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.
Yah, untankable. In the first week of Wrath we tried it out with just one Drake and tried to nuke Sartharion. At 25% the Drake gets that berserk buff and promptly oneshot our tank with a 71k melee hit. Without Shield Wall of course, but it wouldn't matter.
We spent our first night trying to spread out as much as we can under the assumption that Lava Strikes hitting people caused blazes to spawn. The result was people spent too much time worrying about their positioning and not enough time maximizing DPS. Once we got away from spreading out (still have to spread some for void zones) our DPS went up noticeably and we were doing better.
A few times now I've heard of feral druids throwing around figures like '57k raid buffed', and '55k raid buffed'...
How is that done? We have a feral that's pretty well geared -- he misses a few pieces, but really, not much. He's sitting at something like 46k raid buffed...
Am I missing a buff? Or something?
Kings, Commanding, Fortitude, MOTW -- what else?
Or are people simply making typos?
The only glaring omission I can see is that our ferals aren't JCs, so they miss that awesome socketed trinket.
Jewelcrafting is awesome right now for maxing out HP as well. The trinket and three stam gems gives a druid a lot of stamina on top of what they'd be able to get otherwise.
To be honest, anything over 37k post-Vesperon aura is pretty much overkill - You'll already survive a Shadron disciple breath, but no amount of HP will make you survive a Shadron+Vesp disciple breath without SI/Barkskin anyway. (Besides, that's what chucking Twilight Torment by timing attacks is for)
There's also a 32sta/2% spell reduction meta which would be the min-max choice for doing it this way.
To be honest, anything over 37k post-Vesperon aura is pretty much overkill
That is right, but the more hp you have better the healers can bring you back up after a breath, and it is less important to keep the tank at 100% if the breath is cast.
If the MT healer runs a few seconds to prevent a Tsunami death and if in that moment a parry hasted attack occurs ( 30000 damage in about 2.5 seconds) your tank is probably dead. This is a very special case but together with other scenarios the wipe chance of a otherwise perfect executed pull can be increased by 10-25 % if you only have 37k hp.
We also use a Priest healer that shields the tank every breath to reduce burst potential.
Another thing is fire and dragon add tanking. We tried a DK tank, Warrior tank without Piercing Howl and a Warrior Tank with Piercing Howl. The latter works best for us. With the defensive spec you can easily Charge, Intercept or Intervene from add to add, have a improved demo shout which you can keep up on bosses to reduce attack power to zero, minimizing damage, have a good commanding shout to rebuff the MT (if you use a Druid or DK MT) and the best thing you take near to zero damage due to Piercing Howl kiting, Shockwave stun and Shield Block (works only against dragon adds).
With these abilities we can spare another healer for another DPS. The only problem is, that a slowed elemental (or if you make the mistake to Shockwave right before a wave) can be hit by a wave and enrages. In this case our hunters try to dispel enrage with Tranquilizing Shot, solving this problem.
As Falk pointed out, no amount of health will let a bear survive a 100%+50%+75% fully overloaded breath, even if he always has a PW:S. That's why I didn't get the Polar gear for our runs. I didn't even know how to reliably shed Torment at the time and we still had enough cooldowns - Barkskin, Fire Pot, Bearstand, Hand of Sac (x2!) - that it wasn't an issue. For reference I have full best in slot gear except for neck and bracers and I'm JC/LW with stacked stam everywhere. Just over 40k unbuffed hp and 51.5k with raid buffs.
'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.
No tank can survive that with just PWS. Should be using some kind of cool down or removing the twilight torment debuff. A druid HP maxxed out can survive it without complicating the role of other raid members (don't need them for cool downs) though if they get lucky enough to get all the twilight torment debuffs off without getting it instantly refreshed. Depending on how you choose to do it, your tank should only need to survive 5-6 breathes skipping portals til shadron is dead with enough dps.
With regard to the "zomg burn sarth" brute force strat: remember that Bloodlust/cooldowns will be up for the vast majority of the fight in such a scenario, so account for that with regard to dps.
