strawberryfm

Thought I would share the tactic I wrote for my guild using a voidwalker as MT, it has worked very well for us.

The raid setup is actually pretty flexible:

• 1 Main Tank - Demonology Warlock
• 1 Whelp/Elemental Tank - Protection Paladin/Warrior preferably
• 1 Drake Tank - Any tank should do
• 1 Main Tank Healer - Priest or Paladin
• 2 Drake tank/whelp tank/raid-healers - Any healing combo that has enough AoE healing for Twilight Torment. Succesful setups for us have been druid/druid, shaman/druid, paladin/druid.
• 3 DPS - A rogue is nice for enrage dispel, casters and dot classes are preferable but melee seems to work aswell.
• Replenishment dude - Hunters bring misdirection which can be nice, but isn't needed. Shadowpriests bring Vampiric Embrace and 3% hit for the raid. A paladin could be nice for putting up Judgement of Light when Twilight Torment is up, if you don't have a Holy Paladin for that.

That is, 2 tanks, 3 healers and 5 DPS, one of the DPS being a Demonology Warlock.

• Place Voidwalker at tank spot where it can avoid Flame Tsunami. See red cross.
  
• A tank pulls Sartharion in a straight line to the edge of the island, then Tricks of the Trade and Misdirection is used to direct Sartharion to the Voidwalker. 0 DPS on Sartharion.
• Everyone moves towards the other side of the island where Tenebron will land and await him.
• Tank picks Tenebron up and moves him to where Vesperon is going to land later on (right side of the island). This makes it easier for the MT healer to avoid walls, not having to worry about drake breaths.
• Bloodlust is used on Tenebron and he is killed preferably before second set of whelp spawns.
• Likely before Tenebron dies Shadron will land on the left side of the island. Misdirection is used to move him to the tank. Pray to avoid raid breaths!
• When Tenebron dies the raid finishes off the whelps and elementals with some AoE.
• If AoE is done before Vesperon lands some DPS can be made on Shadron before waiting, once Vesperon lands we switch to him. We kill Vesperon before Shadron!
• When Twilight Torment goes up we keep DPSing, with caution. Avoid Lava Strikes if possible and slowly burn down Vesperon. On our last kill Vesperon was up for 2 min 6 sec. We ignore the Acolytes for now.
• Once Vesperon is down all DPS except the Demo Warlock enters the portal, along with one of the healers. Acolyte of Vesperon is killed while Acolyte of Shadron is ignored. We leave Acolyte of Shadron alive not to have to kill it several times.
• Given that voidwalker healing is going okay we have gotten past the hardest part of the fight. The health penalty is removed and Twilight Torment is out of the picture. The raid and drake tank should be taking a lot less damage, giving the healers a bit more time to focus the voidwalker. Burn down Shadron.
• Once Shadron is dead the drake tank taunts Sartharion. AoE down elementals to clear up the add tank. Once this is done the whelp tank and all DPS (may include the demo warlock once Sartharion is taunted) go in and kill the Acolyte of Shadron, bringing one of the healers once again. During this time the MT will have to taunt the elementals that spawn unless the Demo Lock stays behind with his VW.
• Get Sartharion to 10% and then burn him down as quick as possible.
• Profit.

Doesn't really require bloodlust. It's entirely possible to get Tenebron down before the second whelp spawn without bloodlust, even though it doesn't hurt. If you happen to get a second whelp spawn it is manageable.

Misdirection isn't needed either, the tank can grab Shadron with ranged taunt paired with Avenger's Shield/Heroic Throw.

 

Amroo

The DPS are sort of suffering from the change to Twilight Torment to avoid dancing, as well I think. Before the change to TT DPS were continuously DPSing, therefore they got the TT damage, but the aura (I think it was Shadron's, but not sure) was removed for 2-3 seconds, which was the whole point of the dance for tanking. Now that the aura isn't being removed by TT anymore, DPS always get 100% more fire damage, so the damage from the fire meteors on the raid is doubled. At least that's how we explained it away, although at first we had more trouble dealing with it on heroic than normal.

