We had a similar set up (3 tanks, 2.5 healers, and not amazingly synergized DPS). I found the best way (for us) to sustain the fight during the Vesperon + Shadron phase was to go into the portal and kill Vesperon's add immediately. This gets rid of the Twilight Torment debuff and also significantly decreases the amount of damage the drake tank takes (less Shadow damage taken). While the DPS and the off healer go into the portal, rotate cooldowns until the acolyte is killed.

When your DPS return, you should be able to kill Shadron fairly easily before, or RIGHT after the next Vesperson acolyte is spawned. As a benchmark, on a good attempt, we got Shadron to about 40-50% when Vesperon spawned his acolyte. This varied a lot though, based on firewalls and other RNG.

Hope that helps.

-----

On a side note, I noticed something extremely annoying and difficult to overcome when going into the Twilight realm to kill the acoloyte. I was the off healer going in to heal the Fury Warrior tanking the add. Sometimes, it would show the acolyte attacking the Warrior, although it was not registered for me. Therefore, he'd be taking damage that I was unable to heal. This happened sporadically, and I have little to no latency issues. We eventually just decided to have us go in and have me physically call out when to tank the acolyte before doing anything. That obviously solved the issue, but the mechanic is troublesome overall. I was just wondering if anyone else noticed this.

Sarth-dk Healed by me Holy Pally
Drakes-warr or druid, Healed by resto druid
adds- pally or warr, Healed by Resto shaman

We only run four dps. Our drake tank does tank two drakes. Drake tank will use all cd's during the fight depending on when a lava wall comes or where its at. As far as the portals, we burn the first 2 drakes down then go in and kill the mini bosses inside the portal. The dps and one healer will go inside and kill the add when it spawns on the 3rd drake in a cycle until the drake is dead.

your druid can tank sarth without pally or priest for cds?

A well geared and speced DK can solo tank sarth without any CDs whatsoever i believe. Our DK tank has ~33.5k hp after debuff and max breath with his spec and resistance is around 32.2k according to the hit table posted few pages back.

With around 350 fire resist, a druid doesn't need any cooldowns to survive on 10 man - they just help to make the healing easier. See the Sartharion MT(Sartharion 3D Druid MT tips) thread in the druid forum for more information.

The only time the breath on the raid will happen if you position him correctly in the bottom left corner is if someone anhks/SS's up ect.. when they get realloctated onto his threat list he will turn to them for a split second. It shouldn't happen that often if at all. Other than that its someone taunting the boss or the tank not turning him correctly.

That would be a Blood spec'd tank, with Will of the Necropolis. He would also have 2% Spell Mitigation meta, and Spellshattering weapon. Need a LOT of stam to pull this off properly, and a damn good healer. One hit after the breath lands and you're dead.

Yes, as mentioned above.

Note that the 2% spell mitigation meta does not actually reduce spell damage by 2%, it only increases your current resistance levels by 2%. So if you had 200 FR before, you'll have 204 afterwards.

Not so much. Factor in PW:S, sacred shield, divine aegis, mending, renew and possibly resto druid hots, maybe some earth shield; Also you can consider the dmg reduction from vigilance, sanctuary, renewed hope. In the end it's not had hard for a blood DK as it might look when theorycrafting. On our kills we rarely need to use pain supression, the DK can just do his thing most of the time.

You're counting a lot of healer buffs for a 10-man. And i have best-in-slot stam set, and barely break that much health with veteran-spec on 3d.

We did it this past monday. Our Raid Comp.

Feral Druid with Polar Set and topped at around 55K hp
Prot Warrior on The 3 Drakes
DK on the Whelps/Ele's

Healers: Resto Shaman, Pally
DPS: Ele Shaman, Ele Shaman, Boomkin, Shadow Priest, Warlock.

We did 1 full night of attempts, than we got it on the 2nd day, on the 2nd attempt. Healing looked kinda hard at times, but having the DK on whelps prevented the healers from getting hit, and they just spammed away. We did have the 2 Ele's help heal at times, but you gotta. You gotta run with 2.5 healers, because it eliminates the strain, and makes for a much smoother kill.

Good luck all

As has been stated multiple times in this thread, the tooltip is wrong. The debuff prevents shadow damage, but not fire.

K, thanks. Sorry, I skimmed the last 2-3 pages but it was mostly about VW tanking so I figured I would ask.

Yes, if you properly stack your raid its reasonable to assume most of those buffs will be there.

We had a bit of a messy go last night on 25 man Sarth 3d (portal healer DCed in portal) and most of our DPS was down by the time we got over to Sarth. This resulted in the fight taking a very long time.

At 16 minutes after engage something happened which I've never seen mentioned anywhere: Sarth started spamming his pyrobuffet on everyone, even though nobody was off the island. The fight was over a few seconds later.

I think this was mentioned sometime ago but yes, Sartharion has a 15 minute berserk timer (which you usually never experience unless something goes horribly wrong).

When to take portals is really up to your own group. Some guilds I've talked to on Gorefiend have said they take the first portal with Vesperon's acolyte to relieve some of the pressure from their healers and Sarth tank. Others will take the portal right after burning Shadron (Divine Guardian helps out a lot here from your Pallys). Still others will opt to not take any portals and just burn all 3 drakes while healing through twilight torment.

