3 tank, 3 healer strat for us. My FR aura was coming from the paladin healer that was assigned strictly to me, so losing the aura is highly unlikely. After the times we wiped though we would check the numbers on the breath that dipped me low enough that the next hit or two killed me before heals caught up, and they almost always came out to 18% resisted. I know many more breaths are not dipping me so low, but it's the few that do cause the problems.

And in case I'm just dumb and calculating wrong. For example, if the combat log says "Fire Breath for 34000 (5100 resisted)". We calculate it as 100 * (6120 / 34000) = 18%.

Unfortunately my health is also a bit low due to me not being a regular feral druid for the guild. We have roster issues that prevent us from bringing the perfect ideal comp (DK tank) to this fight on a regular basis, so I took a day to dig out my old FR set and build in the new stam and enchants to make it work. So my health isn't quite as high as would be ideal, but it gets the job done most attempts when nothing else goes fubar...


edit: thanks Melthu, your post came before mine. I may have logged one or two attempts last night, will check when I get home to see what the numbers look like in that.

First contributions to this thread, but i've read it extensively in my preparation for sarth10+3. My guild was able to down this last week for the first time after 7 attempts. Needless to say it happened a lot quicker than I expected but I want to provide some feedback to those who are still working on this.

Composition:

Tank(3): Feral Druid (Sarth), Prot Pally (Whelps), Prot Warrior (Drakes)
Healers(3): Shammy, Druid, Priest
DPS(4): Feral Druid, Ret Pally, DK, Hunter

Facts:

- We did not stack FR gear, in fact all we did was stack stam + FR aura
- MT wore polar set (+24 stam gems), and did not regem his T7 for stam
- MT is Enchanter/Alchemist
- Burned hero on Shadron (Although the kill was on an attempt when hero was down, so it is not necessary)
- Used a CD rotation of (Barksin -> SI/Frenzied Regen -> Guardian Spirit -> Bubble/Sac)
- MT plays from Brazil with 400ms
- From a DPS perspective, we were averaging 3-4 breaths before tenebron/shadron were dead
- We had double LOH available in case MT got too low (as a precaution)

From reading this thread I had feared that FR was a necessity as a feral druid to tank this fight however after experiencing it, I do not feel it is. Sure there is still a possibility of being RNG'ed but you can use your CD's effectively and still survive the breaths without it. So for those who are trying to find that magic balance between FR/stam don't stretch yourself too far to do it, if it's not working try just stacking stam and go for it that way. It worked for us, and hopefully it will work for you.

ps. In case you're wondering, I was the dps kitty in the composition, specced bomkin atm for 6 mins malys

That's true, nobody should read this thread and get the impression that fire resist is the only way to do it. The primary problem with doing it with stamina is that it's a bigger load on the healers (common name: stamina bear: latin name: manamus spongius)--but in a 3-heal setup, that's not going to be nearly the issue it is in a 2.5 healer setup.

The object of the FR gear is to make the tank more "deathknighty", if you will, and in doing so make each heal relatively more valuable, so that the MT healer can run out of a flame wave, shed a blaze, and still top you off before the so-called triple breath, and secondarily to ensure that you can single up your cooldowns instead of having to pair SI/barkskin and FR pot/Nightmare seed (or whatever cooldowns you happen to have handy). With barkskin resetting in a minute, you can go for a long time without running out of cooldowns if you're fully prepared for the fight--especially if you get a little lucky with Sarth's breaths. You can still single up your cooldowns if you have enough stamina, but you're adding 20+% to the MT healing load.

For the 10 man version, I found the advantage of FR to be precisely that you can survive without cooldowns. If you've got healers with external cooldowns, and the dps to down Shadron before running out of them, the FR becomes less necessary. FR gives you a bit more flexibility in composition, and a bigger safety net through the first 2/3 of the encounter or so (though you're in a bit more danger after Shadron is down until another tank can take over).

Now that our DK is more geared we've swapped places, with him on Sarth and me on Drakes, and it has some advantages. Just keep in mind that a druid tank without FR is very reliant on external CDs, good dps, and a lot of incoming overheal. A DK MT or a druid with FR can give the raid time to manage adds or take portals for instance if you feel this works better for your comp.

Orin - Where's the 6120 coming from?

