Silmeria

Put a night into it and see if you can kill Tenebron before the second wave of whelps. If you can do this, then you should be able to do the encounter with a little bit of elbow grease. Consider craftable gear for your main tank on Sarth to be able to help with breaths (e.g., polar gear, JC stuff, etc).

 

Vazu

It's clearable with mixed 10/25 man loot for certain. I'd call the 10-man achievement a real stretch in just 10-man gear but doable with quality players.

 

• goss

I think the primary issue with just 10 man gear isn't necessarily the quality of it, but the quantity. Players who are raiding both versions have far better (generally complete) kits at this point.

 

macho

Tip:

When vesperon disciple starts applying debuff, your MT should stop attacking sartharion. At this point the debuff is applied, and the MT should only hit sartharion when sarth casts flame breaths, this will instantly remove the debuff for 3-4 seconds for a small amount of shadow damage, but prevent the 44k breath 1-shotting him.

 

Ultimate

So the only reason the tank stops attacking is so the GCD won't be used at the time it is needed? And what if the tank gets in 2 yellow attacks in the 2 sec breath cast. Will that reapply the debuff, or is it the dragon's attacks the only way to reapply it. What I'm getting from what was posted is that the tank and the dragon are constantly applying and removing the debuff every time they exchange blows. The only time the dragon can't reapply is when he is casting because he doesn't attack then.

 

Xav

I am going to post this to lay out the facts of the fight to prevent the 5,000 questions about how the acolytes, drakes, and buffs/debuffs work.

Upon engaging Sartharion with any drakes up, debuffs/buffs are applied.

First off, Will of Sartharion is activated, self explanatory.
Tenebron's ability is Power of Tenebron
Shadron's ability is Power of Shadron
Vesperon's ability is Power of Vesperon

These debuffs will remain, from engage of Sartharion, until that drake is slain.


Tenebron lands first, roughly 35-40 seconds after engaging Sartharion.

Tenebron is unique in that he doesn't have an acolyte. He hatches eggs in the Twilight Realm. A few seconds after hatching eggs, the Whelps will appear and will need to be dealt with.

Shadron lands next, roughly ~45 seconds after Tenebron lands. A few moments after he lands, he will call forth an Acolyte of his. After the Acolyte is summoned in, it channels a buff on to Sartharion. The buff Shadron's acolyte channels is Gift of Twilight

The tooltip is wrong, it increases fire damage dealth. Sartharion doesn't even deal any Shadow damage, so naturally that part would have been irrelevent had the tooltip been accurate.

When Shadron's acolyte is slain, if Shadron is still alive, he will resummon one shortly after it dies, which in turn will begin to channel the buff again.

Vesperon is the final drake to land, roughly 45 seconds after Shadron lands.

Vesperon also has an acolyte with identical summoning/channeling behaviour as Shadron. Except, this Acolyte puts up a debuff in the raid instead which is Twilight Torment

This debuff causes you to take ~2-4k shadow damage whenever you deal damage. It can crit (probably based on spell crit, as a prot warrior I almost never see it crit). When you "proc" the torment damage, you immediatley lose the debuff for a few seconds. Losing the debuff for those few seconds (about 2) means you will no longer take that additional 75% fire and shadow damage, as well as preventing you from getting any further procs for the duration. This basically equates to Torment being, on average, about 2000 DPS on yourself if repeatedly proccing at max frequency.

The debuffs and buffs in the fight can all interact together and cause difficulty. The common problem is Sartharion's flame breath gibbing your tank. The multipliers are as follows:

Sartharion's Flame Breath = 10938 - 14062 damage.
Shadron (Power of Shadron) x2, 100% modifier = 21860 - 28124 damage.
Acolyte of Shadron (Gift of Twilight) x2 x1.5, 50% modifier = 32790 - 42186 damage.
Acolyte of Vesperon (Twilight Torment) x2 x1.5 x1.75, 75% modifier = 57383 - 73826 damage.

73826 damage *.84 (defensive stance, 16% less damage) = 62014 top end on the breath when all buffs/debuffs are up.

Finally, whenever a drake is slain, Sartharion gains a stacking debuff (naturally, up to a 3 stack, max). Twilight Revenge
It does not affect magical damage Sartharion deals.

 

Fellwraith

One minor thing I'd add because people are talking about the 10 man 3 drake version as well, the top-end of the firebreath is less in non-heroic. It's baseline is 8750-11250 (Flame Breath - Spell - World of Warcraft). With all the multipliers its top end is 59,063 before any reductions in 10 man.

 

Copernicus

A slight addendum:

The acolyte calls for Shadron and Vesperon seem to be fixed timers. If a drake's acolyte is still alive when the drake calls out for a disciple, no new disciple will spawn. The acolyte call has a warning where the portal spawns slightly before the acolyte appears.

Vesperon's acolyte spawns before Shadron's, causing the scary period of overlapping where the big flame breaths can happen.

---

The main thing is that if your group leaves the Shadron disciple up to stay on Shadron until Vesperon is close to landing, it's smart to wait until Shadron calls for her disciple again before killing it. Otherwise, the group would have to kill three disciples instead of the two.

