We go and kill the acolytes first. If you're not doing that you're causing the raid to take a ton of unnecessary damage. If adds are a problem at the point where Shadron dies, go kill them first - but the acolytes (especially Shadron's, since it won't respawn) should be the higher priority.

Some guilds can get by by burning Vesp and ignoring the acolytes, but if you're having stability problems I strongly recommend going through the portals after Shadron dies. Even if you have to do it a few times to repeatedly kill Vesperon's adds, it's worth it and more stable. Remember - when you've killed Shadron the fight is no longer a race, it's just endurance and not being stupid. You will at that point have 13 minutes to kill Sartharion, so you can afford to take your time, not freak out, and do what is more stable over what is more quick.

Read a bit about pet repositioning etc, tried & killed it today with a VW tank and a guy suggested a very good tank spots, on top of the 'hill' on the left when looking from entrance.

http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/7519/os10.jpg

Pets don't take pyroblast and that's outranging the fire walls, so the pet won't ever move in that spot, won't take magma or firewall dmg and the lock has no repositioning to do. Plus the dragon stands in a pretty nice spot and gives you some extra space on the platform.
Once the 3 drakes were down, our tank taunted it off and let it come to him on the other side of the platform and then ran through it to be in the usual spot on the close left of the platform looking from entrance.

edit: We pulled with the tank on his mount running back on those small islands in front of the platform until the dragon was far enough outside and then MDed to the voidwalker.

I'd highly suggest sending all your DPS in to kill the Acolytes once Shadron dies. Splitting up DPS means two things: First, it puts more stress on healers. Leaving ranged up top means the raid healing is still significant, and instead of simply worrying about tanks and themselves, healers get stretched further. If all your DPS goes down, they are taking reliable damage (much less than if they were DPSing with Twilight Torment up top), in addition to taking TT off your tanks/heals faster.

Second thing is that split DPS is highly ineffective. Let's just assume uniform DPS across the board, if you send half down it takes twice as long to kill each acolyte. By the time the half come up from the portal, you're deeper into Vesperon's timer to bring his acolyte back up. If you kill the acolyte again, your melee is going to lose significant DPS time from having to move to the portal. This unnecessarily extends the fight.

Essentially, you'll make it easier on healers, and create a more effective situation for your DPS (especially melee).

My guild was in a somewhat similar situation when we got our first kill on +3 last night. What helped us get control back over the adds during Shadron was going back to 4 tanks total with 2 of them on the adds.

The dps loss from switching to one less pure dps class was clearly made up by the control we got from going back from less adds attacking our healers and damage dealers.

I didn't notice you mentioning how many healers you were running, but maybe you can squeeze some extra dps out by replacing one of the healers. On our very first night of learning the encounter we ran with 7 healers, reduced it to 6 on the 2nd night and eventually on our third night we cut the amount of healers down to 5 which also led to the kill.

Before switching to 5 healers I was browsing this thread and various other sources for tips and couldn't find much on a 5 healer setup. Hopefully our strategy can be helpful to some guilds still trying this.

We used the pretty basic strategy with heroism on Tenebron, after Tenebron dies clear adds and focus on Shadron ignoring portals until he goes down. After Shadrons death however we started taking every single portal to kill Vesperons acolyte to have a more relaxed encounter.

DK Maintanking in a blood spec tailored for just this encounter.
another DK on drakes and a prot paladin and a prot warrior on the adds.

After going through the WWS logs from our previous night we noticed that running with 6 healers and two focusing on the maintank was a waste. And relying on the disc priests shield on the MT seemed like taking chances because two breaths can happen with less than a 15 second difference.

So we instead we had 1 paladin focus on the main tank, One Druid focusing on the drake tank and a holy priest (focus on the protpala on adds), a druid (extra focus on the warrior add tank) and another paladin (focus on the main tank) healing the raid.

To deal with the biggest breaths we had both of our holy paladins and a retribution paladin spec into Divine Guardian. We set up a rotation to keep Hand of Sacrifice up on the MT and the paladins taking turns in using Divine Shield. This gave us more than enough time to finish off Shadron and not have to enter portals before he is down.

