I really won't mind the trash waves so much after the patch when they actually give rep/loot (though looting during the waves could be somewhat interesting)

Mother Shahraz is not as terrible as you are all making it out to be for casters. Mages can get around the prismatic shield by speccing arcane/fire, warlocks by speccing destro with fire talents, or felguard which is even better, since felguard isn't "wearing" shadow resist. Lining up schools isn't hard, Fire+Frost / Arcane+Shadow covers all your bases. Shadow priests are the true black sheep of this encounter. Staying out of Shadow form and casting smite during shadow shield is just silly, so they spend most of the encounter sitting around doing nothing, and in the mean time refunding very little mana their group in what is already a very mana intensive fight.

Honestly it's about time melee had a big advantage on a fight, although the complete lack of any real penalties for stacking melee dps makes it feel a little bit like pre nerf ragnaros.

I don't think people are too upset over the prismatic shield concept or how melee friendly it can be, etc. It's moreso the various easy ways you can die in the fight. Oh, you only got a 25% resist on the 8k beam? Have fun with that 6k burst right after your FA/port/fall damage. So many other things, but we've already gone over them in this thread.

Of course people can spec appropriately to make the fight easier for them, but you can also usually just as easily bring in a few more of a couple classes and save others the money.

The Hyjal trash is so forgiving that it should be seen as a "Don't be a retard" for 15-20 minutes then a boss fight. Once they add loot/rep to the trash, Hyjal will be one of the most reward/time instances in WoW history (its already close with a competent raid staff).

I'll argue, as many have speculated, that Hyjal will be harder for certain guilds as they will need to decide loot

I really like Hyjal once we get to the horde base.

I agree, the horde base has some interesting aspects with the flying mobs, infernals, getting the tauren to help so you can easily AE everything down with no danger, etc. Of course it all gets rather repetitive after a while, but if you only have to go through it once per week, it's decent trash.
The alliance base on the other hand is rather horrible. There is almost no difference between trash waves 1-16, except for the number of necromancers.

I think everyone likes the horde base because of how monster the Taurens are.

The horde base is just a lot more dynamic. You're not sitting on your ass in one spot like the alliance camp, and the trash is basically somewhat interesting - you're really almost forced into an AE situation, or at least to control things better. However, only kaz'rogal's trash is really tough imo. Az'galors trash looks menacing but lacks any real punch.

I'm still a fan of checkpoints and making the bosses and trash both much harder - with better rewards on trash (Without nerfing the rep on bosses).

And then you get to Archimonde, realise there's only one shaman online, and head to BT because it's not worth the god-damn headache...

Sorry. That fight has made me bitter.

Juggernaut loves us some Shammies. I can only remember one raid where we had less than 3 online.

We finally got Archimonde down yesterday, and I hope we never try it again without our full shaman crew online.

There aren't really any mobs that stack as you claim which will danger your Tauren's lives. We use two camps of people, the Tauren camp has a tank, healer and caster CC; Thrall's camp has the rest of the raid.

We have hunters misdirect Aboms over to Thrall's side when the Aboms patrol towards the Tauren camp. If Aboms stay on the Tauren side for some reason, that's where our dps shifts to. All the while our other tanks setup the random noobie trash for the Tauren to destroy once the 1-2 Aboms/Infernals on their side die and our other dps can eliminate the 'deadly' trash before the Tauren can get attention of them.

The tauren can tank spider, ghouls, Necros and banshees which are usually the mobs that can stack like you claim as long as you watch them and peel stuff off with your main raid force if needed. Cyclone, assist trains and splitting pulls how you need are all options to save a tauren from dying.

The fact that you can keep taurens from dieing doesn't make it any less frustrating to be trying to keep 3 separate mobs on you while 3 separate taurens are beating on different ones. I'm fully aware that they can tank for a while and that you can CC mobs off of them, but when you pick up 4 ghouls (or a crypt fiend and 3 ghouls) right at the start, and then you get 3 taurens aggroing your mobs as soon as they're engaged, you're not having fun as a tank for the rest of that pull, and believe it or not, sometimes a ghoul can kill a tauren. When you have that many taurens pulling aggro sometimes you just can't save em all (though of course usually you can)

If dps is doing their job, then the tauren will not die. Call stuff like that out.

Your CCers aren't doing their job. If you chain shackle a mob for a bit, all the attackers on it will move on to other targets. If you do it correctly, you can control where the NPC's end up (so they aren't next to 3 aboms - but that should never happen anyway if you control the waves properly).

