Sartharion + Drakes Feedback Thread!

Dahlaine wrote:Healing: Healing was generally good although there seemed to be always see a healer get hit by a flame wall at some point during in each of the attempts which makes it difficult for the tanks and DPS to carry on when there's three seperate encounters going on at once. However practice makes perfect and I think we're on our way there.

I'm wondering whether this fight won't be easier with 2 healers than 3, as the extra dps makes a big difference. However, that requires a bit more epic healing skills than the 3-man Oracle team we normally have. We CAN to start training for this by sticking with just two healers to Naxx, though it's not essential. Although once we progress to Sartharion2D, I'm not sure the extra damage won't be a bit too epic for just 2.

Dahlaine wrote:Hmm. Perhaps we should send through one DPS to take down the twilight add in the portal then?

The twilight aura inside the portals does steady but significant damage, so you'd have to be FAST at killing him or you just up the difficulty of the fight. So send in at least 2 dps or it's not worth the trouble. A good +healing aura may be able to do it however.[/quote]

I think a big part of the difficulty people are having in this fight is the amount of moving parts. There's a boss, a drake and waves as a minimum, plus adds that you need to avoid/run to the add-tank. Let me type in my strategy for dealing with the waves AS RANGED/HEALER, because I'm not sure everyone has heard them (apologies if you have!):

- On Sartharion's island there are two parallel dry lava streams, running North-South.

Code:

+++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++
++ \\            // ++
++  \\    T    //  ++
++  ||    S    |R  ++
++  ||    SM  |R  ++
++  ||    SM  |R  ++
++  ||    S    |R  ++
++  //          \\  ++
++ //            \\ ++
+++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++

- Sartharion is tanked splat in the middle of the two (middle of the island), facing North (T).
- Ranged stand on the eastern of the two dry lava streams (Rs). Here's what I do: I stand on this line FACING SLIGHTLY NORTH.
- If the wave comes from the south, the lava line is safe, so I just stay where I am. If the wave comes from the north I catch it coming early (as I'm facing it) and quickly run in to the centre, to stand on the melee (M). I stand between his legs, closer to his rear leg than to the front one.
- After a few seconds run back to the eastern lava line (Rs).

This works for me and should work well for all ranged and healers (except possibly hunters and others who can reach Sartharion from the easternmost edge of the island). Only time I failed this was when I lost focus and got distracted looking for Shadron's healthbar out of curiosity and became the first casualty on that attempt... >.< When the drake starts to put up voids on the lava line, just run up and down it as there's always a clear spot (keep to the north bit of the line as the drake is tanked near the south of the island).

I suppose for the melee you can use the lava line as your target to run to (assuming you're not doing it already)?

Here's a very visual guide to doing this: http://pwniepedia.com/index.php?title=Sartharion (the lava lines aren't shown, but it's where the tree is standing )

Feedback for Monday 2nd February, Sartharion + Shadron downed (WWS report on this thread: http://wheremurlocsdare.omgforum.net/tactics-f2/wws-reports-t121.htm).

- The WWS report says the kill took a little under 9 min 30 sec during which we did 6.1 million damage (11k dps) and took 2.3 million damage. Of damage taken, the MT took the most by far (1.4 million, 2/3 physical, 1/3 fire, a single shadow breath) with the drake tank taking "only" 240 000 damage (3/5 physical, 1/5 fire, 1/5 shadow). This is good news, as it means the OT can definitely grab another drake without getting flattened, we just need to come up with a nice healing strategy for handling the spiky 10-11k flame breaths on the MT and the steadier 5k shadow breaths on the OT from each drake.

- Sartharion moved on the pull so he was a bit further west than usual. This threw me out a few times when running in to hide from North-tsunamis. I've made a mental note to watch where the centre is, rather than just "run in and hug the dragon". Note: the tsunamis are NOT a death sentence (I outhealed one on myself, it's a 10-second DoT for up to 40k damage altogether), but they can and should be avoided especially as we're learning the fight and healers have more tunnelvision than usual!

- When South-tsunamis come, the MT has to move to the NW corner of the platform to avoid getting hit. This puts him out of range of the healers (normally all on the Eastern lava line) for a few seconds, which may be too long once we start trying with 2+ drakes. I noticed D was standing right on the northern edge of the platform, did that let you reach the MT on South-tsunamis?

