Just wanted to update anyone using (or planning to use) FR for this. Finally got some boss-level numbers, details of which can be found in the resistance thread, but at the moment, the previous assumption of a constant of 415 for bosses is out the window, and the best fit right now is a constant of 500.

This means that the required values of FR to obtain each threshold of minimum possible resist would be:

Resistance	Minimum Possible Resist
125	10%
215	20%
334	30%
500	40%
750	50%

What this means in terms of max breath damage taken, or recommended HP at each FR, will of course vary by class; updated druid numbers can be found in the thread on that forum.

Wotlk available buffs	resistance	tradeoff
totem/aura	130	0
flask	50	650 HP
head enchant	25	20 def
cloak enchant	20	22 agi/16def
total	225	~80 stat

Totally 225 resistance without using any BC gear, should I use 225 resistance for CD rotation strategy?

Edit: additional to these, Fur Lining grant additional 60 fire resistance.

I would recommend using as much FR as is painless for you, if you're still going to use cooldowns anyway. The reason being that the FR won't help you with the other damage you're going to take no matter what, so if you're using CDs it doesn't save you; it just means you'll take less damage on those breaths. Which makes you more healable on those attacks, but doesn't do much else.

I think the head and cloak are both gimmes at this point. Depends on your class for the flask or not and whether or not 650 HP will do the trick, but 50 FR on this is quite large, and making sure that you take on average 70% damage on the breaths is going to add up to a lot of avoided damage in the long run.

From attempts over a number of weeks, and our kill tonight, I would advise skipping portals entirely until all three drakes are down. With a well-geared (and well-played) DK tank, the danger is basically non-existent with Vesperon + Shadron adds up and Shadron himself down. (It's actually easier for tank healing than the period before Vesperon spawns.) Every time we tried taking the portals, we'd end up having people get confused, or the healing would fall behind below, or it would fall behind up top, and, in the end, it's just simpler to save portals until after you've got a clean playing field. (For 25-man at least.)

Yes, it's nice to have the Shadron add down to take "big" breaths out of the picture, but you're not realistically going to make it to that point unless you can handle breaths of that size for well over the time it should take to kill Vesperon anyway. (And with only one drake on the tank, the damage taken from fire elementals severely cut, etc, it's not that hard to heal through the Vesperon add's damage.)

It's definitely better from the min/max "kill the mob with the lowest possible raid gear" perspective to kill the Shadron disciple, at the least, after Shadron is dead, but in terms of "fight complexity" and "shortest learning curve," just skipping portals takes basically all the complexity out of the fight, turning it into a "dps whichever target down" fight with a little personal responsibility after Vesperon lands. Before, we had three or four attempts where Shadron would go down, then we'd start on Vesperon and just start hemorrhaging people immediately.

Having Paladins in this fight who are Divine Guardian specced is ridiculously good, too, between the raid damage reduction and the reduction in breath damage on the tank. (In fact, the biggest unsung benefit is the fact that it can be used to keep damage down on your add tanks, while the Hand of Sacrifice keeps the MT safe. Having both drakes on you is no joke, and even Lava Strike becomes an enormous risk to the tank with both drakes and the Vesperon disciple debuff.)

Does Divine Hymn on Tenebron's eggs still work?
Yesterday I tried this for the first time. Once entered inside the portal, I cast the hymn, the eggs seem incapacitated, nonetheless after a few seconds they hatch.

Hey guys,

To start off with, I led 10-man 3D the other night. After about 2 and a half raid nights worth of attempts - we got this done.

I raided back during SWP pre-nerf, and I would honestly say that the difficulty requirement is somewhere around Fel Myst (in terms of competency and skill necessary to complete the encounter). It's not just overly difficult, and despite what others say there is a minimal amount of RNG that can gib tanks.

Our setup was as follows:
Healers - 2x Holy Paladin, 1x Restoration Druid
Tanks - 1 Frost Resist Feral Druid, 1 Unholy DK, 1 Warrior
DPS - Elemental Shaman, Arcane Mage, SPriest, Affliction Warlock

During the initial pull, we do not DPS Sartharion. We all stand at the back and wait for Tenebron to drop. DK is tanking the adds, Warrior is on the Drakes, and the FR Feral Druid is on Sarth.