Once Vesperon died we switched the Warrior on tanking Sartharion because the initial DK main tank simply wasn't the best possible choice for taking the increased physical damage from Sartharion.

WWS logs from the night if anyone is interested: Wow Web Stats

We also got our first kill last night. Thank you everyone for your help!

We stayed at 6 healers and 4 tanks. We did, however, make a few changes that seemed to add success for us. We made a point of killing ALL of the adds up, not just the whelps after Tenebron was dead. We also took the advice of many of the posters who responded to my first thread, and sent our entire raid down the portals after Shadron was dead and then had them clear out the accumulated adds after they returned to the surface. Additionally, after Shadron died we had our warrior elemental tank pile up her adds on Vesperon and just work to build threat on them so they were ready for the massive AE storm when our raid returned from the twilight and our DK tank (who as you may recall tanked Vesperon until Shadron was dead) pick up the newly spawning adds. Those changes seemed to solve our issues with being over run by the elementals.

After over a month of decent tries and 2 nights of bugged sarth breathing on the raid when shadron was dying we finnaly killed him on sunday, however we evolved around tactic to not put real focus on the AOE during the transition from first to second drake. However we did utilize pestilance with devouring plague on the drakes to keep everything going down slowly, along with immolation traps, macroed living bombs on whelps/blazes on CD, and a SoC from time to time from a warlock, giving us 30sec of DPS on shadron with bloodlust. Once bloodlust was over drake tank reposition shadron to vesperon spot while we cleared everything. We did use Ironshield potions on the whelp/blaze tank, aswell as shieldwall / surpresion / last stand rotation on the tank before we switched to really finish the packs. Just to point it out, we had every priest in the raid assist with devouring plague before vesperon landed.

Pluses:
-Every whelp/blaze goes down slowly, less chance to have someone pull agro from all mobs and die.
-More dps uptime on shadron before vesperon lands, since tank doesnt reposition shadron to other side untill bloodlust is over, aswell as the fact that you dont waste much less time to kill whelps/blazes.
-Less blazes out there once shadron dies and his acolyte in portal since you kill everything around 30-40sec later if you had aoe everything after tenebron death.

Minuses:
-Bit more stress on the whelp/blaze tank for healers, but from my perspective healers are bored untill vesperon lands anyway. We used 1 whelp/blaze tank, 3 total.

I think this one is not mentioned yet, we asked our ret pally to use judgement of light when vesperon arrives, 650 hp healed per hit. Better than bringing another healer.

I was told by our pallys that judgement of light scales better with AP than spell power. If you run with a ret pally, make sure he judges light every fight. Not just for Sarth 3D.

This is correct. It also generates no threat now, as opposed to the small amount from JOWis.

Simple question: We're doing sarth1d (only vesperon up) altraid, and each time, when tenebron lands he is enraged and oneshots the tank. Anyone know why this happens?

Are you dropping Sarth very low before he lands? If sarth is below 20-25% (I don't recall exactly) and any drakes are still up they all enrage. I assume when you said Tenebron the second time you meant Vesperon (since you said he's the only one left up). I don't think there'd really be time to drop Sarth to the enrage % if it was actually Tenebron you're talking about.

Sure, but what is important is which one it is, because they all join in on their own timer no matter how many drakes are up. If it's Vesperon and you're nuking Sartharion nonstop, he'll definitely be around the 20% mark and thus instantly enraging Vesperon when he lands.

I've been reading this thread reasonably closely recently and seem to notice that quite a few people are getting their raid breathed on. This is all to do with Sartharion positioning as it was indeed a problem that we'd faced a couple of times and could get quite frustrating when you were simply looking for a quick clear. The solution? Don't tank him on the island. I believe this was made popular by an early strat video but it is actually one of the least viable places to tank him. Instead on the pull stand in that area then swing him round into the left (as you face him) corner. This gives very very easy wave transitions and gives healers quite a bit more space not to mention the lack of breaths on the raid. It also means your MT can call pretty much every wave as needed.


