Last night the Cats defeated Heroic Sartharion 3D, and I could not be more proud. And good on Blizzard for putting this encounter into the initial release of WotLK. I think for the first time ever in this expansion we all felt that strong satisfaction that comes with learning and accomplishing a new boss. It was a really awesome kill.
It took about 8 hours of attempts. Our strategy can probably be tightened up once we get used to the fight and continue improving our gear, but it worked for us this time.
We used four tanks: one on Sarth (druid), one on Tenebron (pally), one on Shadron and Vesperon (warrior), and one on pure add duty (warrior). When Tenebron died, the tank ran around and helped out with loose adds. On our winning attempt we also had the Shad/Vesp tank die partway through the fight, so the Tene tank took over his duties.
Our healers consisted of two paladins, two priests, one shaman, and one druid. One paladin was assigned to the Sarth tank for the whole fight. We had a priest assigned to the Tenebron tank, the druid and second pally focused on the Shad/Vesp and add tank, the shaman raid healed, and I kind of pinch healed where needed. (I started on raid healing, moved to the add tank during the tricky phase, and then after Vesperon landed I helped with the Sarth tank.) The tricky healing bits were keeping the add tank up after the second whelp portal opened, keeping up the Shad/Vesp tank when both drakes were active, and of course the flame breath portion of Sarth tanking.
We used up heroism on the first drake to get it out of the way, and asked people to not really DPS Sartharion before then so they didn’t blow their internal proc timers. After Tenebron died, ranged and AoErs handled the whelps while single target DPS moved to Shadron. When Shadron died, everyone took the portal and killed the two Twilight dudes. Then Vesperon, then portal, then adds, then Sarth. For cooldowns we only needed one feral druid thingy, one Hand of Sacrifice, and one Guardian Spirit.
The thing that made the most difference on our winning attempt was only ONE person dying to void zones. You need all the DPS you can muster, and there is certainly no room to lose a healer. Last night we tried is running the Failboat mod and having the output print to officer chat, and I think it helped. It’s a lot more intimidating if I can say in between attempts, “Okay, we lost exactly 11 people to void zones on that attempt, and I know who each of you are. Stop that.”
You need good DPS, tanking, and healing, but at the end of the day this fight is about spatial awareness and team coordination, and I am so proud of my crew this morning. They did real good. Bring on Ulduar!
That was a lot of fun. It was a real challenge and it was great to see everyone working together to make it happen. It’s been a while since killing a boss was that exciting.
Also, I’m glad we pulled it off so quickly after hearing horror stories from my co-workers about how long their guild took on 3D. They went every raid night 4-5 nights a week for 2 weeks plus a few nights prior to completely focusing on 3D. I’ll take our smart progression over that kind of madness for certain. :)
Oh, and thanks for pulling us all together so we can go see these fights. You and the officers do a great job.
Hah! You were not counting!! Fail for claiming you could count when you relied on Failboat :)
Also, that was fun, and while it was a nice challenge, as you said, it still came down to people not standing in bad stuff, the rest of the details seemed to revolve around well timed healing and cooldown usage for the MT.
I still have Rock the Casbah in my head. 2 days and counting.
That is such an awesome mod.