With the amount of DPSers we take, I cannot stress to everyone how important it is for the tank assigned to Drakes to be the better of the 3 tanks. Tanking Sartharion and moving two spots isn't difficult. AOE tanking also isn't difficult - but what is hard is the Drake tank making sure not to move too much. (I concluded later that a Paladin is superior to tanking the Drakes, only because he not only has taunt, but can also throw AS right after the taunt to make sure Shadron/Vesperon will move directly to him). It is key because the DPSers need to be able to stand and nuke as much as possible.

Now, unless you have very superior DPS, you will get two rounds of egg hatchings from Tenebron. We always managed to burn him to about 10-15% before, and we still have people that need upgraded weapons and gear - so I assume that many of you trying this now should be able to DPS Tenebron down before the second round of hatchings occur. Understand that Shadron will drop on the raid at about 35-45%.

I'm going to talk about the DPS for a moment. We chose to go with solely ranged because we're using 3 healers. Because of Lava Walls and Fissures, we felt like we'd be leaving too much to chance by having a melee stacked group. Now, it doesn't HAVE to be spell casters - and as I've suggested to other guilds on my server they can stack Hunters and an enhancement shaman if they prefer not to go with a caster based group. This is entirely up to your own personal preferences, but having seen it done differently and hearing about the difficulty of it from others - I felt that this was the best way we could have pulled it off. Also, it's important to note that we used Heroism during Shadron - and all DPSers (including our Elemental Shaman) pulled 4k+ DPS.

As many of you know, the most crucial time in this fight is from the moment that Vesperon lands and opens up his portal, summoning his Acolyte and Twilight Torment being stacked on the raid. Your AOE Healer (which I've found is better done by a resto druid) should be amazing. The holy paladins are busy healing the 3 tanks, which means that your resto druid has to heal the remainder of the raid. We tried this at first with a Priest - but they seem to lack overall healing for this fight. Bringing health pots and using healthstones is also key.

With both Vesperon and Shadron up - the Sartharion tank will be taking incredible damage - which can be mitigated by his/her class abilities and the two Hands of Sac available from the Paladins. I cannot stress enough that the Sarth tank HAS to be topped off at all times. Our Druid tank had (before the debuff) roughly 51k HP. He died to an overkill of 72 damage once, and he was sitting at around 98% health. It's important not to leave this to chance. Keep HoT's up on him at all times. I have read that some of you used Divine Guardian. While I see it as being useful, do note that we opted not to.

So, we typically make sure all adds are AOE'd right before Vesperon hits the floor. Everyone takes a breath, we push everyone to full, and then I call for heroisms and we burn Shadron as fast as possible. Note: If your DPS during this period isn't high enough, you'll run into the issue of your Sarth tank dying when all available CD's run out. A Feral Tank with this setup can typically live through 4-5 Flame Breaths. That gives you anywhere from 1-2 minutes to kill Shadron. Not a lot of time, and certainly no room for error at this point.

Once Shadron drops, we all giggle and just start DPSing Vesperon. At this point the fight is over. Kill Vesperon, take the portal with the Drake tank, kill the two Acolyte's, and it's good game achievement, title, and black drake.

Now, a few things to note: An optimal raid setup for this would obviously be different. A DK tank on Sartharion is superior to a Feral Druid. We chose to have our DK tanking adds because he does about 4.5k damage per second to them with his AOE. This means we spend a lot less time having to AoE them, and makes the DK superior to even a Prot Paladin. We spend anywhere from 5-10 seconds AOEing the adds. You can't waste anymore time than that.

Also, we don't have anyone to de-enrage the adds, nor do we have someone available for misdirects. Doing it this way does leave a lot to chance - but if your guild is attempting this, you shouldn't require a crutch like that. Your AOE tank should know to not enrage the adds. Your Drake tank should be able to pick up the Drakes without any problem. In essence, this setup requires a lot of personal responsibility on the part of your raid. I doubt this can be considered "harder" than the other ways, but it is definitely a lot less forgiving. If one person dies, we typically call a wipe.

So, if there are any questions about anything I've written, I'd be glad to respond. Oh, and for those of you that did this with 2 healers - I must regard you with a high level of respect and offer a /salute. We tried an entire raid with 2 healers and just got overwhelmed. So, if you've tried 2 healers and it isn't working - give the above strategy a go. It's fairly simple, and just requires people to use their heads.

Thanks!

I was simply eluding to how I did it, and after countless hours of research on this topic - I found that this is what worked best for us after we couldn't successfully do it with 2 healers. You have every right to disagree with the strategy, but consider that with that one set in stone (3 healers) - we did it in roughly 4-5 hours.

