Obsidian Sanctum Sartharion (3 Drakes)

Heya,

First of all thanks a lot for all the great videos, I've been a fan for a while now.

I have an idea re: the taunting method I'd like to bounce off people.

We're going to be trying out 25-man 3D this week and are intending on bringing 3 tanks, 4 at the outside.

How do we feel about a holy pally filling Cider's role in this vid? We now have a single-target ranged taunt, can heal ourselves up if we have an elemental or two on us 'til they get picked up and could spend the time in between taunts healing the tank.

Thoughts?

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Originally Posted by Sylnir

Heya,

First of all thanks a lot for all the great videos, I've been a fan for a while now.

I have an idea re: the taunting method I'd like to bounce off people.

We're going to be trying out 25-man 3D this week and are intending on bringing 3 tanks, 4 at the outside.

How do we feel about a holy pally filling Cider's role in this vid? We now have a single-target ranged taunt, can heal ourselves up if we have an elemental or two on us 'til they get picked up and could spend the time in between taunts healing the tank.

Thoughts?

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We were just discussing this tonight. A Holy Paladin would make an excellent stand-in

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Originally Posted by Sylnir

Heya,

First of all thanks a lot for all the great videos, I've been a fan for a while now.

I have an idea re: the taunting method I'd like to bounce off people.

We're going to be trying out 25-man 3D this week and are intending on bringing 3 tanks, 4 at the outside.

How do we feel about a holy pally filling Cider's role in this vid? We now have a single-target ranged taunt, can heal ourselves up if we have an elemental or two on us 'til they get picked up and could spend the time in between taunts healing the tank.

Thoughts?

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You dont have to limit it to anyone really. Hell, you could have a DPS war, kitty druid, resto druid, ret or holy pally do it. Just would have to be a good and well trusted player really.

To me, im on the fence with this being an exploit or not. The problem is that everything is tauntable now, which I personally hate, so you cant really call it an exploit as blizz in all there great wisdom made this possible. It is certainly a very cool idea but it just feels like a gimmick that will be hot fixed. But time will tell

Thanks for the great vid, I'm able to (somewhat) piece together a way this could be done in the 10-man version, though there are alot of things that I'm sure would work differently. My guild hasn't got the numbers to run anything on 25 yet, so we're stuck in 10's but from what I gather, the 10 version of this is significantly more difficult than the 25. Is there a chance we might see a vid of 10 at some point? My guild is still having trouble with lag and disconnects, so much that even just a single drake up hasn't happened yet, though not for lack of trying. We'll wipe 6 or 7 times before we eventually call it and just bring down the drake then kill Sarth. Thanks again for all the instructional vids!

Awesome video.

My guild spent 26 attempts last night working this, and its looking to be what is going to take us the distance.

We were using a Ret Paladin as our stand in taunter - mostly because he had tons of hit, so the chance of taunt was lower (as opposed to holy paladin).

Yea my experience with blizzard is they will "fix" it, maybe not immediately but ninja fix stuff like this like they always do.

However the main difficulty of the fights are not the breaths, it's Shadron+Vesperon acolyte debuffs and enraged adds, lava strikes and stupid people; it doesn't change regardless of which strat you use.

Some other notes
-5 tanks? you must be packing some hardcore dps :)
-that tank death would have been a sure wipe for us. We normally use 3 tanks
-you got hunters that can actually md!? When we do 3d I have to be in the landing position and aggro them myself sigh :(

Just signed up so I could respond to this thread.

How on earth can anyone call this an exploit. They came up with a unique and creative strategy on how to use their abilities and the landscape of the battle to defeat the boss. This is what Warcraft should be about. Using your own brain to find a way to beat a boss rather than opening up a web page and reading how to do it. I for one congratulate them on coming up with a strategy that works and hope Blizzard isn't so short sighted as to think they have to change the mechanics because it is not what they intended. I guarantee this does not make it an easy fight. Who knows, maybe Blizzard did intend for this to be an option to those who were smart enough to come up with the strategy.

Have you ever had a taunt resist using this particular strategy? I definitely like it better than the cooldown rotation we're using now.

Glyphs that increase taunt % make it a non issue for warriors but unfortunately Feral Druid "Growl" is still considered a spell for hit and therefore takes the 17% miss chance instead of 8%.

My taunt failed a couple times but Cider was easily able to take a couple melee hits until my cd was up again.

Cider,

A few additional questions I had.

1. How did you handle controling the number of blazes you had? with all the cuts in the edit I couldnt really tell how you kept the number of blazes under control

2. Did you find the position of sarth where you did troublesome at all? With cleaves or tail wipes? Also, where did the MT healers position during the fight? Where they just with the raid or put some where else?

thanks for the video again.

A few questions:

1. Have you tried this on 10-man.
2. What is the minimum dps and minimum tank health for guilds attempting this?
3. What would you rather have as a raid composition? You say it was a little bad with 6-7 healers 5 tanks.

Gnurken, there is a huge difference between cheating and what was done here. They defeated Sarth with 3 drakes in a fair manner within the mechanics of the game. I commend them for coming up with a solution within that framework. To compare this with commending someone who cheats is a ludicrous jump in logic. There is always someone who likes to demean the achievements of others by flexing their muscles and saying "I did it the hard way, and I'm proud of that", but usually it is just a case of frustration because they did not think of the easier solution themselves. As I said previously, how do you know that this is not how the fight was meant to go. Maybe they intended for that damage to be avoided and for a party not to succeed unless it was diverted. Maybe you did it the 'wrong' way. If they change the mechanics of the fight, then I am quite sure Ciderhelm's guild will come up with an alternate way to do it.

