Sartharion 3D Druid MT tips
 

Hi all, our guild is going to do Sartharion with 3 Drakes Up this week. I'd like to have some tips.

Don't go to my armory because I'm actually DPS specced (we have tons of warriors and paladins tanking so I wished to spec dps to give it a go).

Actually with my max stamina set I can reach very high value.

What I need to know is if in your opinion is better to run it with:

51.2k HP and 33.5k armor raid buffed
or
50.0k HP and 36.9k armor raid buffed

(I will have about 48% total avoidance)

I think we will go with 3 other tanks (1 warr, 1 pala, 1 warr/druid) and 7 healers (3 on me, 2-3 for the other tanks and 1-2 for the raid). My healers will prolly be 2 paladins and 1 disc priest or 1 pally, 1 holy priest and 1 disc priest.

Do you have any healing cd / my cd rotation to suggest to survive the fight? What will be the worst (more difficult) part of it?

What is the minimum requirment for the fight?

Thanks a lot.

From what I understand the portion of the fight that requires CDs to live through is when you're afflicted by Twilight Torment and affected by the 100% fire damage increase. In that instance you can SI + Barkskin to get through a breath, the pallies can bubble & BoSac you, or you can catch a guardian spirit from a holy priest.

I've read (although I haven't had a chance to try this our other MT has been on vacation) that it is possible to remove the torment debuff wisely so that you can guarantee you'll never take a breath with the debuff up. This eliminates the CD requirement although you still might need to use a few depending on your relative health level.

I've only done 25 with 2 drakes (Shadron & Vesperon) up successfully however, I haven't felt the increased damage from Sarth after the drakes go down. I'm not entirely certain that having the 3rd drake down will make a dramatic difference in my incoming damage curve. Remember besides you, only your blaze tank should take damage at that point so you have plenty of healers available to counteract the damage increase. If it becomes a real problem you can always have someone geared for higher physical mitigation taunt sarth and begin tanking. I personally would go with the higher HP total as the breath attack is the scary part of the fight in my opinion.

Usually I run the following setup.
Head - Valorous - 32stam -2%spell damage + 16 agi - Stalwart Defender
Neck - Boundless Ambition
Shoulder - Valorous - 16 Agi - Honored Hodir
Cloak - Cloak of the Shadowed Sun - 22 Agi
Chest - Polar Vest - 3x 24 stam - 10 stats
Bracer - Bindings of the Tunneler - 12 stam
Gloves - Handwraps of Preserved History - 18 stam
Belt - Polar Cord - 3x 24 stam
Legs - Valorous - 8hit/12stam 16 agi - Frosthide
Boots - Polar Boots - 2x 24 stam - 22 stam
Ring1 - Gatekeeper
Ring2 - Titanium Frostguard Ring - 24stam
Trinket1 - Essence of Gossamer
Trinket2 - Indestructible Alchemist's Stone
Weapon - Origin of Nightmares - Mongoose

I believe I total out to just under 52k raid buffed with food and I haven't had any serious issues with surviving breath attacks so far. Add control is what is messing us up on 3D at the moment. I'll be looking to adjust the glove & bracer slots once the patch comes and the stamina values are nerfed.

50k hp is fine, 33k armor is also fine. I do not think your avoidance is important.

I am using FR enchant on head, FR enchant on cloak and lvl 70 FR gloves in addition to the above setup. I also use flask of chromatic wonder. Together with aura, i am at 250 FR, and i reliably resist few thousand of the breath damage.

We used 2 healers on me, one of them discipline priest. Together with vigilance and the metagem, this cuts 8% of the breath damage. With 40k hp, i am able to survive tormented breath using barksking + fire resist potion, so i have survival instinct for another breath (coupled with priest shield ideally).

I have mixed experience with avoiding torment by hitting Sartharion in the right moment. It seems that torment vanishes within 0.2-0.3 seconds after i hit, and reappears after 1 second roughly. So i stop autoattack once Vesperon lands, and hit mangle + maul when torment is up and breath cast is just past 50%. Hovewer it is not 100% reliable for me, sometimes it disappears and reappears faster and sometimes slower so i sometimes have it up when breath lands. It even happened to me twice that torment didnt disappear at all (i am quite sure i did land my attacks ...). So i always use survival cooldowns if they are available in addition to the torment dancing.

edit: the most difficult part is when Vesperon lands and summons his add. At that point you have 100% more fire damage from Shadron, 50% more fire damage from Shadron's add, and 75% more damage from Vesperon's add (thats the Twilight Torment debuff). You can not survive breaths without cooldowns if all these come together, they hit for more than 70k before mitigation effect. The best advice i can give here is to save Heroism and use it to burn Shadron down as soon as possible, to minimalize the uptime when all these effects are up.