A note for those trying Sarth 10 3D consider a 2 healer setup.

It's pretty exclusive really suiting a Holy Priest/Paladin but can really work wonders. It can be done with a complete melee setup and is probably more favourable to one as JoL and the glyph of Holy Light word rediculously well together but it worked extremely well last night with our caster setup. The simple fact that it meant we could reliably get Tenebron down just by popping potions and saving heroism before the second set of whelps then get the whelps down and Shadron to ~ 80% before Twilight Torment was even active meant the difficulty of the fight was pretty front-loaded meaning no agonising waits for heroism. Once Twilight Torment (TT) surfaced depending on whether we were in a wall or not we had our paladin bubble or just spread out and popped heroism saving the bubble for the wall after heroism ended. Due to the fact TT has an internal CD of 2 seconds heroism doesn't actually bring anything negative to the table and simply means your tanks wont die and your DPS will be awesome and won't die. Our Elemental shaman just switched to healing for this portion of the fight with Shadron dying as our Bubble/Heroism ran out making the fight feel much smoother and less random. The only problem we had was actually in safely killing the acolytes but with some nifty hunter kiting and aggro-switches/dumps it became more reliable. People just have to be prepared for it.
While this tactic is obviously a byproduct of over-gearing the place it makes repeat kills feel smooth with no real chance for frustrating deaths when a healer suddenly has to move.

For the past month I've been combing through this forum to get key strats on how to get my first 10man 3drake kill. Although we farmed gear and didn't this early on, the accomplishment still feels brand new. For my group's kill we used the 3 tank/3 healer setup.

Tanks
DK on Sarth
Feral Druid on drakes
Prot pally on adds

Healers
Holy pally healing Sarth tank
Holy priest healing drake tank/adds tank
Resto shaman healing the raid

DPS
Surv hunter (myself)
Fury warrior
Enh shaman
muti rogue

From the start we had all of our dps go balls out. When Tenebron landed we uses CDs and went 100% on him, we didn't pop heroism until Shardron had landed, then we proceeded to finish up Tenebron and dig in on Shardron. After Tenebron was dead I volleyed to help clean up whelps. Shortly after Vesperon would land and we would have to contend with Twilight Torment. We slowly dps'd Shardron until he died and then all the dps plus our resto shaman jumped into the portal. Our fury warrior threw on a board and tanking weapon and tanked the adds one-by-one. After they died we jumped out and steadily dps'd Vesperon until he was dead and then we jumped back into the portal and killed the last add. After that it was a done deal. I went through probably 2 months of switching strats and groups comps to get a kill. I also put up with alot of people messing up on trivial things like: eating laval walls, eating void zones, and tanks not using survival CDs properly. The melee/physical comp is very difficult but kinda rewarding. Next week is the caster group for me lulz.

We tried this last night based on a lot of information in this thread with a 3 tank/2 healer setup as follows:

DK on Sartharion
Warrior on Drakes
Paladin on Adds

Holy Paladin
Resto Shaman

Moonkin
Shadowpriest
Mage
Warlock
Hunter

We had the Shadowpriest switch to healing once Vesperon landed however we found we weren't often getting that far.

I had thought that with 5 DPS we wouldn't have issue getting Tenebron down without him spawning a second wave of adds - however we didn't have much luck. We tried it a couple of times without Heroism (with the intention of saving it for Shadron) however we didn't really get very far with that - he was spawning a second wave consistently. Next we tried it using heroism after the second lava wave (Tenebron was ~50% by this stage) and it was a bit hit and miss. The idea behind using heroism later rather than as soon as Tenebron landed was to still have heroism to finish off adds and get a start on Shadron - but in practice that didn't seem to be working so well.

How are others going using a similar strategy, do you often get a second wave of adds? Do you think it's worthwhile using Heroism straightaway on Tenebron as he lands?

