You are forgetting fire protection potion? Or is it not enough?

It all depends on the dps you are able to pull out, but my experience is that 10man is generally slower than 25man. We can kill 25man tenebron before shadron lands, but we are nowhere that close in 10man. So i use FR set, where i can survive without cooldowns (i still use them since its very close, but if we run out of them - we can go on with a bit of luck).

I'm now confident enough that the previously undetermined constant in the resistance formula is 510 to post what I hope to be final, correct tables for the flame breath.

This shows the levels of FR that eliminate a potential partial resist - for instance at 127 FR, a 0% partial resist is still possible (though highly unlikely), while at 128 FR this small possibility is eliminated.

At each level of FR, the table shows the maximum breath a druid could receive. This assumes BoS, but does not assume Grace, as a disc priest is less common than a prot pally / prot warrior, and even with one, Grace may not be at 3 stacks for 100% of breaths. Next to this is the amount of HP you must exceed pre-pull to survive this worst-case breath with no CDs.

Fire Resistance Thresholds for Sartharion's Flame Breath

10 Man

FR	Min Resist	Max Breath	Min HP
128	10%	45374	60499
219	20%	40333	53777
340	30%	35291	47055
510	40%	30249	40333

25 Man

FR	Min Resist	Max Breath	Min HP
128	10%	56716	75621
219	20%	50414	67219
340	30%	44112	58816
510	40%	37810	50414

nightcrowler - while it doesn't sound like you need it, you can use a mighy fire protection pot + nightmare seed and guarantee survival for another breath. But why would you want 5 tanks? 4 is already stretching things a bit. Having 13 DPS is probably doable, but they have to be very good DPS with decent synergies and none of them should die. I guess I'd rather ask the question why you'd want to bring 5 tanks.

There are two benchmarks for DPS: Tenebron should die just after Shadron activates, and Shadron should die about 40 seconds after Vesperon lands. If you cannot make those benchmarks, chances are you will fail the encounter.

Snarley - my experience is that relying on cooldowns makes the encounter less stable overall, and having the FR gear to absorb the breaths innately in 10 man is what makes druids fairly preferred. That being said, you're going to take a LONG time killing anything. Depending on how slow you are you may not get Tenebron down until Vesperon lands. If that's the case, I'd recommend strongly that you don't DPS Shadron down, you DPS Tenebron down.

Thank you for the advice, after reading further on here and taking a look at some gear recommendations to hit the 340 mark it really does seem like its the preferred way to go for 10 man.

I am a little confused on what you mean regarding the kill order. We have definitely managed to kill Tenebron before Vesperon lands (Vesperon being the one to land 3rd). I assume you meant if it took us so long to kill Tenebron that Vesperon actually landed before we had any DPS on Shadron? And you were recommending that we DPS Vesperon down as the second drake to kill(thereby negating Twilight torment quicker)?

I was also reading on tankspot someone who successfully used a 2 tank strategy (giving the added bonus of a 5th DPS with 3 healers). Add tank (Prot Warrior) dealing with the drakes and tanking tenebron basically on his whelp portal. However this seems like its a lot to ask of the Prot warrior but would allow our DK who is well geared for DPS to go his DPS spec.

Awesome table! Thank you very much for posting that in a more concise way.

Yeah, basically. In 25-man, you kill Tenebron just as Shadron lands or abouts, guaranteeing a one-whelp spawn and allowing you to do a good amount of DPS on Shadron directly. With a 10-man setup and a 3/3/4 setup where the DPS isn't that well optimized, it's going to be very difficult to get Tenebron down and put any kind of significant DPS on Shadron, and it's almost certainly going to be the case that you'll have 2 whelp spawns (which will overwhelm you if they're not down when Vesperon lands).

So if that's your situation, and Shadron and Vesperon both have roughly the same HP, I'd go with killing Vesperon first. In that case the order of priority would be whelp->Tenebron->adds->Vesperon->acolytes->Shadron. This also may help stability, as the Shadron acolyte isn't nearly as dangerous as the vesperon one is, so after you kill Vesperon you can take one portal, kill both acolytes, and then focus entirely on Shadron until dead.

We successfully did 3-drake 25 last reset with a warrior tank on the drakes, me (feral) on the boss, and a paladin and DK controlling the adds as well as briefly picking up Shadron and Vesperon when they first landed (so that the warrior did not have to move and reduce the DPS's burn time on the drakes). We ignored the portals until all 3 drakes were dead.

I regemmed all my gear for stamina at the expense of everything else (55K hitpoints before debuff) to maximize the margin of error for my healers, and survived the big breaths using cooldowns: Pain Suppression and Sacrifice from my healers (since these reduce the HPS needed to top me off again) and then Barkskin/SI for two more breaths. This worked well, and with Heroism on Tenebron and the extra offtank to help control adds and drakes, our DPS had Shadron down before I even took the 4th breath.

However, we've struggled a lot more in 10 man, mostly because our healers were overtaxed. Often the add tanks die before we even get to the "danger zone" for me (Vesperon active). A few times I've died not because of the breath itself but because my healer simply could not top me off between the "big" breaths.