Honestly, you are there to take giant non-physical damage hits. Your armor doesn't matter in the least. Neither does your dodge. It's nice, in the sense that some of your healers will like you for it, but it's not at all essential. At the very worst, if you get through the three drakes you can have one of the add tanks tank Sarth for the end part where he's hitting like a truck. But at that point the fight is basically done.

You want to use barkskin early liberally, but make sure to save it about 30 seconds from Shadron landing. You should practice being able to wipe off the twilight torment debuff, but you should also plan on not being able to and dealing with the breaths using cooldowns and FR.

And basically, you have one and only one option: barkskin + Survival Instincts. That's the only way to survive a breath without outside help. Plan on doing that for the first one. For the second, plan on getting hand of sacrifice and a shield. For the third, plan on having barkskin up again and getting any other cooldowns you can (FR pots might work here).

On practicing the torment dance: I recommend macroing an attack:
/target sartharion
/cast lacerate
/cast maul

You have approximately 1 second from when you see the cast bar casting breath to doing this attack. It's very, very easy to mess up. What I do is turn off autoattacks, don't target sarth at all, and when Vesperon lands don't do any attacks or abilities that take a GCD whatsoever. It's not like you can do a whole lot of damage or threat to Sartharion at this point anyway. Your healers must make sure you are topped off at all times here if you're going to do the torment dance.

The hardest part is from the time the first drake dies until the second drake dies. For that part sarth has a 25% damage increase from one drake being dead, the 100% fire damage increase, and you still have the -25% sta debuff and still will take damage when you attack. I just didn't attack at all for the whole time to eliminate the damage coming back from attacking. Apparently there's some way to manage it, but I preferred to worry about not tail swiping anyone, flame breathing anyone, standing in a shadow fissure, or getting hit by a flame tsunami, all while managing a rotation of cooldowns from me and others. The largest breath I've been hit with was 51616, that's with 1 drake dead already (like during the fight, not before) where we screwed up timing on cooldowns.

I used 3 polar completely sta gemmed and enchanted. 4 valorous with normal agi heavy gems and enchants, and those blue bracers from up with a sta enchant. And everything else best in slot normal tanking stuff other than the DPS neck from the Maly quest. I think I was right around 53k hp pre pull.

For the time from the first drakes dies till the second we had a rotation of cool downs. We didn't include survival instincts or a nightmare seed in the rotation and I just used those when I was worried. We did barkskin, bubble-sac, pain suppression, barkskin, bubble-sac (another paly), guardian spirit, barkskin, another guardian spirit. I don't think there's anything special about that, but definitely make sure that's the biggest thing being communicated on vent. Also, whoever is doing the cooldown needs to watch sarth and not hit it till the breath is casting because a rotation of 2 things between each barkskin isn't enough for 100% uptime, need to time them for the actual breaths.

A hunter with a tenacity pet is also very helpful. They can cast roar of sacrifice which will act like soul link and take 30% of the damage from the target into the pet. Scorpids can do it and are really good dps pets anyway for once the tank isn't in danger and before he's in danger.

Edit: oh, and sta trinkets, essence of gossamer and alch stone.

First off, I'm assuming you are talking 25 man raids here.

With the twilight torment debuff, breaths top off at about 70-80k, so you cannot survive without using some method of cooldown / removing.

You can use whichever cooldowns you think will help, and have available to you:

Such as:

barkskin / SI
Hand of Sac / pally bubbles
etc.

There is a thread in the public discussion which discusses many of these.

You can also remove the debuff (if you are quick) with a yellow attack, ie save mangle and queue up maul as soon as you see it casting, you need to get it within about 1s of the 2s cast time, since the debuff removes about a second later. The extra HP is really nice to have in this situation.

As said above, you can have another tank taunt and step in if it's hitting too hard at the end, or generally I have found that there is enough free healing to keep you up through the melee attacks at the end.

The extra damage is quite a lot but at that stage you can always have the normal tank geared Prot Warrior taunt it off you no issue. Our first tries we had a DK tanking Sarth and he would often die at this point and I as add tank would be able to pick it up in normal tank gear quite well.

I've put in our first proper night on the 10 man version this week and its quite tough, I was running with about 49k hp when buffed without having to resort to the Polar set nonsense. We felt like we were on the verge of a kill but it kept falling apart at around the time we starting take portals to kill Vesperon's add in between DPsing him.

The main thing is that in a 25 man raid you have a lot more CD's and can pretty much prevent a tank death each time. I'd advise against the 7 healers though, we were going with 6 on the 25 man version and what finally broke it for us was dropping down to 5. The DPS was then able to drop each drake before or just as the next one landed. It gets pretty simple after that.