 

thalys

We take the portal to kill Vesperon's acolyte. I tank it as a cat spec druid, and an offspec caster is perfectly capable of healing through this, even if I'm forced to pull the Shadron acolyte off someone who screwed up and aggroed it. We've found this to be the best way to go, as it is the fastest way to resolve the most healing problems, and get back to DPS on Shadron. If you don't have a cat spec (or OT spec) druid it's much more complicated, as you're unlikely to have any other DPS that can wave their hands and render themselves uncrittable for temporary tanking for long enough, especially if you end up dealing with both acolytes. By not killing both acolytes until Shadron is dead, you reduce the risk of being dropped out into a flame tsunami, as well, since you're portaling out. Note that if you portal out instead of being dropped out by killing the last mob in the Twilight realm, you will *not* be immune to shadow damage, and had bloody well better ask someone "on top" whether it's safe to come out. Once Shadron is dead, the next time we take the portal, we kill Shadron's acolyte *after* killing Vesperon's acolyte. Remember to ask if the tsunami has passed before finishing him off.

A cat spec druid has a pretty huge advantage for portal tanking, at least until they nerf our armor in 3.1. I did have a 'portal set' with a few pieces swapped out, but I flat out forgot to swap into it before the fight a couple weeks ago, and didn't realize it until afterwards. The portal adds just aren't very dangerous once you get to 30k armor and uncrittable--I've gone in alone on them for 10 seconds a few times due to portal/tsunami placement and timing, and while I had to blow my cooldowns when that happened, the healer caught me up without really breaking a sweat. When we had a DPS DK try to do it, she got hammered pretty bad once her cooldowns were exhausted. Also, of course, if you *do* have to tank both mobs at once, feral druids are the kings of 2-mob threat generation, between maul and swipe.

I wouldn't bother killing Shadron's acolyte until Shadron is dead. It only threatens the MT, and even then only when the Vesperon acolyte is also up. Since they spawn essentially simultaneously, you're not really accomplishing anything that exciting by wasting an extra 10 seconds you could use on Shadron, and you're also risking a bad exit from the twilight realm by killing both acolytes. This way you only have at most probably 2 uncontrolled portal exits--and on the last one, Sarth is the only thing left, so unless you lose a *lot* of bodies, you can still finish the fight.

 

Frogmite

Why isn't your add tank on the Drakes and vice-versa? You're running with an almost identical setup to what we ran with and I must say that if you can save that heroism for Shadron it's going to make your life so much easier. Tenebron is easy, extremely easy and if you can manage to get him down without a second set of adds without heroism then you've made the fight so so much easier. What you can then do it mop up adds - start DPS on Shadron (primarily single target DPS should do that immediately of course) and you'll have him to about 80% when Vespersons acolyte becomes active. Then spread out:

DPS slowly pop divine guardian at the first lava wall - no chance of Sarth tank dying/less damage on the raid

At the next fire wall - pop heroism DPS go mental they WON'T take anymore damage than normal but they WILL get topped up 30% faster as will your tanks. TT has a 2 second internal CD making it not increase in damage with haste effects whatsoever (apart from the fact that your less likely to be mid-cast when the CD comes off). This means you safely nuke Shadron for 40 seconds by which time he'll be close to if not already; dead.

Then just get in that portal and mop up the acolytes - we always had a hunter kite it off/on the warlock which worked reasonably well it just requires some practise.

 

Valorath

Has anyone had success with a 2/2/6 setup? We've been trying to get our first 3d10 kill for a couple of months now, and we haven't had any real success yet. We've managed to kill Shadron a number of times, but something always seems to go wrong while our group is killing the acolytes after Shadron death. Our set-up is generally this:

Tanks:
Paladin on Sarhtarion
Deathknight tanking all adds and drakes

Healers:
Priest (discipline) on the Sarth tank
Paladin on add/drake tank

DPS:
Druid, Moonkin
Mage, Arcane
Mage, Frostfire
Hunter, survival
Hunter, survival
Shaman, Enhance

Last night, our best attempt was try number 21 in our wws (Wow Web Stats). Ideally we're only overlapping Shadron and Vesperon for 20ish seconds, resulting in Divine Protection and Pain Suppression being enough saves to get us through the gib phase. I think we'd have had Sarth on our 21st attempt, if we'd have anticipated needing just a bit extra healing on me (Val) after Shadron died. Due to mostly south walls, we struggled practically the entire night to even kill Shadron. The first time we got north walls and used Lust, we were able to kill Shadron and move into the twilight realm. Thats when I died - before the acolytes were dead.

