Healing Baleroc (10 man) - 3 different strats for different healer types

I know lots of people say Baleroc is easy, but not every healer finds it so (non paladins!).  It can take a healer from their comfort zone and put them into a different role where the raid really depends on you, and it can be stressful, as it is not the normal way that a raid will depend on you, doing healing in a different way than you are used to.

So, having had healers stress out, underperform, get angry and all sorts of things on this fight, I am just going to outline a few different ways that we have done it on 10 man that may be able to help you - whether you have a perfect group or a non ideal group.

Basic fight outline

Baleroc will do more and more damage as the fight goes on, and to compensate for this, the tanks get more and more health (from Blaze of Glory).  To keep up with these huge health and damage increases, healers will get healing buffs by building stacks of Vital Spark, which you get from healing dps who stand next to a crystal with debuffs of Torment building up.

Vital Spark - This is the buff you get from healing tormented people (looks like a mote of fire).  Has numbers which go UP as you heal the tormented people.  For each 3 stacks of torment that your heal target has, you get 1 of Vital Spark.  So if your target has 12 torment, you will get 4 vital spark.

Vital Flame - This is the buff it switches to when you start healing the tanks (whoever has Blaze of Glory - and this buff looks like a Primal Fire) and lasts for 15 seconds (so you can't build any more Vital Spark until this goes away)

Torment - This is the debuff you get from being closest to the crystal.  It turns into Tormented once you step away.  Healers stay the hell away from the crystal or you will get this and then Tormented which stuffs up your healing BIG time!

Tormented - This debuff is what you get after Torment drops off and lasts for 40 seconds.  Once you get this you can't tank the crystal again or you will go splat!

3 strong healers (eg 3 paladins)

One way that worked for us was a rotation (ie 3 group rotation) so healer 1 heals tank first, then calls swap then healer 2 goes, etc.  The beginning was always a bit heavy so we got two healers on the tanks first and then call a switch at about 20 seconds so that the other healer who was healing the crystal person would switch over.  Hopefully it wouldn't be while the crystal person was at high stacks or they would go splat from lack of heals.

Note that when I say strong healer I mean a fast stack builder :)

1 strong healer, 2 not so strong healers

This was healed as a 2 group rotation - with the paladin as 1 group and the other 2 as another group.  That worked quite well.  Make sure you start with the 2 healers on the tanks while the other healer quickly grabs some stacks.

3 not so strong healers

The two stronger healers were put on swaps, with the weaker healer put on healing the crystal person full time, and switching to tanks if they needed topping up.  This worked quite well.  The crystal person could get a lot of stacks that way and their healing would look uber.  This way also made sure the dps didn't die.  Because there was no pressure to build stacks for the crystal person they could just heal the crystal tank and then switch to tank whenever they felt like it and then go back to the crystal once the tank was topped up without worrying they still had the vital flame buff on and should be healing the tank and wouldn't be getting any stacks of vital spark.  I think this is also a good method when you have dps that seem to drop quicker when tanking the crystal eg. mages, rogues as they will live longer with the extra heals.

Obviously my favourite people to heal tanking crystals are the warlocks with their soul link and demon armour, and shadow priests with dispersion.  Druids are not too bad with barkskin.  But warriors, rogues and mages.... iceblock does nothing, and I don't think you can cloak the debuff off if you stuff up your rotation.

Resto Druid healing tips:

• I start with 3 LBs on Decimation tank and try to keep them up for the whole fight.
• I have 3/3 Nature's Bounty so when I am crystal healing I put a rejuv on each tank and also on the crystal target, and nourish spam the crystal target, and Regrowth when I have OOC proc, and swiftmend for when they have high stacks
• Jasyla recommends Tree form and spamming regrowth to get stacks, so if you want to start with that to get your stacks up that's fine, don't forget to innervate after!
• It's OK to throw some hots on the crystal target to keep them alive when you're healing tanks!
• Stack haste if you can for this fight!  Make your warlocks give you DI.

I tend to let the pallies and disc priests do the tank swapping and I just do crystals and switch to tanks if they are dropping low, then go back to crystals.

So good luck for your Baleroc attempt!  I hope this post helped someone, it was nice to get it off my chest ;)