Damage can be unavoidable. Deaths are generally avoidable, up to a point. You have to build your strat around accounting for, and having an answer for, the relatively likely causes of death. At some point during the fight, someone is going to get Grip while in midair. What do you do about that? At some point in the fight, he's going to fear someone into a Doomfire and then Burst them a couple seconds later. Again, what do you do about that?

Those are solvable problems. Now, once you move away from the realm of "bad events" that are fairly probable during a typical 7-minute kill, into the realm of cruel combinations of bad events, as I mentioned above, yeah, that's going to lead to a death. But a death isn't necessarily the end of your attempt, unless it coincides with other bad things at the same time. If you get "unlucky" enough, you will wipe. I'm convinced of that. But the truly unavoidable sort of events should only arise in one attempt out of several. You can play perfectly and still wipe. But if you play perfectly, you'll get him on the next attempt.

After the first discussion about SR on the MT in this fight, I actually tried 300 SR instead of 200 and it seemed a bit more stable to the healers. I think this is mostly because last time I tried with higher SR, there were 1 or 2 greens in the mix, which really does hurt your physical mitigation.
8.5k hits still doesnt sound right. Was demo shout on, was your tank using Ironshields and did he have devotion aura (a single pally can get ported)? Also, are your offtanks hitting her? The multiple hit combos in 1-2 seconds are always a result of parries. Our offtanks just hit her once in the beginning and then just stand there spamming debuffs (or in case of druids just idle).

I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this but I'm going to ask anyway, just to cover myself if it's brought up again in guild;

Is it possible to do Najentus and Supremus with twenty-one people, only five healers and one Paladin?

I'm pretty certain it's not but having just had our first Kael'thas kill, people are so eager to try out Black Temple since we zoned in, heard the music and saw the environment. I have to admit that I'm dying to get in there and start learning it myself but I'm certain this isn't possible and am looking for clarification from guilds that have killed them both. Sadly, until next reset, we only have 24 people attuned for Hyjal and 21 attuned for Black Temple.

I'd suggest doing Hyjal with 24 then, first 2 bosses can be done with 24, assuming a decently balanced and geared raid. I wouldn't advise doing Najentus with 21 and only 5 healers (and one pala :p).

As suggested already - you are far better off doing hyjal with 5 healers, than najentus with 5 healers.

You cannot respec a single hybrid? Or box one of the ones that helped you kill kael?

The one person we're missing from our Kael'thas raid is a Rogue, who somehow lost the quest and his Vashj vial without realizing.

For Black Temple, we're missing said Rogue, one Feral Druid that forgot to wear his suit for Al'ar, one Paladin that forgot to turn in the Al'ar quest before Rage Winterchill and one Paladin who's actually an alt and, somewhat understandably, hadn't fulfilled the prerequisite requirements to take Seer Olum's quest after last Fathom-Lord Karathress.

I guess for arguements sake we could have our other Feral Druid respec and maybe even our token Enhancement Shaman but, I don't know, it seems like a real stretch to try. I'm desperate to get into Black Temple but not to the point where it'd be a demoralizingly colossal waste of time and money. I'm just looking to cover every base before tomorrow.

We'll likely try Anetheron tomorrow once we've finished up in SSC. We did one attempt at it's trash and wiped on the seventh wave which, considering we're only twenty-four to start with and had one Warlock chain disconnecting, doesn't seem too bad considering how bad we were at getting the whole AoE thing down. Our raid make up is very solid for Hyjal at least (four tanks, seven healers, three Paladins and four Shamans)

Not that this would be as fulfilling as killing a boss, but you could very reasonably farm BT trash with 21 people. That'd be getting people rep, gems, and random drops - all things that will help BG as a whole, plus a change from stuff you've been seeing. More practically though, probably need to just slog through another week of SSC/TK to get more people attuned, because once you have a full raid plus a few replacements MH/BT attuned, dropping the tier 5 instances in favor of t6 raid time is a pretty good idea. For us at least, since we only raid 4 nights a week, doing SSC/TK means we're pretty much out half of our sessions for new stuff.

We tried najentus maybe 3 hours with 6 healers/1-2 shadow priest with no luck really, lots of 40% wipes.

