Has anyone seen a video of a warlock tanking Sartharion with his voidwalker?

I myself haven't seen it, but apparently some guildies have. Can anyone give me a confirmation of this and, if possible, an explanation of what scaling mechanics enable us to do this? I know it has to do with wearing stam gear and transfering the stats to the voidwalker, but I'm curious how much threat the void can take when it can barely tank normal mobs for me. Even with a 5 minute lead on Sarth for threat, I can't imagine it being able to hold an entire raid's DPS that easily.

And considering the WotLK mechanic of improving tanking threat with damage, how can the void, which already has a reduction to its outgoing melee damage, be able to pull through throughout the entire fight? Does torment/taunt on the void generate as much threat as other tanks' taunts or is the mechanic slightly different?

All pets get 75% of our stamina - this was increased from 30% with 3.0.8, so that's why this is possible now and wasn't before. And voidwalkers get 16 health per stamina.

People have managed to get up to 3k stamina, which would give 36k extra health to the VW just from the warlock's gear. And then there's stamina raid buffs, which the VW gets 175% benefit from, because they affect both him and the warlock. Finally you have the demonic empowerment buff, which adds 20% health on top.

With all that, there are unconfirmed reports of voidwalkers hitting 96k health.

But yeah, it really isn't the health pool that makes them viable Sartharion tanks, it's the 80% AOE mitigation. Healing a VW tank is actually pretty intensive in this fight, not from the breath but from melee, because he has very little melee mitigation. And that's with Sarth's pretty weak melee swings.

So basically there are 3 aspects of this fight that line up to make VW tanking feasible:

1. Weak melee damage from boss.
2. Huge intermittent AOE damage from boss.
3. Boss is off-tanked for the first several minutes of the fight, making threat not an issue.

Blues have already commented that we shouldn't expect to be able to do this in future encounters.

hello, ive been a long time reader, and this is my first post. now, ive been running 0/41/30 since i hit 80, and i love it..anyway, lately ive hit a wall with my dps. i think that i have pritty nice gear ( armory ) but i cant seem to break 4k dps. i dont know if its my rotation or what, simulationcraft, which i understand its only a sim and its the perfect world scenario has me at 5k+ dps.

my glyphs are CoA, Immo, FG
it seems that i get the best dps using only CoA,Immolate, and a incinerate filler, but life tapping about every 10 seconds to keep up the set bonus buff.

i guess my question is, is there a dps cap to what 0/41/30 will take you? or will it take off like a rocket once i get 2k spell power unbuffed?

thanks

Don't forget the Glyph of the Voidwalker which is another 20% more stamina.

So basically to do this you have to do the following:

A) Get Glyph of the Voidwalker
B) Spec Demo for Fel Vitality (15% more stam), Demonic Empowerment (20% more stam and 20% more Threat usable once per minute, lasts 20 secs), could spec Demonic Resilience (reduces all damage he takes by 15%), Fel Synergy (heals him for 15% of all damage you cause). Demonic Brutality (increases the effectiveness of his taunt by 30%), I also read that one person who did it specced for Improved CoW and used that on Sarth.
C) Stack STAM STAM STAM. I read that you need about 41-42K on him non buffed then he will be around 75k buffed. I've gotten to 39.2 K with the glyph, the spec above, 3 pieces of frost resist gear all gemmed for stam, armor kit on the chest, belt buckle and another stam gem on the belt and PVP helm. I am planning to get the 40 stam to boots to see if that will kick me to 41k. I am also using the valour token purchasable PVP helm with 32 stam meta and 24 stam blue gem plus the 37 stam tanking helm enchant. So this seems not that difficult a mark to hit. I figure I might need to add a ring or two that has tanking stats in order to get some more stam if I'm not quite there after the boot enchant but it doesn't seem as hard as I first thought when hearing about this. I'm at only about 1500 stam now so yeah the 3k mark and the 95k health for the VW would be rough, but the 75k mark doesn't seem that difficult.

D) From what I read the warlock doesn't really dps the drakes at all, he is spam health funneling the VW, so the hit to his dps from loading up on stam gear isn't a huge detriment since the raid can bring 2 extra dps that they couldn't before. They did it with bringing only 2 tanks and 2 healers and some hybrids who could heal when needed (boomkin is what they mentioned).

Good overview - thanks

The discussion on the voidwalker tanking Sartharion has been started in another thread as well ( Which Warlock Pet To Use And When ). Screens have been posted in the official forums with a voidwalker hitting 96k hp fully buffed. There have also been videos ( Damaged_Goods_VS_3_Drake_1.wmv Download File on FileFront ) although you basically don't see much except the warlock channeling health funnel (12% reduced damage with talents) all the time and some repositioning being done in case of a knockback. Together with great avoidance and armor, this makes the voidwalker a great, if not the perfect, tank for that encounter.

What's the best "rotation" for 0/53/18 shadow? & Glyphs?

I'm switching from FG/Ember so I'm used to fire and just want to make sure I'm not casting anything useless.

Can you give me an idea of what your VW is at pre-raid buffs and what gear you used to get there? I've gotten to 39.96K using glyph, 3 pieces of frost gear full gemmed and enchanted for stam (except boots couldn't find an enchanter on last night to do the stam enchant so will try to get that tonight) and the PVP valor token purchasable helm gemmed and enchanted for stam.

I've yet to see a consensus on the Curse of Doom/Agony question, although recent reports seem to trend toward using Doom. In which case you throw up Doom, Corruption, and Immolate, Shadowbolt spam until Dots need to be reapplied. Glyphs are corruption, immolate, and felguard. If you chose to go with agony instead of doom, replace the corruption glyph with agony. In either case, give your Felguard a chance to build up 5-10 frenzies, then pop Demonic Empowerment every time cooldown is up.

For Meta, you've got two things to consider, bloodlust/heroism and fight length. If the fight is going to last over three minutes, you want to try and use Meta at the beginning of the fight and every cooldown thereafter. If not, you want to time it around bloodlust/heroism. Immolation aura is a dps increase, so you will want to get into melee range and use that while in Meta form.

The big key is Meta usage. Ideally you want every proc and buff you can get (trinkets, bloodlust, haste potions, etc.) up when you're in demon form, as you can get some pretty awesome dps spikes, and you want to be able to use it as often as possible. If you're in a strong guild that's probably not going to be more than once per fight, so saving your form for the bloodlust is the biggest key to high dps.

I'm logged out in my VW tank gear set. VW sits at lil over 49k pre-raid buffs. My gear set could be improved but isn't really needed. If you're thinking about doing this you have to go all in. You have to gem/enchant stam/armor EVERYTHING. I put the +18 LW enchants on helm/shoulders

Be prepared to spend over 1000g. Farm HMGT and H AN for Essence of Gossamer and Commendation of Kael'thas. Void star talisman is also another good choice if you ever got it in BC. I keep kickin myself for passin on it in BC cuz at the time i thought it was worthless.

Hey guys, I figure I should chime in and offer one tidbit that doesn't seem to be common knowledge: If an elemental shaman doesn't have to drop Totem of Wrath, they can drop searing/fire elemental totem instead for another 300ish DPS

So in situations where speccing into DP/Meta could be a DPS loss for the lock, if you have >2800 spellpower (totem of wrath is 280) it might be worth factoring in the fact that a shaman can pump out a few more points if you have DP

This is, of course, assuming your ele shaman is actually pushing his own DPS and didn't just put somebody on follow with his G15 spamming lightning bolt ; )