vorda

Im responsible for tanking the adds in my guild. On our first kill, I did it without any assistance, it mostley required a lot of good judgement in terms of who an add is going to, how vital it is to blow my taunt/avenger's shield instead of just running of and slamming it, what side of the fire wall to move towards (you can have a chance that the fire wall that spawns just before the whelps hatch is the one that blocks the portal completely, and in that case you have to make sure you're standing on the gap towards the entrace or you'll miss the whelp spawns)

I use my healing weapon (some 4xx spellpower sword with sp enchant) for tanking there as well, since all I'm there for is my aoe threat really.

Lately, I had a holy pala heal with RF up, which helped a lot. Be sure to put raid marks on yourself and on the holy pala, as it can be hard to spot voids with 10+ adds on you, even with spell details on minimum.

The 2D requirement isn't exactly to kill the whelps as well before the second drake lands, its not even needed to kill the first drake that quick. If you're farming naxx and malygos, your guild should defenitly have the dps to kill the first drake before the second one lands, even if it has 'not so good' players. Blowing bloodlust + all cooldowns on the first drake makes sart2D just as easy as sart1D (which is in return almost as easy as sart0D imo).

Picking up adds as pala isnt that easy -with nothing to close distance and only 2 skills you can use to get agro from range-, but it's not a job you should need anyone else for to succeed. Defenitly not a second tank and a rogue.

ps: if I'm having enraged adds, I usually target one at a time and adress one of our hunters to tranq my target. (that is, assuming your hunters have ToT in their MT frames)

 

Imua

Depends how "casual" you are.

I think a guild that has Malygos on fairly consistent farm status has enough l2p to do 2 drake, if not 3 drake Sarth. For 3 drake Sarth, the margin of error is basically zero. No one can get hit by a flame wall, your tanks have to pick up the adds, you can't afford enraged adds, no one can stand in a void zone, etc. If you are still having random raid members just plain die, you can't do it.

Without Shadron, the flame walls aren't insta-gibs. People will still die to void zones, though.

It really depends how much you want to bang your head. I'd say give 3 drake some time. When you're ready to go, kill Shadron, pick up your badge, and be amazed just how easy 2 drake Sarth is.

 

Pyros

Your tanks are definitely slacking, you really only need one tank to handle all the adds, and either a DK or a protadin do it very well. If you're using a feral or a warrior though, yeah he might need another tanks help. Also, you don't need a rogue on them at all times. Just have the rogue poison his weapons with anesthesic, and DPS the drake, and when there's a wall, or when the tank calls it depending on your preference, the rogue just runs over there and fan of knives the elems then go back to DPS. If they're tanked close to melees(and they should to benefit from random AEs to kill blazes faster) the rogue doesn't even have to move to tranq all of them.

You should try to tank the adds close to the melee dps, but not too close so you don't cluster their view for the void zones. Whirlwind and Divine Storm(the 2 good AEs for blazes) have a pretty decent range so you can tank them not on top of melees and it'll still hit. Other than that, you should try to have people rather stacked up in one big pack, not spread out all over the place. Void zones are not an issue if ppl pay attention, and to be honest if they don't pay attention no amount of space is gonna help them. You should be in range of pretty much everyone to pick up stuff without moving using ranged attacks. Try to have a high threat healer next to you, RF holydin is good, but can be annoying to get stuff off if he lands a big heal, a resto shaman works fine usually since they don't take the threat talent, and chain heal tends to get a big bunch of aggro. Judging light on the drake if the add tank is a protadin is good too, until next patch all healing done by the judgement goes to the paladin who casted it.

Every once in a while, usually after each drakes are dead, some AEs should be called to clear the blazes. We usually leave 1-2 hunter out of the portals to volley/tranq shot blazes when ppl go in.

 

Grimzilla

I had a wild idea yesterday, i dont know if its possible or anything, but ill share it with you guys to see what your oppinion on it is. (donno if it has been tried aswell)

The idea is:
- Kill all the add (not the drakes) in the instance.
- Engage Shadron and drop him to lets say 30%.
- Engage Sartharion while still fighting Shadron.
- Kill off Shadron and start the fight normally.

My questions now are:
- Does engaging Sartharion reset the HP of the drakes?
- Will Sarthation or the drakes evade when going past some point in the instance (kiting tactics)?

 

Jezz

We have been fairly consistantly getting to the overlap point of Shadron and Vesperon and wiping there, either due to people being oblivious to twilight torment, or to people failing on cooldowns.

