Hunting Sartharion 3 Drakes!
September 10, 2009Well, better late than never. My guild went back to Sartharion to get our raid leader the reins of the black twilight drake. A bunch of other nice stuff dropped that was actually not wasted- the fact that this is ostensibly a tier 7 encounter did not mean that we had no holes in our gear that couldn’t be filled with an older iLvl 226 drop. Anyways, today I’ll be going over how to not fail at Sarth +3!
First off, a primer. This fight is incredibly hard at appropriate gear levels, and the difficulty level goes up vastly if you ever have more than one drake up. There’s a variety of reasons for this, but any good general guide will go over them and they’re nothing we need to worry about. If you’re going to do this instead of modern T9 or T8 content, I’m assuming that you have already cleared the trial of the crusader this week and are just avoiding going back to Ulduar. That said, you start the fight working on Sarth, and then his friends drop by one every 30 seconds. They each do things to hurt the raid, and spawn a portal, various adds, and void zones. On top of this, periodically, a wave of lava will sweep your fighting area which will enrage adds, one shot clothies, and kill pets.
Tenebron is the first drake up. Don’t blow cooldowns, just DPS him down and do not go in his portal. You will have him down before the second drake comes out. We actually had a good 7 seconds that we used to wipe up adds.
Shadron comes up next. This is where you will blow cooldowns. Your shammie will pop heroism/bloodlust and you should rapid fire, and use a haste pot if rapid fire falls off before he’s down. You also need to go into the portal with an offtank and healer and the rest of the DPS to kill this guy’s disciple.
Vesperon is the last drake. You need to go in the portal here too, but once you’re done with the acolyte, if you have your whole raid up, you can see the end of the tunnel. Kill him, then AOE adds for at least two volleys before switching to Sarth himself.
Now, while these paragraphs were short, the fight itself is actually technically a little challenging. You need to get out of void zones, watch out for firewalls that can come from the north or south and make sure you’re in the proper gap, drop freezing (nor frost) traps to reduce raid damage from adds, tranq shot enraged adds that are on your healer, MD adds to the add tank, and be aware of the positioning of the portals. On top of it, when you go in a portal, if you finish the boss and you happen to be standing in the wrong area, you could eat a fire wave and not have time to avoid it at all. That said, there’s nothing so challenging here that you won’t be able to do it. All these mechanics are things you’ve seen before, and the cluster-frak levels are less than they are on Yogg, or even Freya, in my opinion.
Once you’re onto Sartharion himself, just DPS him down and collect the loot (and maybe a title and a mount!) For a more comprehensive guide that’s not hunter/DPS specific, check out one of these.
euripidesoutdps
jurgwena
M
lemli
eidotrope
I think a bit more emphasis should be placed on not dying. Avoid the flame walls (have someone call them out), move out of void zones, don’t stand in front of drakes, pop cooldowns on the Sarth tank. At Uld25-level gear, dps won’t be a problem. But gear won’t save you if you get hit by a flame wall with Shadron alive.
We preferred to drop snake traps because frost traps slowed the adds (duh), who would get caught in flame walls and enrage. Yes, some of the snakes slow the adds, but not for very long. Plus the adds would aggro to the snakes and not our healers.
yeah, not dying here is of course important, however it’s also easier than, say, not dying on Yogg or even faction champs.
I have done a few 10 man 3D, and I have never had DPS the adds. Everyone just DPS on Sarth. Yes most of the raid will die close to the end due to the adds finally taking there toll, but sarth was downed in about 30-45seconds.
We had the MT on Sarth and 1 drake, and the OT grab the 2 other drakes and alternated tanking the 3rd drake with the MT. When the flame wall came pallys just bubbled, and im pretty sure most of the raid jumped in the lava when the wall came, and RL told me, the only hunter to just “Eat it”.
We always wipe the first time no matter what, but always get him the second.
That’s the burn method, a totally different strat. You have about 80 seconds to kill him before Shadron lands and Sarth gets bubbled. Can’t do that on 25-man (or, at least, I’ve never heard of anyone doing that on 25-man).
Someone was throwing numbers around for that and they said you’d need 7k DPS for each DPSer. I can do that sometimes, and melee can do that most of the time, but not every DPS raider can. You have to take some DPSers who are not able to pull 7k on a single target in order to allow the pure DPSers the ability to do that.
I’ve never done the 10-man version of this, but the 25-man with three drakes was a bitch and a half pre-Ulduar. I don’t even want to think about how much gold I spent on repair bills before we finally got it down.
And after all that, when the reins of the Twilight Drake dropped, I rolled a 97. A rogue rolled 98. Bloody horrible.
But the Fury of the Five Flights trinket that I got out of 25-man is fantastic, I still use it.