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 was just going from the info in Tempest's youtube guide (

If you have timed it and are that sure, I'll gladly concede the point.

Thought I'd give you some more numbers, as our first HM Styrak kill went about as long as it could have gone while still being a success. So, you can probably consider these numbers as close to the minimums needed as you can get. (Also, if you're still fighting the second Kell Dragon at the 8 minute mark, as happened to us more than once, Power of the Master starts to do way more damage.)

Our first kill took 8 minutes, 27 seconds. We hit the second Kell Dragon at 7 minutes, 10 seconds. Here are the DPS totals for before the second Kell Dragon appears, with DPS totals for the whole fight in parentheses:

Shadow: 1963.25 (2132.76)

Guardian: 1871.46 (2129.12)

Commando: 1806.4 (2094.1)

Gunslinger: 1978.04 (2128.92)

Guardian Tank: 811.8 (881.09)

Assume the second tank was within ~100 DPS, probably minus, of the first.

I didn't do the pre-2nd Kell Dragon numbers for healers. For the whole fight, Sage healer had 27 DPS and Commando healer had 152 DPS.

If you are having damage issue, swap one of your tank's gear to mostly DPS. When my group was not geared up a long time ago, I kind of swapped from combat tech to shadow tech during the fight and apart from a few phases, a shadow tank can be healed in mostly DPS gear. The advice here where people say that the healers should not DPS is bullwinkle. Everyone needs to do damage in this fight. Sage healers to have weaken mind up and mind crush on the boss at all times. There are only a few phases where the healers need to heal. Most of the time they can do damage as well. Our healers break the 250k mark in damage over the whole fight.

According to my last SV HM run, my sentinel Allegra did the following numbers :

Total damage : 1319197

Damage per second : 2625.18

We have a second sentinel who pulls even more than me in this fight due to tunneling. As a raid leader I often stop to shout a bit . Our commando does the same numbers like me and our gunslinger is not far off. The healers as i said do 250k as well, therefore we haven't hit enrage in a month on that boss. When you are grossly overgeared this fight is easy. When you lack damage, you need to do the following :

1. Use two maras for 4 inspirations. Fight is over 5 mins so their bloodthirst whatever it is called will give you a better chance at it. We have two sentinels and the doggy dies so fast he can't even roll over so to say .

2. Swap one of your tank's gear, the one that does the most damage, to a lot of DPS gear.

3. Tell your healers to do a **** load of damage.

4. If you are still having issues, craft some gear, hit the dummy, try harder. We all did this and we continue to do so.

If you are having damage issue, swap one of your tank's gear to mostly DPS. When my group was not geared up a long time ago, I kind of swapped from combat tech to shadow tech during the fight and apart from a few phases, a shadow tank can be healed in mostly DPS gear. The advice here where people say that the healers should not DPS is bullwinkle. Everyone needs to do damage in this fight. Sage healers to have weaken mind up and mind crush on the boss at all times. There are only a few phases where the healers need to heal. Most of the time they can do damage as well. Our healers break the 250k mark in damage over the whole fight.

 

 

 

According to my last SV HM run, my sentinel Allegra did the following numbers :

 

Total damage : 1319197

Damage per second : 2625.18

 

 

We have a second sentinel who pulls even more than me in this fight due to tunneling. As a raid leader I often stop to shout a bit . Our commando does the same numbers like me and our gunslinger is not far off. The healers as i said do 250k as well, therefore we haven't hit enrage in a month on that boss. When you are grossly overgeared this fight is easy. When you lack damage, you need to do the following :

 

 

1. Use two maras for 4 inspirations. Fight is over 5 mins so their bloodthirst whatever it is called will give you a better chance at it. We have two sentinels and the doggy dies so fast he can't even roll over so to say .

2. Swap one of your tank's gear, the one that does the most damage, to a lot of DPS gear.

3. Tell your healers to do a **** load of damage.

4. If you are still having issues, craft some gear, hit the dummy, try harder. We all did this and we continue to do so.

Sadly, my guild has 3 level 55 marauders total:

1- The best geared and highest dps mara is an alt of our Powertech tank.

2- Next is the mara we have been bringing with us on the runs. He's reasonably geared, I think he just needs to iron out his rotation.

3- Last mara is a very casual player, and isn't even augmented I don't think...