- The adds were being controlled nicely yesterday, especially on the last 10% when they spawn en masse. Very well-handled!

About next try - if we DON'T manage to get 2 drakes down before our time is nearly up, I suggest we leave the "new" drake up (i.e. kill Shadron) then learn to do Sarth+1 with Tenebron/Vesperon as the extra. That way we can practice that drake's abilities.

I would agree that the control of those adds at 10% was pretty good last night.

There are 3, I believe, different ways of dealing with those adds that spawn at 10%.

One is to completely ignore the adds and focus on killing the boss including the add tank. This option, however has a few flaws as the adds will be able to roam free and slaughter the healers and we could end up wiping as its not a safe option.

The second is to leave the add tank to try and take all the adds and suck up the damage they do whilst all the DPS focus on killing Sarth. One of the safer options in my opinion.

The third option, as I see it, is to stop DPS on Sarth and kill all the adds that spawn, then once they are dead, focus back onto Sarth. I believe that we used this tactic during the fight last night and that it helped keep the healers alive. Personal preference is to kill the adds as soon as they spawn to stop them for doing any damage to the healers at all.

After Saturday 7th Feb (first attempt at Sartharion, Shadron and Vesperon - Shadron removed)...

We had 3-5 attempts at two drakes up, but with the fire breath sometimes critting Cardinal for over 30k (after the -25% health debuff) we decided to remove Shadron (+fire damage) and focus on learning Vesperon (-25% hp).

- The elemental tank wasn't taking much damage from what I saw, so perhaps he doesn't need to go tank spec, just get better gear? The adds also seemed to be nicely controlled.
- With a pally tank, a Disc priest (Improved Fortitude, Grace: 3% less damage taken, Shields/Divine Aegis procs, Pain Suppression) would definitely help on MT healing. There's also a metagem (Effulgent Skyflare Diamond) that reduces spell damage taken by 2% - might be useful for the MT to have a second tankhelm with this in it?
- On almost all attempts we got Sartharion down to 75% before the first drake landed... is it worth it to burn Heroism and cooldowns in this initial phase? On our best attempts we got Shadron (the first to land) down to under 60%, before Card got hit by a spellcrit fire breath.
- The drake tank needs extra healing when tanking two drakes, he'll be getting up to 2 x 5k shadow breaths, which will hurt when the OT is missing a quarter hp. So need to turn up the healing power once two land. On the last attempt I kept lifebloom and rejuvenation up on both tanks (not sure that it's not wasted to have Rejuv on the MT with a pally to care for him), and that helped considerably.
- Once two drakes land, there can be up to two void zones up at the same time. This can make things cramped on the thin red lava line that the ranged stand on - need to remember to move out of them! (doh @ self >.<)

Otherwise a good raidnight - Vesperon + Shadron is the nastiest combo as the former weakens the tank and the second one powers up Sartharion's fire breath. The third drake will not affect the MT further, but will make the OTs task harder (heavier shadow breaths). Very good job done by Taerix on her trial by fire! And I didn't screenshot it but it was good to hear Dahl say she'd won new respect for healers after her first night as a restomoo..

On Monday we bring Vesperon and Sartharion down.

As before, this relates to the 2+ Sarth raid.

I think we made a mistake with the choice of drakes this week. I had completly not noticed / ignored the fact that we were attempting this. I personally just turn up to raid, don't care what we do! Its always fun. So I don't tend to read up on things that often. But from what I have managed to google about this is that you -need- a druid with 50k health or close to that to complete this. All the RG's on ER have done this (I think that's true only going off the 2 I know which have). We don't have that option at the moment as Advent is no longer in use. I think we should avoid this combination for the moment until it gets nerfed (Which it will, no way they will leave this in place for long the bitching will start....)

Other than that, I think we did rather well. A few of the normal fuck ups but that's normal. I was rather impressed with how long we lived at times.