 

Citrinite

We found that for the 10 man version running three tanks and three healers was the easiest for us. All you need to do is build the group around whatever four dps you are running. So for example if you are running a caster group having a resto shaman for a healer is a huge plus. You would also likely want to use a moonkin as one of the dps. It should go without saying but whatever makeup you run you are going to want one mana return class.

For the ten man version we did something a bit different then some other groups. We do not enter the portal to kill the acolytes until after all three drakes are dead. The dps had to watch their hp as to not kill themselves but the healing seemed fine between the resto shaman and a lightwell.

In the ten man version deathknights can make great tanks for Sarth because they have so many cooldowns that they can use to survive huge breaths. This can buy you more time if you dps on Shadron is not the greatest. This is especially true because unlike in the 25 man version we do not take the portals to kill the acolytes inside for a long time.

One thing that I really like about the 10 man version of this fight is that there are a large number of good ways to defeat the encounter.

 

Ultimate

scratch this

 

Sengiratolom

How about this tanking setup?

DK on the boss (extra spell mitigation)
Warr on the drake (sundering it helps the dps and allows the rogue(s) to spend the CP on something else then EA)
Prot pala on small adds

 

PitiChatMignon

In fact the race starts when Tenebron lands and finish when Shadron is dead (half sized flame breath= no more tank death)

As Shadron landing is on a timer and not a health percentage of Tenebron, you can use your bloodlust on Tenebron or Shadron, the advantage to use it on Tenebron is to be sure to avoid the second whelp pop, and to go faster ahead in the fight to learn it.
On our first kill the bloodlust CD were not up for Tenebron and we used it on Shadron, all in all it is almost the same benefit.

PS : side note on the BL, as the fight is long you can use a second one for the 10%->kill rush with massive flame blaze pops.

French cow.
Meuh !

 

spartakos

At the 10man you can also use a BM with a tank spec Ape to squeeze some more dps.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL.../spartakos.png

 

Jalhar

You can add Blessing of Sacrifice for another 3% reduction damage.

A few questions about those buffs / debuffs :
Is Blessing of Sacrifice additive or muliplicative with warrior def stance (or druid, or pala, or DK) ?

Same question for Power of Shadron and Twilight Torment. Gift of Twilight is added first, and I'm not entirely sure Power of Shadron and Twilight Torment are multiplicative. If they are additive, the flame breath calculation is more something like : (FBx1.5)x(1 + 1 + 0,75), so the maximum would be 58 006 damage, before any damage reduction. We actually never observed Fire Breathes higher than 50k on our feral druid with all buffs (and debuffs) up.

As for our kill strategy on the heroic version, we first decided to go for a "smart" way (which proved to be not so smart...), trying to reduce damage taken by tanks & raid as much as possible by taking portals after Tenebron death to kill Vesperon and Shadron disciples. The best we managed was Shadron dead with around 15 ppl alive being slowly overwhelmed by blazes. After 3 days of wipes we just decided to brute force it (no portal taken until Shadron is dead) and it went surprisingly well. Having a druid with 37k HP under Vesperon debuff and a rotation of cooldowns (barkskin + guardian spirit + hand of sacrifice) on him during the dangerous phase (gift + power + torment) helped a lot, as well as players finally being able to avoid void zones and flame waves ^^

 

dssurge

We've plugged a few hours into 10-man Twilight Zone this week and we've yet to get past ~50% on Shadron, somewhere around the same point that we were getting stuck on 25-man Sarth 3 Drakes while learning it. The reasoning for this is we really don't know how to handle the adds downstairs in a reasonable fashion.

Our current approach is to let whelps pop and AOE them down, then wait until Vesp lands and pops his add before anyone goes down, blow up the Vesp add then Shadron add. The issue is we've been running into massive survivability issues with this approach, for our DPS mainly. It seems we can't safely handle the disciples without our ret pally getting himself into a shit storm of hurt, usually ending in his death or our Enh Shammy popping wolves to save his ass. The other issue is we basically ran out of cooldowns by the time Shadron was a little under 50%.

How is DPS generally being allocated in this phase to prevent this issue? We don't really want to run the risk of our tank being one-shot leaving Vesp's add active (he can survive a 150% but not a 175% fire breath without cooldowns provided he is tip-top and gets a partial resist) so we're kind of at a loss how to remedy this.

 

Reliknom

Another thing that might cause trouble is the constant shower of meteors on the raid. While these are quite random, they deal fire damage and with Shadron + Vesperon's Acolyte up, they can practically instagib lower HP classes if they are not at full HP due to Twilight Torment.

"Morituri Nolumus Mori!"

 

mhr_78

It would be an idea to use a tank with high fire resistance to avoid most of the hard breaths on sarthiron, then when the drakes are dead swap in a former drake tank which is going for physical mitigation.

I havent played my druid a lot though in wotlk but from what i recall on my fire resistance set had me able to pick a free head, shoulder, bracer, trinkets and weapon slots. Throwing ballpark numbers out i'd guess you could have your former flame of azzinoth feral tank sarthiron breaths with 360-400 fire resistance and about around ~34k health in bearform.

