Deathbringer Saurfang ICC10

[Arkalthon]

Group Composition

Tanks
Pally
Death Knight

Healers
Tank Heals- Pally
Raid Heals- Tree, Shammy
--Depending on who is available, we might have a second Pally heal instead of a Shammy--

Boss DPS
Death Knight
Death Knight

Blood Beast DPS
Lock
Boomkin
Hunter


We got him down to 17% before we wiped. We popped Hero when he Frenzied at 30%, he hit enrage when we got to 23%, and between that, one of our Healers being MotFC, and our Boomkin being MotFC- with our Tree getting Marked when we hit around 23% and the two pain in the ass Blood Beasts, we didn't make it.

Can you guys make any suggestions as to help us tweak our way to a victory?

One suggestion I've gotten this morning was to drop 1 healer, and get another DPS into the fight.

[Espillion]

There's many things to say that could help.

One, Holy Paladin buffs themselves with Righteous Fury and the tanks get substantial one-on-one threat if possible because the blood beasts need to do little-to-nothing in terms of damage in order to keep that Blood Power down. The small aggro from the RF Holy Paladin will pull the beasts enough to attract it and give your range some time to change targets, snare and whatnot.

Paladins should Hand of Protection a Caster DPS when possible during a blood boil because it removes said debuff without fail. That's 8 BP prevented.

Damage prevention should be key so get the Paladin to learn to Sacred Shield people to reduce damage ticks.

Range positioning should be at least 12 yards from their nearest person while still in range of heals. Reduces the amount of BP generated from Blood Nova as well. 2 BP per person in range is deadly.

Hope this helps.

[Roana]

Since this is primarily a DPS race with a soft enrage (kill him before too many marks pile up), and three marks seem to indicate that your DPS is low (that, or Blood Beasts don't get pulled out of melee range fast enough), the easiest solution would be to switch a healer over to DPS. It's not a heal-intensive fight unless you've got lots of marks up, in which case your chances at success are not so good already.

For what it's worth, on our last kill (which wasn't very pretty, but worked), we had 29k raid DPS, including the tanks.

[Knighterrant81]

We just downed him for the first time on 25 man last night. Last week we had trouble and were in the same boat as you guys.

RF on a Paladin is not really going to give him significant aggro. Paladin heals are subject to an additional .5 modifier (1 Paladin healing is healed x .25 threat, everyone else is healed x .5 threat) so having Righteous fury up (1.8 threat on Holy spells) only gives 90% (.5 x 1.8) threat of any other healing class. That said, its not really going to hurt anything either, just don't expect stellar threat from your RF'd Paladins.

The point of this fight is that you need to kill him before healers get overwhelmed by Marks of the Fallen Champion, because that is how Saurfang gets the most healing. He doesn't really present a significant threat to anyone, its really all about preventing him from healing himself, basically. You do that in two ways

1) Not allowing anyone with Mark to die
2) Minimizing the amount of Blood Power saurfang gets

To do that you need a couple of things:

1) Make sure your tanks aren't getting hit with rune up (they need to taunt switch)

2) Make sure your raiders are spread out enough so that Blood Nova doesn't hit more than 1 or 2. For 25 man, what we did is pair up and use /range 15 on our DBM. This way we usually only got 2 people hit per Nova.

3) Make sure no one is getting hit by Blood Beasts. Have some way to have a ranged get aggro, (hurricane on DBS just before the adds pop is a good one). Also, have some sort of AE knockback or stun ready (typhoon from boomkin, or the one that worked really well for us was lock Shadowfury), and earthbind totems or frost traps ready. Ranged needs to down the adds. Also, make sure none of your melee uses an AE attack (Tanks can just take them off their bar, Melee DPS is important, so they need to stop AE about 5 secs before the beasts spawn then go back to DPS). If there's beasts in your DPS, you know someone hit them with an AE attack. This was the big one by far for us.

4) Make sure you have the DPS. If you can clear TOC 10 on normal, but just barely, you'll struggle here. However, if you're clearing TOC 25 and reasonably geared from there, and/or doing TOC 10 heroic, you should have the DPS to pull it off.

5) I don't think letting the first mark die is a good idea on 10 man. Try to make it so the first mark doesn't come until the boss is at leasta below 60%, and better yet below 50%.

