Amroo

We killed 3D10 once or twice before the Twilight Torment fix came and like most people ran into some raid heal issues afterwards. However, the point is that after another night of trying we got them down just the way we did it before. We realized that not so much the tactics needed to change, but how people were aware of what was going on at every instance of the fight.

We use a 3-3-4 tactic with arcane mage / shadow /ele / affliction lock as dps, paladin, holypriest, resto shaman for heal and a warrior for the medium drakes, paladin for the small adds and myself for sartharion.

We usually get Tenebron down shortly before the second spawn of whelps (but even if not, it is not neccessarily a wipe if people stay focussed). While the dps kills the adds the drake tank moves Shadron to the position where Vesperon is going to land. And like for pretty much everyone else trouble started once the Vesperon acolyte was up. Our first idea was to phase into twilight and kill both acolytes everytime, but it took only two tries to realize that this approach is (at least with a 4-dps setup) impossible. Our second idea was to kill Vesperon before Shadron, which, however, didn't improve anything.

Let's think about it, is there a point in killing Vesperon before Shadron? The effects of either drake dead on the Sartharion tank are pretty similar in that he doesn't need cooldowns to survive breaths anymore. 100% fire dmg aura + 50% fire dmg aura (acolyte) gone vs. 33% more health and i think 75% breath dmg gone should have pretty much the same effect. So let's take a look at raid damage.
The point is, raid damage during that time is mostly twilight torment. Yet, it may be annoying, but it is predictable. Less damage comes from lava meteors, which hit for about 12k dmg thanks to Shadron + acolyte. They are completely unpredictable. They might be avoidable, but this part of the fight is usually chaotic enough without having to watch out for red things that might or might not fall from the sky.

So what we realized at that point is, that killing Vesperon takes the predictable source of raid damage out of the equation, but leaves the random source of raid damage still in there. Fine, people have 33% more health which is about 4k hp on your average mage and they can nuke like there's no tomorrow, but a lava meteor + any other random thing can still one shot them. If people die from this stuff, it's usually God's will, if they die from twilight torment it's usually stupidity.

Taking out Shadron first may not decrease the total raid damage taken as much as taking out Vesperon first, but it eliminates the "dangerous" damage the raid takes.

Once the second drake is down the fight is usually won, however as has been mentioned before, Sartharion starts hitting like a truck and your tank and healer must be absolutely aware of this fact. They shouldn't stop concentrating and using cooldowns just because the interesting part of the encounter is over, since this leads very quickly to repeating the entire encounter (including the interesting part).

However, I'm not sure that a 3-3-4 strategy will still be feasible once 3.1 hits live due to the nerfs to druids and dks. Right now I survive the Shadron-Vesperon-time without any external cooldowns for infinity, but once the changes hit live it might simply take 4 dps too long to kill one of the drakes before cooldowns run out, but who knows...

 

◊ alinna

It's really personal preference as to what kind of damage you prefer during the last drake. Unpredictable damage every so often isn't that bad, there is plenty of room to spread out in the 10-man and no one should ever get hit by more than one lava strike before they receive a heal unless you're really unlucky. A 12k hit shouldn't one-shot anyone who was at full health with the -25% HP debuff gone. Removing the predictable damage source lets us free up a healer to help on the MT while Sartharion is now hitting like a truck. Since the only thing that would cause a guaranteed wipe at this point would be the Sartharion tank dying, we prefer this strategy since we wouldn't be able to free up a healer if we did Shadron first.

 

Grungo

You seem to be suggesting that killing Shadron first is your preferred method so that you can reduce the lava strike damage. Are you taking into account that Twilight Torment increases shadow *and* fire damage by 75%? Killing Vesperon and his acolyte will reduce that lava strike damage by almost as much as killing Shadron will -- 75% for Vesperon's acolyte versus 100% for Shadron -- plus the extra health that all the raid members have.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here, mind you. My group also kills Shadron first, just not for the reasons you mentioned; we do it because he has already had a sizable chunk of health taken out of him by the time Vesperon lands. If this isn't true in your case, and your only reasoning is that it will help stabilize raid damage, then I think you would be better off killing Vesperon first. This is assuming you're going to take the portal afterwards and finish off his acolyte; if you're going to ignore portals until both drakes are dead, killing Shadron first is almost certainly the better choice regardless of whether or not you had a chance to start damage on him before Vesperon lands.

