Dragonage

Sartharian with 3 drakes up is hard, as advertised. We did a nice chunk of work/practice on it last night for ~2 hours. We didn't quite have a perfectly ideal group and I don't think we fully optimized the tanking role, but I personally found it useful to see/hear the fight from a different perspective.

I tried doing the MT thing last night while Ragon & Dethno did adds and drakes. There's a fair chunk of time during the 2nd into the 3rd drake where every fire breath is fatal to me (~40k+). Because the damage from the breath is instant, neither my Ardent Defender (-30% dmg at <35% health) nor my Lay on Hands is useful as a cooldown. So I only have the one (Divine Shield) and long-term that probably means I shouldn't MT the fight in favor of a warrior who can both Shield Wall and Last Stand.

We didn't actually reach the point where the missing cooldown mattered, though. I'd do the first one, then the priests would do Guardian and Pain Suppression. That's about 48s of protection, which is almost enough anyway to get through the critical period.

In the end, we mostly practiced getting the drakes and whelps down as fast as possible and worked on getting used to the flame wall and void zones both being insta-death. Since I'm moving around a lot less as MT, I was able to see when/how people were dying and watch the dps, etc. I also found that the MT has a pretty good perspective on the flame walls although it was hard to call the south wall on vent because my push-to-talk button is right near my strafe-left button. But I think the MT should probably go voice-activated on vent and call the flame walls for everybody else. As soon as Tenebron is down, you end up with such a solid grip on threat that you can afford to watch walls and Sarth's Flame Breath casts to use cooldowns reactively. The MT will also have to call for the priest cooldowns as they wear off. I found that hard because I wasn't used to the buff icon hiding in my 4 rows of buffs during the fight. It should be doable with practice, though.

When we got near the respawn timer, we downed Shadron and did Sarth+2, although that also took us a couple of tries. Several people suggested making it harder by downing Vesperon and leaving Tenebron and Shadron up. I said we'd do that next week if we 1-shot it but I didn't want to risk have to spend 20m reclearing the trash. We didn't 1-shot it, but if we don't get +3 down next week but it looks pretty close, I think Tenebron+Shadron is the way to go for practice.

I'm hoping we'll be back to full strength next Tuesday and get another solid night in there. We may have to consider recruiting another player or two. Hopefully we can do it by word of mouth or via finding good players in pugs instead of forum recruiting spam.

After Sarth+2, we went to do Malygos. It would be nice to get that fight down closer to 6m, but we went in with 3 tanks, 7 healers and only 24 players, which is about 5-6 dps light. I think play was reasonably strong until Phase 3, but we still have people dying or failing to dps well on Phase 3. At least we've figured out how to track drake damage by player in Phase 3, so we can give feedback to the people who are having trouble dpsing. There's usually a handful of people in the 600-800k range and another chunk in the 400-600k range. The second chunk is often people who got a lot of the Arcane Surges (although in theory, you should be able to not let this clobber your dps if you are playing very tight). But there's also a chunk of people below 400k and they are probably still working on the movement and cast patterns.

Maybe we should be running more Malygos-10s. And instead of the usual Bear/Badger group, we can stack one with super-high dps for a 6m attempt and a second, slower group aimed at getting more experience for the players still learning the fight.