Sarth + 2 = Hard

Two drakes is really a lot harder than one versus Sartharian. Just adding Vesperon's debuff to the first phase of the fight versus Tenebron made it extremely difficult to survive. In fact, over 3 hours of attempts, I think we only made it past Tenebron once or maybe twice with a few deaths.

The main difference is the -25% hp debuff, which pushes everybody down into fragile territory. If mobs get loose, they pwn the healers quickly. The dmg builds up quite a bit so that I'm very vulnerable to a spike when I'm holding Tenebron, the whelps and possibly a handful of enraged blazes. And Dethno is vulnerable to a spike as soon as Tenebron goes down and Sarth enrages to +25% dmg.

It's also one of those typical Blizzard "mean to the tanks" fight. I don't know of any other battles where I'm expected to tank a boss level mob, 8-10 additional mobs and still find and taunt other randomly spawning mobs off the healers (the blazes). While moving to dodge the flame walls. While maintaining max threat so the drake dies in the available time. I'm using an ability every 1.5s for the entire fight and best of all there's no regular rhythm to it, it's mostly reactive to the circumstances -- the sequence changes depending on which flame walls we get, who draws aggro, etc.

I sensed a certain amount of frustration as we beat our heads against the fight, too. I think we weren't being creative enough. It's too easy to fixate on "solutions" like, "our gear isn't good enough," or "we need a shammy for heroism," or some unavailable approach. The morning after (now), I'm thinking we should have been trying to find ways to work in some more of our abilities. For various reasons we had talked ourselves out of using AoE or Frost Nova, which we have more of than a typical 10-person group. Once or twice when mobs were getting loose, I felt the absence of a real AoE taunt that Pallies don't have and Warriors do. A couple of times, I was tempted to suggest swapping up the tanking roles just to explore and in hindsight, I wish we had.

There's a tricky balance between practicing the same strat for efficiency and execution improvements and exploring new ideas or just trying weird stuff. We don't actually have a lot of practice grinding out really new content, so we might not have found the right balance here. We typically try to reason out (or read up) on a reasonable strat and then practice it until we get it. Sometimes it works such that it feels like no progress for attempt after attempt and then it suddenly clicks. But other times are like last night, where we might have been making it harder than necessary by being so fixated on our approach.

It also worried me that 2 people got really tired about an hour before the regular end of the raid time. That's unusual and suggests that we weren't having enough fun. Maybe we need to incorporate a regular schedule of every so many pulls, we try something goofy just to stay fresh and focused. Goofy could mean strats we didn't think would work, like taking the portals or using a lot of AoE and fighting both drakes at once. Or something crazy like kite-tanking one of the drakes with a mage & iceblock, or having a non-tank tank Sartharian until Tenebron is down. Even if it's a disaster, we might learn something, or at least get ourselves a laugh.

At least, in the end, we brought Bloc in to show off his new lag-free comp and did Sarth+1. It took 2 tries -- Bloc had never seen a flame wall render on his screen before, but boy did it feel easy in comparison.

Tonight it's back to Naxx for a full-speed 1-night clear (I hope). I think I might be healing tonight since we now have 3 functional warrior tanks and Tuesdays we're usually initially short a healer anyway (Hawksy). Should be fun.