Heroic Sartharion 3D Conquered

by

matts-drake

It is done. Approximately 24 hours since the experience and epiphany I had last night, it all paid off.

Sarth and his 3 drakes are down.

Twilight Drake

A big thank you goes to everyone in the guild. Without their efforts of them, the assistance of the Plus Heal Community, and the various bloggers who’ve written about their experiences, this post would not be here right now.

The handling of the Drake was flattering. The officers and an overwhelming majority of the guild felt that I should have gotten the first one.

Needless to say, I double checked to make sure.

The last thing I want on my hands is a riot because the GM gets awarded the first Drake. I’m not one for mounts. Even though I made a Flying Carpet, I still ride on my purple Gryphon. But I guess the Gryphon will get rested for a while.

Subsequent mount drops will be handled with interested members rolling instead of the loot master doing a raid roll. This gives players a measure of control and it allows players who don’t care about the mount to opt out of rolling for the ones that do.

My hands were shaking once we got that Shadron down. It was the first time we hit that plateau and after that, it just felt like smooth sailing from there.

Total time spent: ~8 hours on just 3 Drakes alone
Time of death: 7:04 PM PST, January 28

  • Worked on the pull
  • Worked on the Drake positioning
  • Worked on Whelp and Elemental tanking (We used a Death Knight)
  • Worked on healing the ad tanks and the Drake tanks
  • Worked on surviving Fissures and Firewalls
  • Worked on timing Main Tank “saves” (Pain Suppression, Barksin + Survival Instincts combo, and Guardian Spirit)

Extra things

These points may be minor, but they might help you. We increased the healing from 6 to 7. This gave us 2 Paladins. The fight took slightly longer, but it paid off.

Now what these Paladins did was they spent 17 points into Protection to pick up Divine Guardian.

The moment I used my Pain Suppression on the first breath, I’d pick one Paladin and tell them to bubble. Since a majority of the raid members are standing together, this helps mitigate raid damage during that period. On the second save, the Druid tank on Sarth popped his Barksin and Survival Instincts to outlive that breath hit. At this point, if it goes off, I alert the Holy Priest to get into position because his Guardian Spirit is up next.

Reader Rivendael brought up a great comment that I wanted to reiterate:

Hi Matt, I’m surprised that you have to watch the animations at all :)

It’s very responsible of you, considering that most healers need to/are very used to watching mainly health bars, but in the end, I’d say that the job of watching for breath cooldowns should in fact fall on the tank.

As my guild’s druid tank on Sarth (we’ve downed 3D), even before the fight, I establish player orders for the cooldowns we’re using. When Vesp lands, I call for the first cd-user to “prep” (usually all my healing pallies and priests). When I see the breath animation, I call for the prepped player to use his cd. Then I call for the next player to prepare. And so forth.

My healers just need to macro their cd to me and be in range, that’s all, and I take the burden off them so they can -visually- focus on their heals, while dodging lava walls and void zones. As the one player facing Sarth’s bigass head all the time, it’s the least I can do. Since your Sarth tank obviously has a mic, why not suggest that he do the same?

The answer to that is we both do it. The Sarth tank and I are able to watch for his head. As a healer, I like to use IceHUD so that I can see the health bar of my target, the health bar of myself, and the action that’s going around. This goes hand in hand with my heads up technique of healing.

The “double affirmative” from the Sarth tank and myself strengthens our judgment. It’s better to have two pairs of eyes on it if possible. It helps confirm that it is the right time to use a save when two players are saying the same thing. While there’s nothing wrong with allowing Sarth’s tank to call out when to use the save, I prefer keeping my head up instead of relying on reflexes to hit the tank.

Either we’re both right or we’re both wrong.

I do have a video from a DPS perspective. Just need to find a suitable host. Any ideas of a Youtube or Filefront alternatives?

Also: Ner’Zhul is ridiculously PvE competitive. We’re in the top 20 of guilds that have successfully killed Sarth 3D.

25 thoughts on “Heroic Sartharion 3D Conquered”

  1. Congrats on the kill 🙂

    I’m interested what classes did you use on the whelps/elementals? Who was aoe’ing them? Our guild has used paladin and pretty much all classes aoe’ing them when needed but when some of you DK’s manage to spread shadowpriest’s devouing plague to the adds then they almost don’t need any aoe at all. As a spriest it was quite fun seeing my average damage at around 6-7k dps on that fight with peaks >10k. Only problem is that pestilence has cooldown and our adds tank don’t often get near enough to DK’s so that DP could get spread to them 🙂

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  3. Big congrats to you sir! Well done! Congrats on getting the mount. I am a firm believer that the “first mount” is a trophy and should be worn by a leader of the guild, since it shows the guild’s progress. My GL actually said he wanted to go 20th, and the other 3 officers go first. Enjoy your mount and Twilight Vanquisher title!

    Derevkas last blog post..Changes in Your Healing Team

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  7. Gratz Matt! Just my little tip here: You can upload your videos on vimeo, viddyou, youtube works for it also, i’d even tell you to go for wegame 🙂

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  8. Good job my friend.
    Glad to see that all of your hard work and reading turned out well for you!
    I will say that I enjoyed your ideas for the ‘save’ rotations. I think that is a very good idea and something that I will implement in the future for our raids when we are doing difficult encounters like this one.
    Good luck and keep it up!

    ~Frangus

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  15. Grats!

    I’ve been following your progress and the tips of sarth 3d and i was wondering (as a future topic suggestion) if you could post a strategy guide with special priest healing tips?

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  16. Congrats!!!

    And Top 20 is amazing. When we get ours down, I think we will be number 4 or 5. But then, there are less than 10 25 man guilds on each side of the server. Any more and we’d have some major lag issues….oh wait, we already do 🙁

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  17. Grats on downing 3D, my guild is in the process of working on 1D atm. I think it really says something that your guild made you take the drake – thats your reward from them, and its more than just pixels (much better than the loot whores I play with – they argue about who’s going to get the strat drake every day, nevermind the fact that the 2 tanks and 2 healers that run it every day dont have it yet! >.<)

    On the note of the where to post it, youtube it. Thats where tankspot posts their Project Marmot videos (raid guides).

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  18. @HoHo: There is no longer a Cooldown on Pestilence. The DKs can cast it every time they have a blood rune. However, you only get 2, they take 10 seconds to refresh, and they can probably be used for other, better(in the DK’s mind) things.

    That being said, Gratz Matt. Lol, now what are you going to do?

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  19. Specing into Divine Guardian is what got us over that damage spike and kept us from losing players, I’m sure of it.

    ’twas a great kill!

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  22. From one Ner’zhul to another, Gratz man.

    Now we just need to get this down, most we’ve done is 2 drakes.

    Whats the name of your guild again, conquest?

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