For avoiding the Acolyte of Vesperon's debuff, Twilight Torment, you need to stop attacking when the first acolyte spawns. The timing is going to differ based on latency but I've found my sweet point to be around 2/3 through his flame breath cast I use maul + mangle which knock the debuff off for the breath and you only get hit for about 29k. We still use saftey nets like wings, AMZ, Divine Guardian, HoSac and Pain Supression as well as shielding every breath possible, but its usually unneeded. 10 mans you have less but our ten man (3 healers, 3 tanks) we managed to use wings, HoSac, Pain Supression, we can basically prevent all the ones without me having to do anything until the first acolyte is dead, the next is down to me.

It did take me a while to get the timing on the breaths right, I'd suggest grab a healer and practice on Vesperon on his own. See how long it takes for your buff to drop after you hit mangle/maul. See how long it takes for it to come back. It is frustrating to repeatedly wipe as your tank learns his latency on this, I wish I'd done it prior to ours as we'd have spent an hour less wiping.

As for your CD, I tried to use Barkskin one breath, SI the next but it didn't really have much effect. Using both in combination though can let you survive one breath where you fail to remove TT in time. The issue is you have to precast them and hope for a cast or you'll be on GCD when he starts his breath and unable to remove the debuff in time. I've not tried using fire pots yet as I've been unable to locate an alchemist with the recipie.

This fight is really easy, IMO. The only frustrating part of this fight is how long it takes for some of the retards in your raid to not die to void zones and or flame walls.

I would go with as much stamina as you possible could muster. avoidance and armor is not nearly as important as stamina is in this fight. Sarth. hits like a complete pansy (even with 3 drakes dead), and the only real threat is the insta-gib breath that comes with vesperion's acolyte. For this reason, my guild only brings 6 healers to this raid instead of 7. Having 3 healers heal you is completely unnecessary, in fact, a skilled healer can easily solo heal you.

Having your holy pallys spec into Divine Guardian makes this fight a lot easier. You should only need 2 other CDs (beyond your bear-wall) to down this fight-- unless the raid dps is bad. Furthermore, with 2 Divine Guardian pallys, you won't have to play games with twilight torment (unless you really want to, to add more difficulty and bragging rights) in order to live through those breaths while shadron + vesperion's acolyte is up.

On another note, having 4 tanks for this fight is unnecessary. One tank should be able to pick up blazes + whelps. I know some guilds have success with 4 tanks, as the add tank can get over whelmed some times, but the DPS loss just makes this fight harder, IMO.

If it's a matter of gear, bring both, if it's a matter of gemming, start with the armor and then add stamina if you need it, because stamina gems are cheap as hell.

I didn't get to be there for our first kill, but I did do some MTing while we were learning the fight. You're going to need someone else's cooldown to survive at some point regardless of your gear (since you need SI+BS together instead of chaining them) unless your raid DPS is *extremely* high (basically limiting the overlap between V. watcher spawn and Shadron dying to the length of your barkskin), so I would suggest that you try it with the armor-heavy set, which improves your odds if a couple healers go down by the last part of the fight. I had only 49K in my stamina set and it was enough to get well into the Vesperon watcher phase of the fight (I died due to a mistimed shuck attempt, mainly because we had a hard time keeping enough people alive to get to that point so I didn't get much practice shucking at all).

I'm not entirely sure you need 3 dedicated healers either, I believe I only had 2 plus some help from one raid healer. He hits slow, he breathes slow, so topping you up is the easy part--it's surviving the insane breath during the last drake transition, and then the heavy physical damage plus a possible moderate breath (due to T.T.) between Vesperon's death and his watcher's death that are the hard parts.

You don't actually need any cooldowns if you can get the Twilight Torment dance down. After a couple unlucky attempts where the buff reapplied itself immediately, we started using cooldowns anyway (wings, pain suppression, BoSac). However, on our kill attempt it wasn't needed. I also used a mix of FR to 340 (hands, legs, head enchant, LW wrist enchant, flask) and magic meta. It wouldn't be too hard to push 415 with neck, ring, and a couple armor kits but I doubt it's worth it. With the armor change next patch it will be easier to keep higher armor at the same time.

It seems to me that swapping pieces for the L70 FR pieces seems too big of a overall stat loss. I'm not trying to argue against your success, just trying to understand the gear choices.

For me, if I switched to the 340 setup that you had I'd be loosing a good chunk of stamina off the gear pieces which would seem to be simply trading a higher HP buffer for a bit of resist.