We don't have a feral druid or DK tank (that is avaliable) in the guild and we are having to use a Warrior MT (The World of Warcraft Armory). Our cooldown rotation is as follows:

1) Shield Wall
2) Guardian Spirit
3) Paladin Taunting + Shield Wall-like Ability + Hand of Sacrafice
4) Warrior Taunting + Shield Wall + Hand of Sacrafice
5) Last Stand + Roar of Sacrafice + Shield

We have had several sub 30% on shadron tries, though I think the main issue seems to be healing. We are having to take the healers we have online which has been:

Holy Priest: 1
Resto Shaman: 1
Holy Paladin: 2
Resto Druid: 2

The tank healing seems to be ok, and our raid healing seems to be ok before Vesperon, though a lot of people die as TT hits the raid. Is this an issue of our DPS not being aware of their own health or do we need to sort something out with the healing? We will have another holy priest tonight which I think will improve this.

Anyway, really just posting this for any advice we can get, here is our WWS:
Wow Web Stats

Is there anything immediately wrong? We do have several undergeared DPS in the guild and in the raid, though it would obviously help to increase the DPS it didn't seem, at least directly, to cause a wipe (with good waves Tenebron died about 5 seconds after Shadron landed).

Could also be a problem with assignments, our holy priest had problems making sure the tank was shielded before flame breath so we assigned him to MT. I am starting to answer my own question, but this would probably have improved raid healing a lot if we could switch him to raid heal and a paladin back on the tank. Though, anything else?

 

• Chicken

Drakes must be alive and not currently in combat for them to count as extra drakes for Sartharion's loot table. If you pull Sartharion while in combat with a drake, you do not get the drake's debuff, and the drake will drop badges as normal, and will also stay dead even if you wipe.

Finally anyone not on Sartharion's "island" in the middle of the instance will be getting hit by Pyrobuffet every 10 seconds, which are fireballs which do 3700 to 4300 damage, and apply a stacking debuff that increases fire damage taken by 1000.

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

 

Grimzilla

Ok, i did not know this. Thanks for helping me to get things straigth.

 

Lucinde

We did 30 or so pulls yesterday as well and are running into the exact same problem.

We're running 6 healers and lacking a DK or Feral tank that I would trust on Sarth, we also use a warrior. That warrior has slightly under 30k health after the -25% debuff which has been leading to non-tormented breaths killing him when they hit for maximum or near maximum (the maximum being 21 more than his health). We fixed it by using a Discipline PW:S on every breath, but it is actually possible for a breath to hit before the weakened soul wears off. It's a bit of a pain to just have your tanked gibbed sometimes, but we're dealing with it and have reverted to click-for-health trinkets and nightmare seeds to avoid those rare occurances.

So with that out of the way, we have been dropping Tenebron consistantly within 5 seconds of Shadron landing. It depends a bit on where the walls of lava come, but sometimes we're quicker and sometimes we're slower, but it's always within a 10 second margin.

Then I have the ranged AoE a whole pile of adds while the melee starts on Shadron. Generally, we get Shadron to somewhere around 40% before Vesperon lands. I call the Twilight Torment on vent so the tank and healers know they should start rotating cooldowns, but everything just goes downhill from there.

We suddenly lose 3-4 people to one firewall, a healer to a void zone and then the add tank decides to take a massive spike because the rogue that was supposed to FoK the enrages was in dodging the firewall in the other gap. We've actually managed to get Shadron down three times with a reasonable raid alive, but in all three cases we lost a MT healer right before and the MT shortly after. I feel we're very close to the kill, but just not there yet. All it takes is 20 more seconds of "people not dying" and then all of a sudden you have your entire raid alive with just Vesperon up.

Why am I typing all this? Because in the end, for most guilds this will be a fight that you just have to do 50 or 60 times before all the small errors are eliminated. Some people just need more tries to stop dying to walls and void zones. With the currently available gear levels the margin for error is very small and losing 2-3 people may well mean a wipe.

It's easy to give up and say "ugh we need better gear" or "ugh we need better setup" and just kill it with 2 drakes for shiny loot and try a fewl pulls next week and reach the same conclusion.

 

oldator

We tried it as we had a mage whining that we should try it, i don't like abusing game mechanics this way myself..same mage also tanked caster side on four horseman last few weeks. Anyway the outcome for us was that the dragon reseted as u pull Sartharion, and we got all the drake's debuff's, and they where to come in combat again.

Anyway u will get the point, it's a bad idea.

 

Jezz

Yeah, I also feel we are very near a kill and it's just a few individual mistakes that are slowing us down. Mistakes like our paladin who is taking a breath getting over excited, pressing taunt too early and instantly killing all 25 members of the raid who were still alive when Shadron was below 20% as well as mis timing cooldowns and such. I definitely feel we can kill it just by practing our tactic further, but mainly was just asking for advice to see if anything could be tweaked with people's performance or our tactics to guarantee a kill

 

dukes

I'm wondering if those who are doing this and having healing issues at the shadron stage are considering:
a) swapping a dps for a healer (as it seems healing is the issue, and if it's an option)
b) switching tactic to kill acolytes/disciples every time they're up rather than ignoring them.