So, unless I blow up my raid composition, I pretty much have just the single marauder at my disposal, and he's the one who needs to up his dps to clear the fight.

Which leads me to another question regarding raid comp........ We run:

Assassin/Powertech - tanks

2x Sorcs - heals

1x Mara/2x Merc/1x Sniper - dps

PROVIDED: our current Mara gets his numbers up, which I think he can....

Should we stick with that raid comp? I do have the flexibility to swap my own dps merc out, and tank in lieu of our Powertech, so he can bring his geared marauder. He brings about the same dps that I do on my Merc, plus it gives us another 2 cycles of Bloodthirst, and another melee dps for the 4-adds phase at Styrak that requires someone to be in melee to avoid the 1-shot kill. However, that will mean that we will be running 2x Assassin tanks in our HM group. Is that going to make our healers hate us? (we did have our Assassin tank Thrasher, while the Powertech lept up to the Demolitionist/Snipers and the healers did struggle a bit... I was dropping a good bit of healing on the tank whilst on my dps merc to keep him alive.)

My assassin is reasonably geared... I have my 4-set bonus, 35.4k HP, 37.8% Shield, 44.7% Absorb, 20.1% Defense... my one downfall currently on my tank, is that I am using an Ark Fort Redoubt & Partisan Shield Amplification.. (I currently don't have my clicky relic that I want)... But I think I can handle it. I've tanked Dash'roode and Titan, and offtanked Thrasher, and I know the fights in SM, as well as HM on my dps. (FWIW our other assassin is geared about the same as I am... he has ever so slightly more mitigation, and uses the clicky Ark relic however.)

That would give us a raid comp of:

2x Assassins - tanks

2x Sorcs - heals

2x Maras/1x Merc/1x Sniper - dps

Like I said... assuming we get our other marauder pushing better numbers, is it worth dropping the PT to his marauder, and swapping me in on my assassin? Or doesn't really matter... we should be able to clear with our current raid comp?

(wow, I am overthinking this.)

And past experience tells me.... I do not believe our healers would be able to heal the fight, if we swapped a tank for a dps and single tanked Styrak.

Please don't take anything I'm about personally and there is a bit of a soap box element to it as well.

Forget about Bloodlust.

Don't try and get 3, don't worry about 2. I've done the fight with a Gunnery Commando, MM Slinger, Balance Shadow and an Assault VG, and you can easily beat the enrage.

If you're trying to get out more DPS by adding more bloodlusts, you're not trying to get better. It's kind of a like the adage of putting a bandage on a bullet hole.

HMs are tuned that you can choose without any worry to bring players, not utility/higher DPS ceilings. Focus on getting your group's DPS up. Getting back in there and learning the phases, tightening up your rotation on dummy, lining up adrenals/relics etc. will be more rewarding if/when you want to move into NiM content.

Also, make sure everyone has 3-4 prototype adrenals to use on cool down, not just biochemists. We found at first when we were still learning the fight/gearing up that if our tank even just used a clicky power relic as one of his relics, it was a huge help in beating enrage.

So to sum it all up...bring players, not Bloodlust. People not being able to do their jobs effectively will eventually come back to bite you.

I was just going from the info in Tempest's youtube guide (

) saying enrage was 5min 50sec after death of dragon, which also seemed to correlate with my own experience. I haven't timed it or anything, it's all just anecdotal (ie assuming enrage timer started after the dragon died always produced better results for us).

Yeah, Tempest's guide is wrong. :-) It's really tempting to call the enrage 5:50 after the dragon, because any groups that are killing the dragon faster than that are unlikely to see the enrage at all. I spent quite a bit of time on youtube, timing different videos, and also I've been clearing this boss with three (sometimes more) groups a week pretty much since 2.0. It's very consistently 8 minutes.

If you have timed it and are that sure, I'll gladly concede the point.

:-)

That would give us a raid comp of:

2x Assassins - tanks

2x Sorcs - heals

2x Maras/1x Merc/1x Sniper - dps

I'll preface this by saying my sage finds healing shadow tanks to be occasionally frightening in HM, and especially NiM ops. The problem with sins/shadows of course is not their overall mitigation, it is spikiness. Combining their spikiness with slow sage heals (and occasional healing downtime for force regen) leads to more anxious moments than I'd like hoping my cast bar finishes before the shadow takes another big hit.