I'm guessing these are made up numbers, but a to figure out the exact resist % you'd calculate it like this (if both Shadron, Shadron's Acolyte, and Vesperon's Acolyte are alive):
Base Damage * 2 * 1.5 * 1.75 * .88 * .97 (Grace/Sanc/Vigil) * (1-Resist%) = Damage Taken
Base Damage * 1.5 * Resist% = Damage Resisted
Solving both for Base Damage
Base Damage = Damage Taken / 4.4814 / (1-Resist%)
Base Damage = Damage Resisted / 1.5 / Resist%
and plug in multiples of 10% for Resist%, look for values within the range of Flame Breath and you have your Resist%

This is a bit offtopic but I didn't want to make a new thread and there is some good os10+3 knowledge here...

As a feral dps'r in a 3 tank (warrior on drakes, dk on sarth and paly on adds), 4dps (rogue, me, dk, spriest), 2 1/2 healers (boomkin, paly, shaman) when is the best time to blow beserk?

We've only been trying this for one night and I think we're pretty close (got shadron down twice and almost down a few other times) but I've been beserking a little after when shadron lands which isn't long before we call for heroism. I'm wondering if I should be blowing up tenebron faster because in this melee heavy group it becomes very disruptive to our melee dps when there are constantly two shadow fissures on the ground right around the melee area. Not to mention the adds, ae affects and waves adding to the confusion.

Very cool encounter but feels like it goes better when we don't have to move around as much (lucky waves and fissures) so I'm wondering if others think that overall dps on shadron will go up if I blow my big cooldown on tenebron. The other upside is that it'll be up again to deal with vesperon albeit that isn't the risky/hard part of the fight.

I've always blown berserk on Tenebron. The faster Tenebron dies the sooner you can start to kill Shadron. The only reason that logic won't hold true is if you kill Tenebron before Shadron lands and you have idle time, but in a 10 man, thats extremely unlikely.

We use bloodlust on Shadron simply because we want more healing during that time than we do during Tenebron. Damage wise it doesn't really matter as long as you do it right after a wave comes, but Tenebron is fairly mediocre on healing requirements.

The greatest danger of the whole encounter is when shadron/vesperon are in play. Thus you want to make this period the shortest possible. Tenebron alone is not the primary cause of wipes it's when shadron/vesperon are down. Personally I was blowing berserk after tenebron was down once we started dps on shadron.

Seems like lots of guilds do it differently. In 10-man, our guild found that blowing most dps cooldowns (bloodlust, etc.) on Tenebron worked best for us. One of our major hurdles was the drake tank getting double-shadow-breathed if Tenebron and Shadron were on him together, and the other was lack of whelp control. Burning Tenebron helped alleviate both problems, so we went that route. As the Sarth tank, I'm pretty safe in 10-man, even without cooldowns (as long as I'm getting healed, I won't get one-shot), so shortening the time Shadron is up was less of an issue.

In 25-man, though, those were less of an issue, and my survivability was much more questionable (i.e. cooldowns required), so for reasons already detailed, we burn Shadron in 25-man.

We are going to attempt Sarth 3D 10 man tonight. I have everyone committed to 2 flasks worth of attempts.
I have read through this thread and I am leery of trying to do it with FR vs straight up stamina gear.

Our setup is as follows: (3 Tanks, 3 Healers, 4 DPS - All players are in full naxx 25 gear)

Tanks:
Feral Druid (Myself, Sarth Tank)
Frost DK (Drake Tank)
Prot Warrior (Add Tank)

DPS:
Mage
Shadow Priest
Hunter
Ret Pally

Healers:
Resto Druid (Raid Heals, Drake Tank Heals)
Holy Pally (MT Healer)
Resto Shaman (Raid Heals, Add Tank Heals)

I know this setup is not exactly optimal (Splitting DPS between magic/physical) but it is our absolute best players that have at least experienced and downed 2D 10 man twice. Is it possible for me to keep a shielding rotation with the Pally for more then 4 breaths? Or would I be better off using FR gear to push 1 shots off the table so my split DPS has a bit more time to get Shadron down and me out of 1 shot range? Has anyone done it taking portals the entire time to avoid twilight torment/1 shots?

First Breath: Barkskin
Second Breath: SI
Third Breath: SI hopefully still up
Fourth Breath: Pally shield (can't think of the spell name)