Can we stop talking about that idiotic idea? When Sartharion reaches 25% all the drakes will Berserk and deal 500% damage with all of their abilities, one-shotting any tank and anyone they breathe on (+1000% shadow damage from Tenebron's aura + Berserk is no bueno.) You would have to kill Sartharion in the first 45 seconds of the fight, which is impossible.
'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.
I suspect it's possible to kite the drakes, at least for a while. With no healing whatsoever, I once stayed alive once everyone else in the instance was dead while kiting Sarth + 2 drakes + many elementals around in the instance with dash for probably 20-30 seconds before Sartharion's fire buffet stacked high enough to kill me. The fire buffet is the only thing that does any damage whatsoever at range, and it takes a long time to stack up and finally kill you. Distracting shot, 20 (soon to be 30) yard taunts and other tricks (bubble comes to mind- think post-enrage Brutallus and you have the general idea) can keep drakes out of melee range for a long time if you're clever about it, and would be distracting the drakes for quite some time while the raid gets to go nuts on Sarth. I have no idea if you could buy enough time to burn 25% of Sartharion's HP before your kiters were overwhelmed, however.
Depending on how you choose to do it, your tank should only need to survive 5-6 breathes skipping portals til shadron is dead with enough dps.
This is why, although you'll see early videos with the lust during Tenebron, it can be good to save it for Shadron. (although getting two rounds of whelps on Tenebron makes things harder.)
Killing Shadron is the the meat of the fight: you need to reduce that overlap period between him and Tenebron as much as possible.
As the 3 drakes landing is on a timer, killing Tenebron PLUS Shadron is the race, not only Shadron.
Imagine you need 1 min 10 to kill Shadron / Tenebron without Bloodlust and 55s with Bloodlust, two cases :
BL during Tenebron :
0' : Tenebron land
5' : BL
45' : Shadron land
50' : BL end
55' : Tenebron is dead, you start to dps Shadron
125' : Shadron is dead
BL during Shadron :
0' : Tenebron land
45' : Shadron land
70' : Tenebron is dead and you start to dps Shadron + Bloodlust
125' : Shadron is dead
With both way you need 125 seconds to kill both drakes.
I prefer to use bloodlust on Tenebron to be sure to avoid the second whelp pop if we are to slow, and if a dps die after 30 or 40s in the fight at least he dps the bloodlust was used with 25 person.
The only reason you should keep bloodlust for shadron is if you can kill Tenebron before Shadron land without bloodlust (certainly soon with 5 heals only and top dpser in maximum equipment)
Edit :
Killing Shadron is the the meat of the fight: you need to reduce that overlap period between him and Tenebron as much as possible.
Both can be true. Killing Tenebron faster means you can get the whelp aoe out of the way possibly before even Shadron lands. The sooner you start DPS on Shadron, the shorter the time you have Vesp/Shad overlapping.
You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.
As the 3 drakes landing is on a timer, killing Tenebron PLUS Shadron is the race, not only Shadron
I thought I mentioned healing as the reason in my post, when apparently I utterly failed to, sorry:
The primary reason to prefer lust during Shadron is that hasted healing gains you nothing on Tenebron, it's easy. Hasted healing during Shadron while Vesperon is up might save your raid if you're having issues keeping so many targets up. (obviously not if your issue is keeping the Sarth tank alive.)
So since the benefit is similar for the DPS (i.e. you don't care), but very different for the healers, it can be beneficial to save lust for Shadron if you can still get tenebron down in a reasonable time period.
There's also the sidenote of how threat works out. Unless you can go full-out, lusted, and have lust drop before you switch to AE, you're wasting part of your lust. So that will depend on the class/skill of your drake tank there.
(edit) Ya, I meant Shadron/Vesperon overlap.
Tenebron really is a non-issue other than a benchmark for dps.
When Vesperon's acolyte is up do you just continue dps on Shadron and chain use CD on the Sartharion tank to keep him alive through 50K breathes ?
If you do it this way I see how you need hasted healing on the raid who suffer from twilight torment, but in our strat we just send all the dps in the Vesperon portals and kill Vesperon's acolyte ASAP.
The acolyte die in about 10 seconds, and sometime Sartharion doesn't even breath one time during this period, so no need to use any cooldown. Usually we can kill Shadron before the 3rd or 4th Vesperon's portal, so we need only 3 CD (Shield wall > pain sup > divine guardian usually).
