So... this weekend my imperial guild was progressing in HM S&V... it's only the second time we've attempted it as a full guild run in Hard Mode.... (first run was last week, and Thrasher was our brick wall, handling the snipers on the wall, but our team comp last week was less than optimal. Assassin/PT, 2x Sorcs, 4x Snipers, and not everyone was as geared as they should be.)

First Night:

Team Makeup: Assassin/Powertech (tanks) - 2x Sorcerers (heals) - 2x Merc, 1x Sniper, 1x Marauder (dps)

• Dash'roode - 2 shotted
  
• Titan 6 - 1 shot
  
• Thrasher - stuck here a little while, 4-shotted, but me (as a dps merc) I ended up dropping over 150k in heals mostly on on the main tank and some spot heals, because the healers were behind a good bit of the fight.
  
• Infiltration/Operations Chief - 1 shot
  
• Olok - 2 shot (we wiped on the puzzle once, second time, we missed the last row on the puzzle and still had an Artillery droid up when Olok spawned, but we managed it... (how long is his enrage? we lost our top dps for 3 minutes during the fight, and still beat enrage...)
  
• Cartel Warlords - 1 shot
  

That brings us to Styrak... we only pulled Styrak once the first night just due to time, as it had gotten pretty late. We started the fight, got to the first Chained Manifestation and were wiped by the lightning chains from the adds with the manifestation in the middle at 20%.... we walked away at that point with the goal of coming back to pull it again.

Second Night:

Team Makeup: Assassin/Powertech (tanks) - 2x Sorcerers (heals) - 2x Merc, 1x Sniper, 1x Marauder (dps)

We told the sorcs during the Chained Manifestation, to drop their circles and then contribute as much as they could to dps. We beat them everytime and didn't wipe the rest of the night on that mechanic. Our problem was.....

We were missing enrage. First time we saw it, Styrak was at 20% and we never even got to the rez'd Kell Dragon.

Mox showed:

• Sniper - 1.3M dmg
  
• Merc1 - 1.0M dmg
  
• Merc2 - 900k dmg
  
• Marauder - 470k dmg
  

at that point, we decided to have our Marauder switch to his Sniper, since he does better dps on that toon, and we really had only wanted him on his Mara to be able to have an easier time leaping to the Demolitionists at Thrasher... then we pulled again. Styrak actually rez'd the Kell Dragon this time, but still enraged at 14%.

Mox showed:

• Sniper1 - 1.0M dmg
  
• Merc1 - 880k dmg
  
• Merc2 - 870k dmg
  
• Sniper2 - 640k dmg
  

Now, our total damage done went down, but we made it further in the fight, which tells me that our DPS was higher, and we "skipped" Chained Manifestation/Nightmare/adds phases in this attempt compared to our previous attempt. Yet, we are still pretty far behind, because we need another 14% (roughly 230k, as Styrak appears to have 1.66M HP) + the Reanimated Kell Dragon... So I see us still a ways off, because we have more than just the 14% on Styrak to tighten up.

My questions are this:

1. How much should the healers be helping out with dps?
   
2. What is the maximum number of Chained Manifestation/Nightmare phases that you can have without it being impossible to beat enrage? (is that how the fight even works? Or are there a set number of phases? Or is it strictly %-based on Styrak? I've never noticed in Story Mode because everything dies so quickly.)
   
3. Is our dps just too low right now, to beat the encounter and we need to go back to the drawing board and hone our skills?
   

Any advice/constructive criticism would appreciated.

I am by no means an expert, but I have cleared this fight both as a ops leader (and main tank) for our guild as a slinger DPS in 8-man and 16-man in guild and PUG runs.

He has to summon dragon after 5th chained or you get enrage. He will still enrage later if you don't kill him fast enough of course.

There are a couple of things you can do to maximise DPS on boss, I will point out a few:

1. One of your DPSers seems to be behind a lot - check his gear/rotation/dummy parse, maybe something can be improved easily?