That said, this fight is not particularly tough on healers, and is pretty much ideal for sages/sorcs. Sorcs are even more advantaged here than in Soa, and Thrasher is really the most "interesting" fight for tank healing in S&V.

Like I said... assuming we get our other marauder pushing better numbers, is it worth dropping the PT to his marauder, and swapping me in on my assassin? Or doesn't really matter... we should be able to clear with our current raid comp?

You can give it a shot, but I'm doubtful. I don't play my mara much, but my understanding from the recent community answers is that Bloodthirst currently *harms* their DPS unless it is clicked off because they cannot build fury stacks with it. In a 16-man it might make sense to bring 2-3 maras for more Bloodthirsts, but with only 4 DPS to start with, what use is a second BT if half your DPS need to click it off?

And past experience tells me.... I do not believe our healers would be able to heal the fight, if we swapped a tank for a dps and single tanked Styrak.

It *might* be possible if you have a DPS with a taunt. That DPS would need to "tank" for 1) when the tank is choked during the first dragon phase, 2) when the tank gets trapped in a nightmare, and 3) during the second dragon phase, long enough for the tank's stacks to drop off. They will need to burn most of their defensive cooldowns for those phases. You might also have them taunt during the dragon spin phase so the tank can shield the rest of the group from spikes and the DPS can drop the acid away from the group.

You can give it a shot, but I'm doubtful. I don't play my mara much, but my understanding from the recent community answers is that Bloodthirst currently *harms* their DPS unless it is clicked off because they cannot build fury stacks with it. In a 16-man it might make sense to bring 2-3 maras for more Bloodthirsts, but with only 4 DPS to start with, what use is a second BT if half your DPS need to click it off?

This is only true for Rage Marauders. The other two specs do benefit from Bloodthirst, though it certainly carries a negative tradeoff.

This is only true for Rage Marauders. The other two specs do benefit from Bloodthirst, though it certainly carries a negative tradeoff.

Would it be fair to say that it is pretty close to neutral for the other specs? That what they gain from Bloodthirst/Inspiration is mostly lost by not gaining fury/centering?

Would it be fair to say that it is pretty close to neutral for the other specs? That what they gain from Bloodthirst/Inspiration is mostly lost by not gaining fury/centering?

Let's find out!

Carnage and Annihilation build Fury at a rate of roughly 1 per GCD, counting the time during Berserk. That gives Berserk once every 20 seconds. Bloodthirst delays this by 15 seconds, which is a delay of 75%. Berserk is worth about 8k damage every time it is activated, which is 400 DPS on a normal timer, or 229 DPS during the Bloodthirst window. That's a reduction of 171 DPS at the tail end of the Bloodthirst window. Assuming that DPS during the Bloodthirst window is 3k, Bloodthirst will be worth a 15 second DPS increase of 450. Thus, we gain 450 for 15 seconds, and then lose 171 averaged over the same 35 second window to a delay in Berserk. 5985 damage was lost, while 6750 damage was gained. Thus, it is a net gain of 765 damage over 35 seconds, or +21 DPS.

Note how small of a number this is. :-) It's really good for situational burst, because the Berserk delay doesn't really hit until after the Bloodthirst window, and it is a DPS gain absent other factors, but it's quite close to being neutral. Rage gets a hefty chunk of its resource generation, as well as the proc which allows their rotation to function at all from Berserk, which means that there are substantial DPS penalties built in that exceed what Carnage and Annihilation deal with (effectively, Berserk is worth more to Rage than it is to Carnage or Annihilation). This is why Bloodthirst is significantly DPS-negative for a Rage marauder, especially if they had to spend their own stacks to push it.

To beat the Styrak you need to have 2100 dps per Damage dealer, not hard to achieve.

That being said, that marauder of yours is doing poorly, marauders are in my opinion 2nd best dpsers, nr. 1 being snipers, but marauders are capable of doind 3000 dps with 72 gear.

My guild has done S&V HC without any wipes in under 2 hours, so the instance on HM is not that hard, just need some 2100 dpsers. (Major problem to clear NiM, since every dpser in NiM has to do at least 2500 - 2800 dps, and only a small percentage of DPSers can pull that off)

Please don't take anything I'm about personally and there is a bit of a soap box element to it as well.

 

Forget about Bloodlust.

 

Don't try and get 3, don't worry about 2. I've done the fight with a Gunnery Commando, MM Slinger, Balance Shadow and an Assault VG, and you can easily beat the enrage.