As I said in the raid the healing needed to be sorted better. We had all 3 healers spamming Card and Gimi dropping below 30% hP every 3-4 seconds. This is clearly unacceptable as it did cause problems for the 3 - 4 first goes. You really need to stick to your target 100% during this fight with more than 1 drake. Raid healing also needs to be heavily looked into. As the raid was getting its arsed kicked. I am sure people can do a bit more themselfs but the healing was pretty poor on the raid. I no smeg all about Shaman healing spells so I don't know if Dahl was suited for the job. Please can you elabertate on that Dahl?

We also need to look into how we can get Card above 27K HP AFTER the debuff has taken place. I've been doing some basic research and found we can get you to 26.2 (I think I did the maths correct) with out any gear changes, but we need to get you to use some more stam gear for that encounter. If that requires a new set of gear then so be it but wiping on an encounter with a RNG for 28k damage is just a waste of everyone's time. There is no gurantee that we will not get that damage during the fight.

I think enchants/potions/flasks/food need to be looked into. If there is a world buff also might be worth it (One from Zul'darak?) or we bring in Advent.

If you down him tonight in my absence with that HP penalty ill take myself outside and shoot myself. But personally, I very much doubt it will happen with the RNG involved.

Its not impossible, just requires some gear changes. Its not a lack of skill or comptence thats our issue here. Its a gear check and we are failing. Well more of a class check. We can do it for sure, just need to remove the RNG aspect of it.

D

Derky wrote:But from what I have managed to google about this is that you -need- a druid with 50k health or close to that to complete this. All the RG's on ER have done this (I think that's true only going off the 2 I know which have).

It needs a druid tank or it needs heavy mitigation (such as a Disc priest brings). And it definitely needs a tank with over 27k or with massive fire resistance (it's Sartharion's 30k crit fire breath that's one-shotting our MT). With more than one pally there's even the option to keep a HoS up most of the time, and rotate with other classes who can mitigate.

Personally, it's a fight with loads of moving parts - and yes, perhaps Vesperon + 1 drake is a toughie, and should only be tried once we know we can dance with Shadron + Tenebron up. I think we're learning, and once we have a tank who can survive a crit fire breath we will learn the rest of the fight quickly.

Druid + shaman aren't very good at tank AND raidhealing at the same time - I think Blizzard saw this as a "bring a druid tank or bring a priest" fight. We had neither last night, which was a pity. And D is right in that healing needed tweaking! Raidhealing won't be a problem if we have two capable tank healers (pally and priest), because the third healer can then help mitigate raid damage. Our best bet at doing this is to have Zuzu/Top in the raid, with one of them specced Disc will increase our chances at success even further. Alternatively gear Marv up for Sarth tanking.. :p

As far as I understand, most of the damage on the tanks is caused by breaths - a massive 30k crit fire breath on the Sarth tank, and a lesser shadow breath on the drake tank (multiplied by the number of drakes up). It's spikey damage, there's no way around that - so we need our healing team to be heavier on pallies/priests, as it's a much bigger challenge for trees (and restomoos?). We had a suboptimal combo of block tanks and raw healers, which made the fight more of a challenge than we need it to be when we're learning it.

The Zuldrak buff doesn't stack with BoK (bastards!), but perhaps others do. And yes, a flask of 2k hp will definitely help.


One more thing:

Wowwiki wrote:Vesperon's disciple will place Twilight Torment (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=58835) on the raid frequently, which increases fire and shadow damage taken by 75% and causes you to deal damage to yourself on hit. It used to be possible to temporarily remove the Twilight Torment debuff with any damage other than autoattacking, but the ability was changed with patch 3.0.8 and this is not possible anymore. This disciple can be ignored if fighting Vesperon alone, but is extremely dangerous in a multi-drake Sartharion fight.

So, we have the 10k firebreath by Sartharion (15k crit), the -25% health from Vesperon, the 100% fire damage increase from Shadron (20k or 25k crit fire breath) AND the 75% fire/shadow damage from Vesperon's ninjadisciple hiding inside the portal.

This could explain the 30k+ fire breath crits Cardinal was being splatted to! If so, we should practice sending the dps squad in to nuke the portal disciple.

Yeah, it seems that Vesperon's portal can't be ignored. The dude inside does massive carnage to us all with increased fire damage and 2k fire damage on attack! We will have to deal with him.

The other drake's portal, which we previously ignored, can still be safely ignored. It just reduces damage to Sartharion by 1%.

