Icecrown Deathbringer Saurfang

[Fledern]

We got him down on 10man with 3 different groups ranging from great geared to average geared. And last night we tried him on 25man. One of our 6 healers had to leave just before so we went in with 24 people / 5 healers. We got owned on the soft enrage. 14% was our best try but marks + enrage became near impossible to heal. We'll try with 6 healers on tuesday. Till the enrage it was cakewalk though. I think we got 2 marks till the enrage and a 3rd during enrage.

[Mr.Winkle]

First mark went off on a holy priest, he shadow word deathed himself to speed things up, but that doesn't really matter.

Whilst in the grand scheme of things it probably didn't matter for your kill, i believe the boss only gets the 5% heal if the person dies from the mark. So if he actually killed himself with SW: Death rather than the mark killing him he saved you an additional 5% on the boss.

Edit: Actually i think this could be wrong, can anyone confirm if the marked dies from another means other than mark damage whether the boss still gets the 5% heal?

Also on a seperate note, on 10man, can anyone say how long it should take before the boss puts out is 1st mark?

[tanksagain]

We did it the other night on 10man with 1 pally tank, 2 healers and 7 DPS. We wiped 3 times due to Mark of the Fallen Champion hitting healers and other clothies. It was just very hard to keep them alive. The successful attempt was when the first mark hit a plate wearer. The plate seemed to take almost no damage from Mark.

Has anyone else noticed this and is the "melee" damage effect of Mark really mitigated by armor?

If so, it would seem who gets Mark adds a bit of RNG to the success of the fight.

[Toxsin]

Just read over all of this and have searched various other forums without luck (I could have possibly missed it of course).

I have been looking for some information regarding Rune of Blood and whether or not he generates BP from hitting a tank that has it (ie. 1 tank strat).

My guilds warrior tank and myself were trying to monitor the BP gains but due to people being bad and not being spaced enough, we could not be sure whether or not he was infact gaining BP from hitting someone that had Rune Of Blood.

We opted to go back to dual tanking and got the kill last night (25m version).

[Mr.Winkle]

Just read over all of this and have searched various other forums without luck (I could have possibly missed it of course).

I have been looking for some information regarding Rune of Blood and whether or not he generates BP from hitting a tank that has it (ie. 1 tank strat).

My guilds warrior tank and myself were trying to monitor the BP gains but due to people being bad and not being spaced enough, we could not be sure whether or not he was infact gaining BP from hitting someone that had Rune Of Blood.

We opted to go back to dual tanking and got the kill last night (25m version).

Either stated earlier in this thread or perhaps in the ICC threads the 1 tank method means the tank generates 1 BP every time he is struck.

[Gargash]

So Friday night we tried DBS the normal way on 25 and couldnt get it down, we would get to about 17% before marks started dieing then he would be back to 50%, so we tried to let the marks die and see how it does, after letting the first mark die we had him to 30% before the second one was applied, from there we just kept dpsing and healing new marks as they came out and downed him. If marks are becoming a problem then i would suggest letting the first 1-2 marks die.

[Fluxx]

You need loads of dps... its just focus and hope you dont get to much marks of the fallen.

Allso note that our hunters who used Feint death when we called it a whipe still got Mark of the fallen on them when he reseted... so they started with the debuff make sure verybody dies.. or let a pallading DI someone without the mark.

Just downed him 10 min ago, we needed about 5 trys

[grale]

Does anyone know anything about his hard enrage? Like how long it has till it goes off? Me and my fellows believe that it's a timer based on when he hits soft enrage. If so then how long from soft enrage does it go off?

I don't know if this has been answered yet, I didn't see it in any of the posts but sometimes I miss things. We had him down to 30% and only 1 mark so i know we were doing fine with the technical side of the fight so I'm thinking that it was a dps problem.

[keebz]

I assume if tanks pop a cooldown (or even an armor pot) when DBS has upwards of 80+ Blood Power, their damage reduction will also benefit any players with Mark of the Fallen Champion. Would the same thing then go for external cooldowns such as Pain Suppression? This way you can pop a cooldown on the current tank and the people with Mark of the Fallen Champion take less damage (mostly a problem for non-plate) as a result, making it a kind of "chain cooldown". This would save a lot of unnecessary healing and/or choosing which players get external healing cooldowns.

This is for 25 man but I presume it would work well on 10 man if you are having problems, provided it is true.

Perhaps it is worth noting via an addition in the transcript.

[dudyy]

This definitely is a pretty easy fight, maybe its just cause im a hunter but to me it seems like a pretty straight forward fight.