We tried this strategy last night. We only brought 3 tanks (DK on Sarth, Warrior on Drakes, Paladin on adds). We had a DPS Warrior doing the taunting like Cider did in the video. It worked great. We are consistently getting to Vesperon with no deaths, and minimal healing on the Sarth tank. Which is better than we did before with the old strat.

We are going back in tonight and having our Holy Paladins spec for DG so that we can get past the point where Vesperon lands. Once we do that, we got it!

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Originally Posted by Gnurken

I still wanna hear Ciderhelm speak on this issue.

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You're welcome to look at post #34. As said, this is neither an exploit nor a cheat. This isn't to say it won't be hotfixed if it's not intended to work this way.

Beyond that, I'm pruning out the last several posts to keep this on topic.

First post I ever make here, so first off all, HAI GUSY!

Secondly, we tried this last night. We have a pretty crap healer setup atm, very few priests and paladins, so this is the only tactic that we can use most of the time.

We decided to go in and try, and we also didn't have our prot paladin available, so a fury warrior respecced for add tanking, but I (resto druid) had to go do the taunting myself.

I glyphed with growl glyph and so did the MT (druid tank), and we went on trying. First thing i can say here is that the video Ciderhelm posts here makes it look EXTREMELY easy. It is not as easy as it looks, not by a long shot! It requires absolutely perfect timing, and requires some tries until you figure out the movement required to avoid the breath. It seems to me that Sartharion's breath has exactly 30 yard range, and therefore we must do the taunt right after he starts casting (while moving if possible) and quickly go away from the 30 yard range.

This worked fine last night, I managed to pull some successful taunts consecutively, but I did have a problem I have still to fix. When I got no lava waves, it's fine, I taunt everything with no problem at all. If there is a lava wave coming from the sides (the one that leaves 2 spots open), its also no problem. However, I had big problems when lava waves came, forcing me to go right side, out of range for taunting, or sometimes in range, but forcing me to quickly move towards the boss, taunt, and start moving back, and this never worked.

So my question is: Inside the lava, are we safe from any lava wave? You seem to mention that in your movie, but It's not clear wether you say it's a safe spot so that you need to move very little from lava waves, or if actually the lava itself makes you safe from lava waves.

Thanks a lot

Creative use of game mechanics, I like it :) But I'm not sure that we'll switch to it.

Instead, we've been making good progress using another mechanic (not mentioned here or in the Fusion guide, but becoming a topic over at EJ) and that is Fire Resistance.

The way resistance works has changed. There are now certain thresholds which give you a guaranteed minimum resist.
104 - minimum damage resistance 10%
178 - minimum damage resistance 20%
277 - minimum damage resistance 30%
415 - minimum damage resistance 40%

An aura or totem plus a Lesser Flask of Resistance - Item - World of Warcraft should get you above that second tier. That means you gaurantee a 20% reduction (possibly more) on each breath, which in turn means your high stam druid can survive all but the biggest breaths without cooldowns, and the big breaths probably only need a minor CD (e.g. hand of sacrifice) to survive. It may also be possible to get above that third tier, although the absence of craftable FR gear makes that difficult. Leatherworkers have a fur lining that might be required to realistically achieve this.

I do like the level of control offered by the video strategy though.

My 1st post here after being a long time reader, 1st of all I wanna say to you Cider, excellent vid on this fight and all the others you've made so far! They have really helped me being a raid leader and have lead us to victory numerous times. Keep up the great work.

Now for this fight we bring in 5 tanks.

Druid on Sarth
Druid/DK on adds
Pally on Drakes
Myself, Warrior for the taunts.

We have 6 healers.
3 on MT
1 each on the add tanks
1 on the drake tank

We tried this strategy last night and was consistantly gettin Shadron to around 50% before wiping.

One of the main problems we were having was melee dying to the void zones. We've concluded that we had too much melee and they were all cluster fucked together to react to the void zones in time. Next time we head into OS we will definately have more ranged than melee.

Another problem we had was the Hunters md on the drakes as they landed. Our hunters said that the md was not working and the drake would instead aggro to them. I've noticed that when the drakes land they are not targetable right away and/or their aggro table isn't properly working. Seems like you have to wait for them to start moving before the aggro table kicks in. Do you think this is the problem, that the Hunters should just wait till they start moving before they fire off their md?

Another thing I was thinking of changing is bringing in another healer so the Holy Pally can work on the taunts seeing as how he can heal himself up. This would allow me to help on adds having Vigi on the MT as well as picking up the drakes should any run loose. Thoughts?

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Originally Posted by Demongate

Another problem we had was the Hunters md on the drakes as they landed. Our hunters said that the md was not working and the drake would instead aggro to them. I've noticed that when the drakes land they are not targetable right away and/or their aggro table isn't properly working. Seems like you have to wait for them to start moving before the aggro table kicks in. Do you think this is the problem, that the Hunters should just wait till they start moving before they fire off their md?

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If your hunters are survival they need to not use explosion shot for the MD. We had a few wipes so far with raiding due to the hunters (who were all BM prior to the patch) would MD with explosion shot and get insta gibbed by the boss as it ran by them. The only other thing I can think of is that the hunters are wasting there MD on something other than the drake due to it taking a while for it to become targetable.

When Sarth 3D was designed, using any taunt to avoid a breath was not feasible. Paladins did not have a single target taunt and warriors taunt range was not large enough range to make taunt/intervene useful.

For all the people complaining about the taunt being an exploit....Do it your own damn way and don't worry about it. Jesus, it's just a video game.