I think we need to concentrate more on Mitigating the damage via Cardinal's gear (Or another tank as Card is not our only tank!) before we start stacking the raid in any shape or form. All encounters are possible with out stacking its just not the easy way of doing things.

Personally despise raid stacking / changing people's spec's just for an encounter (Unless we are short on people of course)


Disc priest isnt the answer imo. Better gear on the tanks is. A disc priest won't solve everything as I am sure you know but it is an option for after the tanks gear has been sorted. No way can a disc migitae 4k damage constantly. Been a long long time since i played on but reviewing the latest talents and spec's I really can't see that happening.

I can and did do on the last raid heal both Gimi and Card at the same time "Bacon" ftw again. But, I can not output the HPS needed to keep them both alive at once sadly. The damage is at different times with different variables so I either spam and go OOM in 60 seconds or wait and try and time it which just doesnt work.

Raid healing and tank gear are the factors here.

Didn't know about the portal, that just sucks even more balls really...Though I guess if we can get that down the fight is ours.

D

Mike,

Simply installing WSS 3.0 on a second server will not automatically set up the LB on the cluster node. WSS WFE will pick up that the server is there and add it to the farm but thats about it. The WFE will need to be configured via CA to allow the load ballancing to take place. You will also need to set this up on the cluster node directly. I recomend using IIS 6.0 due to the configurables located with in the package.

What you will find is the new server will redirect to the default location. It will -presume- that your WSS environment is Extranet/Internet based. This reading you're post is not what you want.....

CA > Operations > Default locale > Change the default to http://localhost/ and delete the extranet zone from the farm. NB This will only exist for this server as SharePoint is thick....

Once that is done change the local redirect to suit you. IE. Http://wss1.com will be your localhost change the redirect to wss2.com which is your actual website. If you are using BIGIP do this there also to save confusion.

If this doesnt work, i suspect you are behind a DMZ with extranet access router via BIGIP or something else, which in that case send me and email.

Rich

Derky wrote:Mike,

Simply installing WSS 3.0 on a second server will not automatically set up the LB on the cluster node. WSS WFE will pick up that the server is there and add it to the farm but thats about it. The WFE will need to be configured via CA to allow the load ballancing to take place. You will also need to set this up on the cluster node directly. I recomend using IIS 6.0 due to the configurables located with in the package.

What you will find is the new server will redirect to the default location. It will -presume- that your WSS environment is Extranet/Internet based. This reading you're post is not what you want.....

CA > Operations > Default locale > Change the default to http://localhost/ and delete the extranet zone from the farm. NB This will only exist for this server as SharePoint is thick....

Once that is done change the local redirect to suit you. IE. Http://wss1.com will be your localhost change the redirect to wss2.com which is your actual website. If you are using BIGIP do this there also to save confusion.

If this doesnt work, i suspect you are behind a DMZ with extranet access router via BIGIP or something else, which in that case send me and email.

Rich

*Facepalm*

Cardinal wrote:

Derky wrote:Mike,

Simply installing WSS 3.0 on a second server will not automatically set up the LB on the cluster node. WSS WFE will pick up that the server is there and add it to the farm but thats about it. The WFE will need to be configured via CA to allow the load ballancing to take place. You will also need to set this up on the cluster node directly. I recomend using IIS 6.0 due to the configurables located with in the package.

What you will find is the new server will redirect to the default location. It will -presume- that your WSS environment is Extranet/Internet based. This reading you're post is not what you want.....

CA > Operations > Default locale > Change the default to http://localhost/ and delete the extranet zone from the farm. NB This will only exist for this server as SharePoint is thick....

Once that is done change the local redirect to suit you. IE. Http://wss1.com will be your localhost change the redirect to wss2.com which is your actual website. If you are using BIGIP do this there also to save confusion.

If this doesnt work, i suspect you are behind a DMZ with extranet access router via BIGIP or something else, which in that case send me and email.

Rich

*Facepalm*

Uhm....Wrong forum!

Sorry!

D

Monday 9th February: several tries on Sarth + Vesperon, then trash respawned and we decided to end the pain.

