First of all, having a balanced set of Stamina and Fire Resist helps a lot against Sartharion. Stamina, even with bear multiplier, suffers due to the 25% hp decrease. At the same time, the gain in fire resistance at same item budget will get you more EH in terms of fire damage taken than stamina, provided that you can hit the sweet spots for "tier-up" on the minimum resistance percentage.

With that said, I find that a lot of guild overly focus on MT survival as well as having people tanking the drakes and the whelps, that they completely overlook the blazes. These are often what destroys a raid during their later learning attempts and possibly during farming nights. It is absolutely imperative that someone controls AND kill fire elementals, because not only do they do fire damage (which will almost do as much damage to the tanks as to the healers), but the enrage gives them a lot of damage. A tank tanking the fire elemental takes extra damage, and a healer/dps tanking elementals makes their job harder. Having a rogue with Anesthetic poison on at least one hand and focus primarily on elementals, calling for help if they become overwhelming, will help you stabilize the fight so much that I cannot emphasize it enough. If your guild has problem (in 25 man) burning Tenebron down before 2nd hatch (or when Shadron lands, this is better mark to shoot for), then it's fine having a tank pick the elementals up. However, after Tenebron and whelps are dead, you should have at least 1 person (rogue does the best) on full-time elemental duty.

edit: nvm... found the answer to my question elsewhere.

Thanks all for the info here which has helped me get our first 25 man 3 drake kill this week.

I was a bit worried to begin with that the breaths would be a problem for me to take as tank but it was more of people staying alive and controlling the adds than anything.

I use full frost set fully stam gemmed for this which gives me 49.6k hp fully buffed. I also have 317 FR from :-

FR head enchant
FR cloak enchant
FR bracer enchant
FR totem from shaman

The rotation I take for the breaths were :-

SI for the first breath and then if SI still up take the other breath too
Once SI wears off useBarkskin and Fire pot (make macro)
Pain suppression for next breath

More often than not this was enough cooldowns to have but a pally was ready for next cd if needed.
The biggest breath i took this night was 27k

I really don't want to devolve into crying, but the drop in Stam from HotW really looks like it's going to kill our ability to tank Sarth without a significant cooldown rotation from outside sources (assuming 5 breaths, I go from only needing 1 outside cooldown to needing 3). Having just gotten a well geared DK tank, Prot Pally, and Holy Pally a couple weeks ago, I was looking forward to running 2 3D Sarths using 2t/2-3h/5-6d, but after 3.1's change I just don't see myself being able to handle it with Druid/Shaman/Paladin as healers. Dropping the Shaman isn't an option because of Bloodlust, dropping the Druid is undesirable, though I suppose I could just have Druid/Druid/Shaman in the DK's group.

I had heard something about a change to 3D abilities, but I can't find any posts on blue tracker, any overall drop in the potential breaths would be welcome news for guilds that have relied on warrior/paladin over DKs.

Unfortunately I think this is going to be determined by whether or not they deem hard modes in 10 man as a way to require the perfect class setup (Seems to go against their bring the player not the class stance) vs the most skilled player set ups. In 25 man they have a bit more leeway considering you have a lot more ways to handle situations just due to the extra people. Their decision on this will definitely effect me until I can get 25 reliable and good players to start attempting any 25 man hard modes. And I only have 10 very reliable very skilled players to work on 10 mans with.

But you also have to consider the fact that while we might not initially be able to tank Sarth 3D 10 at the beginning of 3.1, I cant imagine it wont get somewhat trivialized when we are in full Ulduar 8.25 gear.

Remember that by the time 3.1 hits you'll have access to gear 1 tier higher than what you have now, which will probably boost your health back to 3.0.X levels.

