I would just like to thank the people who did the research on resistance and Fire resist for this fight, it definitely made the difference for us. It made the healing on the Sarth bear so much easier, and allowed us to be more conservative with DPS and bring a 3rd healer.

We used, for reference to any who are curious:
Bear with FR aura, FR flask, FR fur lining, cloak enchant, and helm enchant (with the +2% resistance meta). He also wore the TBC BoJ FR gloves, with a Flame Armor kit on them (they cost the least amount of stamina of all the pieces).

The rest of the raid:
Prot warrior on drakes
Unholy DK on whelps/blazes

Disc priest on Sarth tank
Holy pally on Drake and Whelp tanks
Resto druid on raid

Aff warlock, Arcane mage, Elemental shaman, and Shadow priest for DPS.

For the FR strat to work properly you need to maintain certain stam and mitigation thresholds. Simply swapping in large amounts of sub-80 gear isn't going to suddenly make you tank Sarth better, you have to pick and choose your slots intelligently. These thresholds are outlined earlier in the thread.

Vicks suggested a pretty close to optimal set of pieces to accomplish this task.

The purpose behind utilizing FR instead of exclusively stacking stam is to put more control in the hands of the tank via preparation, rather than having to rely on the reflexes and timing of multiple other players. Clearly incorporating the FR isn't going to be the solution for everyone, but it gives the tank an added element of control that is otherwise absent when relying solely on cooldowns.

From what I've found, level 80 green FR pieces are better than level 70 epics. The 70 blue crafted items actually scale up better since they have sockets. Depending on your server, though, they can be hard to find.

Definitely stick to a few important pieces where you aren't losing many other stats: rings, neck, cloak, bracers. You definitely don't want to sacrifice much base armor in trade for FR or the melee hits will start causing trouble.

Yeah thanks for all effort in resistance research done, we have gotten our 10-men 3D kill with myself using FR gear tanking on Sartharion last week.

I have about 350FR using
+130 FR aura
+20 FR cloak enchant
+25 FR helm enchant
+60 FR bracer enchant
+32 FR level80 green FR ring
+42 FR level79 green FR glove
+35 FR Flask of Chromatic Wonder
+2% resistance metgem

Together with using all 3 pieces frost resist crafted gear with stamina gem, and fill in other slots with regular tanking items. I have around 38.7k hp after debuff, max breath won't 1-shot me but i just use my own cooldowns on each breath(barkskin -> SI last for 2 breaths -> FR pot -> barkskin) for more safety margin, 1 holy pally solo heal on me, 30k breath(after all damage reduction) is the max i ever get during our kill.

Our group setup as follow ~
Prot Warrior - drake tank
Frost DK - whelps /elemental tank
Me - Sartharion tank, Prot warrior take over once all 3 drakes dead.

Holy Pally
Holy Priest
Resto Shaman (dpsing for 1st drake)

Dps DK
Ehn Shaman
Rogue
Ret pally


We find 3 tanks 3 healers setup a lot more comfortable than previous 3 tanks 2.5 healer (elemental shaman) we used to work with. We can prolong the fight even though we get 2 sets of whelps sometimes without worrying run out of cooldowns since i can pretty much survive on my own (although sometimes it can happen Sartharion decided to give me a 8k+ melee hit in 0.5 sec right after a 35k breath when i totally not using any cooldown).

sorry if i missed it in a recent post sham, but wondering why the resist was increased from 417 to 500? were you still getting some lower level resists that would one-shot the tank? and if so, what % of the time was that happening? been working on my set and got it to 417 exactly without flask, and then saw the change. so now wondering how bad it'd be to run with the flask and not be at 500.

**edit**
just saw your new chart on the previous page. the one i quoted was from page 2. did you ever get the resist info you needed from sarth with the 125 resistance? i'd be more than willing to help with some wws info on that if you need.

To avoid redundancy and cluttering this thread too much, I've kept most of the resistance math updates confined to this thread in the general section, and just updated here when something was particularly relevant to Sarth.

Unfortunately the exact constant still isn't pinned down, and it might be another reset til I can test out 515 frost resist on Sapphiron, and it still might not be enough samples to conclude anything :/

As far as these "thresholds", which are what's ultimately important for Sarth, I can at least give the upper limits that I'm confident in:

130 FR - You should never see a 0% resist
223 FR - You should never see a 10% resist
346 FR - You should never see a 20% resist
520 FR - You should never see a 30% resist.