Good Luck!

[jwjsmith]

Couple of tips for you based on your raid comp.

1. Bloodlust off the bat. There are no marks, no blood beasts, no nothing to worry about so all of your DPS can hit Saurfang hard and get him as low as possible. You should aim to get him to 50% before his first Mark shows up.


2. If you're running with two paladin healers then you should be able to handle 2 marks with little to no effort at all. Have one paladin beacon the first Mark target and the second paladin beacon the second Mark target for lulz easy mode healing while they are healing the tanks. There isn't a lot of raid damage going on and he will only hit one tank at a time.

[DimetrisDoA]

My group (PUG) 1 shotted all the bosses and then we got to Saurfang and wiped 5-6 times. i was thinking the dps was way to low.

Tanks
Druid
Druid

Healers
Shaman
Priest (Holy)

Ranged DPS
Warlock
Warlock
Hunter
Hunter

Melee DPS (On boss the entire time)
Death Knight
Death Knight


I think the problem here was that the two warlocks were doing 4300 dps and 3900 dps, and the death knights were doing 3600dps and 3200 dps, i dont have combat logs because it was a pug i didnt think we'd get that far, but i do remember the dps because i was shocked. The locks were constantly switching targets and moving, and the DKs were single target, no movement, dps'ing the boss. I was ASSUMING that was the problem.
I was focused on the adds the entire time, so i couldnt see how many marks were out, but i believe we got him to 40% but we Bloodlusted right at the start.
Appreciate all help!

[Knighterrant81]

Your melee should stay on the boss the whole time, and you should have someone assigned to help kite the blood beasts (warlocks, mages, boomkin, hunter, shaman, and others all have great ways to do this). You could still have low DPS to clear this fight (he has no hard enrage timer), you just have to be better at limiting his Blood Power. Also, your ranged need to single-target DPS down the beasts (they're near-immune to AE damage).

Having the DPS helps (a lot) but the best way to guarantee a kill on this fight is to do better at limiting Blood Power.

[DimetrisDoA]

They were on the boss the entire time, and we werent AoEing and we had 2 hunters kiteing the adds, the locks were just burning them basically while hunters distract shot and kited, everything you said we are doing already lol.

[Megatwan]

how many marks were in the raid when he frenzied? if it was 2 or more your handling BP poorly.

ranged and heals spread
tanks taunt asap when debuff is applied
ranged focus burn and kite beasts
NO ONE face tanks adds... not tanks, not melee, not healers, not ranged.

if an add is hitting you... stun it and/or GTFO. other dps will kill it and your a retard if it touches you. melee shouldnt and tanks shouldnt have threat on them unless they are bad

[Pesmerga]

We just downed him tonight. We also had two hunters distracting them and had two locks burning, but instead of 2 melee we only had one and also had a mage there to help burn the adds quick, as to help minimize the time spent burning the adds and get right back onto Saurfang. I was the only melee (warrior) on Saurfang, and I never left. We had a DK tank along with a pally for our tanks. The DK was throwing his Icy chains (or w/e they are called) on one add as soon as it came out. We also had a shaman healer and saved heroism till about 30%.

We only had one mark of the fallen crusader out on one of our hunters at about 30ish % and she actually died shortly after getting it. We had a great team for keeping the adds off the raid and burning them down fast, which helped a lot with the BP. And 5 of the 6 dps were above 5k and the one lock was at about 4k.

Other then that... I really can't say much else aside from what has already been sad. Control BP as much as you can, keep ranged dps 12yds apart and have a nice set up for kiting and killing the adds.

Good luck with Saurfang!

[jwjsmith]

My group (PUG) 1 shotted all the bosses and then we got to Saurfang and wiped 5-6 times. i was thinking the dps was way to low.

Tanks
Druid
Druid

Healers
Shaman
Priest (Holy)

Ranged DPS
Warlock
Warlock
Hunter
Hunter

Melee DPS (On boss the entire time)
Death Knight
Death Knight


I think the problem here was that the two warlocks were doing 4300 dps and 3900 dps, and the death knights were doing 3600dps and 3200 dps, i dont have combat logs because it was a pug i didnt think we'd get that far, but i do remember the dps because i was shocked. The locks were constantly switching targets and moving, and the DKs were single target, no movement, dps'ing the boss. I was ASSUMING that was the problem.
I was focused on the adds the entire time, so i couldnt see how many marks were out, but i believe we got him to 40% but we Bloodlusted right at the start.
Appreciate all help!