Also - what are people using a 3tank/2(.5) healer setup doing for portals? Towards the end of the night we killed Shadron and tried it Sarth+2 to practice, and when our DPS took the portal, the add only just died before it was respawned again and DPS had to take the portal again to kill it leaving no DPS time on Vesperon.

We did a similar setup to you, Soralin, on our first kill.
Druid (me) on Sarth
Pally on adds
DK on drakes

Resto shaman & Resto druid healing
Moonkin
Elemental Shaman
Warlock
Spriest
Mage

We did not use bloodlust until Shadron landed and a wave had past. We did not regularly get a second set of adds, though this took some practice to get the DPS down. Our elemental shaman healed during the Shadron/Vesperon phase. As soon as Shadron was down, the add tank taunted Vesperon off the drake tank and he went down into the portal. This freed a DPS to concentrate on killing the acolytes a bit more as well as made it a lot easier to heal down there. Before this we had had the moonkin tanking, but we found that this wasn't as stable. Vesperon's easily moved around after all the DPS and one of the tanks is away, and the chances of getting a healer breathed on are basically nonexistent.

We did get unlucky and have to go in right immediately after killing him, but that's not that big a deal; you have all the time in the world as long as you can keep your tanks up at that point. I believe it took us three portals before Vesperon was down.

I think that if you can't reliably get Tenebron down without a bloodlust before he spawns a second set of adds, you're probably underbudget for the DPS.

In my experience it's best to use heroism as soon as Tenebron lands, or as soon as your DPS can start attacking safely, at least. You really need to get Tenebron down before a second wave of whelps spawn, or it becomes extremely taxing on your healers.

Good attempts are measured by how many spawns of whelps you get. One usually means you have a good shot at killing it. Two usually means you're going to be swarmed with adds and it will be too much to deal with. OS103D is all about add control and survivability.

Don't go in portals until Shadron is dead. You need to focus on killing Shadron before you run out of timers to keep your tank alive through Torment breaths. Once Shadron is dead, have everyone but your Sarth tank, drake tank and both healers go in the portal. Your moonkin or shadow priest is good enough for healing in the portal, both main healers are needed outside.

Just for comfort: we tried 2 tank/3 healer tonight for a while in vain. Switching to 3 tank/2 healer made it immeasurably easier--so much easier, in fact, that we one shot it with the composition change. You've got the right strategy, just tighten it up.

On Voidwalker tanking:

After some heavy raid lock fail last week we actually got to try this. I have a hard time comparing it to our other 3d sarth 10 man kills because this was a mele stacked group Vs our usual caster heavy group.

This is from my perspective, and as such has me doing a lot of healing and can be considered very boring for most of the fight.

Also Though I used a different spec, if I were to do it again I would go this spec Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft As it is much higher dps, and the VW doesn't crit very often at all, as in nearly ever. So DP is pretty much out of the question.

Things to note:

Use meta to help burn down the first drake, after that, healing becomes more and more of an issue. Mele is where the VW takes damage and that means as each drake dies, more pain for the VW. Upwards of 23k crits. The VW starts with 49k hp, but is much lower.

Once the third drake dies, as you see we do a bit of a tango, the warrior drake tank swaps to sarth (which is really shady do to the VW position, he fixed it when we went into the portal) the dps and 1 healer go into the portal and start going at 1 add with a hunter pet tank (replace with a plate dps if you have one) and then I came in and tanked the other add.

Once we are out I use my vw to assist our add tank and peel adds off. He can take a flame wall no problem, 80% reduced aoe dmg means teh waves don't tick that hard, add in health funnel and it's all good.

Here's the video
Sarth 10 + 3d with voidwalker tank!

WMO
http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/2102595#damageout

Enjoy

Feel free to ask any questions.

