I’ve Never Been Here, Is This Boss Hard?

I mentioned in my last post that we often have to learn things the hard way because we are working on content without strategies or documentation. In this age of live streaming broadcasts, full strategies before content leaves the Public Test Realm, and detailed write-ups within a week of release, the opportunity to see content in this virgin state is limited to a very small number of guilds. The process of learning can be very fun and very frustrating.

Night 1 - Does The Lava Burn?

We didn’t put any time into learning Sartharion with drakes alive in the Wrath of the Lich King beta so all we had to go on was vague rumors and inaccurate second hand information. On our first pulls we had two people literally kill themselves off and sit there with stopwatches timing everything that happened. Our only goal was to live as long as we could so we could figure out the timing of as many events as possible and figure out what all the buffs and debuffs were doing. Sarth 3D is a complicated fight with a lot going on, so making enough sense of it to control it was the first priority.

We knew from experience on the normal version that we couldn’t handle the whelps by killing eggs, so we knew we’d need a tank to pick them up when they spawned. We quickly learned that the drakes entered the fight in a specific order and at set times so we had to adapt our strategy to killing them in the order they arrived.  We spent a lot of “retard time” the first night learning how to dodge Shadow Fissure and lava waves. We had a lot of deaths to the void zones before realizing that setting spells effects down all the way would hide Death and Decay but not the void zones. It’s tough to make progress on a strategy when people are dying to the basics, but by the end of the first night everyone had learned how vitally important it was to stare at their feet and to be aware of lava wave positioning.

We spent a lot of night one having people running around wasting DPS time because we thought that we needed to spread out for void zones and because we thought Lava Strike spawned fire elementals when it hit people. We didn’t realize this wasn’t true until the second night. The reduced DPS caused serious issues with our ability to kill Tenebron quickly.

We finally got to the point where Vesperon was spawning and then our tank would get one-shot within 30 seconds every single time. We didn’t know what the hell was happening. We just knew that whenever both acolytes were up our tank was about to get one-shot by a breath. Our first tactic to deal with this was fire resist gear. Yes, level 70 fire resist gear. We went and re-gemmed and re-enchanted one of our tank’s old Illidan fire resist sets with all new gems and enchants. This worked a little better than our previous tactic of doing nothing at all. Our tank would resist enough of the huge breaths to live about half the time, but a 50% success rate does not a server first make. We spent the rest of the night rolling the dice with the fire resist tank and brainstorming how the hell we were supposed to deal with the breath. There were many exclamations similar to, “Holy hell, a 65k breath! How are we supposed to survive that?”

Night 2 - Where’s The Level 80 Fire Resist Gear?

By the second night we realized that Tenebron needed to die before the second whelp spawn wave and that became our benchmark. We emphasized to the raid that they needed to minimize time moving around and any other downtime. We told everyone to get in position before Tenebron was even attackable and to hammer him the instant they could. Our DPS on Tenebron greatly increased and we were able to start making progress on Shadron. Fusion tends to put more focus on controlling fights rather than zerging them, and on certain encounters this is to our detriment. For our initial strategy we opted to kill the acolytes when they spawned rather than straight burning the drakes.

We banged our heads against the fight with a fire resist tank for the entire night before deciding that no, it definitely wasn’t going to work. It often happens that with difficult and complex fights that we end up with “lost time”. This is time that was basically completely wasted either due to players making the same mistakes repeatedly or us using a strategy that just wasn’t going to work and it took us too long to realize it. This lost time can be an hour, a night, or a whole week. It depends on the difficulty and complexity of the fight and how dumb we, the raid leaders, are.

Night 3 - Cool Down with Cooldowns

The third night we came back after further gearing up our tanks and having our druid tank focus on creating a maximum hitpoint set. We still didn’t know what was causing the huge breaths and thought maybe they were a fluke and we were doing something wrong and that we could prevent them somehow. During night we realized that we were going to have to deal with breaths that would be well in excess of whatever hitpoints our tanks could get, so our logical conclusion was that we had to chain damage reduction cooldowns and minimize the amount of time the acolytes were alive. Thus our strategy was to take portals and gib the hell out of the acolytes. We used a Druid who would hit Barkskin and Survival Instincts, a Priest with Pain Suppression, and a Paladin with Hand of Sacrifice and Divine Shield.

Only by the middle of the third night were we starting to get a firm grasp on the interactions that caused flame breath to hit for so hard. Cooldowns were being used at the right times, the tank was living, and we were living longer. We still had a ways to go, but the end was finally in sight.

The rest of the night was typical of a complex fight that we had nearly mastered. Getting so close to the kill for hours on end but not being quite able to bring it home. A mistimed cooldown, a healer gets gibbed, an uncalled lava wave. One mistake and its all over, and mistakes happen a lot. This touchiness is indicative of one of a things: either we’re undergeared for the fight, the fight is really hard, we’re using a sub par strategy, or some combination of the above.

Our kill shot looked like another wipe. During the hardest point of the fight with both Shadron and Vesperon up, their acolytes spawning, three of our seven healers died in a short period of time. Somehow the four remaining healers (including me!) managed to keep everyone in the raid alive. The tanks, the raid, in the portals, outside the portal. It was the hardest healing I’ve ever done in my life, but we refused to give up. We killed Shadron and the fight stabilized. Our second tank taunted Sartharion off the druid tank and we were able to chain battle rezes and get two healers back up. Once Shadron is dead the fight becomes significantly easier and we coasted to victory a few minutes later.

Postmortem - So That’s How You Do It

Often when we have difficulty with a fight we try and refine our strategy in following weeks to make the kill more repeatable and less stressful. This process usually involves incorporating the findings and strategies of other guilds as it becomes discussed more and more in the community. The details of how all the buffs and debuffs function was worked out on Elitistjerks in a discussion between a number of people in guilds who had beaten the encounter, including a few of our members. It became obvious on analyzing this that the crunch point was when Vesperon and Shadron were both alive and that the ideal strategy involved burning Shadron as fast as possible in order to minimize the time when both were alive. Our strategy of taking every portal and killing acolytes was far from optimal and in fact made the fight significantly more difficult to learn.

We’d spent our time figuring out how to control the encounter; killing acolytes, keeping tanks alive with cooldowns, meticulously coordinating everything. The right strategy was to just burn the hell out of the drakes and kill them before they killed us. We implemented this strategy on our second kill and it was much easier. Our first kill was above 10 minutes, our second kill was around 6 and a half minutes. Our third kill was a one shot, as we had mastered the encounter and were using the optimal strategy.

Our experiences with Sarth 3D are a good example of what it’s like at the top end of raid progression. Without the experiences and knowledge of others to draw on it’s really hard to know what the “right” way is. We just muddle through until we get something that sort of works and we pound at it until we get the kill. A lot of times we end up spending a whole night or more on a dead-end strategy that won’t be able to take us to a kill.

Reins of the Twilight Drakes