Edit: our setup was 3 tank/2 healer (disc priest and resto druid). We've also tried having an elemental shaman in resto gear (or resto in elemental gear) DPS on Tenebron, then help heal on Shadron.

I'm very hopeful that a FR gear setup might alleviate the strain on our healers since it will require fewer HPS from them. Unfortunately, I dropped LW recently so I can't use the fur lining, but I believe I still have my epic FR gear from Illidan Flame tanking at 70.

Thanks for the chart! I will be looking at it closely.

Except Shadron and his Acolyte are far more dangerous than Vesperon. On our end, the difference means an extra 2 breaths that are still at full strength and likely another 4 at 30k (within 2 shot range considering +50% physical damage). While there's certainly not only 1 way of doing things, you're already running very high Control setup with 3/3/4, depending on what you're looking at for gear having the whelp/blaze tank likely means significantly less raid healing pressure, meanwhile having lower DPS means more pressure on the Sarth Tanks' Healer.

I personally recommend Bloodlust after Tenebron (You'll get 2 whelps anyway) > Whelps > Shadron > Vesperon > Vesperon's Acolyte > Shadron's Acolyte

Shadron's debuff is 200% fire damage, not 150%. By killing Vesperon you don't reduce the breaths at all, just the 25% health. So, it doesn't actually reduce any healing load at all (think stam vs armor). Killing acolytes can be done exactly the same regardless of which drake is killed first (or can wait until after drakes if Shadron first). 200% fire damage is more dangerous than -25% health. Also, Lava Strikes are fire damage and more likely to kill raid members than Twilight Torment is (larger spikes).

Basically, killing Vesperon first helps raid survivability (via raid health) and Shadron first reduces healing load (via reduced fire damage).

We tried Heroism both ways, and found that heroism right at the start gave us a smooth transition to Shadron and fewer random/avoidable deaths--at least on 25man. I do think the point about Heroism/Bloodlust buffing healing as well as DPS is something to consider since we're having heal issues on 10man.

We tried acolytes before Vesperon, too, and killing all drakes first in the order they land worked better for us. The damage one gets from Shadron's acolytes is controllable--stop attacking and you stop taking that damage. Vesperon's +fire damage aura is not. Additionally, we free up our offtanks and healers to all go in the portal by killing Vesperon, and of course greatly reduce the healing needed on me. (And, as long as Vesperon is up, she can continue to spawn acolytes.)

But killing Vesperon and then his acolyte (who won't respawn) does reduce significantly the healing load.

And when I said 150% fire damage, I meant 150% extra fire damage - it's 100% from Shadron and then another 50% from his acolyte. Similar to Vesperon; it's 75% more from his acolyte + Twilight Torment + 25% less health.
Right. I guess my experience has been that the sarth tank isn't the problem, nor is the healing load; it's whether your 10 men survive. Anything that can help that is good, and I had at least a couple tries where we downed Shadron but dealing with Vesperon's TT damage and the fire damage and having the low health killed us before we could stabilize.

I took a route where i chose to ignore both armor and fire resist to just stack my stamina as high as humanly possible, I also ignore my dodge because the big concern is just the breaths, our pally or warrior will come take over tanking sarth once vesp goes down. I run with a fully buffed 58k health giving me about 42k with the 25% debuff. This allows me to pop one CD per breath on 10-man sarth and i have to blow 2 CDs per breath for 25-man (sometimes 3 to ease up on healers if we have plenty of outside CDs). I also chose a spec specifically reducing the damage i take from sarth's melee attacks. I'm usually hit for no more than 5.5k per swing (before tene goes down) I also spec into infected wounds to slow his attack speed so as sarth gets buffed its not as big a deal. I do use a 2% spell dmg reduction meta in my helm. The highest breath i've ever seen from sarth on 25 was a 62k blow (on 10-man i've never seen higher than 45k). We have a disc priest and holy priest able to keep me up between the 2 of them, sometimes one will die but one healer can usually keep me up long enough to get my heals back.

Things I have:
4/5 Points into Feral Aggression (tier 1) (4 points hits the attack power reduction cap)
3/3 Points into Infected Wounds (tier 8)
Professions are JC/LW (Monarch Crab, 41 stam gems, 90 stam wrist enchant, 18 stam armor kits)
58k buffed health
34% Dodge
32k armor
0 Fire Resist

My specific sarth spec is not a necessity but my healers love it for both mana efficiency and less danger from melee blows.

I usually pop Barkskin/Survival Instincts together leaving me Fire protection pot for emergencies along with nightmare seed
I usually have 1-2 Guardian spirits, a Pain Suppression, and a Hand of Sac available but seldom used.

In my experience just stack stam...survive the big breaths and you're healers will take care of the rest. Thank yous going out to my healers that keep me up each week!!!

Also, we kill shadron first because you never have to really stop and we clean up acolytes before and after vesperon. The catch with vesperon is you either need to kill him before he summons an acolyte or you are FORCED into the portal after killing vesperon and have to take down his acolyte for the tank to not be taking 50k+ breaths. With shadron, once he's down tank is safe, plus you have the ability to dps him almost all the way down before vesp even lands. Killing shadron over vesperon is no question to me.