Video: 2-manning Sapphiron 10!

ETA: Added information from myself and Rexdart about our specs, gear, and strategy on this - all below the video!

In follow up to my post about 2-manning Sapphiron 10 the other week, my friend and I went back in the other night and took him down again! I remembered to video it this time (and actually insisted we wipe it the first time when the recording had a fault and stopped midway through the fight, so I could make sure I had a good video of the whole thing. Repair bills went into this recording!).

It was a ton of fun, and we learned from our kill last week and sped up the kill time by over a minute (though it still took 13 minutes - don't worry, the video has been sped up!). Mostly it was just being a little more strategic in our placement to avoid getting out of range of each other and deciding how we wanted to deal with the blizzards - we decided to just sit and take some of it, as keeping up the healing for it wasn't too demanding and constantly moving was hampering our DPS a bit.

Enjoy the video! (and share it around!) Link to the video here. You can watch it in HD! I'm embedding it at a smaller size just so as not to take up too much space on the blog page.




Also, on the topic of videos, I'd like to give a plug for my friend Bouncydemon's new YouTube page - he does some amazing videos (he made the official video for our Halion HM 25 kill) and will be making more in Cataclysm, so keep an eye on his channel! Bouncydemon's YouTube Channel

ETA: Also now have an official YouTube Channel for the Blog - FeralTree YouTube Channel

We didn't do anything too special for the fight itself - a lot is mostly the joys of overgearing content (and the healthpool boosts from 4.0.1 don't hurt either). We grabbed a food buff for this kill but we didn't have any for our last kill. The only buff used was Gift of the Wild and, apart from Wild's inherent Frost resist, we didn't use any additional Frost resist pieces.

My spec was my standard raiding spec (2/0/34) and my PvE gear (armoury) which is mostly 277 pieces. If you wanted to use a spec specifically for things like this, Fury of Stormrage would probably be a good talent to pick up to boost your DPS a bit more. I didn't find it necessary, but it would definitely be a nice talent to use to get some Starfires worked in there as well. I used my Tree of Life as a DPS cooldown in this rather than a healing cooldown (though as you can see my first one was poorly timed, as I wasted half of it in an ice tomb), tree-form Wrath spamming can pull some great DPS if you can keep it up, plus the instant-Regrowths make it much easier to recover quick big heals should anyone fall behind while you're DPSing. In hindsight, I probably could have thrown on a piece or two of +hit gear - missing wasn't costly at all, but it was a nuisance, particularly at one point where my Faerie Fire missed three times in a row. I mostly kept my Wraths to tree-form as it's such a long cast in caster form, but I tried to keep Moonfire and Insect Swarm up as often as I could as well as Faerie Fire from the start. I also tossed Thorns on Ortega whenever I remembered to add in a little more DPS there. Along with keeping HoTs up, I popped Efflorescence pretty exclusively onto Ortega, both for the big Swiftmend heal and to add that additional healing tick to give me more time to DPS or move.

For Rexdart, his spec is a PvE Beast Mastery spec (31/2/3) and his gear was also PvE gear of mostly 264 pieces (armoury). Glyph of Misdirection is a pretty great glyph to help pets build up good threat if it's needed. Ortega's spec is this (Tenacity). A pretty key talent Ortega has is Blood of the Rhino, increasing all healing effects on the pet by 40%. You can see in the video, too, Ortega has cooldowns as well - Shell Shield, effectively a shield wall with a 50% damage reduction, is used frequently.

From Rexdart:
"As for things like building threat, Kill Command with some reforging of excess hit into mastery was more than enough threat generation. I honestly only needed to use MD once at the very beginning and that was it. Disengage was used to escape out of blizzards faster, and mend pet was used to help during transitions between air phases, assuming he didn't run out of range to the opposite side of where we were.

There's actually two turtle damage reduction effects, which is why they are one of the best pets for tanking now: Shell Shield and Cower. Shell Shield when put on auto-cast seems to use some fairly smart AI, and I only see it activate when the pet drops to about 50% or less HP. Cower gets used whenever it's up when it's put on autocast. Being BM spec with Longevity, the cooldowns on these two get reduced to 42 seconds on SS and 31.5 on Cower, so the cooldown coverage is pretty good even with spamming.

A few other solo-style hunters have a stamina gem set they use to boost up their pet's health even more. Currently I don't have this, but I could see a turtle tanking some of the bosses in ICC without too much trouble given a decent +stamina setup."


For the most part, the fight wasn't really complicated - ultimately it was a tank and spank, really. The air  phase was trivial as both Rexdart and myself were icetombed each time, and Ortega's passive AE damage reductions (as a pet) protected him from the frost bombs. For me, I was focussing on balancing keeping us all alive and putting out DPS to help ensure we beat the enrage timer, and also decursing (as that curse heals Sapph). Rex will have been more focussed on managing Ortega's threat and survivability along with dishing out the damage. The main nuisance of the fight were the Blizzards, as they would inevitably target onto us (as there was no one else to target), but just intelligent decisions on when to remain standing in it and when to move out of it was all that was needed to deal with it. For positioning, we had to adapt after each air phase as Ortega would often shift positions, but we simply communicated that on vent to ensure we both went the same direction.