I also didn't say that doing it with Melee was impossible, just that we felt more confident doing it with casters. Blowing heroism on Shadron does make sense, and we never once wiped because additional whelps spawned in the raid.

It's also interesting that you bring up the point of the Drake tank dying. We never once dealt with that - even when he did get two breaths, because our Warrior tank typically used that time to burn SW. We do it on 25-man with a Feral tank, but because we lack an MD of any kind - we'd run into threat generation problems with our druids. The warrior was the best option for us.

I also don't think that it's a legitimate kill using a VW and his passive damage redux from AOE. To each their own, I guess.

There are some advantages to all melee. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you - a full caster group will probably do better DPS. But, consider your Whelp / Elemental tank. They probably have the most difficult job simply due to the randomness of the encounter. If say, an elemental spawns right as a lava wave is coming and it gets enraged right away - then it aggros a clothie (for whatever reason), he can crit him and one shot him. If a stray elemental aggros a Ret Paladin or a Fury Warrior? Big deal.

Also, if you use all caster DPS, this can be problematic when you're doing portals. Who's going to tank the Acolytes? The healer? We had a moonkin do it with the full caster group.





Oh and the guild that used the Voidwalker has been killing 3 drakes since early December the normal way. I just found this to be extremely amusing. For reference, here is the forum post - World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Digital Gangsters kills 3d Sarth w/ VW tank

(25)
Melee fissures are seriously annoying. We mark one good melee DD and have the rest track him, as well as call out fissures on voice chat as quickly as we can. It helps tremendously to zoom in with the camera on your feet, and look slightly from the side (isometric). It might also help if you run a blind DPS rotation and just look at your feet the entire time, as much like KT, spending just two seconds watching CDs can mean death.

We've honestly never had a problem with any spawns running to DPS casters. The only person it typically goes after is our druid - and he charges head-long into the DK's DnD and it's off about a second later.

As for the Acolyte tank - we wait til Vesperon is dead to go downstairs. At that point, the Warrior is free from tanking because all Drakes are dead and we let him tank the Acolyte's. No reason for him to stand upstairs and tank nothing, and the DK hasn't needed any help at this point to tank adds so it shouldn't be anywhere near a problem.

As per - the main thing we don't typically have an issue with are adds.

We have 2 holy and 1 ret, so we make them all spec in divine guardian. We usually put our MT healer directly under the boss to avioid additional movement due to fissure shared by others. It seems that the pally healing MT is too far away from our raid for divine guardian to be effective.

Where should we place our MT healer?

1) Directly under boss to avoid stepping into others' fissure and get less lava strike dmg from overcrowding, or

2) inside the crowd to make sure divine guardian is in range and add tank can pull lava blazes away from them easier.

Hi guys, long time reader, first time poster

Thanks to all the advices in this thread, we finally manage to kill Sarth25 3D yesterday.

We were trying the "ignore portals until Shadron is dead" strategy since one week, but it was just a bad idea (for us, at least).

I think Twilight Torment is too annoying to be ignored because Twilight Torment makes the dps slow down a lot to not kill themselves (and sometimes, they unluckily killed themselves...). IMHO, removing this from the fight in killing Vesperon's acolyte is what makes it works : increases dps, removes random people autokills, less raid healing, so more tank healing. In short : a controlled fight, without any randomness.

Killing Vesperon's acolyte also reduces the worst breath case from 74K to 42K, before defensive reductions. A lot more managable...
And the bonus part of taking portals : if we killed Shadron's acolyte too (what we did), worst breath is down to 28K. A joke.
And from that point, the fight is easy : kill adds, kill acolytes in portals if they respawn (2 by 2, not 1 by 1), kill Sarth, loot.

So, for me, taking portals from Vesperon's landing is now the way to go.
And our fight became :
- Tenebron lands, dps on Tenebron
- First wave, Heroïsm/Bloodlust
- Shadron lands, Tenebron is at 10% or less
- Finish Tenebron
- AoE (warlocks, mages) on whelps, single target dps on Shadron
- Whelps down, dps Shadron (ignore Shadron's portal)
- Vesperon lands, dps stay on Shadron
- Vesperon's portal shows up, all dps + 1 healer go inside
- From this point, the damaging part of twilight torment becomes a sapphiron-like aura (in portals) so it's easy to heal. An elemental shaman might help here, just in case. Tanks stop attacks on their targets. Healing in "real world" is easier because there is only 9 people to watch : 4 tanks, 5 healers. A plate wearer (retri pala for us) tanks the adds in portals, dps kill Vesperon's acolyte first then Shadron's acolyte.
- Exit from portal (watch the waves !), all dps go out on Shadron
- Shadron's down, dps on Vesperon
- Repeat the portal phase until Vesperon's down
- Kill Sartharion

Hope this can help some people. If you're ignoring portals and constantly wiping when Shadron is at 20% or so, or right after his death, try to go into portals : it's really easy if you can go that far in the fight and don't have shiny dps.