2. Pop your relics, adrenals, DPS cooldowns, inspiration (or the imp version), all orbital strikes the first time boss comes down after kell dragon is killed - that is the longest period of uninterrupted DPS on boss you will get.

3. Healers should at minimum keep their DOT up on the boss at all times. We have a scoundrel healer drop the flyby as well when it's off cooldown (it hits like a truck with his gear).

4. Remember to maximise DPS when actual boss is there, not the adds/chained manifestation. Only first chained is usually hard to clear, next ones come down much quicker.

5. We do it and couple of guilds on The Red Eclipse do it - get rid of the second tank and bring high DPS, preferably a guardian, but can be anything if your main tank is good enough. I solo tank it usually, or if second tank doesn't have good enough DPS kit/character I swap to my slinger. It makes it much easier on DPS check. Tanking this solo is a bit tricky in the spinning phases but it is doable and there is very little groupwide damage if you do it right. Can be done both on Shadow and guardian. I am sure vanguard/powertech can do it as well. A DPS will have aggro of the boss for 4-5 sec's after each time he throws the tank - that person will need a lot of healing and to blow his cooldowns, but if tank is quick enough no real danger of death happens usually. You have to be back for the thundering blast and I never once missed it so far.

6. Maximise use of the slinger/sniper scrambling field to ease things for healers in AOE lightning phases and resurrected dragon phase so that healers can DPS. Dpeending on your healers my preference would be to have one of them heal only and maybe refresh the DOT and second one actually DPS if possible in particular phase but it's up to your healers and what is easiest to do for them.

7. If you are still stuck bring tons of granades and give them to healers and tanks

1. I cannot give you any number about how much the healers should be helping with DPS because I don't heal the fight, but I can say that they should be helping out whenever they can.

2. There is some argument as to when the enrage timer actually starts (Kell Dragon or Styrak himself, but from the spawn of the Kell Dragon rnd 1, it's about 8min. As far as I can tell, the manifestation phase changes are time based. I don't really pay attention to these things anymore, but I want to say if you hit a 5th nightmare phase, you're going to hit the enrage, but that number could be +/- 1 off. Someone else can come in with a guaranteed number.

And just some anecdotal constructive criticism from my observations on the fight.

a. I've noticed that if I hit 1M damage before or even during the revived Kell Dragon, it's a good chance Styrak is going to enrage. It's not that you don't have the DPS (well, it sort of is), but you need 4 pretty consistent DPS parses. If Sniper 1 and 2 were averaged out, going into 2nd Kell Dragon, you'd have more time left on enrage. This is a fight where someone who's being "carried" can't hide. I want to see my total damage be less than 1Mil because it means we're pushing phases quicker.

b. You can sneak a lot of extra DPS out by knowing how the phase changes work. I don't know what specs your DPS are running, but knowing that DoTs are cleansed each time he disappears helps planning out when to use them. I run an Assault VG mainly (yea, yea, yea) and for example, I know after the big apparition and before the 4 smaller manifestations come out I'm better served spamming IP/HIB than wasting a GCD on IR, because he's just going to disappear again and cleanse himself.

b2. Knowing when he's going to be out for longer periods (after the 4 small manifestions for example) helps better plan out when to use relics/adrenals. And relics/adrenals should be used as close to on cool down as possible in this fight, but smartly enough that you'll have a lot of uptime when it's in use.

If you're running a lot of DoT specs in your dps, they either need to be more judicious about when they DoT vs. when they just spam high damage instant cast abilities.

c. Positioning in the fight is also helpful. If you know who's going where to attack the 4 small Styraks, and get to them quickly, having the Kell Dragon in Phase 1 tanked in a way to minimize chasing after him (I see you ran ranged, but it's still helpful) and grouping for salvations should help your healers DPS a little bit more.

