honestly just ignore the soakers but if I have downtime for whatever reason I can help heal them to build more or just to spot heal them as they go now as the shadow priest is soaking and ranged you'll notice our melee doing this weird dance at the melee Crystal as the crystal Only Hits whoever is closest to it and the first few Stacks even with 500% more magic damage taken it's not enough damage to kill you so our melee move in and out soaking Stacks in a cycle pretty much invalidating the need to set a series of soakers the melee crystal is pretty easy in this way just be sure to spot heal them if they accidentally get too many ticks of it the melee will continue this Cadence for the rest of the fight all right so the second set of shards is done we move to the third and our normal rotation sets in the third set spawns The Raid moves away from it and the person designated to soaking starts about halfway through that person moves out and their partner moves in soaking the rest of it until it despawns we continue this way for the rest of the fight two sets of pairs for the ranged plus the shadow priest taking one entire Crystal by themselves remember the order works this way because once you've soaked you have the tormented debuff increasing your magic damage taken by 100% for 1 minute and this spreads so if you've soaked you want to move out of the raid away from anybody else to allow for your debuff to fall off safely before moving back in and dodging anyone on your way that might be tormented in addition to this countdown is going out so if you're tormented or the person you're paired with is tormented you will get a fresh tormented debuff as you run to each other if this happens and you're in some rotation you need to call for a backup person to help so for you comms here are important so we say your name needs a backup in my case Jordan needs a backup rotation three and someone says I got it and we'll cover for you until your debuff falls off and the normal rotation can begin again all right we're almost done now the tank should have a bunch of stacks of blazes of Glory which is great but you'll find that even with the new huge amount of HPS the healers have decimation blade will still truck your tank super hard and dropping him off from 10 to 100% within 3 seconds is very difficult in this case we have the off tank taunt the boss whenever decimation blade is being cast he's got a much smaller HP pool and often even a single heal with a buffed up healer is enough to get him back to 100% remember you'll need to have over 250k HP and our tanks are just a bit under that in normal gear so the off tank might need to taunt the B get a single stack of vital spark putting him over 250k before the main tank taunts back early on in the fight to get above that threshold once decimation blade finishes the main tank taunts back and the Fight Continues Inferno blade casts the tank pops a strong cool down for 15 seconds and we make it through the Fight Continues this way for the entire 6 minutes it's a long grindy fight with often frustrating edge cases that if if you're quick on your feet will be easy to manage but even a single person screwing up will ruin the pull big reasons that we wiped here are someone running into the raid with tormented and debuffing the entire raid people forgetting to soak a crystal or the tank dying to Inferno blade or decimation blade so watch it carefully and use cooldowns to survive and even if you hit the enrage timer the boss is still pretty killable just kite them as best you can and make sure you soak the crystals as you do if no one's on them they will explode and kill the raid we had a kill a full 20 seconds after the boss enraged so don't give up if you're close if you did your jobs didn't spread torment unnecessarily survived the boss's onslaught of attacks he should go down and you're one small step away from ragnaros himself congratulations all right let's talk about some tank tips this fight is all about surviving for you HP doesn't really matter here as you've got a lot coming from the blaze of glory buff so look to itemize for Dodge and Parry they'll go a long way to surviving the boss's attacks and work to line up those cooldowns for Inferno blade it's likely the way that you die here and need something to survive and for healers I know this one's a lot remember build vital Sparks early and then use it to keep that tank up we assigned three full-time tank healers here with one Paladin ramping huge stacks on the early shards and then taking over tank healing while the other two to do the same and be careful not to heal the tank when you want to be building Stacks once the vital spark has flipped over to vital flame for 15 seconds you won't be able to build stacks until it falls off again so focus on those soakers and get that buff High then swap to the tank and if you get countdown or tormented make sure that you call what your assignment was so that the other healers can help cover until your debuff falls off it sucks but it does happen so work to build stacks of vital spark during it as it's your best way to come back strong once tormented falls off and for the DPS this fight is all about sticking to your Shard soaking rotation and not dumping a tormented debuff on the raid move out once you've got a debuff and wait it out and melee you can pop defensives to soak the crystal if your HP gets below half and then wait until you got to heal before going back in if you see someone soaking too long in melee move in and help them out everyone needs to live for the entire fight to meet that DPS check all right well that's it for ballok it's a very tightly tuned mechanic and DPS check and if you've got what it takes to get him down you absolutely can do heroic ragnaros so hold your head high and get ready for the big guy if you enjoyed this video do me a huge favor and like And subscribe it helps me a ton and I super appreciate it and that is it for me we're almost done in here so get ready for the boss man himself soon enough see you all in the next one