I’ve noticed a few closed threads about this, but I figure it’s about time to get things going. I’m going to assume that people know the fight already, and general approaches. We’ve been pushing this in both 10 man and 25 man recently, and a few things to share, or get feedback on.

10 man
Raid Comp
I’d say that 3 tanks / 3 healers is generally necessary, but I’m having some troubles getting confirmations of this, I would say you need one on, sarth, drake(s)?, adds, since the breath mechanics on the first 2 really limit moving them around, I think that would leave a dps tanking the portal guys. Can anyone think of anything different here?

25 man
Generally not too bad once people figure things out. What generally gets us is the breath when the second drake opens its first portal doing the +50% damage buff, how are people overcoming this? We generally have a warrior tank this, though from what I have seen druids seem to be a popular choice also, since they can stack the stam pool quite high, what are the opinions on this, truly necessary? On the same note, how would dropping avoidance to stack stam work here, since I would think towards the end the frenzy of +dmg +attack speed, could get hard, how have people dealt with this.

Thanks.

This is probably obvious, but that sounds like the appropriate use of weapon/relic swaps as the fight progresses could be a part of a decent strategy, since you could reverse part of that trade-off as the drakes went down.

It has been done by many raids with two healers, obviously for the sake of getting an extra dps'er.

I know of one guild who has done it with two tanks (paladin as the drake tank). Our own experience with two tanks led us to believe that the dps gain was not worth the expense of control. We ended up with our kill using a three tank / two healer approach. It's really a question of how much DPS do you need, and how much control you need on the fight.

On the topic of breaths: you can mitigate the higher damage breaths using several cool-downs: blessing of sacrifice, guardian spirits, barkskin/shieldwall, bear/last stand+fire resist pot, etc.

I think this is an important point many people have missed. Sure X class has this when tanking when Y class can do this - but there are many other castable buffs that can be put on the tank to reduce incoming damage and/or increase healing taken. Combine this with the specific classes tank cooldowns and you can survive it (PvE use for Pain Suppression).

I really like this fight, because it finally combines the "insane tank damage along with tight DPS requirement" which I love so much.

I guess that depends on your raid makeup.

We have a Warrior MT, Druid tanking the drakes and Prot Paladin on everything else.

Each tank is more or less doing their job full time, so I do not see a time where they could go off and taunt+cooldown one of the breaths - and the DPS requirement is sufficiently tight at this beginning gear level that you could not afford a spare tank on your first few kills.

Sartharion is suspectible to taunt, so it's possible to switch the drake tank with the Sartharion tank once the drakes are down, so one tank can focus on HP and some fire resistance without getting killed from the increased melee damage later on. Edit: Starfire beat me to it

During the super-fire breaths, Hunters can also use Roar of Sacrifice (provided they have a tenacity pet) to substantially lower the damage taken by the main tank, as they can't really do anything else with their pets as long as the reflect shield is up.

You don't need a 4th tank, you just need a Damage-dealer of a tanking class that can taunt and pop cooldowns. Fury Warrior, Arms Warrior, Retribution Paladin, Unholy Death Knight, Feral Druid.

Tenebron seems to fly off to 'hatch eggs' once or maybe twice per fight, and can breath on the raid when he flies back. This fight seems pretty hard with a lot of melee as they get in each other's way when trying to see the Twighlight Fissure - turning spell detail down supposedly makes it easier to see them but we still struggle with melee dieing when they simply don't notice a Fissure.

Is there a mod that can time his breaths? DBM seems to do nothing.

Has anyone noticed how fire resistance seems to work a bit differently on Sarth's flame breaths than on most other fire damage. I was tanking him on 25man with my old illidan FR set, and with FR aura from a pally I was at the lvl 83 FR cap. I still NEVER resisted more than 50% of a breath. I was also resisting very odd %s of damage. Sometimes I'd resist 10%, or 20% of a breath, which from what I know about the resist system shouldn't happen. Did they change the system so that it's not 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% resist, and nothing else in between or something?

As has been posted elsewhere, resists now work on 10% granularity rather than 25% and are far more consistent in the amount resisted.

After doing quite a few attempts on the 10 man version(me as prot paladin), I'm finding it very difficult to pick up blazes while waiting on the whelplings to spawn. The raid seems to panic as soon as an add is on a healer(we're attempting to 2 heal it) and do stupid stuff like earth elemental and run away from me and thunderstorm the adds as I'm gathering them up. A single tick of consecration won't keep all the whelplings on me through the healing that the 2 healers are doing, so I usually manage to only get 4 whelplings while the other(s) + a blaze cause panic throughout the raid.

Should healers just stand on/near the portal or me so when the eggs pop and the blazes come to hit the healers they're on my consecration? I just don't have enough ranged attacks to deal with 1-3 spawns and 1-2 whelplings passing my aoe. I've asked to use the DK for aoe tanking since they have more in the way of ranged tanking but they seem hell bent on me doing the whelps/blazes.