Hope this helps

1. I am one of the healers for our progression team. I usually do around 300k in damage and 1.3-1.6mil in heals. If I remember correctly the first time we kill him I did 300k and our other healer was around 200k damage.

2. I don't know exactly how may manifestations you can before you can't be enrage timer. But the trick is to burn him through these "off" phases as fast as you can so you can get dps back on Styrak. The quicker you get through those phase the more uptime you have on styrak.

3. From the numbers you posted, your dps is to low. Mainly the 4th dps maurader/sniper. Need to take a look at his spec and rotation on both classes, cause he is no where near the numbers he should be putting up as those classes. I am not trying to be mean or anything, but as the numbers show, when he was on marauder he only did a third of the damage as the sniper and barely over half of the other sniper when he switched. In my opinion if he was putting up the numbers he should be, you should have been able to kill Styrak.

Styrak is mainly a big dps check after you have mastered the mechanics of the fight. While you are working on him I would suggest for the waves of add to kill them then wipe the first time so you only have the 1 wave instead of 4. This will give you a little more time on enrage. We have killed him with out doing this, but when we was learning the fight we cleared the waves out first.

I am not positive, but pretty sure all the phase changes are based on a timer, not the health of Styrak. As I said earlier you want to get through all the phase changes as quickly as you can. The only time that you can put a set number of phases you don't want to go past is the first time you kill the Kell Dragon. You want to kill the dragon before he can do a 3rd spines.

I am not sure when your snipers are using their orbital strikes, But our group usually saves them for chained manifestations. This is when I drop my flyby and our slinger drops his, I usually ignore healing during this phase and let the other healer top people off.

Hope some of this helps.

So, what I am seeing here from everyone's comments (thank you very much)

1. Maximize DPS on Styrak when he is up. Adrenals, Cooldowns, Relics should be used to burn him as fast as possible. (But don't forget about #2 below.)
   
2. The first chained manifestation will be the tightest, so make sure we have the dps to beat that one, then save the big burst dps for Styrak.
   
3. Squeeze some more DPS our of our healers.
   
4. Beat Styrak's Kell Dragon reanimation by or before the 5th Chained Manifestation at the very latest.
   
5. Address the dps inconsistency with our 4th mara/sniper to get his numbers in line with everyone else.
   

Thanks for the advice everyone, hopefully this will help.

Pure DPS issue, without a doubt. 400k damage from a Mara is terrible, and I don't mean to be rude saying it.

Definetely do not blow cooldowns when the first Dragon is up, but do beat him fast.

You will want to make sure that the melee won't have to run XX meters because of the tanks kiting. Keep the Dragon and Styrak at a fixed position and only move when you have to. For tank swaps, make sure the other tank is at a fixed position so the only thing he has to do is taunt and move when necessary. Let ranged deal with adds (ghosts popping up during the Kell Dragon for example). If the Dragon is at 100k HP or less, just kill the Dragon and then the choker (if there is any) while skipping the buffer ghost, because there's a small break between the Dragon and Styrak popping up. When he pops up blow all cooldowns. From there on, after every lightning phase and before Chained Manifestation you want to use everything you have (relics/adrenals/OCDs).

Assign positions for the melee and tanks during the Lighting Manifestation phase. There are 4 "corners" in that mini-phase, North, East, South, West. If you only have 1 MDPS, just have 1 RDPS do the MDPS' job on that phase (because melee range is required or face instant KO's. By assigning these corners your DPS can react faster which results in better DPS.

If all your healers and ranged can stack up as much as possible, they can AOE heal and put out a bit more DPS for your group as well.

---

Another question:

Is your group of DPS augmented and do they have their stuff optimized? Are they using the right abilities?

There are some abilities for classes that will gimp their DPS if they are not specced into it. I.e. a watchman should not use Bladestorm, a Commando should not use Sticky Grenade on a single target (if he's not moving) etc. These are just minor details but these details can indicate a lot (for example the DPS not having knowledge on optimizing their DPS).