I did it today on 10man. probably have heard this strategy before but here is how my guild did this.

First all dps on boss. then hunter sets down a freezing trap, before adds spawn,
then we had a boomkin root one while all ranged dps killed the first one
then hunter concussion shots te trapped one and sorta kites it around but should it should go down fairly quickly.
then you pretty much repeat that.
Another note all melee just stays on the boss, we used 1 tank for this and 2 heals so it was fairly easy.

[dudyy]

OH yea forgot to mention with that strategy we got the achievement for less then 3 marks, i think we managed to only have 1 mark out, and that was on me, and it was like with less than 5%.

oh yea forgot to mention the make up in case anyone was wondering

Tanks, warrior and paladin
Heals, priest and shaman
DPS, 1 hunter, 2 boomkins, 1 mage, 1 warlock and 1 rogue

[Wolfè]

We downed this one on 10 man the 13th after finally beeing able to enter the place due to the instance "limit" crap.

Anyway, I would just like to point out some minor tips about making the whole add phase a tad easier.

Our tank/healer setup was
3 healers (Paladin, shaman and holy priest)
1 Tank (Paladin)

we also had a hunter, and Boomkin with us so the kiting should be easy.
However, as we had some dps DKs with us, and Paladin tank they did forget to time their AoE abilties from time to time making some of the adds aggroing them and giving Saurfang some uneeded power stacks.

So more or less fixed this with the simple solution of having the paladin healer (me) standing in the middle of the room, but at max range, with righeous fury on giving me more threat then usual, and making the adds aggro me as they spawned more or less 99% of the time, thus leaving the melee alone, and the adds free for the ranged to kite and kill.

other then that, I read some guy talking about Defensive CDs etc, I would also just like to point out the fact that if you got paladins with you, they can all use Hand of Protection on people with the mark, and it will obviously make them immune to the damage for the duration of the buff, though ofc not removing the mark, so preferably, if both a magic caster, and a melee have the Mark on them, use HoP on the caster as that way, your not loosing any dps but still making someone immune for the buff duration (as melee can't use their abilites in HoP, while casters can)

Also, Beacon on Tank or someone with the Mark will make this fight easier for the healers as you if you can more or less ignore the first mark that way.

[Chamenas]

How hard is his base melee hit on a tank in 10 man?

[Startinglife]

We ran as a composition:
1 Paladin tank, 1 Warrior tank (both very ready to taunt off)
6 healers -- Two priests, two paladins, a Resto tree and a resto shaman.
We had two Shadow priests stay on boss fulltime (never to focus or touch an add, because of thier job we placed them on either side of the frost trap as they would never aquire aggro on the beats and this game us necessary room elsewhere).

We split the Dps as such:
Mage, warlock (ret pally) Left -- Mage, warlock (retpally) right -- Elemental, hunter, mage Middle.
Each side we responsible for killing their respective adds.

I placed 'ret pally' in brackets cause they are designed to respond to an add at half health and attempt to burn it in one rotation. Also their hammer is great at control the second add on each side.

We did have issues with the tank and ret paladins getting aggro and insisted it was their fault and must fix it. If your tank does get aggro however one of your melee should taunt the proper mob off.

Also please note that because of his abilities, people who disobey the mechanics or fail the kite WILL OUT HEAL YOUR HEALERS!!!! Crazy right?

Yah all that healing goes to the boss on 25 man 5% of his health is 1.5 Million.

[brawl]

We failed a bunch on this last night - never got him past 20% or so.

Group make up was:

1 war tank, 1 paladin tank
Melee DPS: Rogue, DK
Ranged: 3 Arcane Mages, 1 Hunter
Healers: 1 Holy Paladin, 1 Druid

At one point, one of our mages left and we brought in an elemental shaman. According to the recounts, we did really well with beasts and hardly had anyone ever get hit. The problem seemed to be that our DPS was just too low. The ranged DPS averaged around 2.5 to 3k, due to constantly having to switch targets. We generally would get him to about 50% before the first mark hit. We're in an average of probably around 226 to 232 gear and range anywhere from 2500 to 2800 WoWHeroes gear scores.

I'm not sure what we're doing wrong - we do have some cases of people getting hit by blood nova, but generally it wasn't too bad and we had the ranged moving around to help kill the adds so they sometimes got caught by it.

We're thinking about switching 2 ranged to add duty only and having all the others DPS the boss constantly to try and just get him down faster. Neither of the tanks have a good DPS set, so it's better for us to use the tank switch method. We actually hit the enrage timer a couple of times.

We did get him to 20% a couple of times but someone usually was marked by then and died, so he'd heal for 5% and then we'd be screwed.