Currently our raid is split on whether or not we should be changing our comp to a 3/2/5 or a 3/3/4. We're able to control all the adds and drakes with little difficulty; our DK (drake tank) doesn't have much trouble picking up the whelps. So, some of our raiders feel there's no reason to switch to a 3 tank set-up, since a third tank lowers our DPS and increases our add control (which isn't really an issue for us currently).

I just don't want to miss out on Glory of the Raider - The Twilight Zone is the last achievement most of us need. Any tips or advice would be welcome.

 

david0925

The overlapping of Shadron and Vesperon is something you need to work out. At this point your raid is taking pretty significant amount of damage while your tank are taking a lot more damage from the Debuffs from all the entities present. So either you need to squeeze out more dps and shave another 10 seconds off, or just have your moonkin go into healing mode. He should have enough spell power to offer some sort of healing for the raid, once Vesperon lands, the fight shifts from a complete DPS race to a controlled DPS and survival balance. Whichever path you decide to take is obviously your choice. Having done the fight as Enhancement I also throw all of my MW procs as Chain Heal or Healing Wave, when we are on Vesperon.

Maniq is my hero

 

Tzeni

You say you've killed Shadron multiple times, but of the entire WWS parse you provided, the log file contains only 1 instance of a Shadron death, and that was on try 21. Only 2 other times did you do at least 900K of the 1.2 million needed to kill Shadron. I think you still need work there before anything else.

We haven't downed him yet either, but I can't imagine that your 2 tank strat is working for you. Look at the damage that lava blazes are doing to your raid vs. their "tank": Wow Web Stats

The whelp damage isn't as bad, probably indicating that your tank is having trouble holding both Shadron and Vesperon and picking up lava blazes: Wow Web Stats
(It could also just mean that a lot of the lava blaze damage is coming from wiping after you die to something else, but it's impossible to say from just a text parse)

Without linking the appropriate pages, your DK tank also took an inordinate amount of lava wall damage, and also lead the raid in void zone damage; probably due to his split attention. I think you're just asking him to do too much.

Also, why not have your Paladin on add/drakes and your DK on Sarth? Paladins are generally better at picking up adds and DKs have more cooldowns for flame breaths.

 

Zuel

You'd have a much easier time with a third tank, and like Tzeni said, switching tanks around a bit might help, although it's not as important for 10 man. Our last kill we used a druid with a bit of FR on Sarth, druid in normal tanking gear on drakes, and a prot warrior for all the adds.

A third tank simply adds a lot more control to the fight, since you won't have one person scrambling trying to pick up everything, dragging it all over the place. Your death knight might be the best player in the world, but there are some unavoidable things that happen if you're trying to do too much at once. Specifically when we were using a two tank strategy, our raid would get breathed on because the same tank was trying to pick up lava blazes and whelps too, and everything was constantly moving, running everywhere. A third tank cuts down on the number of hits other raid members will take from blazes as well, because that tank's only job is to keep them off the healers (druids are lava blaze magnets, I hate this fight so much).

Anyway, you can fine tune it however you like. You won't kill it just by using the strategy that I say is easiest, since this fight is so dependent on individual performance and awareness.

 

Tupu

Yes. We did get our first kill yesterday with 2/2/6-setup. We had protection warrior on Sartharion and protection paladin on drakes and whelps. Restoration druid and holy priest kept people alive while our dps did their job. Dps was affliction warlock, enhancement shaman, arcane mage, survival hunter, shadow priest and retribution paladin.

We've had tries with 3 tanks/2 healers/5 dps earlier but somehow we did not get it to work. I was a bit surprised how much better it was with only 2 tanks overall. But then again the actual kill was totally mess, but we managed to get it done even with some dead people.

I read this thread and many guilds seem to use death knight or feral druid on Sartharion, do anyone actually use warrior or paladin?

 

Jagiya

Even though I'm a casual these days and I don't raid, I figured I'd provide a bit of input to the discussion.

One of the guilds on my server asked me to come and tank their OS3D (10man) as their tank didn't show up, so I respecced my Paladin alt to Prot and came along.