For those of you who are:

Doing a 3 tank / 3 healer / 4 DPS strat for 10man
-and-
Have a solid MT who can eat flame breaths indefinitely (VW, or DK w/ Disc Priest healing)

Then I recommend killing Vesperon after Tenebron. If you're doing a 4 DPS setup, Vesperon will have either landed or be close to landing once Tenebron and whelps are dead. The advantage over burning Shadron first is that while burning the 3rd drake you don't have to worry about twilight torment, and everyone will have their 25% HP back. Once Vesperon dies, jump in the portal and kill only the Vesperon acolyte, then jump out and the fight is literally over.

Our comp was:
DK on Sarth
Feral on drakes
Pally on adds
Disc Priest healing DK
Druid/Pally healing everyone else
Hunter, Mage, Lock, Priest DPS

That is, not stacked at all.

We spent some time on 10-man sarth+3 last night, and have been having tank survival issues. We're going with a 3 tank, 2.5 healer setup as follows:

Death Knight on Sarth
Warrior on drakes
Warrior on adds

Resto Druid
Holy Paladin

Elemental Shaman (who switches to healing once Vesperon lands)
Frostfire Mage
Affliction Warlock
Combat Rogue
Survival Hunter

We're not very well stacked, but we haven't had issues with dps. On our attempts with heroism, we easily get Tenebron down before the second set of whelps, get the whelps down, and have Shadron to 75% or so before Twilight Torment goes up. This is where it breaks down. Our original problem was that at some point during Shadron + Vesperon, I would always die to a double-breath gib. I'm aware that the breaths during Twilight Torment do less damage than the breaths while Tenebron is still alive, and I *am* successfully tanking Tenebron + Shadron for a not insignificant period of time earlier in the fight (during which I have survived double breaths). The problem is that healing gets so strained during Twilight Torment that I'm often not fully topped to survive the double breaths (plus melee hits).

We switched to having our add tank pick up Vesperon, but this did little to help. With each of us on a drake (on opposite ends of the platform), we tried having each of us pick up blazes so we would wind up each having half of them. Still, at some point (on our best attempts, it would happen with Shadron at ~25%) we would lose either myself or the other Warrior. Sometimes it would be due to insufficient healing during lava wall movement, sometimes it would be because we weren't able to pick up blazes immediately and they wind up beating on the healers a few seconds too long (I have Vigilance on the Vesperon/add tank, and he has Vigilance up on the Sarth tank, so we're relying on cooldown-free taunts to pick up the blazes without having to move from our spots).

The more I think about it, the more I want to go back to having me on all the drakes and leaving the add tank free to move all over to pick up blazes. The biggest problem I see with having us on the different drakes is that we often wind too far from each other for Beacon of Light.

How have others had more success in a 3 tank setup? Splitting up the drakes between tanks, or leaving one tank free to get blazes? Do I need to just tell my healers to man up and keep me topped for the double-drake period? I'm saving cooldowns for this chunk of the fight, but there's only so far that Shield Wall or Last Stand + trinket can carry you. For reference, we have our Elemental Shaman moving with our Sarth tank during lava walls (he had some trouble in the early attempts keeping him solo-healed, but has worked out the kinks) and our Holy Paladin and Resto Druid moving with the drake tanks and dps.

You could consider running 3 healers in the end, thats what net us a kill last sunday for the first time.
We've been stuck trying 3tanks, 2+1healers for long long time untill i decided to switch into my resto druid and heal.
With 1 DPS less, we were very close to not have 2nd set of whelps with heroism but in the end, it wasnt any problem for us to have 2 packs instead of 1. I even managed to die when shadron was 50% but the amount of healing provided with regrowth/rejuvanation spam on DPS and tanks for next seconds helped tremendously.

We were originally trying it with a 3 tank, 3 healers setup (the Elemental Shaman I mentioned in my last post used to be Resto). We still had him DPSing during Tenebron and switching to healing once Vesperon lands, but found that his DPS as Resto wasn't sufficient to consistently get us Tenebron down before the 2nd wave of whelps.

I did consider having him go back to Resto, since our dps has improved since he switched and we might be able to do it now, but since he's on the Sarth tank full-time once Vesperon lands, and our deaths are generally one of the other two tanks, I didn't think it would help all that much.