On 10 men version, we burn Shadron ignoring vesperon portals, but I found this method to be very stressful and dangerous.
On 25 men the fight is highly sustainable when Tenebron is dead : two weeks ago we killed him with something like 3 dps and 2 healers down when we killed Shadron and managed the kill.
When Vesperon's acolyte is up do you just continue dps on Shadron and chain use CD on the Sartharion tank to keep him alive through 50K breathes ?
If you do it this way I see how you need hasted healing on the raid who suffer from twilight torment, but in our strat we just send all the dps in the Vesperon portals and kill Vesperon's acolyte ASAP.
The acolyte die in about 10 seconds, and sometime Sartharion doesn't even breath one time during this period, so no need to use any cooldown. Usually we can kill Shadron before the 3rd or 4th Vesperon's portal, so we need only 3 CD (Shield wall > pain sup > divine guardian usually).
Our first two kills we took portals, I agree it's doable. The next 2-3 after that we didn't.
We found the fight a lot more stable and repeatable just skipping portals burning Shadron (we're one-shotting it now.)
We don't "need" the hasted heals; I actually think we've lusted on Tenebron each time just out of habit.
My comment was merely that, since it speeds up DPS the same either way, you get the added benefit of hasted heals on Shadron which may tip you towards a kill if you've been close but lost too much DPS, or find your drake tank at risk. It's certainly worth trying for a guild that's on the cusp of winning but finds things falling apart during Shad+Vesp.
It gives you an added tool you didn't have before.
In the end for us we decided that the time it took to go into the portal, kill the acolyte, and then safely return (this could change learning for some guilds once the Twilight Residue is put in place) didn't really reduce the amount of possible one-shot breaths. Maybe we were sloppy about getting down and refocusing the DPS quickly, but just burning Shadron down and entering portals after he died was noticeably better.
You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.
Different guilds will find different things work. We did a full "kill all acolytes as they spawn" method, and found it not hard to learn (died in one night, one shot it the next week).
Stating what you did or didn't do, and whether it worked or not doesn't seem to be very productive, however the basic premise of "brute-forcing" may be easier than the more complicated (seemingly) of taking every portal and having to communicate on when/where waves are to those who are in portals, as well as communicating as to when 2 acolytes are up rather than being able to just assume they always are. The most difficult part of this fight is making sure the majority of people are alive until Shadron dies - if you lose too many people then you will have issues with keeping up with DPS. Concentrating on avoiding Void Zones and Waves is the most important thing.
One thing that occurs to me in the excellent vid by Fusion, is that it says that if you kill Shadron on the 2-drake version you have a full 90 seconds to kill Tenebron before Vesperon lands. I think that might not be correct.
Given that Tenebron has ~2.2mil hitpoints you'd be looking at roughly 24.5k raid DPS to get him down in 90 seconds, which is laughably low (in the range of 1700 DPS per player). Now, my guild runs what I consider "high average" DPS with our Patchwerk kills in the 3 minute region and more than half the raid hovering around the 4k benchmark on regular fight, yet on our 2 drake kills we usually managed to down Tenebron just before Vesperon started landing and that included a heroism. That seems odd, as it would mean we'd somehow be completely shit on that particular fight.
Since we're working on 3D now I can't really check anymore, but might it not be the case that if you do two drakes, they just land at the 45 and 90 second marks, regardless of which ones you keep up? Similarly, it would seem rather silly that if you for some reason decide to just kill Tenebron, you won't get a Drake to land before the 90 second mark.
The drakes landing times are in fact completely fixed. If you kill Shadron you definitely have the most time in between drakes, and if you leave only Vesperon up it really will take a long time before Vesperon lands.
Sartharion is also anything but a "Stand still and nuke" fight, which will hurt your DPS performance compared to Patchwerk quite a bit. With good positioning you can minimize the movement needed for the Lava Tsunami, but people's DPS will still be a lot lower as they will still have to move at least slightly, and can get "interrupted" at random times by the Shadow Fissures the drakes spawn.
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
12/24/08, 5:22 AM
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