Very educational raid! First and foremost - the dps needs to go through the twilight portal on Vesperon and gank the disciple within. Why? Because while that disciple is up, the raid is debuffed with Twilight Residue, which makes anyone take damage when they hit something. So he must die, or anyone doing damage, tanks included, will take 2k damage extra per hit. Not fun! Once we figured this out, it became very easy to keep both tanks up (the elemental tank still took a fair bit of damage), and the portal phase became a good regen phase.

We had Enth on MT duty, Card on drake duty and Bal (dps spec) offtanking the elemental adds. Zuzu and Marv stayed outside to heal the three tanks, while Dahlaine went into the portal with the remaining 4 dps (Taq, Kayte, Yazminea and Taerix). Soon as the disciple died, they phased back out and had 5-10 seconds to dps down Vesperon before the next portal. Every window of dps Vesperon lost about 15% hp. He goes down very fast with dedicated dps, so we need to find a way to down the disciple faster!

Nice work avoiding the firewalls - our best attempt lasted long enough for me to use Tranquility twice, so it's a long sustained fight with little room for error. We're very close to getting him, and now we've figured out the tactic, it should be a doozy getting Shadron + Tenebron down - I believe we're attempting that combo next time.

So status:

- WMD + Sartharion = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Shadron = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Vesperon = Work in Progress
- WMD + Sartharion + Tenebron = ???

Very good raid!

If you want I can try and spec arcane - there is a new arcane build that does huge amounts of damage but uses exceptional amounts of mana, but that way we would down the disciple much faster and perhaps get through the fight better?

Just a suggestion of course...

Can you post a link to the build Yaz?

I'd be tempted to stay frost if I were you - you do decent damage, and the winter's chill debuff benefits all DPS casters in the raid. (plus of course your elemental helps with mana regen somewhat). 3/3 in imp blizzard provides good snaring too when required.

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Earthen+Ring&n=Kropotkin

Is one example of a possible arcane spec

Next time we will be trying Tenebron and Shadron.

Tenebron is going to require heavy AoE (he's the one with eggs). We will ignore his portal and whelps will come flying out of his portal for us to round up and kill.

Tenebron lands 30 seconds after the fight starts. Shadron (who is the easiest of all drakes) lands 90 seconds into the fight, giving us one free minute to kill Tenebron, which should be quite easy as you can ignore his portal.

AoE damage is more important than burst damage for our next attempt. Note that Tenebron increases shadow damage by 100%, meaning those void zones are going to one-shot anybody who lingers in them.

We will leave Vesperon (the one from last week) until we're comfortable doing 2 drakes.

Brief throw-in of a random thought-reply. The Zul'Drak buff doesn't work outside of Zul'Drak, D, if the one you're talking about is the one from the shrine-statue-things. I've had it before and left the area and it went bye bye.

*trots off to take more cold meds and then go to work! oh the joy of being out of one's head while working with people and money!*

Okay never posted feedback before, but hopefully this'll help future OTs.
This is the positioning I used to tank the drake. Flame walls from behind could safely be ignored, and flame walls from the far side you saw in plenty of time. and you could just strafe to the left to about where the little circle of solid looking ground is. Although saying nearer the edge is better for giving more space to whoever is picking up whelps etc (so Balgarim informed me.)

The good news is: I picked the wrong 2 drakes last week. If I'd left up the right drakes, we would've had an extra 40 seconds to kill the whelp-hatching drake before it landed. The downside is, we'd need to leave up the dreaded 25% health reducing drake.

I'm not sure we have the DPS to do those 2 drakes. I've read that to kill Tenebron before the 2nd drake lands, all the DPS need to be doing 3k minimum otherwise you'll never do it.

I'm not blaming our DPSers for that. Doing 3k DPS in 10-man Naxx loot isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a requirement to getting this goal. For now, probably best to stick to 1 drake till we've got Uldaur gear.

Had some time to do a few WowWebStats searches today. Starting with the basic 10-man Sartharion search (best of guild, public reports) I get this page: http://wowwebstats.com/?npc=i51&public=true&best=true - results are sorted by raid duration.

If you want to do your own searches note that Sarth has 2.5 million hp - so if a Sarth kill reports 3 million damage done it's just Sarthation they downed, with just over 1 million added per drake (not counting elementals and whelps).