 

If you're trying to get out more DPS by adding more bloodlusts, you're not trying to get better. It's kind of a like the adage of putting a bandage on a bullet hole.

 

HMs are tuned that you can choose without any worry to bring players, not utility/higher DPS ceilings. Focus on getting your group's DPS up. Getting back in there and learning the phases, tightening up your rotation on dummy, lining up adrenals/relics etc. will be more rewarding if/when you want to move into NiM content.

 

Also, make sure everyone has 3-4 prototype adrenals to use on cool down, not just biochemists. We found at first when we were still learning the fight/gearing up that if our tank even just used a clicky power relic as one of his relics, it was a huge help in beating enrage.

 

So to sum it all up...bring players, not Bloodlust. People not being able to do their jobs effectively will eventually come back to bite you.

To argue against inspiration you must know something many of us don't. One of the best PVE 8 Man guilds on TOFN who has both the terror from beyond and dragonslayer titles are using a two sentinel, 1 commando, 1 gunslinger setup. I don't know how you do it it, but when I start most fights I have 30 stacks of centering and valorous call available. The other sentinel has the same thing, therefore, when I use inspiration, which I do first, as raid leader I need the timer, the other sentinel uses ZEN. So he gets, zen+my inspiration+his other trinkets. His opener as watchman is 3400 and his dots tick like batman on a pogo stick. When my 30 stacks are up, he uses inspiration and I get the pogo stick buff.

Now lets look at the other two dps who benefit from inspiration. So either way, when using inspiration, you will have 3 people doing 15% more damage. When the second inspiration is on its way, you have again 3 people doing 15% more damage. You call these inflated numbers that is your problem. My guild uses the tools BioWare gave us and we down bosses just fine. There are no extra medals for not using sentinels and if it makes matters easier and you can carry people in ops to gear them up, why should we be against it? Just last night I ran SV HM, we were 5 from our normal progression and three joined to get gear. We cleared the instance without any issue. The three had 61-66 gear. Again, please point me to a video or a guild that has two shadows in their progression, NIM, DPS ofc.

Bottom line : If you want to make things harder for yourself, be my guest. Everyone wants to have the best chance at killing a boss and at the moment this is with two sentinels, 1 commando, 1 gunslinger or 2 sentinels and 2 gunslingers.

To beat the Styrak you need to have 2100 dps per Damage dealer, not hard to achieve.

 

That being said, that marauder of yours is doing poorly, marauders are in my opinion 2nd best dpsers, nr. 1 being snipers, but marauders are capable of doind 3000 dps with 72 gear.

 

My guild has done S&V HC without any wipes in under 2 hours, so the instance on HM is not that hard, just need some 2100 dpsers. (Major problem to clear NiM, since every dpser in NiM has to do at least 2500 - 2800 dps, and only a small percentage of DPSers can pull that off)

That is close to the optimum but you can carry them. As I said above we had 3 people with low grade gear. The parser showed the following last night :

1. My sentinel 2550 DPS, was a bit short, some lag spikes on my game for some reason.

2. Second sentinel 2725DPS, i wanted to slap him seeing these numbers

3. Gunslinger 1 1975 DPS

4. Gunslinger 2 2020 DPS.

We had 4 inspirations, damage from healers, boss died without any issue. Everytime I start this fight I go for a swim and build 30 stacks of centering.

Thumbs up for Leafy. You see which people talk from theory and who actually does the ****.

Sometimes we do 7man toborro :-)

It *might* be possible if you have a DPS with a taunt. That DPS would need to "tank" for 1) when the tank is choked during the first dragon phase, 2) when the tank gets trapped in a nightmare, and 3) during the second dragon phase, long enough for the tank's stacks to drop off. They will need to burn most of their defensive cooldowns for those phases. You might also have them taunt during the dragon spin phase so the tank can shield the rest of the group from spikes and the DPS can drop the acid away from the group.

We usually have DPS with a taunt for this (guardian), but it can be well done without one as he will go for the highest - both slingers and sentinels have good defensive cooldowns so it's not such a big issue. I solo tank it practically every week since I first cleared it, and my first clear was helping out another guild who's MT wasn't there and I solo tanked that one as well.

The protection from dragon's spinning and dropping the spit in right spot can be done solo without much issue if you time it right. Only real issue with solo tanking this one is that I will usually have 0 cooldowns left for bun phase after resurrected dragon and end up dead before the end which is not nice.