Also this may sound like a bit too much, but having your DPS love up the Ops dummies to train their DPS does miracles for your progression group.

Why is it the enrage timer is a mechanic?

I find that the healers no matter what have to dps this fight. Using MOX both our healers try to pump out at least 200k damage each to beat the enrage timer. My sentinels also use inspiration back to back, 1st Kell and 2nd Kell.

My group:

Shadow (T)

Guardian (T)

Sentinel (D) 2600+ DPS

Sentinel (D) 2600+ DPS

Gunslinger (D) 2500+ DPS

Commando (D) 2200+ DPS

Commando (H)

Scoundrel (H)

I am 95% sure that the enrage timer starts after the first Kell Dragon is dead, so I wouldn't recommend blowing cooldowns in that part of the fight.

And I'm 100% certain it starts when the first Dragon drops down. Start a timer when the Kell Dragon spawns. You'll see the enrage at exactly 480 seconds (8 minutes) every time, regardless of how long you take to drop the dragon.

To answer your question: this is really a DPS issue, and the list of your DPS damage output really tells the whole story. Styrak is a great fight for Marauders (though slightly better for Snipers). Your Marauder should be leading the damage pack, not trailing behind by 50%. If you correct that issue, you'll have the fight. Work with him on rotation and gearing. Everyone in your group should be able to parse a 2.4k at least on a dummy to be able to clear Styrak (2.6k gives more margins and allows for less healer/tank DPS). 470000 / 480 = 979 DPS. That's insanely low for a Marauder of any spec, and certainly not enough to get you past the enrage.

In summary: I would work on your Marauder's DPS before I worried about healer DPS, adrenal timing, etc. That's where your biggest win will be.

When our main group does this fight, we generally have a DPS breakdown that looks something like this:

• Sentinel: 2.65k DPS
  
• Commando: 2.69k DPS
  
• Gunslinger 1: 2.7k DPS
  
• Gunslinger 2: 2.4k DPS (hybrid spec is terrible on this fight)
  
• Shadow Tank: 1.1k DPS
  
• Vanguard Tank: 800 DPS (we're working on him)
  
• Healers: 200 DPS a piece (they can do more, but there's no need)
  

We clear the fight with about 30-40 seconds on the enrage. I've also done it in groups that have cleared the fight with over a minute to spare on the enrage and everyone over 2.7k, but that's not our main group.

How much should the healers be helping out with dps?

Next to nothing, on Hardmode all your DPS should be able to pull enough DPS to get the bosses down without having the help of healers, as said before I would rather say that you should drop a tank and use an extra DPS then to count on healers doing that extra damage that you need. If you anyway choose to count on healers to cover for the extra DPS, ask them to do it when they have time and the health levels are safe, there is no red line of what they can do, it all depends on how much damage the raid takes and some RNG.

What is the maximum number of Chained Manifestation/Nightmare phases that you can have without it being impossible to beat enrage? (is that how the fight even works? Or are there a set number of phases? Or is it strictly %-based on Styrak? I've never noticed in Story Mode because everything dies so quickly.)

This has been answered correctly before so I am not going to look it up.

Is our dps just too low right now, to beat the encounter and we need to go back to the drawing board and hone our skills?

Your DPS is to low to beat the encouter, if you want a kill drop the marauder and find another DPS to cover his spot, the marauder is doing terrible DPS and needs to spend ****loads of time on the dummy and reading guide to up his DPS. You can also, as suggested earlier use one extra DPS instead of one of the tanks if you want to keep the marauder in the group, however I feel that would be unfair to the tank that gets drops since it's one of the DPS that is playing badly, not the tanks.

We don't really another viable geared character to replace the marauder, and I've raided for a long time with him republic side prior to 2.0 when he was on his Commando, and he was always near the top of the Mox, and played very intelligently and aware.