Group composition:
Feral Druid (Sartharion Tank)
Protection Paladin (Drake Tank, Elemental Tank, Whelps Tank) - Me
Healer (Holy Priest)
Healer (Holy Paladin)
Healer (Resto Druid)
Arcane Mage x2
Elemental Shaman
Moonkin Druid
Hunter

In short; two tanks, three healers, five ranged DPS.

- The Main Tank pulled Sartharion into position on the island side of the lava parallel to the X in strawberryfm's map.
- Nobody attacked Sartharion as to preserve ICD's.
- First drake landed, I taunted it, pulled it into position parallel to the main tank about 30 yards west of him, allowing me to strafe minimally in order to avoid lava waves. (described similarly in strawberry's post)
- The Holy Paladin was using RF, generating aggro on loose adds. I set up a Righteous Defense macro to taunt from him every cooldown. It just became a passive part of my rotation like Heroic Strike.
- We popped all our cooldowns including Avenging Wrath and Heroism as soon as the first Drake landed, and nuked him down.
- ~10 seconds after the first portal spawned, i consecrated beneath it in order to pick up all the whelps. The group was advised to move away from the portal in-case they were breathed on whilst I was in transit with the drake.
- Drake #1 died about 5 seconds before Drake #2 landed. I picked him up and they AoE'd down all of the accumulated adds & elementals on me.
- Main Tank was calling out each breath as cooldowns were cycled for his survival.
- Drake #3 landed whilst Drake #2 was on ~25%, I taunted it and dragged it across the island whilst the raid strafed to avoid being breathed. I used all of my survival cooldowns at this point.
- Drake #2 died, steady DPS was used to kill drake #3 to prevent people from killing themselves. I stopped attacking completely once I had a reasonable headstart on threat.
- After drake #3 was dead, we waited for a lava wave, and most of the raid went into the portal to kill the Acolytes whilst I stayed outside and kept the elementals in check.

From there, it was a piece of cake.

The same guild invited me back the week after, as their tank didn't show up again. Composition was pretty much the same, with a 2nd Holy Pally instead of a Resto Druid.

My Pally isn't very geared... I've been to a few PUG Naxx's and whatnot. Last time I checked, I was wearing 10 pieces of ilvl 200, 6 pieces of 213 and 1 piece of 226. But the only time I died during OS3D was when I'd be tanking two drakes at once, and they'd breathe simultaneously.

I figure most of this is fairly straightforward, but it might shed some light on options for those who use 3 tanks.

EDIT: Apologies for anything important i might have missed. I don't know which drakes are which. I just call them one, two and three.

EDIT2: A few other tips... which are just common sense, really.
- I kept Sacred Shield on myself and the MT permanently.
- I judged Sartharion (macro) every second cooldown, as to maintain the -20% attack speed debuff.
- I used improved devotion aura rather than ret aura

 

Valorath

Update: Tonight we got Sartharion with a 2/2/6 set-up. We changed a couple specs around from last night, and switched in a ret paladin for our arcane mage. WWS: Wow Web Stats

The reason we used the Deathknight for Drakes/adds was because he could place his DnD on the whelp spawn; whereas for me to do it as the paladin tank, it involved some moving around with the drake in tow, leading to breaths on the raid. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. I certainly don't begrudge our raid lead for not wanting to do 3/3/4 anymore! We were actually able to kill Shadron before any TT breaths tonight, which made the fight signigficanly easier.

So happy to get Glory of the Hero before 3.1 hit

 

Spifli

We have been trying 10man 3d for about 3-4 raids now

setup:
Deathknight (mt)
Prot Warrior ( tanks first 2 drakes and then those in portal)
Prot Palladin (tanks adds+vesperon)

Resto Shaman ( healing drake/add tanks and raid when he has a spare gcd)
Holy Priest ( healing MT and coh/poh on raid)

Mage
Mage
Balance Druid (switches to healing once Vesperon lands)
Demonology Lock
Surv Hunter

We usually get Tenebron to about 15-30% with heroism before Shadron lands, from here on the RNG starts fucking us over, On some tries our Drake tank just gets almost hit simultaneous by both dragons breath (about 26-31k damage in 2 seconds time) causing the Drake tank to die.