 

Amroo

Umm, Shadron's disciple increases fire damage by an additional 50%. Even if you are doing 3-3-4 Shadron is usually down by 10-15% when Vesperon lands, which isn't much, but it is something.

Anyway, that as pretty much the point that I was trying to make. As alinna was saying it is very much personal preference as to what drake you kill first, but a change of the order of killing the drakes won't compensate a lack of healing or damage output. So if the reason someone is wiping on 3D10 is, that people die because there is not enough heal or the crucial part of the fight takes to long because there is not enough dps a change in order won't make a difference.

 

Ra1ahast

Gift of Twilight (from Shadron's Acolyte)only increases fire damage by Sartharion in 3D fights. I haven't seen this affect either lava walls or meteors in my own experience.

 

Amroo

True, I mixed that up with Vesperon's acolyte, thought he was the one only buffing Sartharion. But of course you are right. Even in this case I still don't think it matters to the overall chance of success which drake you do first.

 

strawberryfm

Read all your comments about which drake to kill first, Vesperon vs Shadron. When we are done with whelps we are just seconds away from Vesperon landing, if he hasn't already. Since we were using a VW tank we didn't think reducing the breath dmg would help that much (killing Shadron), since the melee is the problem with a VW tank. Removing Twilight Torment and giving everyone more health however seemed like a really good benefit. You take away a chunk of raid healing needed and the voidwalker gets a bigger health pool to deal with the additional damage due to Vesperons death.

 

MatsT

I'm getting slightly confused here. Are people actually suggesting taking down Vespiron before Shadron (not disciples, drakes)? That sounds absolutely insane. No matter which one you take down first, the basically over once you do it. When the 100% fire dmg debuff is removed, the burst dmg to the raid and the healing requirements are basically halved instantaneously. Taking down Vespiron will probably also make it a clear win, though it's not trivialized until his acolyte does down.

The thing is, when Vespiron lands, you are likely to have Shadron anywhere between 25% and 75% depending on your dps. It seems very doubtful that it would be worth swapping targets at that point and prolong the hard part of the fight with 15-30 seconds.

After the second drake goes down, the fight is basically over. What you do from that point doesn't matter very much. You can burn down the third drake right away, you can kill 1 disciple first, you can kill 2 disciples first. Doesn't really matter at this point, unless you have lost a significant number of players.

 

Ra1ahast

I think the idea is that in 10man with slow AOE there may be only a few seconds of time to DPS Shadron before Vesperon lands. If that is the case, removing the twilight torment threat sooner would make the healing strain a lot easier to deal with, and like you said trivialize the fight again (once Vesperon's Acolyte is dead)

 

kalbear

Exactly. In the 25 man the fight is essentially over when the second drake is dead, but in the 10 man the fight can still be lost after Shadron dies due to the increased pressure on the tank healers and the possibility of raiders wiping due to TT and being unlucky. The pressure, if anything, actually seems to increase at that point.

 

Arcite

Question for those who have done Sarth3D 10 man a few different ways. Has anyone healed both a VW tank and a normal tank on Sartharion for this? We ended up going with the VW tank (3 3 4) because we didn't have a DK that was appropriately geared, but I'm wondering if the spike damage is so different that the VW tank cheeses the fight too much, or if the increased melee damage makes up for not having huge flame breaths.

After Shadron was down, the damage on the VW was so high that I was worried about keeping him up until Vesperon died and not running OOM.

 

Calgar

@Arcite, we have our drake tank taunt Sarth after the third drake dies, as it's mostly physical damage at that point, and that's a normal tanks strong point mitigating physical compared to a VW.

I finally got around to successfully doing 3D-10 man this week for the first time since a few attempts ~2 months ago. Nailed it in about 2-3 hours.

Our setup was a melee based 3/3/4. Healers were Holy pally, disc priest and resto shaman. Tanks were VW/Lock on Sarth till 3 drakes were dead, Feral on drakes and frost DK on adds. DPS was combat rogue, blood knight (me), fury warrior and a hunter.

We originally had the paladin on the drake/add tanks with beacon healing and the priest on Sarth healing, but the paladin couldn't seem to keep the drake tank alive (Surprising really, he's pro, and it doesn't seem like the harder task frankly). On the kill we switched the priest and pally assignments.

DPS wise; Tenebron dead seconds after second drake lands. We hit blood lust with ~5 seconds left before second drake is active, finish the first and begin mowing the second one. Once we start in on the second one we have the frost knight drag the add swarm into melee range of Vesperon and AoE the hell out of them. Fan of Knives, DnD, Pest, Volly, Whirlwind...blammo, dead adds. That took a TON of healing off of the add tank. We usually got Vesperon to ~40% health before Shadron landed, and once Vesp died we took the portal and killed the Acolytes, back up and finished Shadron, then killed Sarth.

