Sartharion with 3 drake Zerg

This past week, I got a pretty cool achievement. I zerged 10 man Sartharion with 3 drakes up. To summarize, doing this fight as a zerg is a lot of fun. At the gear level available in game, it’s really easy, it doesn’t require more than 10 people to do and a good pug will be able to clear this. I’ll run down what I did with my group to accomplish this.

How to get your group together:
The interesting thing about this is I did this as a pug I put together on the Exodar forums. I put a post up on the forums with a date and time for the run seeking anyone interested in taking part in the zerg. As soon as people started posting, I filled a roster up pretty quickly (about 3-4 days before the run happened). I took 4 people from Mediocrity, and the other people consisted of pugs from 4 other guilds. Calling this a pure pug would be a lie, but the group was put together in a pickup group style. You can find your group anyway you want, forums in guild, in trade. Most groups will be able to do this if you have heroic 5 man Trial of the Champion-Naxx-Conquest gear. The better the gear, the easier it is.

What to take:
In the group we had a Protection Paladin tanking and a Holy Paladin healing, and the damage dealers were a Warlock, Elemental Shaman, Feral Druid, Fury Warrior, 2 Death Knights, Marksman Hunter, Arcane Mage. You’ll want 1 tank, 1 healer and 8 DPS(1 who can taunt). Group composition shouldn’t matter too much as long as the roles are filled. You’ll want at least 1 person who can taunt and a Shaman for Bloodlust though. Each DPS should be able to sustain about 4000 DPS over roughly 80 seconds using bloodlust, trinkets and big cooldowns(which is extremely easy with the current gear availability). More important than DPS, everyone in the group should be able to survive fire walls with minimal movement.

Pulling and positioning:
After all the trash is cleared in the instance make your way to the back of the room. You’ll want to pull Sartharion from his left rear side. The tank will turn him around. Everyone except the tank should stand at the back of the room. Movement is key, and it won’t be perfect the first time. Allow yourselves a few wipes to get used to movement. As for fire walls*, when a fire wall comes from Sartharion’s head the group will collapse on a little piece of land sticking. When fire walls come from his tail, the group can collapse on Sartharion (not behind him to counter tailswipes and not in front of him to counter flame breathes). Again, the less you move the more you focus on DPS.

*A note about Fire Walls: If someone gets hit by a fire wall, two things happen. They take damage and spawn adds. Since there is only 1 healer he’ll have to shift his attention away from the tank which is bad. Adds create an added issue of hitting non-tanks. You can never switch from Sartharion to adds so they are just a problem to everyone.

“The red spec is Sarth, the brown spec is the tank, and the green spec is the dps and healers. Standing here lets you DPS the dragon, and avoid one direction of fire walls.”

The fight:
Zerging Sartharion with 3 drakes relies on a key statement: Minimal movement with high uptime on DPS. This is usually why melee zergs are popular(Melee can move and DPS at the same time very easily), but I believe any group composition can do this.

Group pulls. As soon as everyone is in position, Bloodlust, DPS cooldowns and trinkets should happen. Ideally, Bloodlust should last until he’s at 50% health (80 second fight with 40 seconds of bloodlust). If your DPS is high, Bloodlust can last up to 30% health.

Shortly into the fight, Tenebron will land. The tank needs to taunt the drake and keep the drake on him for now. Continue to avoid fire walls, etc. At 30%, Tenebron will enrage. His damage will be increased by a significant amount. It gets a bit tricky here. Our group was lucky enough to have a druid. A druid can taunt the drake, and sprint away in cat form. This will give the group a little more than 15 seconds to finish Sartharion off before the drake slaughters your druid and runs back to ruin your group.

Another way to deal with the enraged drake is to have any class with a taunt, taunt the drake and use a potion of Swiftness to run it away from the group.

The whole fight cannot take longer than 85 seconds (1 minute and 25 seconds). At this time, Sartharion puts a shield on himself making him immune to damage. The only advice I can offer for low DPS is again, to minimize movement and keep a high DPS uptime on Sartherion (in addition to having mastered your class’s rotation/priority). If your DPS is low because threat is an issue, misdirect and tricks of the trade at every cooldown. If your tank’s threat is not spiky, you can ride threat at 90% all of the fight.

“Angryknight on his sweet new Black Drake.”

The Reward:
You get a pretty sweet title, like mine “Ossein of the Nightfall”. And one person in the group gets to walk away with a Black Drake. Our group rolled on the drake, and Angryknight, one of our death knights in the group won it. With the success of our group, we’ll be doing this run every reset until we all have drakes(and probably even after since this run is quite fun).

Upcoming: I’ll be writing a post about raiding leading and how bad leaders can make successful groups. Another Warrior interview soon and a role playing post on the gear aesthetics in Tier 10 gear.

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