If they don't cast there breaths at the same time our healers just manage fine and we get tenebron down, aoe the adds and dps Shadron till about 75% when Vesperon lands. From this moment our druid starts healing (tranquil air/single target ) to keep the raid up, the tanks who got enough agro on there target stop hitting to avoid extra damage and everyone pops his HS when needed.
The holy priest is spamming greater heals on the MT and coh/poh'ing the raid, while the Resto shaman is forced to use Healing waves to keep the Drake tank on Shadron and the add tank who is tanking some fire ele's + Vesperon up. Which means only the balance druid is able to heal the rest of the dps which doesn't seem to be enough burst for the RNG Lava Strikes or Fire ele's spawning and focusing on 1 person.

Which means we mostly wipe when Shadron is at about 2-25%hp.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what we can try?

 

Jagiya

Seems to me like your Prot Warrior is a waste of space. Swap him for another DPS and you'll have Tenebron dead with time to spare before Shadron makes an appearance. It makes all the difference. There's nothing you can do to survive a double breath short of wasting valuable cooldowns when you could simply bring an extra DPS and preserve them for when they really matter. (TT)

EDIT: Also forgot to mention, I (Pally tank) stay outside and keep the adds off the MT healer whilst the DPS and raid healer(s) go in the portal. The elemental Shaman ends up tanking the Disciples, at no risk.

 

Westar

We use a 2/2/6 Setup (tanks/healers/dps):

Here is what we ran with Last Week

Holy Paladin/Resto Druid
Prot Paladin/Unholy Death Knight
Mage/Warlock/Boomkin/Ele Shaman/Survival Hunter/Fury Warrior

Ideally you would want a Disc Priest instead of Resto Druid as they have such good synergy with a DK Tank and they can provide a caster DPS with PI, however we are getting people their achievements so we took in the druid. Also you would want to stack either all caster or all melee to help with synergy buffs.

Here is how it went down:

Tank Set up:
Unholy DK on Sarth
Prot Paladin on Drakes + Emblems + Whelps

Healing Set up:
Resto Druid healing DK Tank
Holy Paladin (me) healing Prot Paladin - When a single Drake is up it is easy to focus on the tank have a beacon on him so you can watch the raid too, however when the whelps come out you may need to just spam on the Prot Pally to make sure he doesn't get low.

Key Things to note:
The whole point of this strat is to have minimal time where two drakes are up to avoid double breaths.
Use lust at an optimal time
Stay alive - Dieing before the second drake is dead can mean more raid damage/chance for a tank to get killed from double breath as the drakes go down slower.

How it went down:
Holy Paladin uses Fire Resistance Aura (i spec into 40 yard range for this fight)
Unholy DK Initiates Combat pulls Sarth towards him and moves him into position so that if a churn comes from behind him he doesn't have to move and if it is coming from in front of him he moves to his right.

Raid stays towards the center of the platform and get ready for the first churn and first drake.
As soon as Tenebron lands we get him down ASAP with 6 DPS he goes down before the second set of whelps and should not be up for very long while Shadron is up -

When Tenebron Dies, aoe down all adds (when tank calls that he has enough threat) then switch to Shadron. We use our lust here to get Shadron down, it is important that you time it well so that you minimize time wasted from lust due to churns, what we do is wait for a churn then as it is passing if everyone is safe we lust. Usually we get Shadron to around 7-15% then Vesperon will land.

When Vesperon Lands we have our hunter MD the tank and move out of the way to give it a clear path towards the tank to avoid breaths on the raid, our elemental shaman starts healing the raid to help with the incoming damage from Twilight Torment.

Shadron soon after Vesperon lands and you are pretty much in the safe zone regarding the fight (no more hectic breaths on the DK tank and the lava strike does not hurt as much, so it helps the raid healing)

From this point on we take down Vesperon making sure you stay alive by any means - It is no longer a DPS race.

The only thing you have to be ready for is Vesperon's Death - Make sure the holy paladin is able to switch to the DK tank - at this point i just keep a Beacon on the Prot Paladin and heal the DK Tank/Raid. The timing of Vesperon Dieing is important, you don't want Sartharion gaining his last increase of attack speed when your sarth tank is low as it could lead to a possible wipe.