I think for the time being, I will have him chat with another marauder, and check up on his rotation/etc to see if he can boost him numbers a bit.

We cleared the rest of the operation fairly easily for our first real go through, and I think with some adjustments, and get the dps up, our raid com can clear it.

We cleared the rest of the operation fairly easily for our first real go through, and I think with some adjustments, and get the dps up, our raid com can clear it.

I'm quite sure of it. You have the mechanics down, you just need to bring up your DPS, and there's a really strong point to focus on in that area. There are a lot of people on these forums who can help with Marauder rotations and gear of any spec. Just ask! :-)

Here is links to two well written guides for Carnage and Annihilation Marauder, he should take a deep look on those and try to shape up:

http://suckafish.enjin.com/forum/m/2482819/viewthread/6717427-20-guide-to-annihilation-marauder

http://suckafish.enjin.com/forum/m/2482819/viewthread/7699674-20-guide-to-carnage-marauder

Here is links to two well written guides for Carnage and Annihilation Marauder, he should take a deep look on those and try to shape up:

http://suckafish.enjin.com/forum/m/2482819/viewthread/6717427-20-guide-to-annihilation-marauder

http://suckafish.enjin.com/forum/m/2482819/viewthread/7699674-20-guide-to-carnage-marauder

I can't speak to Annihilation, but Steadfast's guide to Carnage has some issues with it. For example, only putting VT within a Gore window means losing out on Execute-proc'd Force Screams. This is strictly a DPS loss, since VT doesn't hit anywhere near as hard as Force Scream does. The optimal Carnage rotation has several VT usages outside of Gore windows, simply due to the Ravage cooldown. The guide also advocates a "no Rupture" rotation, which is a significant DPS loss.

I am 95% sure that the enrage timer starts after the first Kell Dragon is dead,

And I'm 100% certain it starts when the first Dragon drops down. Start a timer when the Kell Dragon spawns. You'll see the enrage at exactly 480 seconds (8 minutes) every time, regardless of how long you take to drop the dragon.

I think that KBN is right on this one. I just checked a log from last night. I died at 8m 23s and Styrak had been enraged long enough to wipe both our tanks and at least 2 or 3 other people before me. In looking at the log, the first 120s were us killing the first Kell Dragon/adds, which left us 6 minutes to deal with Styrak. Now, iirc the Kell Dragon has around 865k HP? Which means that 120s to kill him, was slow on our dps all around. Assuming the tanks are doing... 600dps while getting choked and to account for the spines phases, it means the 4 DPS were averaging 1,500 dps. Which is super low. I think for starters we need to be able to drop the first dragon absolutely no more than 90s which is an average of 2,100 dps between our four dps. And we really should be pushing higher than that, and drop him faster.

Now, I know personally my dps isn't going to be on the [DPS Leaderboard] anytime soon, but a parse I took on my ship dummy last night, I hit 2,400 on the nose for a 5m15s session. So, hopefully I can push that in a combat situation, accounting for dps loss from movement/mechanics but the gain from buffs like Bloodthirst/etc.

Myself and the other merc in our group are geared/parse right about the same, and our Sniper has always topped us in the Mox and is the best geared. iirc he typically parses (in combat) between 2.6 and 2.7k.

I think for starters we need to be able to drop the first dragon absolutely no more than 90s which is an average of 2,100 dps between our four dps. And we really should be pushing higher than that, and drop him faster.

The Dragon is super hard to DPS due to Spines. Even in really top-flight DPS groups, you don't see the Dragon going down in HM much faster than 105 - 110 seconds. The fight is really decided by the burn phases on Styrak right after Lightning Manifestation. The more damage you can pour onto him during those moments, the better you will do on the enrage.

The first time we cleared Styrak, we downed him at exactly 8:03. We killed the dragon at 1:57.

