Correct me if i'm wrong, but didn't testing conclude that this meta did not provide 2% spelldmg reduction, but rather a 2% increase in your resistance values, rendering the meta gem fairly worthless unless you're in full resistance gear. Or has this been changed in a recent patch?

Anyway, i tend to gear in a similar way as you do, but i aim to get to the level of at least 20% damage resisted (this is 200-something FR, see the thread about resistances in the general public forums). With 130 from a totem/aura and 83 from a Mixology-buffed [Lesser Flask of Resistance], this value is very easy to reach and the minimal sacrifices in maximum health are well worth the significantly lower worst-case breath (and a lower average breath is just icing on the cake).

We spent a solid 2-3 hours trying a whole bunch of different things last night. You were 100% right about us getting backed up so far with Tenebron that by the time we managed to down him Vesperon was landing, we had two sets of whelps and just got overwhelmed with adds.

Our two major flaws:
an inexperienced DK tank (His primary role has always been DPS)
an under geared and inexperienced shaman healer (10 man geared alt who had never played resto before)

Setups we tried:
3Tanks/3Heals/4DPS - Prot Warrior on Drakes, DK on adds, myself (Feral) on Sarth using 346FR/Stam gear - This was our most troublesome due to mismanagement of flame guards. We lasted the longest using this endurance setup but our DK just couldn't get a solid handle on the adds.

2Tanks/3Heals/5DPS - Prot Warrior on Drakes & Adds - This went a bit better (Tene went down) but ultimately trying to have 1 tank manage drakes & adds no matter how skilled he is just did not seem to work for us.

2Tanks/2Heals/6DPS - This was our final configuration and people were drained at this point but the under lying flaw was still the same, flame guards just seem to spill everywhere and kill people. We ended up just killing Vesperon and then proceeding with a 2 Drake kill using this setup.

Next week we are going to switch our holy pally over to prot and have him deal with adds. Hopefully this will alleviate a lot of the problems we are experiencing with the adds and allow us to focus on whatever our next problem area happens to be.

I haven't seen people mention that they had much trouble with the flame guards. No matter what raid configuration we tried every attempt we had 0 problems with whelps but the flame guards were always out of control.

Any suggestions?

Snarley, my experience with the fight is that there are two basic keys: how good your DPS is and how good your add tank is. Healers being good is important but not as crucial, and honestly, the adds are the fight. If you have really good DPS you can take care of the adds while still meeting the dps budget for the drakes. But you still need to have the adds under control, and all I can say is that it's a learned skill.

I think that 3 tanks really gives the fight a lot more control. 2 tanks means that drakes can be running around, adds can be loose, and in general it's mass chaos. I'm not honestly sure how you'd do this reasonably without either a lot of misdirects or a lot of paladins/warriors DPSing and bringing over to the tank, which kills DPS time.

And yes, the whelps aren't as problematic from the perspective of getting loose. They're problematic because they do a lot of damage and can quickly overwhelm one tank's healing, which means they need to die. The armor debuff really hurts after a while, and two sets of them at the same time will be very hard to heal.

I'm not sure what it is exactly at this point. I do know the numbers i get hit for and the meta used to reduce the damage I took from sarth's big breaths by up to 6-7k, this has recently been fixed and now I notice that the breaths I take are hitting for less with it rather than without it and I usually don't resist any of the fire damage because our fire resist aura runs away. I'll come up with some numbers when i do sarth this week on both 10 and 25.

It's been noted both earlier in this thread and elsewhere that the gem is currently bugged (?) in this fashion (adding 2% to your resistances). This evening I'll try to confirm this myself when I actually put the new meta in my Hood of the Exodus.

Edit: beaten, sorry about that.

Are your add tanks keeping them out of the lava churns? Do you have a hunter tranquing them or a rogue using Anesthetic Poison and Fan of Knives? They're far more dangerous if they're enraged and take a lot longer to kill.

Also, this is pretty basic advice, but get your raid to stand in a clump if they aren't already. Only the MT and her healer should be more than a few yards from where the drakes are tanked.

For us, using a DK and a prot pally together on the drakes and adds did a great deal to keep them under control. Not only is there less risk of them getting loose, but the offtanks actually contribute significant DPS on the adds with their AOE.

Edit: one more thought regarding tank gear stats.

Stacking stam is certainly the simplest way to go, and works very well for me in 25 man with both a disc priest and a holy pally as my healers. (The three of us form a little ladies' club with our own concerns away from the main raid group; with practice your MT healers become very well coordinated and can get you through a lot.) However, things went really badly for us in 10 man when we tried 3 healers. (I am talking Tenebron still up when Vesperon landed and whelps everywhere). For us, the 5th DPS seems necessary.