With the set up we had we had 4 people stay up top (Prot Paladin/Unholy Death Knight/Holy Paladin/Resto Druid) and the rest of the raid go into the portal - The Elemental Shaman healed down the bottom and the Fury Warrior chucked on a sword and board to tank it - Killing Acolyte of Vesperon then moving to Shadron then timing it so they killed the acolyte after a churn happened so they would not port up into one)

In the case that you get a full caster group - have the Moonkin Tank going into bear form if needed for the acolytes.

Below is the Link of the WMO where we got a kill in 6:28

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

Below is the WMO for the week before having a caster group however we ran 2/3/5 - Exactly same strat however having an extra healer to help control the fight regarding heals etc. I'd suggest going 3 Healers for learning this fight (first kill was 3/3/4)

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

 

Spifli

We tried that but it seemed that 2 tanks wasn't enough to keep the holy priest and resto shaman free from getting ganked by fire ele's

 

Jagiya

A few other tips of advice I guess I could offer...

- I pay no attention to the mobs hitting me. I just mash my standard rotation keys and hope they stick to me. (They do) Instead, ALL of my attention is focused on the background, watching for the lava strike animation so I know when to expect adds, and to taunt them immediately.

- I also have a Salv/BoP macro set up on the squishy healers in the event of both my taunts being on cooldown. But as I said in my original post, having a Holy Paladin spamming heals with RF on tends to draw all of the adds to him.

- Having the RF Holy Paladin standing underneath the drake's tails, 99% of the mobs tend to spill into my Consecrate and HotR, whilst I'm passively spamming a taunt macro on him every CD. The adds are never really a concern.

I can't stress the first point enough. I literally spend the entire fight with my eyes dashing from side to side, turning the camera like a pendulum so that I can keep a constant view of the island. Communication from your raid members is important too, as the Holy Pally in their group would notify me when adds had spawned and who they were on.

If they bring me along again this week, I'll record a video and upload it. It's one of the most intense raid roles i've ever performed, but generally speaking, if you find ways to automate some of the more repetitive tasks (such as my macros), it brings the amount of things you need to think about down to like 3. (Dodge lava, dodge voids, identify loose adds)

EDIT: Just to clarify, this is my Armory: The World of Warcraft Armory
As you can see, I'm not exactly decked. You shouldn't have much trouble with a Pally tank who actually raids and has some great gear.

 

Yaha

I'm going over our guild's WWS logs. I figured I'd start with the basics and see how much trouble was being caused by the lava waves hitting people.

I'm assuming that each count of the flame tsunami debuff gained by a player records a run-in with a different lava wall.

I seem to recall that players hit by lava walls cause a lava blaze to be spawned, but now that I try to confirm this I only find an old report on wowmb.net. Is this the case? And if so, do pets hitting the lava wall also spawn blazes?

The log for our last successful 2D attempt lists 67 Flame Tsunami hits, mostly to hunter pets, spirit wolves, etc. If there was even a small chance of a blaze spawning on each hit, it would still be a major complication.

 

Mijae

Lava walls do not spawn blazes, the meteors have a chance to. If a blaze gets hit by a lava wall it enrages.

When browsing logs you also have to be aware of people getting hit just to wipe.

Feral DruidStats spreadsheet
v3.2.0.0.xls - updated 8/4/2009

 

Ryanb

Have you done this before with a more standard 3/3/4 or 3/2/5 strategy? Do you think it is easier or more difficult?

 

strawberryfm

I haven't done it personally, but my guild has downed it with a 3tank/2healer/5dps setup. And from what I have heard this strat that we are using now is alot more stable. Before we started using this tactic we had a raid with 3tank/2healer/5dps setup and it was hard keeping all three tanks up, we were gonna try 3/3/5 the next night but discovered WV main tanking and decided to try it (looked like alot of fun).

Keeping the WV alive hasn't been an issue at all for us, but keeping the drake tank up while Shadron and Vesperon bashes on him can be challenging. Also, having the Demology warlock helping with DPS provides higher DPS than with a 3/3/4 setup.

 

solbergb

Ok I'm curious. Why kill Vesp before Shadron?

Isn't it easier to get out of the deadly twilight torment+increased damage phase by killing off the wounded drake rather than starting on a fresh one?

Vesp by himself isn't that bad, you just gank acolytes as they come up and burn him down. Shadron's also easy when alone so to me the idea would be to finish the damaged guy to get into a one drake situation faster.

