We've honestly never had a problem with any spawns running to DPS casters. The only person it typically goes after is our druid - and he charges head-long into the DK's DnD and it's off about a second later.

As for the Acolyte tank - we wait til Vesperon is dead to go downstairs. At that point, the Warrior is free from tanking because all Drakes are dead and we let him tank the Acolyte's. No reason for him to stand upstairs and tank nothing, and the DK hasn't needed any help at this point to tank adds so it shouldn't be anywhere near a problem.

As per - the main thing we don't typically have an issue with are adds.

We killed 10 man 3D tonight, we used the following setup:

Warrior - Tanking Drakes
Prot Paladin - Tanking Adds
DK (my alt) - Tanking Sarth

Paladin - Healing Sarth tank and beaconing the prot paladin
Holy Priest - Healing the drake tank and the raid

Enh Shaman
Elemental Shaman - Offhealing during TT
Warlock
Mage
Shadow Priest

We bloodlusted on Tenebron and nuked it down, at this point we switched to the adds and killed them quickly. After this we had the paladin tank call for AoE when it was needed. I was specced for CDs and I was able to keep myself up without any other CDs (BS/AMZ/AMS/IF).

We ignored all portals untill Vesperon was dead and had our elemental shaman help healing. We had about 4 or 5 wipes taking portals untill we decided it was easier just to skip them.

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Hi guys, long time reader, first time poster

Thanks to all the advices in this thread, we finally manage to kill Sarth25 3D yesterday.

We were trying the "ignore portals until Shadron is dead" strategy since one week, but it was just a bad idea (for us, at least).

I think Twilight Torment is too annoying to be ignored because Twilight Torment makes the dps slow down a lot to not kill themselves (and sometimes, they unluckily killed themselves...). IMHO, removing this from the fight in killing Vesperon's acolyte is what makes it works : increases dps, removes random people autokills, less raid healing, so more tank healing. In short : a controlled fight, without any randomness.

Killing Vesperon's acolyte also reduces the worst breath case from 74K to 42K, before defensive reductions. A lot more managable...
And the bonus part of taking portals : if we killed Shadron's acolyte too (what we did), worst breath is down to 28K. A joke.
And from that point, the fight is easy : kill adds, kill acolytes in portals if they respawn (2 by 2, not 1 by 1), kill Sarth, loot.

So, for me, taking portals from Vesperon's landing is now the way to go.
And our fight became :
- Tenebron lands, dps on Tenebron
- First wave, Heroïsm/Bloodlust
- Shadron lands, Tenebron is at 10% or less
- Finish Tenebron
- AoE (warlocks, mages) on whelps, single target dps on Shadron
- Whelps down, dps Shadron (ignore Shadron's portal)
- Vesperon lands, dps stay on Shadron
- Vesperon's portal shows up, all dps + 1 healer go inside
- From this point, the damaging part of twilight torment becomes a sapphiron-like aura (in portals) so it's easy to heal. An elemental shaman might help here, just in case. Tanks stop attacks on their targets. Healing in "real world" is easier because there is only 9 people to watch : 4 tanks, 5 healers. A plate wearer (retri pala for us) tanks the adds in portals, dps kill Vesperon's acolyte first then Shadron's acolyte.
- Exit from portal (watch the waves !), all dps go out on Shadron
- Shadron's down, dps on Vesperon
- Repeat the portal phase until Vesperon's down
- Kill Sartharion

Hope this can help some people. If you're ignoring portals and constantly wiping when Shadron is at 20% or so, or right after his death, try to go into portals : it's really easy if you can go that far in the fight and don't have shiny dps.

Our raid setup :
- Feral tank with full Frost Resist on Sartharion (51K before -25%)
- Defensive warrior on Tenebron and Shadron
- Protection paladin on whelps, then on Vesperon
- Protection paladin on blazes
- 6 healers : 3 priests (one with grace on Sarth tank), 1 resto shaman, 1 holy paladin, 1 resto druid (on raid, in portals)
- Only 4 melee, including 1 DK on blazes and 1 rogue on enraged blazes

P.S. : sorry for my english

I was having an issue with this encounter yesterday with my guild. First time trying it since 3.09.

The first Lava Wave would happen, then 8 players would disconnect. They never had this problem on this encounter before. We tried a few times after having them disable all of their addons - no dice. Anyone else having this issue?

This seems to be a somewhat common occurance in other raid instances as well.

To put it mildly, I know which people, in advance, will DC out of 4HM. Every. Single. Time.

We've yet to figure out which the cause of the problem is. Sloppy connections, a combination of addons.

Has any one else noticed seeming differences between the encounter pre and post patch? We put in about 12 attempts tonight and noticed MANY more lava strikes than before. Our add tank also stated that the fire elementals seem to be doing significantly more damage than previously.

Is this bad luck, and/or a subjective experience or have other people been noticing the very same things?

We noticed nothing like increased damage yesterday. But we had some players disconnecting on lava waves and several others reporting heavy lag right after the first wave, including me. Symptoms were similar to the short time before a real disconnect, but after 3-4 seconds, everything snapped back in place.
I suspect the 3.0.9 patch, since I disabled all addons after the first lag occurred.

Is Onyxia deep breathing more often as well?

Seriously though, we had no such issue on our kill last night.

Considering how random the spawns are I'd just chalk it up to bad luck.

The total number of lava strikes is typically constant, but what can change is the total number of adds spawned. It is random, and it does change from pull to pull. You'll have some attempts where you have to do a mop-up round of AoE on blazes because your tank is getting overwhelmed ... and others where there isn't a blaze to be seen when it comes time to AoE the whelps.

When you look at the mechanic for strike -> spawn blaze, it makes sense. It is random, and it does fluctuate.

So ... yes, you probably saw more blazes than "normal". No, it's not a changed mechanic. And yes, Onyxia does deep-breath more, always.

I don't doubt that and it's what I told him at the time. I wouldn't have even second guessed it if I hadn't seen a couple of posts in this thread.

My guild has been working on 10-man Sarth 3D for a couple weeks now and not making much head-way when we have both Vesperon and Shadron up. I took a look at the WWS to see if I could pin-point our weakest link and while doing so I found something a little confusing. At first it looked like Twilight Torment was proc'ing off Thorns but then I noticed that a Twilight Torment proc'd without Thorns hitting Sarth:

19:51'26.344 Bigwojo Thorns failed. Sartharion was immune.
19:51'29.516 Bigwojo Twilight Torment hits Bigwojo for 1805 Shadow. (558 Resisted) (140 Absorbed)
19:51'34.406 Bigwojo Twilight Torment hits Bigwojo for 2310 Shadow. (182 Resisted) (140 Absorbed)

Ref: Wow Web Stats

I looked back through the report and found:
19:51'34.406 Bigwojo attack failed. Sartharion was immune.

In fact, it appeared that Thorns WASN'T proc'ing TT and it was failed attacks instead that was causing this. This is confusing because when Twilight Torment comes up, our MT on Sarth stops auto-attacking to prevent additional damage so our healers have a little breathing room. It appears that even with auto-attacks turned off that there is still an "attack" happening. Am I missing something? Our MT swears up and down that in no way does he auto-attack (and I very much believe him). In addition, our holy pally who is healing our Sarth MT also appears to be "attacking" Sarth: 19:51'35.453 Arkonial attack failed. Sartharion was immune.

Where are these attacks coming from?

WWS: Wow Web Stats