We went in with a full 25 8 healers and he fell over in 1 attempt. Basically, you might be able to do it with 5-6, but i would not count on it and wouldnt smash my face against the wall over it. Its probably better to just wait a week and hit it full force. The first 3 bosses fall over pretty hardcore, and gorefiend isnt that hard either(assuming you dont let the MT die and bring 8 healers)

We initially did Naj'entus with 22 and 6 healers, but we had 2 shadow priests and it still took a full day to learn it. This was also back when Hyjal was 12 waves and almost no one was even considering trying Anetheron. Had we had the option of going to Hyjal as it is now, I'm sure that would've been much easier progression, especially if you get an extra 3 people for those raids.

Pretty simple solution if you think about it -_-. 24/25 vs 21/25. We've done all of Hyjal save Archimonde with no shadow priest, 1 shaman and less than 25. Granted, BT is *very* rewarding once you start killing in there, but if you simply insist on doing tier6 content, why not set yourself up for the most success possible. Shadow priests were simply made for Naj'entus. Our first couple kills had none, and our latest kill had one; man the difference.

Simple question, probably not deserving of its own thread.

Am I missing something, or when Blizzard devs sat down to design Mother Shahraz, was the thought process something like "Hmm, this boss seems to be missing a certain something, just that special x-factor. Oh hey, I've got it! Let's make it fuck caster DPS!"

If I'm missing something, feel free to tell me that I'm dumb and need to think more, but looking at other kills I'm pretty sure I'm not missing anything. We spent the weekend farming Hearts and should be taking our first real shots at her tomorrow, but we did a bunch of practice pulls in between farming runs to see all the mechanics firsthand, and is there really any point to the whole Prismatic Shield thing? I mean I think I know how to control it, and how to coordinate to minimize its effects, but even with the best handling, it horribly gimps your caster DPS on a fight where they're already swapping out a lot of gear for SR. And it makes it almost impossible for me to justify bringing, say, an elemental shaman to this fight. I mean even a moonkin could moonfire between nature cycles.

What constructive purpose as an element of encounter design does Prismatic Shield serve?

I believe its intent is to require casters to think actually about what spells they are casting, and to possibly supply some sort of stop/start method to dps that can be seen on certain fights where melee DPS has to constantly move in and out of range etc.

All it really leads to however, is melee and healer stacking and a bunch of disgruntled casters.

Ehh, sort of. For most immune bosses you can have people respec, and just bring your ordinary raid with mages as arcane instead of fire, or whatever.

The current mechanics would make more sense if there were some sort of vuln component to offset the damage reductions (like if fire damage increased her susceptibility to frost, or vice versa), or if her HP were lowered and she also had some kind of melee hinderance like a periodic damage shield, so that all classes faced similar sorts of obstacles.

Right now it's basically just "casters do 500 DPS, melee 1000" with no real explanation or elegance beyond that.

Looking on lossendil you just see one 400 DPS caster after another, and stacked raids.

I think Prismatic Shild has something to do with the nature of her beams: "Strikes an enemy with shadow energy that arcs to another nearby enemy. The spell affects up to 10 targets." Without Prismatic Shild and with only ranged DPS the raidgroup could spread out like in the C'Thun encounter and would suffer minimal damage. A clear advantage from ranged DPS over melee DPS. But with Prismatic Shild you are forced to bring some melee DPS. Melee DPS take a lot of damage because one beam upon a melee will arc to all melee players. At the bottom line you and get:

melee: high damage output but also take much damage
ranged: low damage output and take few damage

In my opinion Prismatic Shild is a balance mechanism.

But the beams aren't really very dangerous with SR, and also bounce over greater distances than the usual abilities that bounce, so if you tried to just spread loosely around her you'd see lots of chains. But still, if you look at WWS parses for kills, melee often take less damage than ranged, and really Damage Taken is just a product of who got targetted with Fatal Attraction more.

Looking at the top DPS public WWS, from Blood Legion: Wow Web Stats
They had two rogues that were #1 and #2 on DMs with 1216 and 1176 sustained, respectively, and #21 and #25 on damage taken.

Compare that to the warlock who had 99% DPS uptime, lived the whole fight, and did 476 DPS and was #9 on damage taken.

Melee really don't have a harder time on this fight in any way, and certainly not to the extent that would justify having to gimp caster DPS to justify bringing melee.

I guess it's like how Archimonde is a ton easier with Shamans, Shahraz is a ton easier with melee and Hunters, and with sprint or intervene it's very very easy for them to break the fatal attraction. I wouldn't hesitate stacking melee for this fight, and it's what we do.