We killed Sarth3d in one night of about 3 hours of attempts, by going through portals and killing things after Tenebron was dead - we then one shot it the next week with a couple of new people. It slows down the kill a bit, but it makes incoming damage on the raid a lot more controllable (eliminating Twilight Torment removes some 15-20k incoming RDPS) and means your tank should never have to deal with back-to-back huge damage breaths.

 

nataku

We had our first couple of 3D Sartharion kills with a similar strat, taking Shadron's portal and killing it, then taking all portals and killing adds while Shadron and Vesperon is up. This can work obviously, but requires good communication amongst the raid so that the MT and MT healers know when to use a save for those times both disciples are up, and when it's possible to not use it. The idea behind was sound as we were trying to minimize the time where the MT needs help to survive a breath. However, it means the total time Shadron and Vesperon are alive is a fairly long time as dps is moving in and out of position to take portals.

The past couple of weeks, we've just been ignoring portals until Shadron is dead per some suggestions posted in this thread, and it's a more stable strat. Whereas in the past, we would need 2-3 portal trips to kill adds before Shadron dies (basically requiring 3-5 'saves' coordinated by the tank and healers to survive massive breaths based on whether or not dps switched down to portals fast enough), we would only need ~2 saves to keep the MT up while the raid kills Shadron, and reduce the time both Shadron and Vesperon are up by a significant amount of time.

 

Bonemage

We've done 2 drakes now and planning on working on 3 this week, biggest problem is mele getting hit by void fissure. Whats the lowest spell detail setting where you still see the fissures?

 

kalbear

You can be set to the lowest setting and you'll still see fissures. This is recommended, as you won't see all the other crap on the ground like DK abilities.

 

Andrast

This is in addition to improving fps so people can't use the old "It didn't appear on my screen" excuse.

Other tricks include:
1. Turn off player names in the interface menu.
2. Melee can constantly strafe back and forth slightly so they are focusing on the ground more.
3. Have one person in raid announce the lava waves and the direction they are coming from. My guild uses "Front" and "Back" for left and right waves respectively.
4. Make sure you tank the drake in such a way that melee don't need to move for at least one of the waves. We find that tanking Tenebron in the Shadron landing spot is fairly optimal since it means that we don't need to move at all for behind waves.

 

MatsT

Melee will almost always get hit by more fissures. They stack up a lot so the chance of getting one is bigger, and this combined with a flurry of aoe effects and flapping wings makes it hard for them to see them. Good news is, after Tenebrom is down most melee have enough hp to survive a fissure.

In general, for almost all guilds the problem lies in the period from when the Vesperon disciple spawns until Shadron dies. In my opinion, it's VERY helpful to have paladins with Divine Guardian for this period. All holy and retri paladins should specc this talent for this fight. As soon as the Vesperon disciple spawns, the paladins take turns to Divine Shield and Hand of Sacrifice the main tank. This will reduce his damage taken by 51% (or even 60%, not sure how it stacks). This is by itself enough to survive even the hardest breaths. On top of this, the entire raid takes a lot less damage. When Divine Guardian is active everyone should be able to survive a fissure, and the healers will have a lot easier time keeping up.

With 3 paladins specced in this, you can keep it up for 36 seconds. This is longer than most guilds will need to take Shadron down. Maybe it's possible to stack multiple effects, no idea how that would work. In the long run, Divine Guardian will probably need to be nerfed to prevent it from trivializing encounters and making stacking paladins too good.

 

Kupeludo

How avoidable is the tormented breath? Does it have a small cooldown where it won't be applied if you remove it as the breath comes, by using specials such as maul/mangle? Sorry if this has been asked and answered.

 

Xyl

Yes Kupeludo, you can toggle Twilight Torment off. Simply have your tank stop attacking once he gets the debuff, then do a special/auto attack when Sarth begins to cast his breath. Given your tank has low latency, he should be able to toggle the debuff off in time for the breath to hit.

 

Lucinde

While it can work, I would not count on it as your strategy. I'm aware that a properly kitted bear tank doing this won't need any cooldowns to survive breaths, but it's also been reported you can get the torment re-applied a splitsecond before the breath hits and still get gibbed.

It's way easier just to rely on 2 or 3 cooldowns because that should be all you need. We got our first kill last night and ended up just having to use shieldwall. Our Disc priest still put pain suppression up for the second breath, but Vesperson's acolyte was already dead at that point. I think we may have gotten lucky with the timing between breaths, but if you have 3 cd's ready you should be fine. Needing more is just stretching the Shadron + Vesperon phase for too long and that'll almost guarantee a wipe due to fire elementals wrecking your OT and healers.