Assuming all raid buffs (including kings) and the #s from the Feral Druid Numbers thread are correct, we have a 17.49 HP per 1 stamina conversion.

Differences:
Flask of Stone Blood -> Flask of Chromatic Wonder (680hp or 38.88 stam vs. 18 stamina) loss of 20 stamina
Handwraps -> Inferno Hardened Gloves (103 stamina vs. 52 stamina) loss of 51 stamina
Valorous Legs -> Inferno Hardended Legs (9 stam socket + 12 stam gems + 102 stam innate vs. 69 stam) loss of 57 stamina
Arcanum of the Stalwart Protector -> Fire Enchant (30 stam vs. 30 stam) no change

Total Stamina Loss - 128 Stamina or 2238 health. If you're resisting over 2.5k damage at the worst case, then I guess it would be worth the loss of stamina to switch in a few FR pieces. What kind of resist numbers are we getting for a 340+ resist set assuming worst case?

Today i again watched carefully twilight torment and i believe its not reliable. Sometimes it reappeared immediately (less than 0.5 secs), sometimes it was off for 2 seconds.

I believe it is related to the heart beat aura reapply. The damage component of the Twilight Torment Debuff has a 1 second cool down. The trick is to time the cool down as the other negative effects are believed to reapply once this debuff's cool down is up.

As noted before, practice with a healer just by pulling Vesperon without engaging Sartharion and simply try to learn your timing since it will be affected by your latency. Also, there is no reason to not stress safety and apply the mitigation cool downs anyway so accidental tank death is minimized.

The value of Fire Resistance on this fight is questionable. I was originally trying it with my only fire resistance being a paladin aura. The kill night I dropped my HP from 53 to about 50 but gained the FR head enchant, the -2% meta gem, the FR cloak enchant, and a Flask of Chromatic Wonder (210 total FR). Playing RNG games with FR is pretty risky, and can result in wildly varying results. After reconsidering my numbers and the sample size, I can't find proof of anything funky, but the results are what they are - wildly varying.

Examples (anonymized WWS -- I'm "Mist"):
(Pre-Shadron Disciple)
20:24'56.203 Sartharion Flame Breath hits Djfurball for 9762 Fire. (4414 Resisted) (1540 Absorbed)
20:25'19.740 Sartharion Flame Breath hits Djfurball for 16860 Fire. (2756 Resisted) (1960 Absorbed)
20:25'30.552 Sartharion Flame Breath hits Djfurball for 12120 Fire. (5329 Resisted) (1527 Absorbed)

(Including Shadron Disciple)
20:26'57.109 Sartharion Flame Breath hits Djfurball for 27282 Fire. (5273 Resisted) (2125 Absorbed)
20:27'10.390 Sartharion Flame Breath hits Djfurball for 37325 Fire. (5659 Resisted) (2125 Absorbed)
20:27'21.640 Sartharion Flame Breath hits Djfurball for 18276 Fire. (5641 Resisted) (1387 Absorbed)

That said, the small fraction of resistance did save my life on a slow HoSac from one of our Paladins. Your mileage may vary.

Also, clearing Twilight Torment is certainly non-trivial. It's reapplied very randomly, and with the pitiful Hit/Expertise you will have in a full Polar set, you'll have plenty of times that it simply won't go away.

Edit: Removed my statement on resist mechanics. I was wrong, and all my results were in the range for 25% resistance. Unless I find a more-extreme example, the combat log is indeed showing (X*5.25*(1-Resist%)) Fire taken and (X*5.25*(Resist%)) Resisted on fully debuffed Breaths.

Since both ways work it obviously doesn't really matter. I wasn't sure exactly how much it would reduce the damage and I don't remember exactly the difference I saw after increasing FR. My goal was to reduce the burst as much if possible. We had our warrior tanking the drakes taunt Sarth after the adds were down.

Flame Breath deals 10938 to 14062 fire damage. With all debuffs up (x2 x1.75 x1.5) thats 57425 - 73825 damage. According to wowwiki the difference in damage reduction is 45% for 249, 60% for 332, and 75% for 415. PotP reduces damage 12% and the meta an additional 2%. Taking the worst case hit:

73825 x 0.98 x 0.88 = 63667 max damage
249 resist (45%) = 35017
332 resist (60%) = 25467
415 resist (75%) = 15917

I might want to try 415 resist next time. However, I remember getting hit for close to 40k with 340+ resist which shouldn't be possible. So, I'm not sure if my math is wrong or if these mechanics are not interacting correctly. Is there some other damage increase I'm missing? Do resists and other damage reduction not stack?

Edit: Pioneerjd's response explains the difference. That does reduce the value of FR dramatically.