I can't speak to Annihilation, but Steadfast's guide to Carnage has some issues with it. For example, only putting VT within a Gore window means losing out on Execute-proc'd Force Screams. This is strictly a DPS loss, since VT doesn't hit anywhere near as hard as Force Scream does. The optimal Carnage rotation has several VT usages outside of Gore windows, simply due to the Ravage cooldown. The guide also advocates a "no Rupture" rotation, which is a significant DPS loss.

Still better then the marauders 900 DPS

Still better then the marauders 900 DPS

lol No question there…

Ideally you'd want at least 2 people being able to do 1m damage in that fight. Your other Sniper needs to work on his play, 600K damage is a bit low. More gear or more practice should do it. Didn't read your entire post but Sniper2 should be MM spec (not Lethality, Hybrid nor Engineering).

Some 8-man Sniper/Slinger tips:

1) Spam Takedown. You'll have plenty of instances to use your execute due to the nature of the fight. Takedown -> FT.

2) If your Snipers run 36/3/7, start up your rotation with CD (whenever Styrak respawns from any of his mechanics: closing in adds, jumping adds, etc)

3) Pre-cast Orbital strike for chained manifestation (adds that close in on you).

Ideally you'd want at least 2 people being able to do 1m damage in that fight. Your other Sniper needs to work on his play, 600K damage is a bit low. More gear or more practice should do it. Didn't read your entire post but Sniper2 should be MM spec (not Lethality, Hybrid nor Engineering).

 

Some 8-man Sniper/Slinger tips:

 

1) Spam Takedown. You'll have plenty of instances to use your execute due to the nature of the fight. Takedown -> FT.

2) If your Snipers run 36/3/7, start up your rotation with CD (whenever Styrak respawns from any of his mechanics: closing in adds, jumping adds, etc)

3) Pre-cast Orbital strike for chained manifestation (adds that close in on you).

I think... both snipers are Marksman. But I could be talking out of my butt.

I really would like to have him there on his Marauder if he can up the dps by adjusting his rotation/honing his skills. (I dont believe his gear is an issue, but I could also be again talking out of my butt.) I'd love to have at least one bloodthirst in the fight, and having melee dps with a gap closer will help on the adds that have the 1-shot ability on ranged. I'll have to take what I can get though.

The biggest change we made between our first night working on HM Styrak (where we were hitting enrage very early, much like the OP described) and our second full night working on him (when we finally got our first kill) was focusing all of our DPS cooldowns and hardest-hitting attacks on Styrak himself, instead of using them on the Kell Dragon or the manifestations.

There are two "clocks", if you will, in this fight. The 1st is the enrage timer, and it is a fixed time of 8 minutes (starting when the Kell Dragon first jumps down). The 2nd is Styrak's health, and thus is percentage-based. Once you push him to around 18% health, he uses an emote (I think it is "Brothers and sisters, grant me power!"), and then at around 15%, he says "This broke the beast...it will break you!" or something like that. You need to get to that emote, since it pushes him out of the current phase (with all the Manifestations) and causes him to reanimate the Kell Dragon. The key, for us, was to make sure we burned down Styrak fast enough so we only saw 4 Chained Manifestations / Lightning Manifestations. When Styrak disappeared for the 4th Chained Manifestation, if his health was below 30%, we had a good shot at forcing him to the reanimated Kell Dragon phase before he could cycle through his Chained / Lightning Manifestations again. If we failed, and got the 5th set of Manifestations (and thus a boatload more health to burn through and time wasted), we then hit enrage while the Kell Dragon was still alive and then it was game over.

Thus, have DPS use cooldowns (Inspiration, adrenals, relics, etc.) on Styrak himself, and healers/tanks save big attacks for those phases (e.g., Freighter Flyby), and you can push that 2nd percentage-based "clock" a little bit faster. We also asked our healers to try and dot up Styrak whenever possible (e.g., Weaken Mind, Vital Shot) to give us that little bit more. There are also brief windows (like between Chained Manifestation and Lightning Manifestation) where Styrak was available for some DPS. I tried to use attacks with big upfront damage (for me, that is Overhead Slash, auto-crit Blade Storm, and Dispatch) to squeeze in some extra damage. Note that Styrak seems to drop debuffs and DoTs when he disappears, so any DoT-heavy classes need to reapply each time.

