Has anyone had any success controlling the frequency and amount of Lava Blaze spawns?

I recall reading an mmo-champion thread where a guild reportedly only had 7 Lava Blaze spawns before Sartharion's 'Lava Blaze Enrage.'

This leads me to believe that the frequency and Lava Blaze spawns is tied to something.

My two theories are:
1. Depends on Sartharion's current health. Thus, by not damaging Sartharion much before all three drakes are dead, you avoid spawning more Lava Blazes than necessary. This ties in logically to the health based 'Lava Blaze Enrage.'
2. Lava Blazes have a chance to spawn when a raid member is hit by Lava Strike (the meteor). Thus, the more raid members that can avoid meteors, the fewer Lava Blazes spawn.

Thanks for your mod ! It works like a charm. I did not see any non accurate info.

I've only heard of the second theory so far, but unfortunately I have no further intel on it.

As for the first theory, I think I can almost certainly deny it. On our first night we did no damage at all to Sartharion before the drake adds landed (to get into people's heads that the fight is decided with DPS on the drakes, not on Sartharion - that thought didn't last until next raid though...), and he still spawned multiple lava blazes. One time they were enough that the tank assigned couldn't handle them anymore and they went roaming.

No hard proofs here though either.

I'm not sure lava blazes are tied to anything. As a lava blaze tank, I often get to stand there doing nothing early in the fight so I tried to figure how they were spawning, since some waves you get like 4 of them, and others you get 0. I was checking the falling meteors, and to be honest, I couldn't discern a pattern, when usually humans tend to see patterns even when there's none. I've seen just as many blazes spawning from a place where no one was standing and when no one got hit, than no blazes spawning even though a meteor hit a pack of 8people at once. I'd be tempted to say it is random at this point, they do spawn in waves however. It is definitely not tied to health, until 20% or whatever when he just chain spawns them as everyone knows.

You have to learn to do the "Twilight Torment Dance" as Kyth likes to call it. Twilight Torment is removed briefly when it damages you, which happens when you do an attack or when you heal. All the tank needs to do is auto-attack when Twilight Torment is up and wait for the breath to cast. As soon as he sees it cast he does a special. This will remove the Twilight Torment debuff just in time for the breath and prevent it from being a huge one.

She did a pretty extensive write up at the fight if anyone's interested in more details. Sarth3D - FuStrats. She also did a really cool narrated video of the fight: Sarth25 + 3: A Tutorial By Jynxx.

As far as Lava Blazes go, I'm pretty sure they're completely random. We actually tested this when we were first working on the fight. We stacked the entire raid in one clump and did nothing but heal and tank him. The Lava Strikes would hit everyone but the number of blazes spawned was random. It can actually be a frustrating part of the fight because you can have runs where you get an absolute assload of them.

It shouldn't ever come to that. Your tank should be able to call for AE (or just have the AE-capable classes notice.) If he's getting overwhelmed (amusingly I typed that as 'overwhelped'), DPS needs to split off earlier.

Ideally he moves the adds over to whatever Drake is being killed so the spriests can use Mind Sear and barely lose any drake DPS while they kill the adds. (Mind Sear is so incredibly strong.)

No.

You clearly haven't read the thread or seriously attempted the fight. Xav posted the "auras" that each drake left alive has. Hover over the Gift of Twilight debuff.

Adds go berserk if Sartharion is too low HP.

I usually stand as if I am playing melee on Sartharion; at his back foot. It's difficult because there seems to be only a very narrow space where you avoid both tail swipes AND cleaves (but better to take a bit of cleave damage than get stunned).

I used to stand with the raid and run towards the centre for waves, but found I was often slightly out of the MT's range for a few seconds and that proved deadly on a number of occasions. We changed it so that I stand as his foot and when a lave wave comes over, I either run straight through Sartharion and out the other side (and then back again), or I back up slightly, depending on which wave position it is. You just have to be careful that if the MT turns him slightly (to avoid waves/voids himself) that you aren't exposed to a stun. Also, stand a few feet back from his leg to make voids easier to see - they can spawn under his belly and be almost impossible to spot.

Other tanks will periodically come into range for me and I can toss a few HoTs on them as extras. In terms of raid healers being able to reach me, it doesn't really matter that I am running in the opposite direction to the rest of the raid - I can look after myself if I take a small amount of damage (which is rare). If I get an add on me I will call out (or the MT will often call out when there are adds near us) so someone can grab them.

