How much easier does the encounter get with a Voidwalker tank? I have read quite a bit on it, and it seems to help alot. I also see that quite a bit of Stamina/PVP gear helps drastically, but how important is the gear on the Warlock? We will be stacking our warlock up with Stamina gems, Frost Resist Gear and a couple out +Stamina items. I am not familiar with Warlocks at all, but will he be able to handle healing his pet alone, or will he still need a mainhealer on the voidwalker?
Our guild has done it both ways. There are pro's and con's to each.
The voidwalker tanks is basically an HP sponge. He is immune to the fire walls, the lava, and sarth's breaths. You also don't have to rotate CD's since the breath now becomes obsolete. He doesn't however dodge many attacks from sarth. So after the 1st and 2nd drakes down, he takes some pretty hefty damage from swings. Your recovery time is during the breaths. There is a bit of randomness to the fight in general and having a blueberry tank it isn't much different. Depending if the lock moves too far away can make or break the fight as sarth will usually reposition and face the entire raid, which is a wipe. Or we've had the blueberry randomly get knocked back or reposition weird.
What we did was use the blueberry for the 1st and 2nd drakes life, and as soon as the 2nd drake died, we had our tank taunt sarth and take it from there. The lock cannot keep up his VW alone. He will need a dedicated healer full time since the swings take quite a toll. + stam is good for the lock, but don't go too overboard. His pet does scale off his own HP, so all buffs help this, including the pet food buff.
Usually the Feral Tank and an Unholy DK are the best for this, we are using only a Feral Tank.
But if one of your locks have golds/time/support to stack stam gem and use his Void as tank and taunt Sarth off him after the 2nd drake dead, is way easier.
We are currently rotating a couple DK tanks from our guild. The biggest problem we seem to have is the add tank being unable to pick up the adds fast enough. But, this week I think will be different because our best pally tank is back from being inactive and seems keen on picking up the add tank role.
By reading your responses, it seems like a DK tank is still "easier" than a voidwalker tank?
As per healing, should the Sarth tank healer be ONLY on the Sarth tank, or should they be helping with OT and Raid (Pally Healer)?