In other words, the required amounts may be slightly lower than this, which would be useful to know in case people are just a bit short and would rather not swap another solid tank piece. But if you hit these amounts, you should definitely knock the listed resists off the table.

As you can see it's quite the jump from 346 to 520, and would mean a much bigger stat loss than moving from 223 to 346.

Regarding the resist flask, as one of the more "efficient" ways to get resist I'd recommend using it, and if you're uncomfortable with your HP, swap back on a piece of tank gear instead.

I can say that overall tanking 10 man was pretty smooth with 362 FR, we did not have to rotate CDs on me. The pally healing the drake/add tanks just used his Divine Guardian when he felt he and the raid could use it, and my priest healer saved GS for when he felt he couldn't top me up in time. I only used barkskin and SI if I wasn't quite full before a breath. It's actually nice to have them up when Shadron dies - the extra melee damage is pretty brutal until Vesperon is down and your Drake tank can take over, especially considering you take TT damage when you keep up Demo / Infected Wounds (We don't take portals until Vesperon is down).

Point being I personally would recommend against anyone straining their way to 520 with greens, on the 10 man it's unnecessary (and dangerous post-Shadron), and on the 25 you'll need CDs to be safe no matter what. 346+ however can be done fairly comfortably if you have the luxury of some extra pieces to enchant.

All that said I'm actually looking forward to trying out our DK drake tank on Sarth next week now that he's geared up. We haven't actually had one spec for it and try it yet but sounds like it works pretty well. I'm thinking as a bonus I'll probably pump out a lot more damage and threat on Tenebron in a bloodlust.

cool, thanks for the timely update, sham.

yeah working towards 520 seems a bit much. i can get to 450, but that is with green shoulders, helm and back... bracer enchant and paly aura. in order to keep the HPs up, also have the polar set decked out in stam gems. definitely lost a lot of mitigation this way. our DK has talked about taking over the role which would be fine with me lol. he's an add tank in 25 man with our paly but i think we might switch that up some.

as far as the sapph testing goes, does his aura count as an aura cast by him as a skull mob? or is it not level-based? i've seen people mention how level of the caster might come into play as far as resists go and how that might be why using the lava around sarth might not be the best way to test stuff too. i need to find me some masochists to sit in OS with me for several hours and just heal through a buncha flame breaths so we can get a large enough sample with different FRs to nail this down

anyway, thanks again for the response.

Resist potions work like a shield, so they reduce after after all multipliers. At worst, with a 30% resist and minimum absorb from the pot, you would still need 39912 HP to survive a breath with the [Mighty Fire Protection Potion] This was just barely possible with the FR set I have, and I'd have to demand Commanding Shout up at all times.

It's impossible to get to the "No Cooldown" sector at current gear levels. You can't surpass the 58.8k and 334 FR, or the 50.4k and 500 FR marks.

The rotation I'm currently using is;
Breath 1: Barkskin
Breath 2: SI
Breath 3: If SI is still up, Freanzied Regen to ensure being topped off before and lessen the impact of SI wearing off afterward
Breath 4: PS/HoS
Breath 5: Barkskin and MFPP
Breath 6: Frozen Rune and the other Healer Cooldown
Obviously have shields as often as is possible, as well as Divine Aegis and Sacred Shield

I'm sad hearing that it's not 334 as previously expected, I guess I've been lucky thus far and have never seen a 20% resist during the 73k breaths

Thanks for making that clear to me. I will probably use the same rotation as you do.

Well with the constants possible, the chance of seeing one at 334 isn't going to exceed ~1.6%, and some of the cooldowns you're using may still get you through it. The odds of a bad resist lining up with a "weak" CD may be "acceptable" considering all the other things that can go wrong in the fight, just depends what you'd lose going higher I guess.

Indeed. And after a few 3d clears your raid will know the encounter so well that you only need 1 or 2 (SI and Barkskin). Last kill we only had 1 full breath before 2nd drake died. But the first kill we needed 5 I think (SI, Barkskin, Sac, GS and Seed+Fire Pot).