I agree with you in regards to Ouro. There were so many ways of manipulating the mechanics of that fight that you have to wonder if it was intended.

And now for getting things back on track:

I don't think AR is pointless even with the current version of Mark of Solarian, it just doesn't make that much of a difference later on. Not like any other tank gear would be more beneficial.
I ended up with 10 stacks of it when she got to 20% (93AR left, would be 243 with the ptr version).

How do you unhide the spoiler tags?

Highlight the text...?

Ah, thanks, im pretty new to these forums. : )

How long did your kill take?

I'm utterly confused now. 6 marks? Do you have an approx on your killtime?

Wow, that is insane. I can't believe you could last that long personally. Our kill was very sloppy and it ended with 5 marks at 4:30.

You don't need any AR or even pots for that matter in her current state. Additionally she's quite bugged at 20%, unless blizzard intended her to just stand there and die, which I'm sure they didn't.

Are those kill times fully potted/flasked? It wasn't exactly a flawless kill, a couple people died and got CR/ankh'ed. We just used regular pots because repop was about to happen. We were going to flask up after that, but it turned out to be a kill.
Lasting that long didn't seem hard. With 393 AR at the start, she dealt just about no damage to me the first couple minutes. Not sure if anyone was holding back on DPS, even though they were told not to.

Does she melee at all, if so how much was she hitting you for with all that resist gear?

Ambiguous grammar FTW! Do you mean she hardly ever melees, and that she hits for less than 1500? Or do you mean that her melee attacks hardly ever do less than 1500 damage?

A logical question would be, how much does heavy AR gear affect your DPS overall ? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just go full out and try to overheal the damage ? For us at least, its quite difficult to find an acceptable tradeoff.

Sorry, fixed the original post. She hardly ever melees, and when she does, it's quite weak.

I don't know why our DPS appears to be so low compared to what others are saying here, but I was the only one wearing any AR in that fight.

We killed all adds all the time and it was messy sometimes even on the kill (4-5 add phases?). I was only amazed how much there was still left to fix performance wise and it was still a kill.

20% of the time, she melee's 15% of the time, for hardly less than 1500 damage, usually.

If the DoTs are regular are you basically saying you're taking twice as long as some of the other guilds here to kill astromancer? That seems like a pretty absurd control gap in terms of how sustainable the fight is... and really how tightly tuned it is in terms of "pushing the envelope."

Edit: yeah okay Bernita summed it up - its just surprising that you can get that large of a margin and still be successful.

I don't really see how Sapphiron is particularly elegant. The boss applies a raidwide resistable DoT. You could turn any fight into a resist fight by adding that mechanic....

How can any resist fight be seen as 'elegant'? They require you to forego the stats you want to defeat an encounter, in order to survive, and you're stuck with bare-minimum effectiveness.

Huhuran was beyond unorthodox, as the popular strategy of designated soakers slowly turned into total zerg-rushes at the enrage mark, as our gear progressed.

Sapph was equally as silly. You'd do dry runs, with no consumables, just your epic FrR, and the best guilds would muster was 50-60% attempts. 2-3 fully potted runs later, you had a kill. I don't see that as elegant.

If anything, Hydross is the best example of a resist fight done right, ignoring random delays on the transitions. Same with 1/2 of the Leotherass fight. I'm glad they don't seem to be forcing a raid-wide resist mentality with any fight thusfar.

Fights that force your whole raid to sacrifice their effectiveness and walk around in matching red/blue/puke-green armor are not fun.

Except for Vael.

Edit : Actually, I might be able to see your point from a DPS point of view. I assume that Gurgthock is basing his opinion from a healer's perspective, as I am. It's not fun, at all, to heal resist fights. It's always a downhill battle against dwindling health pools, and your already meager mana pool. I would imagine that a DPS mentality doesn't really change, you're still nuking/stabbing/bolting, your numbers simply aren't as high.

No, from a DPS point of view resist fights are just as terrible as for a healer or for a tank (having played all 3 roles in Sapphiron and Huhuran). The fights don't become about strategy, or about good play, it becomes mainly a min/max thing while still getting a certain resistance.

As DPS I do nothing but worry about getting my hit and crit up, with mass pots for AP. As a healer I try to maximize + healing so that I can spam mana pots the entire time. As a tank I want nothing more than health and 25% shield block. I don't think about strategy, I think about farming greens and checking the AH for upgrades over my T2.5 or T3 or T5 (whatever was relevant at the time), and that's why raidwide resist fights are poor excuses for encounters in any scenario.

I think Sapphiron is particularly elegant because of the Frost Breath bomb mechanic (which yes, takes getting used to if you aren't familiar because all 5 of the blocks CAN be on the same side of the room, but this can be worked around, etc.). But also because the gear that was required for the fight was <right there> in the instance, and was practically guaranteed unless you were near world-class raid progression (in which you had to buy runes). Basically, it was a resist fight yes, and in that, sure, it may have sucked for healers, but at least it wasn't hard to get the gear for it - it was built-in.

It also wasn't <really> an enrage timer fight...unless you were Horde (I seem to remember anecdotes about most Horde kills being very near the 15 minute limit). I believe our first kill was something around 13. And it was a fight where you wanted to stack healers - which is vastly different than the raid scene today, where you stack DPS.

I also thought it was elegant because while Frost gear was necessary, it definitely didn't trivialize the encounter, as you can do with some fights like Firemaw (sans the MT/OT) - if DPS wears FR gear, the fight becomes almost trivially short because they can stay in LoS longer. Or Baron Geddon.

I don't know, I just thought Sapphiron was a FUN fight (remember, DPS class here). Clearly, my perspective is skewed being Alliance (especially in that day an age), but it's just my perception.

Heh playing Sapphiron as a priest was about 10000x more fun than as 2nd prot warrior, I can tell you that much. I'd hardly describe the fight as elegant though; we got our first kill with terrible execution, simply by worldbuffing and blowing a lot of pots.

So your execution wasn't elegant....not the fight design.