Raid composition isn't the best for that. You're running with 2 healers and one is a holy priest, which is great for group heals, but in this fight a lot of the abilities a holy priest brings to the table aren't going to be used effectively. If possible, see if he/she can use a Disc offspec on this fight. Holy priests will tend to OOM too fast with the sustained healing required in the later half of Saurfang. You have two druids and a shaman, so that might help, have them save their innervates for the Priest if necessary. Make sure he is saving most of his mana for when the first mark target shows up. Chain heal is not very effective for a shaman in this fight, as most people taking damage will be too spread out for it to work to its maximum effect.



Demo warlocks are a great boon to this fight as well, besides the obvious spellpower boost that benefits your healers and caster DPS, their damage spikes on the last 35% of fights, which is the critical part of the Saurfang encounter. If they are both Destruction, have one consider using a Demo spec so you can get the necessary buffs + late encounter burst damage.

If your DK's are doing 3200-3500 DPS then they suck. They should be doing 5k+ for this fight to work.

[Salloman]

Group Composition

Tanks
Pally
Death Knight

Healers
Tank Heals- Pally
Raid Heals- Tree, Shammy
--Depending on who is available, we might have a second Pally heal instead of a Shammy--

Boss DPS
Death Knight
Death Knight

Blood Beast DPS
Lock
Boomkin
Hunter


We got him down to 17% before we wiped. We popped Hero when he Frenzied at 30%, he hit enrage when we got to 23%, and between that, one of our Healers being MotFC, and our Boomkin being MotFC- with our Tree getting Marked when we hit around 23% and the two pain in the ass Blood Beasts, we didn't make it.

Can you guys make any suggestions as to help us tweak our way to a victory?

One suggestion I've gotten this morning was to drop 1 healer, and get another DPS into the fight.

Were the blood beasts up for too long? Were the ranged getting hit. I have dps'd and Healed this fight. Blood beast have to be managed, Easier with 4 ranged oppose to 3. If this is the problem you could have the DKs help with the Blood beasts by their DC, IT and Chains of ICe. With 3 heals, the last 15% will be the toughest. Its easy to Overheal and waste mana for the first 50% or so. Only to do about 80% of the overall heals in the 50% of saurfangs life. 2 healing it would be a stretch for that last little bit and very dependant on the Healers not getting the mark.

[Lanore]

My 2 cents is this:

Two heal it, put two ranged on beasts instead of three (more dps on boss), and let the first MotFC victim die.

We had to make these changes to get him. Healing isnt' that hard if you aren't healing the MotFC. You will need to have a third ranged on beasts (we did) after about 40% health because they start spawning faster. But we had our tree putting roots on the second beast while dps downed the first.. tehn they switch to second. This worked great. Of course no strat works if you are letting him get BP to 100 too early. We were able to minimize BP and got him below 25% before the first MotFC.

I have heard many successful strats on this one tho, but this is what worked for us. Of course if you get MotFC on healer with this strat you are wiping... so it's a little RNG.

[dethkrik]

We actually had several groups do 10 man without any Marks. One of the groups consisted of some lower geared alts, so its not about DPS. Make sure everyone at range is spread out 12+ yards so only 1 person gets hit from Blood Nova. Make sure you tanks are switching asap after one of them gets Rune of Blood so they are getting hit once at the most. Also, I would keep all of your ranged DPS on the Blood Beast and make sure they are running away if they get close. Having 1 ranged on Saurfang constantly is no difference in DPS than having all 3 ranged on Blood Beast and killing them 50% quicker then all the ranged on the boss until the next wave. The only difference is you lower the chance of someone getting hit.

Also, switching one of your Raid healers to DPS if they have an offspec will help, since until you get MotFC, there isn't much raid damage in this fight, so if you can limit the amount of Blood Power gained and burn him a little quicker with the added DPSer you should be able to do it with 0-1 Marks.

