I wonder if this is feasible from a caster perspective, with Arcane Mages as the brunt of the DPS force. 70-80 seconds might be short enough that you could just nail the dps% time on AB spam to push the same DPS numbers.

Killed 10 man + 3D in 1:21 tonight.

3 DKs (1 of each spec)
2 Rogue
1 Feral Druid
1 Resto Shammie
1 Retri Pala
2 Warriors (1 prot + 1 fury)

We're well geared and all but the kicker is we had two middle waves so had to use the tiny edge to stand on and so lost some DPS, we didn't use Army of the Dead and we didn't use Heroism as we were just using it as a practice go to work out when the feral should taunt and dash away as we had exhaustion de-buff. That was also our fourth attempt.

Bottom line - its actually not that difficult at all.

anyone succeeded this with a caster group yet?

we tried a few attempts tonight with 4 caster dps and 4 melee dps and our best try was 20%

caster group was magex2, ele shaman and demon lock, both mages were around 6k - 6.7k dps, the lock and ele shaman at 4k+, our melee didn't benefit that much from each other surv hunter/rogue/2xdk so they were at 3-3.9k dps

My main concern without (plate) melee is that the clothies would just get owned by the fire ele's

edit: nvm WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish proved it is possible

We did it with a mixed group, killed him in about 5 attempts. Probably doable with all kind of mixes if you have bloodlust, no fury warriors required.
Wow Web Stats

I may be chiming in with the obvious here, but some quick back of the tablecloth maths:

Sartharion has 2,510,100 HP on normal

Power of Vesperon adds 25% Hp

Therefore total HP to kill him = 3,137,625

85 sec kill = 36913.24 raid DPS

That is 8 people doing 4614 dps each

That seems very do-able with any reasonable group.

Did it tonight as well with:

1 Prot Paladin
1 Holy Paladin
1 Elemental Shaman
1 Enhancement Shaman
1 Unholy Death Knight
3 Fire Mages
1 Fury Warrior
1 Feral Druid

I don't have a WWS offhand. We had people all over the place in terms of dps, nobody broke 6k since it was a poorly composed group. Kill time was 1:17.

I found that the warrior picking up the loose non-enraged adds with whirlwind helped keep them off the casters. And two caster groups for void zones seemed to help quite a bit.

Don't turn this into a "hey do you think we can zerg him down with this" thread, please.

I'd be very surprised if this wasn't hotfixed soon in some manner, I guess people can debate it but to me it's pretty clearly an exploit.

Sorry for my request if it was unappropriate, but I don't think it will be hotfixed. Blizz MUST have known this way before WOTLK was out when they designed the encounter, anyone can figure out this strategy is viable if you can achieve 4500+ DPS.

You can compare it with other fights too where "exploits" are used.
Some examples:
Killing Noth before he teleports, killing heigan before he teleports, therefore doing "safety dance" easily. Zerging the first horsemen instead of splitting the groups and switch sides at 3 stacks. Suiciding at the beginning of sarth to get the volcano blow achievement. Killing anub'rekhan fast enought to not have to deal with locust swarm. Having a warlock to drop off his drake at malygos phase 3 to apply a debuff for 6mins achievment.


Those are all easier way of doing an encounter or getting an achievement that were not the original way of doing things. As of know blizzard have not hotfixed any of those "exploits". If someone is clever enough to find something that works and nobody has thought about it before, how is that an exploit? They're not bugging the game or anything. I think this is "clever use of game mechanics" as blizzard says.

And if blizzard doesn't want that to happen, how do you explain the wording on the twilight zone achievement? They could have simply put "With 3 twilight drakes still alive, engage and defeat sartharion along with the drakes on normal difficulty" rather than what it is currently.




Anyway, even if it get fixed or not, it works right now so I don't see what's wrong about sharing strategies and raid composition in this topic(even if there's almost no strat involved lol)

Normally I'd agree with Snowy, but I've seen videos (such as this one) where they still manage to zerg down Sarth AND tank down the enraged Drake, without any taunt-and-run fuckery.

Yes, there's an enrage, but it's not really on the scale of a Patchwerk/Brutallus/etc. instant death enrage timer either. Time will tell if this is working as intended, or if Blizzard simply didn't foresee that DPS (and healing throughput on the tank) would get this high.

We got inspired by the russians aswell, and tried this last night.

It took a few attempts, but we got him in the end. 79 second kill.

3 casters + resto druid + feral tank + 5 melee.
While I agree with those saying "it wasn't that hard", we had absolutely no room for mistakes - and the whole thing felt as 'tuned' as Brutallus the first time we killed him.

It was, however, very fun! :)

I think its more like a taunt and kite tenebron, he does enrage though. It might also be possible to just shieldwall through it I guess.

Can anyone confirm if you get the achievements doing this? I've seen a couple of videos where achievement notifications have popped up but were too small to see. Anyway blizzard is doing rolling restarts today so who knows, they might be fixing it

The streams I saw, it clearly looked like Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows - Achievement - World of Warcraft. Haven't checked if they have had the Nightfall-Achievement before, but considering their gear, I'd suppose they alread had it.

My point is they clearly put that enrage in so you have to kill the drakes before Sartharion first. Due to gear and the way the enrage works, it's possible to work around it with clever use of game mechanics. (note that the kiter also leaves the platform) I don't think that's intended, gear or not. They might be able to fix that by making sure Sartharion enrages as well as the drakes, I imagine Sarth would be able to one shot everyone before dying.

Taking a look at one of the players (Халльгерд) from the first report and checking his armory, both say March 31st as the date for the 'The Twilight Zone' achievement, so I'm pretty confident it is/was working.

Not sure after the rolling restarts though.


They didn't kill the enraged drake, but they tanked it while Sartharion was still alive, and did not kite it away like in the first video.

I can confirm as of last night you get the achievements/loot from it.

What happens with Shadron and Vesperon when you zerg Sartharion? Do they stay at their starting points indefinitely? Do they still drop emblems?

Sarth dies before they land. Based on the videos I've watched, you basically zerg down Sarth and then the enraged drake(s) wipe the raid and then despawn. You still get the title and all the loot though.

Interestingly, in our kill we just did this way the drakes despawned and we were able to finish of the blazes/whelps without dying.
However, the third drake did not despawn and was flying above our heads, thus we weren't released from combat.

Also I can confirm you still get both achievements (Twilight Zone and Glory of the Raider) this way even after the rolling restarts (if those happened on the EU servers).

Just want to point out - "cheating" or not, i found this just as hard to execute as the "normal" way. The margin of error is basically zero, it just shoves all the responsibility over on the dps. :d

A brainless monkey can heal that zerg, but only a paladin can survive <25% (due to noone having resources to deal with the adds). If I were to do this for the first time, I would bring a paladin for the heals. I had no problems healing this, but death @ 25% was certain. Every time. :d

Just want to note that armor is irrelevant since the damage done by Lava Blazes is pure fire damage.

However, like all elementals, they do follow melee damage rules. As such, melee dps generally have much higher avoidance. That is all melee (and hunters) though, not just plate.