Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Clean Kill

By now all the information people need to be able to kill Sartharion with 3 adds is out in the open, but what you don't see a lot of are the stories of how these kills have been achieved, and I think it might be interesting for people venturing into the encounter to read how such kills have happened without forcing them to read a bunch of spoilers. This then, is our story(more or less).

Let me begin by saying that there are some things which are likely to hold you back from progressing past a particular point in this encounter, and knowledge of them beforehand is a lot easier than trying to pick up what they do from looking at a WWS. Now as our christmas break was fast approaching, we gathered a motley crew and headed over for one last attempt at the 25man+3 kill. We had 3/4 of the primary tanks, missing our warrior maintank and guildleader. Most of the group was the same core as had been wiping on the encounter for many long hours as we'd worked to overcome the various initial challenges of the encounter. Our first pull promised good things, as only some failures at around the time Shadron went down cost us a wipe. The hard part was clearly within our reach, after that it was simply transitioning into the less frantic Vesperon kill and the ultimate kill of Sartharion. One or two more wipes ensued, memory fails me, but then also Vesperon yielded. Nothing to do but keep the MT up and dps the dragon down then. Except when you go all out for stamina, you inadvertently end up sacrificing a good bit of mitigation and avoidance, and at this point Sarth was hitting like a truck.

Now, obviously we could have swapped in another tank to take the dragon the last leg of the journey. We could have, but we felt confident that the Elu could take the beating. In truth I don't know why, but for some reason the unthinkable happened, and furry Elu went down. Panic, wipe imminent. Luckily we had two tanks(me and Leipis, our paladin) quite idle at this point. Now you might think we'd have a plan in place, who takes the dragon if the MT dies at this point. Well, not quite. So we both scurried off to pick up the evil before all our raid had wiped. After a somewhat hilarious bit of taunting back and forth, I let Leipis have him and ran off to battleres some dead. Now it's worth mentioning our normal raid-comp includes a lot of druids, two boomkins, a tree and 1-2 ferals. That's a lot of battlereses, so we got most of the raid back up. And then it happens again, Leipis went down due to a cock-up with some cooldown I believe. Luckily I was still in bear and twatting around some fireballs that were trying to set my fine fur on fire, so I ran off and picked up the dragon. No more tank deaths at this point, and as we hit 10% I popped my berserking and mangle away happily. Dragon down, all's well. In the end I wonder if it didn't just get tired of trying to figure out who it was supposed to kill. But hey, a kill's a kill, sure we could have probably gotten a cleaner kill on the next attempt, but I'm ok with a messy kill. Next time will be better, and hopefully after next reset we'll be able to confidently declare this farm content.

What to learn from this? Don't stop until it's over. You might not get a clean kill, but atleast you learn something from it, and you might just down it after all.

-Shamad

Edit:
I recently found a similar post on the subject by the Trouble/Kyth from Fusion, although be aware that their account does contain a lot of spoilers. But if you're ok with spoilers, they also made a video which explains what goes into the encounter. By the time said video came to our attention we'd allready figured out what we needed for our kill, but it should help avoid much drama for those who come after.

5 comments:

A Khudori Soleh said...

nice blog

Shamad said...

Thank you, glad to see people are enjoying it :)

Anonymous said...

Very nice posts so far!
I too am a druid in a casual raiding guild (resto atm, but going to dual-spec to tank), though I have never done it before, when i get enough gear from heroics for it.
So for those reasons I am very much looking forwad to many more posts on this blog-site.
I have many questions for our guild bear when he comes back after christmas, and many for you too. Too many for now :)
Anyway, like I said, very interesting and informative stuff so far. Thanks
Banshee, Ghostlands, EU

Shamad said...

Welcome Banshee :)

Feel free to ask what you are wondering about and I'll try to help out as best I can. For starting bears, Kalon's gear lists(http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/search/label/gear) and Karthis Feral gear worksheet(http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/search/label/gear) are very good starting resources which should help make picking up the gear you want easy. I might consider writing a post on how I've tried to get around the limitations of swipe when tanking larger(4+ mobs) aoe-packs, which I would think be useful for new tanks aswell. In the end though, I fear that part of it comes down to trying and trying again until you figure out what works for you.

Tallyswift said...

Hey!!!

I posted my own Sarth+3 25man experience on my own little known blogspot too. I felt rather alone in the world when I did it also...

lol but it's good to see others out there with the same wow experiences as mine. :D

swissarmycow.blogspot.com

The blogs are the only thing I can read while at work.. they have blocked anything else game related.. so keep posting all of your interesting experiences!!