A lot of guilds are beginning to work on Sartharion with three drakes up (affectionately referred to as Sarth 3D) and having fun trying to figure out how to live through 75k breaths on their main tank as well as all the other raid damage going out. Currently the hardest fight in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, this is the pinnacle of raid progression.

First, let’s review all the buffs/debuffs of the fight and their sources:

• Power of Tenebron - +100% Shadow damage taken. Present until Tenebron dies.
• Power of Shadron - +100% Fire damage taken. Present until Shadron dies.
• Power of Vesperon - -25% on your raid. Present until Vesperon dies.
• Gift of Twilight - +50% Fire damage taken (the spell details for this are incorrect). This is an invisible aura that is up when the Disciple of Shadron is alive.
• Twilight Torment - +75% Shadow and Fire damage taken and causes damage to you when you deal damage or heal. This buff is cast by the Disciple of Vesperon continuously on your raid. The buff is removed when you take damage from it.

The first thing you should notice here is that there are three fire multipliers, and they stack multiplicatively. With that in mind, here’s the Flame Breath damage numbers you will see during the fight:

• Base: 11k - 14k
• Power of Shadron: 22k - 28k
• Gift of Twilight: 33k - 42k
• Twilight Torment: 57k - 74k

Keep in mind that your tank’s total health is reduced by 25% throughout all of this. There’s nothing you can do to prevent the 33k - 42k breaths. Your tank needs to be able to survive these with a combination of hitpoint pool, Power Word: Shield, and cooldowns. Druids with jewelcrafting should easily be able to get enough hitpoints for this and other tanks should focus on a hitpoint set as well or get full 25 man gear.

The next thing your tank needs to learn to do is the Twilight Torment Dance. Sartharion’s max strength breaths require very poweful cooldowns and careful coordination to control if you don’t do the dance because they hit so ridiculously hard. It’s simply easier to learn how to manipulate Twilight Torment. Twilight Torment is removed within a second of it dealing damage to you, which happens when you cause any damage aside from autoattacking. When Vesperon’s Acolyte is up your tank needs to go into dance mode and simply autoattack. As soon as he sees the Flame Breath begin to cast, he does a special. This will clear Twilight Torment just prior to the hit, reducing the max damage to something reasonable.

There are many other aspects to mastering this fight which I’m not going to go over, but the Twilight Torment Dance is the least obvious and least well known aspect of the fight and dealing with the breaths is one of the hardest parts.