This just in

Seems Blizzard wasn't all too happy about guilds facerolling Sarth3D(we were 1shotting him weakly without breaking a sweat and so were many others), so they've made the encounter a good bit harder. You used to be able to avoid most giant breaths by removing the twilight torment debuff, but after the patch there's no way of removing it. This forces any guild wanting to do this to keep up a cooldown rotation on the MT. It also means the whole raid is taking a periodic dot whenever they hit anything. And it means that the healers are being taxed more even as they've just been hit by some pretty decent nerfs.

Don't worry too much though, 25man is still doable and I expect 10man to be as well. We added another healer and changed our tactic a bit and added some more cooldowns on MT, but in the end Sarth gave in after about 90 minutes of raiding.

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.

Expertise

It seems to me that expertise is the least discussed tanking stat for druids. Not only that, but it's often simply dismissed as a DPS or threat-stat. My approach to tanking differs quite a bit on this.

As I started researching my future as a feral druid, it became obvious that armour was the key to druid tanking. Mitigation is the most reliable way of reducing the damage you take, it smoothens your damage profile and makes sure your healers don't hate you(something that has always been at the back of my mind having my self been a healer for most of TBC). Beyond a smooth damage profile, it seemed stamina was the best scaling stat, indeed nothing increases TTL quite as much as stamina. But inflating your healthpool is only good as long as your healers are overhealing, and even then you best be aware that you do not do so at the cost of higher spikes of damage. At the end of T7 raiding I've settled into the groove of about 40k health(raid buffed), opting not to stack stamina from gems, gear nor enchants. Quite simply, what I get naturally has been enough, and I still see gearing for other things as being more beneficial to my tanking overall.

So then what am I left with? Most people would assume I then stack agility for high amounts of dodge, but as a former healer I never much liked the damage profiles of avoidance-tanks. Instead I've picked quite a few pieces of gear for expertise instead of agility and stamina. It's the stat I value the highest, and the reason is simple. As agility is both a threat and dps stat(ap and crit) and a avoidance(dodge) and slight mitigation(armour) stat, so is expertise a powerful offensive as well as defensive stat. Just as the golden rule for DPS is that if you don't land attacks, you lose more damage than if you stack a bit more AP or crit, so you lose more threat from getting parried than you would gain from the bit more AP and crit, especially with frontloaded threat abilities such as swipe now is. This means for good threat, stacking hit and expertise is key. But whilst hit only reduces incoming damage based on applications of infected wounds(if you've opted to take the talent, as I have), expertise reduces parry chance, and this in my opinion is the second best source of mitigation for a druid tank. Put simply, each parry has been shown to increase on average the speed at which the next attack comes in by 40%. That's nasty. That's spiky. That's potentially deadly and at the very least, it increases incoming damage by a truckload. This is all counter to my philosophy of having a stable and smooth damage profile. I'm currently sitting at 11.75% reduction to parry chance, and I'm intent on switching out a few gems to take it up to 12% or more. Early druid gear had the luxury of having a lot of expertise available, and the base 10 expertise we can get from talents helps us greatly. And there's nothing I love more than hearing my healers remark on how little damage I take and how steady it is over time. Simply put, do your healers a favour, don't forget to stack some expertise as well.

-Shamad

Furry scaling - The future of druids

This seemed like a natural follow-up to the first article, or rather expansion on it.

Ferals get a lot for free. It's great. We're crit immune and sporting tons of mitigations and some dodge and parry reduction out of the box. Life's good, and blizzard is piling on the sweetness with the upcoming changes to armour, providing even more scaling before you even start gearing up. Sure we're getting hit by a small nerf to current top end armour(although how small it actually is is debatable), but we can live with it. And besides, we'll make up for it with the next iLvl gear. So why am I concerned about the future viability of my furry friend?

Put simply, the problem is the 3.0.8 changes are going to help us hit the armour cap faster in the long run. Armour scales ridiculously well with harder hitting mobs. We might even max out armour during T8. We're almost certain to max out expertise in T8. And we're already knocking on the point where dodge starts to feel the effects of diminishing returns. Sounds good, right? But what's left for us to scale with then? Stamina? With Blizzards stated goal to avert the endless mana of late TBC, the upcoming JoW nerf for high int classes and nerfs to aoe-healing, we're likely to see healers blowing more mana on raidhealing, and having less mana to work with. This won't be a problem for current top end guilds, as we already outgear the content by a country mile(and is unlikely to be felt hard in general on the T7 level). What it does mean, is that going into the next level of content, healers are probably going to start to feel the constraints of mana-shortages. Stacking stamina in such an environment will get you many angry remarks about that stupid manasponge of a bear-tank. But that's all we really have left to scale with. And this scares me. Because by the end of T8 this means other tanks will be on level with us, but they still have ways to improve themselves. We won't.

You might argue that armour scales not simply as you get more of it, but it scales as the hits get bigger. This may be our saving grace until Blizzard gets around to figuring out how they really want us to work. But having played underdog classes in the past, waiting for Blizzard to get around to fixing a fundamental flaw really does not fill me with confidence. We need a comprehensive re-think akin to that which paladins received in the beta. The problem is Blizzard already gave us a fundamental reworking, and we're getting another, almost as important one, in 3.0.8. And yet neither of these addresses the problems looming over the horizon.

There is hope, but past experiences makes me weary. While I don't expect to find any gear tailored for my tanking needs in T8, there is the chance that if Blizzard does decide not to give us proper leather tanking gear they might instead feel we have to gain more from offensive stats into defense. If so, we're set for a reverse-paladin style mechanic, not gaining offensive powers from defensive stats but perhaps scaling our healability from crit or AP. If our healability is allowed to scale, it opens up an endless scaling in terms of stamina when coupled with good DPS-stats. The risk might be that stamina becomes simply too powerful or that druids can become a lot easier to heal, allowing a raid to bring more DPS and less healers if they stack druid tanks with high healability and mitigation. There are many pitfalls and if something is done, it's quite likely to have to result in nerfs to our base talents. Will Blizzard accept nerfing most druids to maintain the highest geared druids as viable tanks in late T8 and going into T9? This remains to be seen.

-Shamad