From a DPS standpoint, we have a Vigilance Guardian and Combat Sentinel that parse (on ops dummies) in the 2500-2800 range, and a TK Sage and Combat Sentinel that parse in the 1900-2100 range -- so nothing overwhelming, but sufficient to clear HM Styrak. In our second, somewhat cleaner kill, our final DPS numbers from the fight were as follows (keep in mind the end numbers get boosted a bit by the reanimated Kell Dragon, who takes about 2-3x more damage than normal):

Tanks: 810, 805

Healers: 240, 173

DPS: 2618, 2555, 1872, 1508

Thus, have DPS use cooldowns (Inspiration, adrenals, relics, etc.) on Styrak himself, and healers/tanks save big attacks for those phases (e.g., Freighter Flyby), and you can push that 2nd percentage-based "clock" a little bit faster.

It's worth noting that the reanimated Dragon (and last-phase Styrak) get a significant multiplicative damage buff, meaning that Inspiration/Relics/Adrenals/etc have a dramatically more significant effect during that final phase than they do at any other part of the fight. Skipping past the last Lightning/Chained Manifestation phase is really important, but if you're having trouble with the enrage, you really need to find the DPS to beat that last cycle without blowing all of your big CDs.

it means the 4 DPS were averaging 1,500 dps. Which is super low. I think for starters we need to be able to drop the first dragon absolutely no more than 90s which is an average of 2,100 dps between our four dps.

Remember the dragon takes almost no damage during his spin phases, which are usually around 40s total IIRC. I've been thinking the best way to optimize this part of the fight is to leave the first choking add alone until the dragon spins, have the tank with aggro shield the group, and the choked tank pick up the dragon once he's free. Alternatively, have a single ranged DPS on the first add so you don't lose damage to "overkill".

As others pointed out though, sniper2/mara really needs to up his game. Even 640k damage is not great. My group failed it until our average DPS go to about 2.1k, much closer to sniper1's number.

However, if sniper2, and to a lesser extent the mercs, can pick it up a bit, you are not as far off as you might think. Styrak gets a damage debuff in the last phase after you've killed the dragon for the second time, so you can melt that last 14% pretty quick. As long as he doesn't enrage with more than about 7-8% of his health remaining, you should be able to kill him. Of course, it is always nicer to just flat-out beat the enrage, but any time the boss dies is a win! :-)

As far as your healers go, my sage can cover about 70% of the healing required in this fight since everyone is mostly grouped up so nicely, which frees our scoundrel to contribute DPS. I expect that 2 sorcs should be able to spend >30% of their time doing damage without draining themselves of force too much. If they are not, they are probably overhealing by a large margin. They just need to make sure they have close to full force when the dragon appears the second time, as that will be a lot of healing until the end of the fight.

It's worth noting that the reanimated Dragon (and last-phase Styrak) get a significant multiplicative damage buff, meaning that Inspiration/Relics/Adrenals/etc have a dramatically more significant effect during that final phase than they do at any other part of the fight. Skipping past the last Lightning/Chained Manifestation phase is really important, but if you're having trouble with the enrage, you really need to find the DPS to beat that last cycle without blowing all of your big CDs.

Good point. We have two Inspirations in our group -- we use them when Styrak first appears, and generally have at least one up for the reanimated Kell Dragon.

Your issue is the marauder, plain and simple. Either he's in lvl 50 greens, or he's doing something very wrong. A ~69 geared mara with setbonus can easily do 2000dps on that fight and should break 1mill damage mark.

Healers can easily do 200k dmg without putting too much effort into it. I've healed it, so I know.