The main points of failure for us were;
-Loose adds getting on to the priest and screwing up healing on Sarth at the beginning. Fixed by making him spec into -threat talents and having the frost knight drop his DnD near the priest.
-Drake tank death when 2 drakes were on him. Fixed by switching from pally healer to priest healer on him and AoE'ing adds down during second drake to free up shaman heals for the drake tank.

Not an overly difficult fight compared to the old SSC/TK/SW days, and we had a blast getting it done....now to roll on the drake better next week.

 

strawberryfm

Think you mixed up the drakes there, the landing order is:
Tenebron -> Shadron -> Vesperon

 

Lekter

We were struggling for a month and a half with this encounter without any luck and then we decided to do it with a voidwalker tank. I must say this was really easy with a voidwalker. We killed it in our first night of attempts.

Composition:

Tanks:
Warlock (38K full buffed) – Sartharion Tank
Protection paladin – Drakes Tank
DK - whelps and elementals

Healers:
Paladin holy – On drake tank and raid when needed
Resto shaman – On DK + raid and supporting the warlock when needed

DPS:
Shadow priest
Mage
Rogue mutilate (me)
RPaladin
Feral druid

We used BL in Tenebron to kill it as fast as possible, then we killed the whelps/elementals, then shadron, then Vesperon AND then the acolytes. Our shadow priest started to heal once Vesperon landed.

Our warlock wasn’t doing any dps, he was only healing the voidwalker. We placed the voidwalker outside the platform.

We had some issues with our resto shaman getting too close in aggro to the voidwalker, so both healers switch places at a certain moment of the encounter.

I must say it felt kind of “illegal” doing this with a voidwalker… It’s really different from the real version using a real tank...

 

BelteshazzarKT

What addons are people using to track source of death by player for each attempt? I use WWS but can't see an easy way to see a summarized death count without drilling down into each individual name. I tried using failbot, but as I'm not the raid leader I'm not sure people appreciated me broadcasting deaths real time. Just wondering what other people are using. It appears that we have some of the same people dying to fissures and tsunami often and it would be nice to see a concise summary after each attempt. Maybe it is a matter of learning to use failbot and broadcasting a report at the end of the fight?

 

• moz

I would encourage you to convince your raid leader to utilize something like failbot -- after having done multiple 3D groups for both 10 and 25 nothing has been more useful than announcing when people mess up with waves and fissures. Sure, it's not the most flattering thing in the world, but you get immediate results usually and when the same people repeatedly mess up you have the rest of the group seeing exactly what's going and there's no trying to weasel out of it. It would be nice to have an aggregation mechanism for it, but I think immediate adjustments are invaluable on this particular fight because post-mortem lessons rarely seem to stick.

 

Rhaegal

Agreed whole-heartedly. People tend to respond to being called out in real time even if it's a mindless mod doing it. Especially considering the mod is pulling directly from the combat log, so if it says you stood in the fire, you actually did stand in the fire.

If your guild's management doesn't like having that broadcasted, though, there are other avenues. It takes a little more maintenance, but FailBot has the capability of just storing the information and reporting a summary when you tell it to. (Maybe it's FailBot Enhanced--I don't remember if that functionality has been rolled into the base mod yet.) It requires a little more maintenance on your part because it stores information until you manually clear it--it doesn't recognize that you're starting a new attempt and automatically reset, but if I remember correctly it can be reported to a channel of your choice, making it so you can report it to the raid leader(s) without it being quite as public, if that's their preference.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

BelteshazzarKT

I like the idea of delayed reporting to the raid leader and will experiment with this in Failbot.

 

Mikari

WoW AddOns - RecountFailBot - WowAce.com is nice if you just want a list of fails listed per attempt that you can track and then report to the raid if you wish.

 

c4tuna

I personally use Acheron Death Reports for detailed parses of pre-death incoming damage. It goes back about 10 seconds, is organized by player, and stores until it's reset and lists everything that happens to the dead person in question and it's very easy to use. I can look at the add tank and say--oh look, he didn't die because of excessive whelp damage, it was twilight torment that did 15k damage in 2 seconds. As a healer, it helps me adjust immensely.

