Dos Drakes

For the last couple of weeks, my 10-man raid group has been attempting Sartharion +2 drakes. We have been leaving Tenenbron and Vesperon up. The first night of attempts was an absolute disaster. After back-to-back tries leading up to respawns, we eventually went back to one Drake (Tenenbron) and completed the raid with ease. It seems that now, leaving Tenenbron up is easy for us. I guess that makes sense after a couple of hours of working toward killing 2 of them.

This past weekend we tried again. We definitely improved. Our DPS on Tenenbron was much faster, and we downed him pretty consistently before Vesperon landed. The practice and upgrades our group had gotten over the past week had made a difference. However, we still were unable to win. We got Tenenbron down and even got to the point to clearing whelps a couple of times, but never without losing people. The damage everyone was taking was just too high. We finally (again, after respawns) gave in and killed Sarth with one drake up—but this time we chose to leave Vesperon up. We wanted to get practice on this second drake. We all assumed it would be as easy as Tenenbron, but there was a distinct difference: When we were doing 2 drakes, we had to leave our third tank (me) and his dedicated healer (Tamzz) outside of Vesperon's first portal to continue handling the many whelps and fire elementals that were still up from when Tenenbron's last batch of eggs hatched. This left Laeryn (our Ret Pally) to attempt to tank the add inside Vesperon's portal and left Whammie (our Ele Shaman) to heal him. Basically giving two of our DPS players non-DPS roles in the portal. That just left Ay (Rogue) and Vressa (Boomkin) to burn down the dragonkin. By the time the portal was cleared, another was spawning—and people were dying. We learned a lot by switching it up. It was clear that we can't complete the fight with that strategy. Without trying Sarth + Vesperon (rather than Tenenbron), it may have taken us much longer to come to this conclusion. See, when we moved to one drake, we still used the same setup. There were no whelps, but Tammz and I still stayed out of the portal and just dealt with Fire Elementals. The four who went into the portals just were not set up for success. Once we discovered this we decided to have Tammz and I go in and let our DPSers get back to DPSing. Wouldn't you know, it was cake.

Lesson Learned: Six of us need to go into ALL of Vesperon's portals. In order to do this, when we have two drakes up, we'll have to clear out all of the whelps before entering the first portal. We were under the impression that the portal should take priority over the whelps, but freeing up Tammz and I make dealing with the portal possible, so the whelps need to take priority. Next time we go into Obsidian Sanctum and try Sarth + 2, we'll handle all of the whelps before any of the six of us enter the portal. Yes, that means a longer amount of time with no one in the portal (and more damage occurring outside), but it also means that (once we are in the portal) the dragonkin will go down quickly. Once the first one is down, it should be cake. I think we'll get it the next night we try it.