[DavesWorld]

(he has no hard enrage timer)

Pretty sure he does have a hard enrage, 8 minutes. My guild spent some time on him last week before we got him down, and after we'd worked out most of our footwork, we had several attempts fail at the 8 minute mark as he started one-shotting people.

Raid DPS of at least 25K seems to be the level needed to beat him.

As others have indicated, the key to this fight is managing Saurfang's blood point generation. The single best way to do that is preventing blood beasts from landing any attacks. After that, a disc priest shielding blood nova targets; then having as much shield up-time on the tanks as possible. If you can limit the marks to at most two, with the second coming very shortly before you down him, you're on the right track. If the boss gets two+ marks up before he's even into his frenzy period then the raid and/or strategy likely needs more tuning.

[Espillion]

Yeh there would be an enrage. Pretty much if it takes longer than 5-6 mins to get through the first 70% with zero or one mark dropping, odds are the DPS are running outa juice to sustain the needed raid DPS.

Plus the blood power is a soft enrage mechanic as well. Once the heals get overwhelmed, it's pretty much game over.

[Theotherone]

Idid this fight on my hunter and we found 2 hunters and 2 healers made a big difference. For the hunters, a spider pet is made for this fight, the cooldown on web wrap ties almost exactly to the spawn of the Blood things. So I'd keep my spider (Tenaceejed) on passive and off the boss, drop a frost trap, Distracting shot the Blood thing toward me and into my frost trap, tell spider to attack so the web is thrown burn the add, if he starts to move, Concussive Shot him and finish the burn. Not one Blood add made it to me or the lock I was burning them with.

It really is a fun fight as a huntard. Like Faction Champs you get to use all those fun non-dps things.

[Lionsoul]

Just fancied throwing my thoughts in here,

Raid Composition

Tanks
* Warrior
* Dk tank

Dps

* moonkin (myself)
* 2x hunters
* Destro Warlock
* Fury warrior

Healers

* Disc Priest
* Resto Shammy
* I healed every encounter until marrowgar, as well

To be honest I was a little disappointed with Deathbringer Saurfang, there was a lot of hype about this guy & my raid ended up 2 shotting him. Tanks taunted off each other to compensate for the debuff, ranged dps (including myself) surrounded the boss in a semi circle with me in the middle, as soon as the blood beasts appeared the hunters MD'd to me. I immediately used typhoon that seemed to work great for this encounter, along with hunters using frost traps. And to top it all off we managed to get the achievement, for killing him before MOTFC is cast 3x.

Overall a pretty fun boss just needs some practice, then like everything else it becomes easy.

Good luck in your raids folks.

[Herah]

Drop one of your healers, you don't have enough dps. Your tanks need to be absolutely on top of taunting the second the debuff shows up, and the bloodbeasts need to be pulled away from the tanks asap.

We use 2 hunters standing on the right side of the room, each pulling a beast the moment they spawn, and the rest of the raid focusing them down one at a time before they get to the kiting hunters.

The healers should be able to keep you up since you shouldn't get more than 2 marks before he dies. Pop cooldowns to get him below 50% before the first mark.

[Vorla]

For what it's worth, adding my thoughts in here as an Arcane mage and on/off raid leader.

Our ten man kill setup consisted of:

Tanks: Warrior, Druid
Healers: Priest, Paladin, Shaman
DPS: Blood DK, Ret Paladin, Arcane Mage, Balance Druid, Destro Warlock

We'd do the normal semi circle thing, with, counting from left as facing Saurfang, was Warlock, Priest, Boomkin, Paladin, Shaman, Mage. We could have probably gone with another DPS to shorten the fight even more since our healy shammy put out some 600 DPS.

However, our Boomkin was not specced for Typhoon and I was not specced into Slow (Our tactic worked so well I didn't even cast any non-arcane spells so I did no slowing what so ever on the kill attempt, and I only cast one Arcane Barrage at all, and it was at a Beast, indicating that I didn't have to do much kiting) so we had to make do - the basic tactic was to cast Entangling roots one of the beasts, and focus burn down the other. Usually I'd end up with aggro on the first one, as I would switch targets mid-cast and mid-rotation as soon as they appeared, landing anything from a 0-stacked Arcane Blast (weak) to a 4-stack boosted Arcane Missile with Missile Barrage (OMG WTF MUST KILL MAGE) as my first cast.