EDIT: And it's not necessarily GG once the second drake goes down--We downed Tenebron and Shadron, but then the incoming melee damage on the VW + twilight torment was too much for me, a holy paladin, and a resto druid to keep up and as we readjusted our targets the VW went down (paladin went OOM, which I'd consider a failure on his part for not using divine plea effectively TBH). I'm considering going disc, leaving raid healing to the resto druid and handling the add tank + VW while the paladin does drake tank and sniping. However, since we're running with a melee-heavy group, TT is brutal. PI would also help immensely for tough phases (though I couldn't blow it early for Vesperon dps because we have NO caster dps, rogue/hunter/ret/enh), and mana wouldn't be a problem whatsoever.

 

Denic

When Shadron dies, send all your DPS + 1 healer into the portal and kills acolytes. Shadron's acolyte won't respawn, and this curbs breath damage (less of an issue for a void I suppose), but also raid damage from lava strike, which can get an all melee group low easily. Further, it takes TT out of the equation for a good amount of Vesperon. I wouldn't bother going in a second time, just burn Vesp at that point.

Also, when TT is up, having a ret pally judge light is insanely good for this fight.

 

Mordekhuul

Could someone PM me a few tips on spec and how to tank whelps/blazes well for a death knight, or point me to a thread/post where this has been done to death, if there is one that eluded me?

This is for non-heroic Sarth+3.

We were killing the 2nd drake all night tonight, only it was generally seconds after losing a healer. Our DK isn't sure what spec is strongest here. Our recommendation is to find a high AOE dps unholy tanking spec and abandon his 10/51/10 spec, and we aren't sure what to point him to.

He's new to the job of tanking whelps/blazes, where the other nine of us are very comfortable in our roles, and anything I can do to hasten the (admittedly steap) learning curve on picking up whelps/blazes effectively would be appreciated. I'm the one that did it in our 25 man kill, but we switched me to tanking drakes with my high BV set since we found I could out-threat our DPS by massive margins, comparatively.

 

Tel

I would strongly recommend unholy with UB. It's fantastically good for getting agro on all the blazes, especially if you miss one or two. Morbidity is a must too.

My parses from yesterdays 25man version...

WOW-Meter Online: WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish
WOW-Web Stats: Wow Web Stats

(yes, i'm aware we suck before anyone points it out )

As you can see, I did a huge amount of damage and got 90% of the blazes without thinking. i use the same spec for the 10 man, but unfortunately dont have a parse for that one.

 

Calgar

@Mordekhuul I'd put forward that his spec isn't that important, and he should spec what ever is most beneficial to his group. Our DK tank for the adds on our 10 man 3 drake kill typically specs unholy to tank, but we didn't have an enhancement shaman for imp windfury so we had him spec frost for the 20% melee haste. Granted he's had tons of experience tanking adds over the last 3+ months on 25 man mode, but really, spec isn't that important. If you are running a caster group unholy is probably better for ebon plague on everything.

Frost and unholy should get the job done equally well, with unholy having a slight edge in unholy blight.

 

krilz

Sorry if this has been answered already but I've searched in multiple places (not just here) and haven't found any information regarding this matter.

First of all, my guild has downed Sarth+3 on 25-man once. It was hectic but we did it on our first try where we actually managed to down Shadron during the fight. But since then, we haven't been able to reproduce this and I'm having a hard time understanding why.

Our biggest concern during the fight is nothing more than the Twilight Torment debuff. We can AE the adds without problems, the tanks does a wonderful job as does the healers keeping them up (they got very good rotations now on the MT) but the problem is the DPS nuking themselves down while the debuff is active, hindering us from getting Shadron down. I've told them multiple times to take it slow and using HS if they drop very low but they just keep nuking themselves down with it. My main question is: Are you actually supposed to nuke Shadron nuke while Twilight Torment is active (and everyone is taking damage) or are we doing something wrong (i.e: when Vesperon's add show up, you go kill him right away)?

EDIT: Short description of how we're doing the fight:
1. Attack Tenebron.
2. BL when Shadron is close to landing (5-10 before) to really burn down Tenebron.
3. Kill all adds, then switch to Shadron.
4. When Tenebron lands, keep DPS on Shadron to get him down ASAP.
5. When Shadron is dead, kill adds and enter portals to get rid of both.
6. Swap between Vesperon and portals until Vesperon is dead.
7. Kill Sartharion.

Seems like standard-tactic but as I said, people die to Twilight Torment constantly (and I'm not talking about the tanks!)