This is however considering that you can actually switch tanks on sarthiron.

 

Vodos

Just ignore the disciples and kill Shadron ASAP. If your tank is doing it right, he won't get any really big breaths.

 

jaxdahl

I've gathered from several 10/25 WWS parses that the drakes land and are attackable 30/75/120 seconds after Will of Sartharion is applied.

When you say the acolytes 'channel' the buffs, are you implying that the channeling is interruptible in other ways besides killing the acolyte, such as using spell interrupts or stuns? I don't really think this would change the overall strategy though.

 

KamPa

We tried tank with 360FR and results were far from spectacular. Perhaps when you're at full 415 it really works, but with 360 he'd still get big breaths randomly and surviving 50k was down to luck - so no big improvement over typical tanking gear, while losing your physical mitigation. Getting DK to do it was far easier and less stressful. And they are getting even more magic mitigation in patch.
You can definately swap tanks, even if MT dies, one of your OTs can grab him if you're quick. Of course, if he has anything else on him and Shadron is not yet dead, he won't last very long.

 

• Caniki

It's kind of a silly thing, but our melee really appreciate it when we use [Baby Spice] on Sartharion. The hitbox remains the same size, but his model is shrunken, making it easier to see the stuff on the ground near him.

It's also pretty amusing. The spices work on Patchwerk and Kel'Thuzad too.

 

• Chicken

I've found that Baby Spice not changing the hitbox size isn't universally true, so I'd be careful with it. We had some issues when someone used Baby Spice for fun on Kel'thuzad and our melee were incapable of damaging him while it was up without possibly allowing the MT to be hit by Frost Blast.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Llilyth

Sorry for this possibly dumb question: Are disciples and acolytes different mobs? I've never been in the portal realm, and when I research this encounter, I keep seeing mentions of both acolytes and disciples.

 

delling

We're working on the 10-man version at the moment, so I can't add much there, but I can talk about our experiences with the 25-man variant.

We opted for the 'safe' version, which not many people here have talked about.

We ran with a DK tank on Sartharion, a feral druid on the Shadron (and then Sartharion later), a prot warrior on Tenebron and Vesperon, with a prot pally picking up whelps and elementals.

We had tried using the feral on Sartharion with cooldowns from priests/paladins, but it just felt too random, and relied on those healers being incredibly sharp, not lagging, and not being dead at the time.

The moment we switched to the DK tank it became almost trivial. We use a pain suppression occasionally if the DK tank has slightly screwed up his CDs, but otherwise they are self-sufficient.

Now, the 'safe' bit... we go through portals! We DPS Tenebron, and then AOE down the adds when Tenebron is dead. By this time, Vesperon is about 15-20 seconds away from landing, so we get some time on Shadron.

The moment Vesperon lands, all of the DPS and a healer go through the portal. We zerg down the Acolyte of Vesperon, and from that moment on the main tank can't really die. Then we kill Acolyte of Shadron -- and simply repeat, putting in DPS time on Shadron, some AOE on elementals, and finally Vesperon.

Using this strat of 'all through the portal ASAP', the MT might take 1 'max' flame breath, and sometimes none at all.

It took us 2 nights of raiding to get the kill with this strat, so I'd definitely rate it as 'fairly easy and repeatable', and not 'pray for RNG and perfect use of cooldowns' which other guilds might be trying.

I like communication-oriented fights like this!

Edit: I forgot to mention, we use 6 healers, and never really feel too stretched, other than on those huge 12k lava strikes that occasionally hit a clothie.

---

Re: 10-man -- keep discussing it...! I am still trying to put together a strat for my guild. I would like to try it with 2 tanks, as it really adds a lot more DPS, and it's not really a problem if you get the whelps down very quickly (and Tenebron dies before he spawns multiple packs of whelps...)

 

kleps

We scored our first Sarth10 +3 kill last night and that is what worked for us. We had a druid MT Sarth, a prot warrior round up the flames and whelps, and a prot pally on the drakes.

We ran a 3 tank, 2 healer, 2 off-healer/dps, 3 dps setup.

We immediately used a bloodlust in order to get Tenebron down before he released a 2nd set of waves, as it made control much easier. After Tenebron died and the timed lava wave passed, our prot warrior dragged over all the adds near Shadron and we aoe'd both together to maximize dps output between the adds and Shadron. At this point, we ignore all portals until Shadron dies. When we got Shadron down, our dps dk enters the portal to tank Shadron's add to kill him since he'll no longer respawn after killed. We had our off-spec healers and an additional dps go in the portal to get the add down asap so we were all able to get back to dpsing Vesperon. Once you get Shadron down, it's almost a cakewalk to finishing off the fight.

For those wondering, our group comp was:

Feral Druid
Prot Warrior
Prot Pally
MM Hunter
BM Hunter
Elemental Shaman
Resto Shaman
Shadow Priest
Resto Druid
Unholy Death Knight