One Dragon Three Drakes MANY Whelps!

Of course I am talking about Sartharion, a raid boss that introduces some interesting new mechanics to the WoW raid scene.

The obsidian sanctum is the first raid dungeon in WoW that allows players to increase the difficulty of the encounter for a greater rewards. Sartharion by himself is a simple tank ‘n’ spank encounter with some minor AoE and movement needed to succeed however the difficulty can be upped by adding drakes to the encounter and its when adding theses drakes that the fight takes on epic proportions that I can only compare to the Kil’Jaeden encounter at the end of Burning Crusade.

My guild Aeon has always had what I would call a casual bunch of raiders but we started raiding pretty early in the current expansion Wrath of The Lich king and have cleared all the raiding content with relative ease. Content clear is not really a huge thing to wave about these days, raiding in lich king has been designed so that new players and casuals can get in to the raiding scene and not face the difficulties like in raids of old but there is one encounter designed for the hardcore, Sartharion and his 3 drakes.

So we started out week one of raiding doing the fight easy-mode no drakes, We ended up wiping because people failed to move from the incoming fire walls but after one wipe we managed to get him down even though people still died from firewalls, seems moving and casting is too hard for some people.

Week two time for a drake? I had high hopes; my guild did not, we tried with Shadron up but ended up doing it with no drakes in the end because people wanted an easy fight.

As the weeks went on we carried on doing the fight the easy way because we were more focused on getting the standard raid content clear. January 16th Malygos cleared on Heroic mode, it was time to go back and visit Sarth this time with a drake.

So we tried Sartharion with Tenebron and his many whelps up, it did not go too well. I had not watched any videos because we had a make our own tactic policy which seemed to work for all the other raid content. After some failed tries I decided to watch a quick video on youtube of the fight and saw how we could improve, with tactics adjusted we one shotted the encounter with tenebron.

Two drakes. A week later and we went for Sarth with two drake; Tenebron and Vesperon. We wiped for the best part of three hours attempting the two drakes but managed to down him with the last attempt before raid time was over.

A week later we consolidated and did the two drakes again this time with a little more ease.

With 2 drakes under our now epic belts it was time for a bash at 3 drakes. We spent 2 nights of attempting the encounter with varying degrees of success but it was clear people lost focus towards the end of raids which resulted in arguing amongst the ranks, people were just frustrated that we weren’t progressing and some people were making simple mistakes which ruined attempts. We fought on for a 3rd night and it seemed that people actually wanted to do this! the casuals were gone, I had a raid full of raiders who were prepared to do what it took. We had some good progress on night 3 but it seemed it would not be 3rd night lucky, raid time was drawing to a close and I got a tell from one of my mages Twisted, he told me this next attempt would be his last as he had to get up early int he morning, I told him it would be every ones last because we would do it this time.

The fight started as usual with sarth being pulled to the main tank, the raid ran to positions and waited for Tenebron to land and the first firewall. Tenebron landed I smashed him with my shield immedietley to pickup threat and started to move him. We downed Tenebron without a bloodlust dealt with his whelps and began DPS on Shadron as I moved him accross in anticipation of Vesperon, bloodlust was popped as the raid attempted to get past Shadron who had been our downfall so far.

Vesperon landed and put our raid in all sorts of trouble, the damage that flies around when Vesperon lands is frenetic but every one focused on getting Shadron down. Shadron dead with most of the raid alive! we continued to DPS Vesperon healing through the insane damage, Vesperon went down and it was time for the DPS and raid healers to enter the twilight portals and clean up acolytes that were causing debuffs. All of a sudden the obsidian sanctum was a very lonely place, so much going on just a second ago now 3 drakes lay dead at my feet and only the other 2 tanks and their healers remained, every one else had gone out of sight when they took portals tot he shadow realm. Screams of “WHOS TANKING?” were heard over vent we did not send any tanks down to the shadowrealm, instead we just let a plate DPS deal with it. So I heard the shouts over vent I had no idea who was alive and when my comrades would return to the normal realm to finish the fight, it was also time to see if our main tank who was wearing level 70 fire resist gear could survive the intense melee damage from a now enraged Sartharion. Suddenly every one appeared, it seemed that a few had been lost to the shadow realm but we had enough left push Sarth over the edge, it was touch and go with the main tank healing healers were running out of mana and our main tank was taking some heavy blows but at least the fire breaths felt like a warm breeze instead of the molten fury it does on a normal tank.

It was intense but we managed to finish the fight with the small group we had left, the downing was met with screams of celebration over vent and it was official, Aeon had arrived on the raiding big time.

Tactical guide coming soon!