Our raid setup :
- Feral tank with full Frost Resist on Sartharion (51K before -25%)
- Defensive warrior on Tenebron and Shadron
- Protection paladin on whelps, then on Vesperon
- Protection paladin on blazes
- 6 healers : 3 priests (one with grace on Sarth tank), 1 resto shaman, 1 holy paladin, 1 resto druid (on raid, in portals)
- Only 4 melee, including 1 DK on blazes and 1 rogue on enraged blazes

P.S. : sorry for my english

I was having an issue with this encounter yesterday with my guild. First time trying it since 3.09.

The first Lava Wave would happen, then 8 players would disconnect. They never had this problem on this encounter before. We tried a few times after having them disable all of their addons - no dice. Anyone else having this issue?

We had one player disconnect in Sarth yesterday (we weren't doing any extra drakes because of low turnout this week, so we did heroic "less is more" instead this time). The same one player disconnected during Archavon 25. Nobody seemed sure what the cause was.

This seems to be a somewhat common occurance in other raid instances as well.

To put it mildly, I know which people, in advance, will DC out of 4HM. Every. Single. Time.

We've yet to figure out which the cause of the problem is. Sloppy connections, a combination of addons.

Has any one else noticed seeming differences between the encounter pre and post patch? We put in about 12 attempts tonight and noticed MANY more lava strikes than before. Our add tank also stated that the fire elementals seem to be doing significantly more damage than previously.

Is this bad luck, and/or a subjective experience or have other people been noticing the very same things?

Our prot pally complained of the same problem, he also said there were far more adds every single try than usual.

Is Onyxia deep breathing more often as well?

Seriously though, we had no such issue on our kill last night.

Considering how random the spawns are I'd just chalk it up to bad luck.

The total number of lava strikes is typically constant, but what can change is the total number of adds spawned. It is random, and it does change from pull to pull. You'll have some attempts where you have to do a mop-up round of AoE on blazes because your tank is getting overwhelmed ... and others where there isn't a blaze to be seen when it comes time to AoE the whelps.

When you look at the mechanic for strike -> spawn blaze, it makes sense. It is random, and it does fluctuate.

So ... yes, you probably saw more blazes than "normal". No, it's not a changed mechanic. And yes, Onyxia does deep-breath more, always.

I don't doubt that and it's what I told him at the time. I wouldn't have even second guessed it if I hadn't seen a couple of posts in this thread.

The number of people a lava strike hits may make it seem like you are getting more, and in those cases (if I see 3+ people taking a strike) I yell at people to spread out more to reduce "insta-gib" chances.

My guild has been working on 10-man Sarth 3D for a couple weeks now and not making much head-way when we have both Vesperon and Shadron up. I took a look at the WWS to see if I could pin-point our weakest link and while doing so I found something a little confusing. At first it looked like Twilight Torment was proc'ing off Thorns but then I noticed that a Twilight Torment proc'd without Thorns hitting Sarth:

19:51'26.344 Bigwojo Thorns failed. Sartharion was immune.
19:51'29.516 Bigwojo Twilight Torment hits Bigwojo for 1805 Shadow. (558 Resisted) (140 Absorbed)
19:51'34.406 Bigwojo Twilight Torment hits Bigwojo for 2310 Shadow. (182 Resisted) (140 Absorbed)

Ref: Wow Web Stats

I looked back through the report and found:
19:51'34.406 Bigwojo attack failed. Sartharion was immune.

In fact, it appeared that Thorns WASN'T proc'ing TT and it was failed attacks instead that was causing this. This is confusing because when Twilight Torment comes up, our MT on Sarth stops auto-attacking to prevent additional damage so our healers have a little breathing room. It appears that even with auto-attacks turned off that there is still an "attack" happening. Am I missing something? Our MT swears up and down that in no way does he auto-attack (and I very much believe him). In addition, our holy pally who is healing our Sarth MT also appears to be "attacking" Sarth: 19:51'35.453 Arkonial attack failed. Sartharion was immune.

Where are these attacks coming from?

WWS: Wow Web Stats