Here's a few sample kills by various guilds/groups:

One drake kills

Sarth + Tenebron: http://wowwebstats.com/cye4aurv5y5rm (5.7M dmg, 5'13")
Sarth + Shadron: http://wowwebstats.com/b1pzk2zozc3je?s=5768-22647&m (5.3M dmg, 7'17")
Sarth + Vesperon: http://wowwebstats.com/zslcyp4c1udra?s=17471-32823&m (5.2M dmg, 4'40")

I assume Shadron takes longer because you HAVE to kill his disciple, while with the other two it's optional to go into portals? Or maybe it was just a crappy raid. Anyway, this is just an unscientific preview of the kind of dps/tanking/healing needed for Sarth1D.

Two drake kills

Sarth + Vesperon + Tenebron (ER's Syntax): http://wowwebstats.com/21qabdlu34klq?s=134063-150562&m (7.4M dmg, 7'02")
Sarth + Shadron + Tenebron: http://wowwebstats.com/gtyml2fxk5mqa?s=33260-51587&m (7M dmg, 7'11")
Sarth + Shadron + Vesperon: ?

As far as I can see, most Sarth2D kills by far are of Vesperon + Tenebron (lost health and shadow damage and whelps), though I did dig up a single Shadron + Tenebron (fire and shadow damage).

Three drake ZOMG kills

http://wowwebstats.com/gr4fto31gptzu?s=78301-103867&m (8M dmg, 7'26", druid MT)
http://wowwebstats.com/nhrppar4ebgsw?s=55515-84721&m (8.2M dmg, 8'02", paladin MT)
http://wowwebstats.com/uecwtcqjr3toc?s=36012-57171&m (8M dmg, 7'05", death knight MT)

That's raidwide 17k damage per second, sustained over 8 minutes. And if we have 2 healers doing 0 dps and 3 tanks doing much less than 1k dps each (to avoid selfharming on the auras), that means the remaining 5 dps need to do a comfortable and sustained 3k dps each. With an extra healer and one less dpser, make that up to 3.5k dps or it's not doable. And that involves jumping into portals, changing targets, moving to avoid firewalls and voids, etc...

The Drake-o-meter reads:

Marveen wrote:- WMD + Sartharion = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Shadron = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Tenebron = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Vesperon = Work in Progress
- WMD + Sartharion + two drakes = ???

First time I have actually tanked since level 60! Really enjoyed it. Fucking chaos on the whelps but was good to see how easy it can be with some organization.

Good raid!

D

I figure we'll get very comfortable with doing all the different types of Drake before we worry about trying 2 again, assuming Uldaur doesn't come out first and we forget about Sarth for a while.

I healed for first raid at Vesperon's portal, and the initial 2 attempts were disastrous - I kept healing people not in the portal yet and losing people inside (no indication at targeting). After that, (with the use of Prayer of Healing that can start building immediatelly after the "transfer") we were in general OK on the other side

It is a problem we will meet at Ulduar too - our holy healer is slow on learning new situations and needs some time to grasp how things work

Do you use unitframes that are set to fade out people not in range? I found it helps (loads!), as those who go through show as out of range and then you know when people have gone through early on - instead of waiting to see if the island starts to look a bit lonely.. :p I am partial to XPerl, but I know many prefer Grid. When people in my group are out of range they fade out - notice Circus in my party:



(I keep meaning to take a screenie in-raid, but find myself getting distracted >.> If someone can remind me to do it on Thursday there's a chance I'll remember - I'm most likely to remember it on Noth or during trash...)

I think we did very well - the Holy priest and the Tree are both better at raid healing than at coping with tank nukage, but once we start Ulduar we'll have D back in Team Oracle, and then he can rub his fat bacon on the tanks...

The Drake-o-meter reads:

Marveen wrote:- WMD + Sartharion = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Tenebron (30'') = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Shadron (75'') = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Vesperon (120'') = Profit!
- WMD + Sartharion + Tenebron (30'') + Vesperon (90'') = ???
- WMD + Sartharion + Tenebron (30'') + Shadron (45'') = ???
- WMD + Sartharion + Shadron (75'') + Vesperon (45'') = ???
- WMD + Sartharion + Tenebron (30'') + Shadron (45'') + Vesperon (45'') = ???