That's why a FR gear setup seems like a promising alternative--same effective health vs. the flame breaths, fewer HPS and cooldowns needed. Speccing a full tank spec with Infected Wounds, etc. goes without saying; there's just the loss of some armor and dodge to swap in the FR pieces. Threat is a nonissue, even if you stop attacking completely when Shadron lands except to refresh IW, because by the time your DPS gets around to actually attacking the boss you have been on him for like 4 minutes.

So after 3 days of serious attempts we got 10man 3D down. Based on reading here (and in the main 3D thread) I was strongly advocating a 3/3/4 setup in favor of control. We weren't reliably getting Tenebron down before a second set of whelps (without BL) with that setup, and the adds weren't getting hit by as much incidental aoe as possible.

Switching to a 2/2/6 setup resulted in Tenebron dropping much faster, the adds being hit by far more incidental aoe near the drake, and a solid kill. The rogue helped pickup adds for the OT, and the ret pally helped heal when Shadron+Vesp were both up.

Our setup:
Feral MT (me, 355FR ~50k pre-pull health)
Prot warrior on drakes+adds

Holy pally on MT
Resto shaman on OT+raid

Unholy DK
Combat Rogue
Surv Hunter
Ret Pally
Enh Shaman
Shadow Priest

I swear I see far more people get their first success with 3/3/4, so it was surprising to me that using 2/2/6 with a melee-heavy raid is what ended up working for us. Interestingly enough, on our kill the largest breath I took was only 20k. Thanks to everyone who posted in this thread.

Just out of curiousity, how do you get to 58K buffed even with the things you mention? Even as a JC/Enchanter with the Monarch Crab, all four polar pieces, and gemming absolutely everything for stamina, I've only been able to get to 55K with full raid buffs. I could probably get about 40-50 more stamina by replacing every non-stamina enchant (shoulders, gloves, chest) with Heavy Knothide Armor Kits, but that doesn't account for a difference of 3k. (My ring enchants make up the difference between your bracer enchant and mine.)

Oh. It's the PVP gear. Thanks for the listing; I'd also overlooked that the Gale-Proof Cloak has a socket (while Shadowed Sun does not).

This evening I used 49k HP/376 FR, and I must say it's a big relief to be able to survive indefinitely cooldown-free given sufficient healing. The problem we're having now is that it really does seem to be indefinitely... Tenebron is dead when Shadron activates; Shadron is usually dead within a comfortable timeframe not long after Vesperon lands, but then Vesperon and the portal adds seem to stay up forever and we eventually wipe to a sheer lack of healing.

Our setup was 3/2/5 as follows:
Feral MT
Prot pally on drakes
DK on whelps and fire elementals

Paladin MT healer
Druid raid healer

Ret pally
DK
Elem. shaman
2 mages
(clearly not well stacked, but individually our top DPS and the people who were available).

The issue that we could not seem to get past is people dying after Shadron was dead, which seems bizarre to me, since on 25 man Shadron dead basically meant we'd won. I'd survive the breaths fine at first, but my healer would fall behind by 5-10K each breath, so that eventually I was out of cooldowns and unable to do anything about a breath when I was at 10K health. I'm not even attacking Sarth between the time Shadron's disciple spawns and my death, except for a /mangle /stopattack macro to refresh IW that I only use at full health. I'm at a loss as to what else I can do to make myself healable. We tried having the elemental shaman switch to healing me full time once Shadron died, but then we'd lose other DPS, or the drake tank, or healers.

I came to the conclusion that Vesperon simply wasn't dying fast enough so I talked to the healers. They were falling behind on the healing and running oom because we had so much reflected damage. The DPS, on the other hand, said they simply couldn't DPS because they had to spend too much time waiting for heals after pot/hs/bandage were used up.

Killing Shadron's acolyte before Vesperon would alleviate some of this, no? The only problem is keeping upstairs and downstairs under control simultaneously... I'm not sure how to keep Vesperon under control, keep her tank alive, keep me alive, keep elementals off the healers, and send enough people downstairs to kill an add without getting fried.

foxglove, how we got it to work was to have one of our DPS switch to healing around Vesperon's time, and continue doing it for a while until things stabilized. And yeah, when Shadron dies Sarth stops being as scary from a breath perspective but becomes much scarier from a average DPS standpoint; your lack of avoidance really hurts there.

Well foxglove tbh, your setup looks perfect to be able to enter portals and kill off acolytes. Have DK tank and one elemental heal.