Also remember that Sarth3D is designed to not be tankable without healer cooldowns-- they just didn't take into account druid health or Death Knight cooldowns being as strong of mechanics as they are. I'd be willing to bet that Blizzard didn't think to themselves, "Let's design a fight where 2 of the 4 tank classes are orders of magnitude better than the others", they thought "let's design a fight that requires coordination and rotation of cooldowns on the Sartharion tank." And they simply made two classes too strong, so they didn't need healer cooldowns.

I'm not sure about you guys, but at least with my raid, our DPS has gotten so good that we rarely have more than one breath while Shaddron and Vesperon's Accolyte are both active. Last night the DPS was standing around waiting for Shaddron to land, because Tenebron was already dead. Sure we'll take a stam hit with 3.1, but we'll get upgrades, and so will our DPS, making the only danger point in the entire fight non-existent.

This is going to be highly dependent on group composition. Perhaps with 2/2/6 that might be possible, but we generally run 3/3/4. Of course, I can't say what most do.

Note: we're talking about 10 man and surviving without cooldowns.

So you think their intent wasn't to make a fight where 2 of 4 tanking classes are too strong, but it was their intent to make a fight where 2 of 4 healing classes were too strong?

As I said, I was looking forward to being able to do 2 runs. Because I am now limited by what healers I bring this makes it difficult, and leaves no room for error for either me or the DK (I believe they are receiving nerfs as well). I know many guilds are now being put in a situation where a 3 Drake kill is completely out of the question since these changes (so far) aren't enabling Warriors or Paladins. It's not an easy fight right now, will it be an easy fight with full Ulduar 25 gear? Maybe, but it seems like rebalancing (nerfing) tanking classes and not rebalancing the most difficult encounter seems contrary to their "Everyone should be able to see all the content" stance.

I think their position is, everyone should be able to see everything from a lore standpoint. From a difficulty standpoint, not everyone is supposed to beat the hard modes. Blues are posting this essentially all the time on the official forums now about Ulduar hard modes. There's already easy versions of the fight-- Sarth2D. Sarth1D. Sarth0D. Everyone can experience whatever minor piece of lore Sarth is playing. The entire point of a hard fight is it's supposed to be a challenge for seasoned raiders, and it shouldn't be much harder for groups with warrior/pally tanks than it is for druid/DK tanks. Rather than make another easy fight when 3 easier versions exist, they kept the innate difficulty the same and nerfed the mechanics that placed survival on one person's execution rather than many. The hardest mechanic of a hard fight should require multiple people to do something right, not just one.

And I think you overestimate how much the current Sarth3D requires certain classes. Imagine, for instance, that instead of one tank on Sarth the whole time, you work a switch: Sarth tank uses his cooldowns, then you call for all the adds to be burned down, then the add tank grabs Sarth while the original Sarth tank grabs adds. Instantly, more cooldowns. Think the front 2 of the 4 horsemen, but with tons more distractions. Or, you have a ret or holy pally bubbletaunt a breath. Or voidwalker tank it until you get 2 drakes down. Or have a DPS class that can tank taunt before a breath, die to the breath, then get battle rezzed. Or sacrifice a hunter/warlock pet that's second on aggro (especially if your main tank is a night elf and can shadowmeld). You accept the fact that now, you have a slight chance to lose to the RNG game, and it might take you 3 times more attempts than before. Sure, it's harder than having one ubertank that can just stand there and dodge waves, and manage hitting 3 buttons a minute. But the DK/healer cooldowns and stam/FR druids aren't the only solutions to "how do ten people live through an absurdly strong breath 3-6 times." And they don't necessarily require tank DKs, ferals, or holy priests/pallies. However, they do require good players, perhaps better players than the ideal classes.

And if you really think they designed the encounter for druids to be maxing out both FR and stam with so few resist pieces in the game, while also requiring wearing 3 pieces of frost resist for its stam, you give the developers a heck of a lot of credit. I think they designed a challenging fight, saw that the challenge was massively hard for the test group that has had its warrior be the MT on all content since WoW classic, figured tanks were balanced based on their assumptions about the rest of the game, and called it a day.