Your decision depends on your own raid, and how well your healers react to the massive AOE damage from twilight torment. In my own attempts, I've found that taking the portal immediately after Shadron drops works best for us, it not only gives us some extra time to burn Vesperon for "free" but it alleviates a lot of the pressure on the Sarth tank and healers as well.

The biggest killer for this fight after you worked out the cooldown rotation, the dps CD managment, and healing assignment are going to be the Blazes. While they seem to not hit very hard, guilds often find themselves not communicating well enough and not clearing up the blazes when there are too many until it is too late.

I highly recommend bringing a rogue, with or without synergy, for a 10man just because they can deal with blazes very easily even when they enrage. Hunters are ok but tranq shot with a cooldown can be hard to use constantly.

For tanking, I find that if you have a DK tank, you can definitely run with just 2 tanks and still pick up the whelps relatively easily as long as the DnD was placed in the correct location. If you don't have a DK tank, having healer stand near the drake tank, drawing healing aggro, and let the drake tank aoe taunt and build aoe threat is also very viable.

In terms of DPS, having the ability to burn Tenebron down before Shadron becomes active will come a long way, although it's definitely not required.

I personally had the most success doing 2 tank+ 2.5 healer setup, with the 0.5 healer being an elemental shaman.

You need to give some timing to the encounter/a WWS/your raid setup - give us some clues as to what you're doing so we can tell you what benchmark you're not hitting ect.. Generally though you should really be getting Shadron low enough when Vesperon's acolyte becomes active that it makes more sense to burn him down. Shadron should certainly be sub ~35% and as such at that time what makes the most sense is to have a paladin pop divine guardian and nuke through. Alot of guilds will get him significantly lower than that though. If you're not then give us some details as to your raid setup and show us a WWS.

Two things to say on this:
1) It's probably a bad idea to be hopping in the portal as soon as the Vesperon Acolyte is up. I'm going to assume you're using 1 tank on Sartharion and 1 tank on adds. If you use 2 tanks on the drakes (1 on Vesperon and 1 on Shadron), then you dont' have any tanks to spare for the portal. If you use 1 tank on the drakes (1 tank tanking both), then really, the drakes are more deadly than the acolytes.
2) Realistically, you should be killing Shadron at about the time Vesperon lands. If you aren't making this DPS benchmark, you should start solving your raid problems there. If Shadron isn't below 20% before Vesperon lands, you're going to be having a lot of hell.

I disagree with this strongly. The best way to kill Blazes is through incidental damage. Most guilds run the 10-man with some sort of plate DPS in order to tank the acolyte down in the portal. Conveniently, all plate DPS have strong sources of incidental damage. DK's have pestilence, warriors have whirlwind and cleave, and paladins have divine storm. We find it pretty key that the only thing we have to "focus down" are the drakes and the whelps. If it flies, we kill it. If it doesn't, we let incidental damage kill it. They only have 20k or so health. Any tank can usually solo one before the next one spawns, and if he can't it's incidental damage again.

Again, this works in the 25-man too (and could help JarL): let the adds die to incidental damage. You shouldn't be losing DPS on the drakes due to fire elementals. The adds will die just from DPS warriors, death knights, ret paladins, multishot, chain lightning, and normal tank damage. Hell, you could even have a boomkin pop starfall if they ever became a serious problem. The only quick AoE burst you should aim to do is on the whelps because they pose a significant threat and can do a lot of damage. Other than that, it's just tanking the adds near the drake.

Ok have spent abit of time on 10man 3D but struggling alittle on progress (fuck having to wait for hero cooldowns sucks).

We kill Tenebron before second hatch of whelps and then clean up adds etc and move onto Shadron, usually get Shadron to about 75% when twilight torment goes up and things fall apart.

What are peoples experiences with killing disciples at this point? should we continue to push for shadron dead before we clear disciples or clear disciples each time they come up and slowly dps Shadron then Vesperon down.

We've tried both ways without things clicking properly so need to choose one and stick to it, people just slowly die off until the dps requirements are to much for those left.

DK tank - Sarth
War tank - Drakes
Dk tank - Adds

Pally Heals - Sarth tank/adds tank
Druid Heals - Drake tank
Elemental specced resto geared sham - Raid

Warlock
Mage
Spriest
Hunter

(have tried a mixed dps group aswell with similar results)

Also is there a new change to Twilight Torment i'm not aware of? i know about the change that prevents tanks from clearing it for a breath etc but have heard talk of dps taking significantly more damage than is indicated by peoples experiences in this thread.

Personally, I'd suggest having your Shaman spec resto. Have them blow CDs and help nuke on tenebron by all means, but the majority of the hard part of the fight they're going to healing, and if you're struggling with healing at the moment, then would it not make sense to have them helping ?

That's obviously if you're going with the 'kill drakes before acolytes' strat. One problem with the other strat with your make up is that you have no tank to tank in twilight realm (retadin/dps war etc) either. Make sure your shadow priest and DK add tank are abusing devouring plague pestilence-ing onto all the adds. You can keep it up for a good long time if you're pestiliencing it from add to add.

I'd also suggest having your healers swap roles and have the druid on MT, with pally healing drake tank with beacon on add tank. This gives your druid a bit more leeway to help out with raid healing when torment goes up too.