Our average total DPS for the fight was around 26k.

Anyone have any tips for what we could try? It seems we're executing well, I think we may just be a little undergeared in terms of DPS or need to concentrate more people on him and burning him down.

[Shaolinsnake]

Although plenty of posts have already been made, thought I may as well add our setup for any who might find it useful. Killed him on 10 man the other night.

We ran with:
1 tank (Me, prot warrior)
2 healers (resto shaman, resto druid)
7 dps (hunter, boomkin, arcane mage, enhance shammy, feral druid, Deathknight and ret pally)

On our first night we ran with an extra healer (holy priest i think) but kept losing people around 5-10% to the mark, which healed him, which just led in wipes. The second night our priest couldn't come, replaced him with a hunter and we one shot him. Boomkin and mage blew up the adds with a frost trap in the middle and we burned him down with only 2 marks, first one comming at 35%.

If we had run with the 2 tanks on the first night things might have been different, but i think the 3 healers would have slowed things down to much. 2 healers on the second night was very smooth, especially up until the first mark but I think our dps was also fairly high. Our second tank, who went ret for the encounter was lowest on the dps meters, but still at 5200. Hope this info helps.

[Lanore]

We downed him on 10 man last night. Our group was:
Prot War
Prot Pally
Tree
Disc Priest
Mage
Shadow Priest
Rogue
DK x 2
Fury War

Normally we would have a Boomkin in place of one of the DK's, but we had to fill in this week. Two ranged on the adds was plenty, we had our resto druid root the right one while mage and spriest blew up the left, then they switched to right. Tanks taunted at every rune of blood cast to keep him from healing. We also made the decision to let the first mark of champion kill it's victim. This helped limit him getting a to 100 BP a second time. Yes he healed for 5%.. but that was easily overcome with dps. We killed him on the third attempt with the first mark being thrown at us when he was at 30% health. He only cast it once and we got the "Mess" acheivement.

I would recommend at least 3 ranged dps (tho it obviously can be done with 2) in the group and 2 healing was easy. Letting the first Mark of Champion die is probably a choice we will use again as well (as long as that person isn't a healer).

[keebz]

other then that, I read some guy talking about Defensive CDs etc, I would also just like to point out the fact that if you got paladins with you, they can all use Hand of Protection on people with the mark, and it will obviously make them immune to the damage for the duration of the buff, though ofc not removing the mark, so preferably, if both a magic caster, and a melee have the Mark on them, use HoP on the caster as that way, your not loosing any dps but still making someone immune for the buff duration (as melee can't use their abilites in HoP, while casters can)

Also, Beacon on Tank or someone with the Mark will make this fight easier for the healers as you if you can more or less ignore the first mark that way.

This is definitely an option and should be utilized every chance you get, but the defensive cooldowns and external healing cooldowns used on tanks should, in theory, regularly reduce damage done to those with Mark of the Fallen Champion (as well as the tank obviously). It is simply worth mentioning in the original transcript, lest this mechanic is not taken into account, that this would probably be the best timing/use of the defensive/external cooldowns. I presume Hand of Protection will be utilized in mostly any encounter with mechanics as deadly as Deathbringer Saurfang's.

[TeddyTauren]

we seem to be having problems in our 25man.

we've gotten 6 marks in 5:40 of fighting. we have 10 melee which i think might be part of the problem.

heres the log for 4 of our attempts
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis


is there anything we can do about the nova? is it instant or can we see the target and run away in time?

[Supersick]

Raid makeup: Prot pally, Prot Warrior, Disc priest, Resto Druid, Blood DK, Ret Pally, Fury Warrior, Arcane Mage, Combat Rogue, Enhancement Shaman.

We didn't have the ranged to do the suggested strategy so I came up with one to meet the strengths of our raid makeup. This made the fight very quick and very simple and we almost got the achievement on our first downing of him.

The main problem here is the adds that spawn. So I assigned our prot warrior and ret pally to stun the one that spawned to our right and all to focus him down quickly (this took no longer than the duration of the stun). I myself (being a prot pally) used my hammer to stun the one on the left which kept it incapacitated until our focus changed to him..where he was promptly snuffed out as well. Then our focus went back to Saurfang and we repeated this tactic over and over. He got his 3rd mark off when he was at 5% so I know that with better execution and a bit more dps we can easily get this achievement on our next downing of him.

One last thing, we used our blood lust right at the beginning to get a head start on the encounter and it proved to be the best way to use it.

Edit: Just wanted to add that we did indeed get the achievement(I've gone and made a mess) on our second week's attempt!! WOOT!