Also, don't forget the mana burn, it's just great when you get hit by it a couple of times in a row, why they added that to her i'll never know.

My guild is pretty far away from Mother Shahraz (3/9 BT), but after reading the many comments in this thread, I am seriously dreading the fight.

Sounds like a poorly designed, poorly tuned encounter that doesn't sound fun at all. On top of all that, it's a resist fight, which i tend not to like. Just seems like that added every unfun element in the game and put it in this fight.

Is she pretty doable with everyone in epic SR, or is it still pretty difficult?

Mother is indeed plain stupid, it seems very much as though when designing her they thought 'oh that would be cool' for quite a few seperate abilities but never really thought about how all of them together would work. It was kind of interesting to learn, but after 2 kills I don't think there is anyone left in the guild who can say anything nice about her.

It's funny how that exact comment seems to come up over and over with respect to many fights in the expansion. People said it about pre-2.1 Vashj and her mind control, Solarian has so many design issues it's not funny, Archimonde has some really frustrating interactions between his abilities, and now Mother. I'd add Azgalor's Rain of Fire killing Thrall (who can't be healed or pulled off the boss) to that list, but that's a side effect from the nerf they gave him (although clearly wiping over and over because of NPC death wasn't the intended effect of that change). Even something small and silly, like Prince throwing axes before his last enfeeble wears off, is clearly unintended.

I think while Mother Shahraz is definitely not the most fun fight, it's tuned pretty well for what I think it's supposed to be. It's kind of like a super gear check on top of the organization check.

Personally I would be glad to see some of the really terrible porting locations removed (Hrm, 3 people just got ported inside a couch and died, great!) and I'd like to see the fact that the ports/knockback can make saber lash a gib (off tanks ported or MT knocked in the air) Those are the biggest complaints I have with the fight. I can also say I think that the reduction to caster damage is a bit severe, I've never seen myself on damage meters as a tank before except once in my old guild on a very sketchy firemaw kill. The idea behind the mechanic is kind of interesting, and it does make people adapt, but in functionality casters get fucked.

We had some comments last night that we fully expected patch notes saying that her Fatal Attraction would become more predictable and have it be nerfed to hell. Personally I hope it isn't that bad, but there are some port locations that are just really stupid and if you get 2 MT healers ported into a couch at the start of the fight, you're probably going to wipe.


edit: as a side note, somehow I don't find this fight to be too bad, but maybe that's because as the tank it's pretty much one of the 2 fights that I usually have full rage at all times for (Archimonde being the other) so I just get to go nuts. Though I get angry when I run out because she doesn't hit me for 20 seconds. My biggest annoyance is that between learning her and getting her down a second time, I used probably over 70 ironshield potions. Between the 2 days we killed her the total was 66 and I think that I used a few on attempts we were checking her out.

Not going to lie, everytime Thrall dies I cry inside. That mechanic is awesome, or kind of a reminder that Thrall owns Doomgaurds while hiding in a corner affraid to fight.

Hello, I can cast doom on you, hope you enjoyed travelling death airlines. Good times.

But all and all, TBC has been very enjoyable for raiding and I hope the next expansion brings as many new raid design ideas as this one. You have to give the developers respect for managing to design 20+ new bosses with semi-unique fighting styles and abilities that don't seem overly repeatative.

Edit: added useful stuff.

OTs can't get ported unless they dodge/parry multiple Lashes in a row -- you can actively turn your back if that happens to make sure the 30sec debuff stays on you.

Anyway, as I said above, we haven't actually pulled Shahraz with a proper raid group (a farming group with 5 healers and only 2/3 of the raid with SR gear doesn't count) so I reserve further comments until after tonight. My main initial gripe was just with Prismatic Shield, because as a raid leader it pretty much sucks having to deviate so much from any semblance of our ordinary raid composition. I mean I can understand "shamans are really good on Archimonde, let's bring more" where you're basically talking like 2 raid slots changing, or "melee is great on RoS, let's make sure we bring enough rogues," and a mechanic that makes all caster DPS, regardless of class, nearly useless. Warlock curses can't even justify their spot over another hunter or something, because CoR on Shahraz seems like a less than good idea, and CoS/CoE are modifying damage that is pathetic to begin with, which makes them pretty marginal.