There's also the added benefit that you are away from all the AoE and not standing with a bunch of people, meaning that A) you'll get fewer voids near you and B) when they do spawn, you can see them easily without a bunch of spells going off near you. You still need to pay attention to your feet, obviously, but this does make it a little more easy to concentrate on the tank's health.

It has nothing to do with Gift of Twilight. GoT isn't the drakes aura, it is the disciple's. Pretty ironic that you call him out and you are fucking clueless.

The reason you cannot kill Sarth first is due to a built-in mechanic that prevents you from doing specifically this. The adds get some ridiculous buff and wipe your raid when sarth hits 20% or something.

Wow. I hope you feel big for swearing at someone over the internet. You call me "fucking clueless" but your reasoning is that "the adds get some buff... when sarth hits 20% or something". Hypocrite.

The Gift of the Twilight buff that is given to Sarth on a regular basis alone makes the concept of keeping Shadron alive and trying to kill Sarth a dumb idea even if the adds didn't go berserk. Perhaps my statement was badly worded but it wasn't incorrect.

I did mention you would kill the disciples in order not to get those debuffs. Agreed, you would have to maybe kill the disciples a couple of times more but even then that's fast.
The fact I didn't know was the add-enrage at 20% which of course is a good reason not to try it.
If that would'nt have been the case I'm pretty sure that killing the main boss first would've been a viable strat.
Tanks just tank all adds, with minimal or no AoE untill the main boss is dead (I've seen that the dps a couple of tanks can do on the elementals can take them down fast enough too), all dps stays on boss, and a couple dps would pop in and out of the portals to kill the disciples as to not get the nastier debuffs.
Sartharion himself has lowish hp, I bet he could be down before the third drake hit the ground.
But granted, the 20% add-beserk makes this toppic obsolete.

I doubt that with all the mobility required to avoid the flame waves and the void zones, you'd be anywhere near killing Sarth before Vesperon lands.

I know Sarth is around 65-60% by the time Tenebron lands, but the moment that happens, shit hits the fan, as at about the same time, you get a lava wave, a set of whelps and a few fire elementals. To me, it feels a bit like Vasjh where the first part is very straightforward and relaxing and then all of a sudden everything hits at once.

Enraged fire elementals hit for a lot and need to be dealt with somehow and there's only so many mobs even the best paladin tank can hold. Guilds wipe on two packs of whelps - I can't even beguin to imagine what happens when there's THREE packs flying around. And that's not counting the fact that Shadron's add will make Sarth invulnerable so you need to deal with that as well. DPS drops greatly when switching targets and/or moving - it's not as if you're trying to get patchwerk down in < 3 minutes. Even without the adds enraging it'd be completely impossible.

No what makes it completely obsolete is the way the buffs interact which is why I quoted Xav's post in my original response.

Your main tank needs to rotate cooldowns to simply stay alive. If dps is not fast enough killing the drake your tank and healers run out of cooldowns and your tank will die. This is in addition to your raid becoming overrun with whelps and your drake tank/s being one shot by double breaths or triple breaths.

As much as I think we can all appreciate outside the box thinking it is a silly idea to think about killing Sarth before the adds even disregarding the berserk.

There's quite a lot of mob spells that have multiple entries despite seeming to be only one effect. As far as I can see based on the encounter each Lava Burst that lands, regardless of where it lands, has a chance to spawn a Lava Blaze where it landed. Doesn't matter if it hits someone or not, it can just spawn a Lava Blaze. The Lava Blazes are definitely directly linked to the Lava Burst, but I don't think there's any controllable mechanic in place for how many you get spawning at once.

Most of Sartharion's yells that aren't him calling for help for his drakes are also a sign that a batch of Lava Bursts are incoming. Lava Blazes also begin massively spawning in the last 10% of his life as you get such a huge amount of Lava Bursts at that point.

Sartharion has 9,587,188 HP with 3 drakes. Tenebron lands at 30 seconds, Shadron lands at 75 seconds, and Vesperon lands at 120 seconds.

9,587,188 / 120 = 79,893 raid dps

Assuming 3 tanks, 3 healers, and 19 dps, that's an average of 4204.9 dps per person over two minutes without tank dps. Perfectly doable to kill Sartharion before Vesperon even lands, if the artificial enrage wasn't in place. With proper coordination and positioning, you shouldn't lose too much on a straight burn from flame tsunamis or void zones. Speculation is pointless, but the theorycraft is still fun.

