Sang Grail

Last week I posted some information on Saurfang that helped explain the encounter and what we needed to do to manage the healing and runic power in order to defeat him more easily.

While we have downed him several times, I think I have just found a piece of information that may make him really easy for us in the future.

We had previously identified the two areas where we could impact the fight most (other than the obvious: DPS a lot and heal a lot):

• Rune of Blood - make sure the tanks switch as soon as this debuff is cast on the tank. This reduces the amount of healing on Saurfang and reduces the Blood Power gained from melee swings on the tank with this debuff.
• Blood Beasts - kill them quickly or kite them to reduce the number of times they hit a player, which generate Blood Power.

In our last run, our tanks worked hard at switching as soon as Rune of Blood was cast. We ran into a couple of cases where the taunts were missing on some of our failed attempts. However, on our successful kill, we cut the number of heals in half and the fight went very smoothly.

And now to unveil the new information that will make this fight a piece of cake…

The exciting new information (new for me…I’m a little slow) is that several classes have effects that reduce healing that can be utilized on this fight:

• Mortal Strike - Warrior
• Wound Poison IV - Rogue
• Aimed Shot - Hunter
• Improved Mind Blast (Mind Trauma) - Shadow Priest talent

Let’s see how the numbers work out using our last 2 Saurfang fights as an example.

Attempt #3 (6 min 49 sec):
Saurfang’s health = approx 9 million
Heals from Rune of blood = 31 * 45K = 1.4 Million
Heals from Mark (due to death) = 439,000

Attempt #4 - Success! (6 min 1 sec):
Saurfang’s health = approx 9 million
Heals from Rune of blood = 17 * 50K = 850,000

Attempt #4 - What could have been:
Saurfang’s health = approx 9 million
Heals from Rune of blood = 17 * 50K * 50% = 425,000

This illustrates a couple of things:
1. DPS kills the boss much faster if his healing is reduced (success was 48 seconds faster than previous defeat).
2. We have a better chance to keep the person with the mark alive if we get the boss down faster.
3. If we were able to reduce his healing by 50%, we could have downed him another 14 seconds faster (assuming 30K DPS).
4. Healers have a much better chance of not running out of mana if we can shorten the fight.

So, let’s keep up the great work and see if we can blow him away even faster next time!