The DK DPS Chainsed the burn target (which was always the one to the left of Saurfang IE furthest away from me) and when the burn target was either A. Close to dying B. Close to hitting someone, the tanks would taunt and we'd gain another 10-15 yards of Beast movement towards the tank and then towards whoever grabbed aggro back, which equals burn time for us - again, usually I'd have the most aggro on the target and having a pocket shammy FORST SHOKING the beast for you greatly helped. Whoever got aggro on the second beast was a lot more varied however, but again, we had shammy frost shocks, DK chains, tank taunts and warlock shadow fury to help contain it for the burn. On our kill, ranged DPS and healers took zero damage from the Beasts and tanks + melee got hit 12 times in total - most of it on the bear tank - I suspect it's from messed up taunts or from beasts being entangled too close to the melee.

The kill felt very controlled this way, we had few cockups and the Beasts' travel paths were optimized and very restricted. The boomkin was in range for burning the Beast that generally went for me, and the warlock could easily move forwards to follow it and still maintain 12 yards to the melee and the closest healer (IE priest). The second one would run towards either a healer or the Boomkin for a short bit before my burst overcame their aggro to lead it back to me. We were careful to taunt the second one exactly because of this - the angle of it's path would sometimes take it close to the melee and I had plenty of space to kite, with Chains I usually could just back up and chaincast Arcane Barrage for some extra DPS while the non-chased ranged would burn it.

MAGE SPECIFIC STUFF BELOW LOOK OUT LOL

For the magey types out there (or the raid leader with an Arcane Mage in his roster), here's a few pointers:

You have to make sure your camera is in a good angle to quickly swap targets (Arcane Missile borks this up a bit by switching the angle to face the target so it's easy to forget, but be ready for this and move that camera back!) to the designated burn victim. If you utilize a knockback tactic it might be trickier however - we relied on hard burns and targeted slows to neutralize the Beasts, and the chaos that can ensue with Thunderstorm or Typhoon tossing the adds all over the place or totems/traps setting up "slow zones" would maybe have been a bit problematic for us. Your milage may vary and the most important bit is finding a method that makes your raid sync and works with your setup.

Next thing I want to add is that to perform optimally on this fight as an Arcane mage you really, really need to hone your mage skills and play the spec to the fullest of it's potential. I am very proud to say (to the point where my waving of E-peen is a standing joke in the guild) that I played close to optimally on the kill, so I thought I could share something to strive for (I pondered weak and weary over the logs to use as future reference for myself as well).

Practise and being rested made a difference of around 1k from first try (late Wednesday) to 8th attempt - the kill attempt (normal time, Sunday) for me, and I'm in very average gear. This represents around 400k more damage which is almost what Saurfang self healed for during our kill. Meaning what? That by improving my playstyle I could almost completely negate one of the important mechanics of the fight, making the kill that much easier. And I don't even consider myself some kind of super mage or anything. No, honest.

My mana regen approach was:
Gem 1: After ~1m (having spent enough to not waste any mana)
Evocation 1: After ~2m30s (Manapool at less than 30%, straight after a Beast pack was downed)
Gem 2: After ~3m10s (when it's off cooldown)
Evocation 2: After ~4m30s (Same situtation as the first one)
Gem 3: After ~5m10s (again, off cooldown)
Evocation 3: Never came, we got the kill at 6m40s which is when it would be off cooldown - I opted for a haste pot and a hard, final burn so I was very cool for mana here.

My cooldown usage is a bit harder to explain, so here's a screenie from WoL which I think visualizes it in a very clear way:


So, generally speaking I hit everything in the beginning, then Arcane Power whenever it was off cooldown (paired with troll racial whenever that was off cooldown as well, they match up pretty well), Icy Veins + Spell power trinket ("Hospitality") together, synced with 4th Arcane Power and Bloodlust which was popped when he reached 30%. I included the Evocations in the diagram as well, haven't figured out a way to add the Mana gems to the diagram and I can't be arsed drawing them by hand.

I think that's all you need to know to amaze your guild mates with your imba DPS. If anyone is interested, here's a link to WoL for our kill attempt:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Hope this helps at least someone to some degree.