Which seems to be at most 15 seconds after he lands, so you actually have only 90 seconds at most. Add in that you lose a good 5-8 seconds of DPS while positioning the mob or getting your melee stunned with tailswipes you're looking at 112.790 raid DPS.

Assuming your tanks do 2k dps (which is generous and also doesn't account for the fact that two of them aren't actually DPSing Sarthation) it means 5.936 DPS for each dps'er. I don't see that happening in this expansion.

And then there's random whelp hit pushback which reduce DPS, there's this thing called Lava wave (like, one of the core gimmicks of the fight) which you need to avoid (costing you 6-7 seconds of DPS time each wave at the very least). It isn't much, but it is if you're trying to sustain 4k+ dps for two minutes, unless you're a mage or a hunter. Losing 6 seconds is 5% of your total DPS time. I'm happy if I can reach the 4500 mark on Patchwerk and SP's aren't exactly gimped nowadays.

It's not going to happen.

You wouldn't lose 5-8 seconds positioning the mob or 6-7 seconds on flame tsunami or get hit by whelps unless you aren't trying. But yeah, Gift of Twilight would add about 10 seconds to zerg the acolyte, I didn't factor that in. (Not that it matters anyway)

Usually when someone says that, it does eventually happen ^^. Really the biggest issue is massively stacking your raid with high DPS classes, and having the minimum of healer possible. 3 might even be too many, and 3 tanks is definitely too many. You'd want 2tanks(1for for drakes+adds and the other for sartharion), with each DPS healing themselves off blood aura(doubled next patch) and jol, but theorically taking minimal damage anyway since there's not that much raid damage. 21DPS definitely cuts down on the requirements to make it, and actually seems almost possible. It might involve quite a lot of luck for your tanks not to die(especially the drake+whelps+blaze tank) but probably doable, if not now, in one or 2 tiers.

The enrage would probably ruin the whole thing though, but I gotta admit I don't know exactly what kind of enrage it is, is it partly offtankable for like 20secs if you shield wall or something? Cause if it is, it could definitely end up being possible. If it's not the point is moot, but I don't think DPS would be the issue and I don't think it's that far off using inventive ways to do stuff(ret+enh shamans offhealing the main tank while the 2 healers spam heal the offtank for example, sartharion doesn't require a whole lot of healing). The only limit is how hard the enrage is.

Berserk - Spell - World of Warcraft is listed as one of Sartharion's abilities. If that's the berserk used on drakes (and it's a pretty standard 500% /150%) then a shield walled tank would be taking... looks like 6.25x physical damage. Not tankable, even for the duration of shield wall, although you might be able to kite the adds using Distracting Shot or somesuch.

It also lowers DPS if you expect people to be moving extra to spread back out after a lava wall goes past.

It's very easy to test if you want to satisfy yourself in your own mind: just have everyone group up, pull Sarth, see what happens. Wipe, do it again but spread out. If tests are inconclusive, group up again. Etc.

You'll see, like everyone else that I know who tested it, that there's no discernible relation. It's a chance to spawn for each lava strike and sometimes you get very very unlucky indeed.

At first, we had a Death Knight Unholy Tank rotate his cooldowns for the Breaths, but sometimes Sartharion does his breath too often, and the DK Tank had no cooldowns and died.

Second, I tried a Fire Reistance suit with 415 FR. But it seems that the normal resistance mechanic does not apply to Sartharion; I resisted only a maximum of 37% spelldamage (and once in ~50 times 55%).

Third, we tried a Druid Tank with about 57000 hp raidbuffed, that is 42750 hp with aura. The breath does slighty above 35000 damage at most (Druid Talents, -2% Spell Damage Meta Gem, Vigilance). That simplifies the encounter extremely and you only have to watch the 3rd Drakes debuff, and get it off you before a Breath lands.

EDIT: Another thing to add is that our Druid uses a extra head item (I guess it was Hateful that is only for spell damage encounter) that has beside the -2% spell damage metagem, also the fire resistance enchant. Even if the resistance mechanic does not work properly in this encounter the added resistance of Fire Resistance Aura or Totem plus the head enchant often reduces the Breath's damage by a few thousand, which stabilizes the MT furthermore.