To argue against inspiration you must know something many of us don't... .

I'm not trying to argue against inspiration. I agree with you completely that it's a fantastic tool that can help push encounters in your favor. I was trying to point out two things.

1.The fight, if the players are geared/play well enough, does not require Inspiration(s) to beat the enrage timer.

2. I was suggesting that what needs to improve are the players behind the characters. Yes, the OPs group could probably get a second inspiration in the group and have less work to do to beat the enrage timer. But eventually Inspiration isn't going to be the answer.

Eventually (if they are interested in continuing to progress into NiM/even future HM raids) they will hit an encounter that won't allow them to use (another) Inspiration as a get out of jail free card.

So in my ignore Inspiration rant I was proposing that they get better at the fight with who they have, rather than try and sneak past by adding another Inspiration to the group.

The benefit from Inspiration when time-averaged over 300 seconds is just not that exciting. Sorry, Leafy. You get 15% extra DPS for 15 seconds out of every 300 (at most), which is just an 0.75% (no typo on that decimal) increase to overall DPS. If your raid has 4 damage dealers who can parse a 3k, you will pick up a grand total of 90 DPS over the course of your fight, which is a mere 27000 HP. This is why I say that the armor debuff is so much more exciting, since you're talking about an improvement to DPS across the entire raid that is on the order of 3-4% (depending a lot on class).

The exciting thing about Inspiration is that the effect is concentrated in a single burst window. Thus, for fights where you have interrupted uptime or specific burst moment (the EC Kephess Walker is a great example), Inspiration is absolutely DOPE. What you described though was popping it right off the bat, which is a fair thing to do, but it doesn't actually affect your group's DPS all that much.

Also, remember that Inspiration is almost DPS neutral for a combat or watchman sentinel within the burst moment. Which is to say, rather than picking up 15% of your DPS, you're really only picking up about 0.67% within those 15 seconds. The reason for this is the loss of Centering stacks which would have built during the buff. As a result, Inspiration isn't even an 0.75% buff for your group. Instead, it is the following:

(2*0.75 + 2*(0.67*15/300)) / 4 = 0.39%

That's it. Again, assuming you have four damage dealers over 3k, you're picking up 11.7 DPS over the whole fight.

Inspiration is great, but don't over-value it. My guild runs a sentinel, a commando and two gunslingers (one SS and one hybrid) in Nightmare modes, but we don't use Inspiration except under very specific circumstances because our Sentinel is in Focus spec and we just plain don't need it. The benefits are quite marginal except in burst windows.

Maybe I calculate wrong but:

4dps pulling 2500 each equals 10000 raid dps

15% increase = 11500 raid dps

thats 1500 raiddps more for 15 seconds in styrak fight you have 2 inspirations or 4 if you 2 sents

now give 2 inspirations at begin and 2 inspirations at 2nd kell dragon (amplified + adrenals +relics)..

only did like 3 parses with 2x zen so it might be not that accurate but jeez.

You're so theoretically KBN.. I mean you can time inspiration perfectly, especially at styrak when 2nd dragon always comes at about 13% you can just inspiration->VC->Zen and it is all good.. I am not spending my time doing calculations over and over, but I down bosses practically and while doing that I'd always favor inspiration over Zen.

On the dummy, when I don't use inspiration at the begin, but 2x Zen my dps goes from around 3k +- 50 dps over 5minutes to 2850-2900 over 5minutes

You're so theoretically KBN.. I mean you can time inspiration perfectly, especially at styrak when 2nd dragon always comes at about 13% you can just inspiration->VC->Zen and it is all good.. I am not spending my time doing calculations over and over, but I down bosses practically and while doing that I'd always favor inspiration over Zen.

Not sure what you're implying. You know that I progression raid in nightmare content, right? My guild has gotten server firsts on all but one of the nightmare bosses cleared thus far (we are a bit behind the other servers, but not by a lot). :-)

In any case, as I said, the benefit of Inspiration is timing it with a specific burn phase. That's a benefit which is undeniable and it's the true strength of the ability. However, popping Inspiration right off the bat in a fight, while still a good idea, is not something that is as dramatically beneficial as most people seem to believe. Remember that the cooldown is very, very long and you need to time-average the effect to derive the value of the utility. The uptime ratio just isn't that good.