What am I missing? (disclosure - my only experience with 3d is on 25 man) Is this a 10 man thing or a voidwalker tank thing or something else I'm not considering?

 

kalbear

My experience is that the more critical time where a raid can fail the most is not when Vesperon lands; it's when Shadron (or the second drake) dies. At that point, Sartharion does a lot of damage, your DPS is going down into the portals, and it's hard to keep up with all the incoming damage potentially. Killing Vesperon means that you only have to deal with bigger damage on Sarth and you will not have any more Twilight Torment debuffs for a while; it also means you don't have to keep going back into portals to kill Vesperon's acolyte and can kill Shadron's at your leisure.

And giving the entire raid 25% more health is significantly useful.

 

solbergb

Edited to adjust for post just below this one.

All right then it is a diff in 10 man and 25 man. If Drake 2 is at 80%, when drake 3 lands, we fail. Our emphasis is to hurt drake 2 a lot more than that, which is a luxury you get when your 3 tanks still leave 22 members for everything else, including fitting in a shaman, instead of 7.

Also our tank isn't immune to flame breaths and we have a limited set of cooldowns that let him survive it. So that also puts an upper limit on how long we can allow drake2 to stick around.

 

◊ alinna

As acote mentioned a few pages ago, our guild killed Vesperon before Shadron running a 3/3/4 strategy. With 4 DPS, Vesperon lands almost right after Tenebron is killed and the two sets of whelps are killed. At that point Shadron is normally above 80%, so it's not a huge deal which one we start with since the only damage Shadron has taken is from the AoE used to kill the adds. Since we use a DK tank with a disc priest, flame breaths with Shadron up have never been a problem. We chose to kill Vesperon to lighten the strain on healing since our healers would only have to heal through one drake with twilight torment up, plus everyone gains 25% more HP when Vesperon dies. Prior to this we had never been able to get Shadron down plus the transition to the portal without deaths. We tried going in the portal to kill Vesperon's acolyte while both Shadron and Vesperon were up to get some time to burn drakes without twilight torment but it did not work for us because our composition had no plate DPS, and myself (Shadow Priest) was unable to keep either our hunter or pet alive to tank the acolyte. We couldn't send in our third healer in with the DPS due to a single healer not being able to keep up our drake tank with 2 drakes breathing on him plus our adds tank.

Our choice to kill Vesperon before Shadron, then going in the portal to kill just the Vesperon acolyte, lets us send our third healer down in the portal to heal the DPS who are tanking the acolyte, while the second healer can then keep up our drake tank and add tank. After this, our 3rd healer is free to help our disc priest heal the MT, as one healer can easily heal the two tanks and DPS who aren't taking ridiculous amounts of damage from twilight torment. Since Shadron is all that's left, we then burn him with no worries about watching our health since twilight torment is no longer an issue, and then kill off his acolyte. With this strategy we only kill each acolyte once. When we tried killing acolytes while the drake was still up the acolytes would respawn fairly quickly. Our strategy does rely on a tank that can take large flame breaths almost indefinitely, but it works with a DPS composition that's not particularly stacked with no heroism.

 

Grungo

My learning experience was similar to yours with this, but for my group it was because of a lack of coordination in taking the portals -- invariably the first few people into the portal would die due to everyone else being too slow to get there, and the people who got there first starting on the acolytes without proper support.

Granted, this could have been solved through better reaction speed in terms of getting into the portal and getting the acolytes down, but what we found easier was to just ignore the acolytes completely. It's very possible to heal through Twilight Torment as long as your dps knows to stop if they're getting low on health. And be extra safe with that margin: stop at 50% rather than 20% (for example). Accepting that we weren't going to be taking repeated portals to kill Vesperon's acolyte, we also didn't bother going in to kill Shadron's. Yes, this means your Sarth tank is taking 50% more damage from breaths, but with Shadron down they're survivable indefinitely without external cooldowns. Dealing with this, for us, was a lot easier than dealing with the portal.

As has already been stated a few times, hybrid classes switching into healing mode during Twilight Torment helps tremendously. Not only is this an extra healer (or some fraction of a healer, depending on how effective they are in a non-healing spec), but it's one less person taking constant TT damage.