As said before, the benchmark for doing the 'ignore acolyte' strategy seems to be your raid being able to kill Tenebron before, or right as Shadron lands. If you can, ignore acolytes and get rid of Shadron as fast as you can. The 100% fire debuff gone incredibly increases the margin of error you have on enraged adds, walls of lava and random meteors which is well worth the added stress of healing through twilight torment for ~25 seconds.

If you can't get Tenebron down fast enough, you should probably take the portals and kill Vesperon's acolyte as otherwise you're going to spend too much time sitting with twilight torment debuffs.

 

sovelis41

The dps benchmark is killing Tenebron before she can hatch a second set of whelps, to put a fine point on it. If you can do this then you're good on DPS for the rest of the fight. The only decision then is whether or not you want to take the portals and kill the acolytes. We found that sending people into the twilight when two drakes were up meant that the double void zones were making it difficult for the dps to keep up if the RNG rolled the wrong way, and just meant we would have to do more to deal with insta-gib breaths (DK MT, so slightly easier).

Removing Shadron from the fight basically means you've won if you can keep your tanks alive.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

LittleHamster

There's a time delay between Tenebron flying off to lay eggs (ie open portal) to the whelps hatching. Is the second hatching you mention fast enough so the second set is never laid? Or just fast enough so Tenebron is dead before the second waves of whelps appear?

We did our first 2D last week. We got Tenebron dead after she laid eggs two times, but before the second waves of whelps appear. Would like to know if we need to up our dps so we shave another 20s on our Tenebron kill.

 

Lucinde

I'd go as far to say that being able to kill Tenebron before she hatches a second set of whelps is a requirement to beat the fight in the first place. I'm not seeing how you're ever going to deal with 2 sets of whelps + Tenebron + Shadron + fire elemental adds under a +100% fire damage taken debuff. Someone will probably jump in and say "well, actually my guild.." but you get the idea.

The point I was making is that if you can't kill Tenebron in, say, 50 seconds, but instead, for example, take a minute, that means you'll have 10 seconds less DPS time on Shadron before Vesperon lands. It's not unrealistic to assume Shadron herself will then take a good 15 seconds longer to kill as well. Probably a fair bit more, because you also have to get rid of the accumulated whelps and fire elementals and due to taking longer there will also be more of those.

All in all that means, if you would choose the not-portal option, at the very least 25-30 seconds more overlap of Vesperon + Shadron which means not only 2 more breaths to deal with, but also 25-30 more seconds more dealing with Twilight Torment and 25-30 more seconds of fire adds spawning that are nuking your add tank for 7500 a hit when enraged.

Basically, if you don't have the DPS output to power yourself through the hard phase of the fight, I don't think you should try to do just that. In that case I believe it's better to play a more controlled fight and kill adds as they come while keeping 2-3 melee on Shadron fulltime. Downside of that is a much longer fight which means more time for the RNG to misbehave.

If you can down Tenebron in 45 seconds you can still take the portals and kill Acolytes if that works for you. What my gut feeling is saying, however, is that if you take 55-60 seconds for Tenebron, you don't really have a choice anymore. I might be completely wrong of course.

 

KamPa

The difference between 2D and 3D is fairly substantial. No matter what 2D combo you have, you aren't dealing with tons of whelps, hard hiting elementals, reflected damage and instant kill breaths(and lava) all at once. 12 whelps, together with elementals take quite a while to kill, can get loose easily, plus they block your view and make it a pain to grab additional adds. Which then proceed to mess up your AOErs or healers. It's also quite a bit of damage to heal, and trying to avoid Enrages with so many mobs on you might not be easy - increasing it even further.
Of course, this depends if you mean that you killed Tenebron before she hatched the eggs, or before the whelps spawned. Quite a difference, if you have eggs simply sitting there behind a portal, it doesn't matter that much. I guess it only means you have to manually exit the portal once you kill Disciples - or kill all the eggs.

 

sovelis41

The difference between killing Tenebron as Shadron is landing (~51 seconds) and getting her down just before that second set of whelps is usually dependent on raid makeup and the RNG of lava waves/fissures. Killing her before/as Shadron lands is certainly preferable, but is more of an ideal case.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Dominus

You could make it work, but it will be very stressful on the raid overall (specifically healers). Honestly, to reliably be able to beat the fight by brute force method, I'd set the benchmark as having Tenebron die before or shortly after Shadron lands.

For your two drakes did you BL on Tenebron? If not, I'd say your DPS is probably up to the task to handle the encounter, as a BL will speed up your Tenebron kill quite a bit.