Returning to Shahraz, what sort of learning curve has been the norm with her for guilds that have killed her, and how repeatable have the kills been after the first? As noted above, we had our first night on her yesterday, and it's a tricky fight to troubleshoot in terms of strat refinement. We had a 1% wipe that was pretty much completely clean at 10%, shield wall wore off at 4-5%, and precisely at that moment she ported 3 melee on top of our MT, who exploded before we could blink, and then she killed the rest of us before we killed her. Heartbreaking, but my typical take on 1% wipes is that if you deserve the kill you should be able to turn around and do it again; we clearly didn't, since I don't think we got below 30%ish after that.

But it's tough, looking back, to figure out what needs to change. Most FA ports were nonfatal, with the exceptions being really bad locations (oh hey we're inside a tree), or the same person being ported 2x-3x in a row and having no timers at all left to use in response, with the occasional outright fuckup. Wipes would be due to the MT getting gibbed more often than not, but comparing our WWS to others, our MT was taking less damage overall than the tanks on many successful kills, and the deaths almost always were not attributable to healer error (either OOM late in the fight due to Wicked spam, or something like 3 healers getting FA-ported at the same time as 3 other healers get punted in the air by Sinister, or just an unreasonable spike doing 22k+ in <1.5sec). With probably every other fight it's been easy to identify where exactly we were going wrong, what element of our strat was flawed, or where our execution was lacking. I wonder, what was it that "clicked" for people, to turn repeated wipes into a kill?

I'd say the wipes were 50% the tank dropping dead on an otherwise smooth run, 20% healers dying to FA and leaving the raid to slowly wither shorthanded, 20% losing enough important DPS early on (ports on top of melee, etc.) that we just leashed it, and 10% bizarre things (she spams Wicked for like 90 sec nonstop and the whole raid is OOM a third of the way into the fight, teleports into objects, OTs getting Lash dodges despite facing backwards and /sitting and getting ported right before a Lash, etc.).

It's hard to understand the repeatability of a Shahraz tactic without knowing how they are tackling the fight. Obviously if 50% of your wipes are due to the tank dying then perhaps you could make some alterations to deal with that. If he is dying to saber lash issues, try having your tauren tank use a deviate each try (we found this helps a bit with hitbox issues) and perhaps try tanking it in a position where you can not be knocked into the air. I know bringing in more healers is not really an option for you always but it really helps in this fight. Dropping some caster DPS to get 9 healers does eliminate some of the risk involved.

I think there will always be the attempts where you get crazy luck and cause wipes but I'm pretty confident we could kill it within 3 attempts every week, just need the roll of the dice to agree with us. We use an inherently risky strategy with most of the raid on one spot, but with careful positioning of where that one spot is you can reduce the chance of a FA being put next to them.

The highest hurdle on our first kill was probably FA survival -- once we (mostly) had that down, we were able to strategize around the other difficulties, most of which pertained to healing.

MT gibbage was a recurring problem until we micromanaged heals a bit. A couple of paladins spamming Flash of Light, with a few other healers throwing out slower, more staggered heals has mostly eliminated early MT deaths aside from, say, unresisted Sinister Beam + Saber Lash (another one of those lovely combinations you just have to experience to appreciate). Some tweaks to healer placement can also go a long way to reduce the number affected by a single beam or an unfortunate port (near them, not of them: half of your healers having to sidestep at the same is almost always trouble).

Beyond that? Dunno. We try to keep the fight as short as possible by stacking physical DPS, and bring a few extra healers to ensure we can top everyone off before the next port is due. The fight's long enough that you can rotate every shaman through a healer group twice for Tide, and dry casters are encouraged to bandage everyone in range.

The RNG factor with Shahraz is especially harsh, and we still can (and do) wipe even with seemingly perfect execution, but we are at least getting her down in just one night these days.

I'm curious though if FA is really intended to tick damage against oneself.

The tank dropping dead can definitely be a fairly common showstopper, and it comes down partly to getting an attempt where that doesn't happen and where the other parts go right, which comes down to everyone playing well so that you don't ruin a good attempt.

Our first week we figured out one part of the fight to help with tank burst and killed her in 2 attempts, this time we didn't have that issue but weren't that lucky. So my original claim of repeatability dropped a bit. Sometimes you will have 3 people ported on the tank, she'll parry one of the tanks attacks, and saber lash, with no avoidance, you're just not living through that without shield wall being up before hand. That said, I don't think it happens that often, and I'm doing everything I can to prevent that, I would have killed to have the tauren racial while learning with how many times she did just about a 22k-22.5k damage burst to me when I had 21.7k hp, as is on our kills there were plenty of times that I saw my health under 20% (maybe even under 10) before that heal landed.

Hm I was only on our first kill, but mum's enrage seemed a bit like a joke to me. First time we reached 10%, we just killed her and we had a few guys down. She did not seem to do that much more then normally. I mean, I am sure we had SW avaible and used it, but I very much doubt it was up for the whole enrage.
Our raid was not stacked at all for physical and we used eight healers, so our dps was pretty sucky. I guess you just had a bad luck wipe that took the worst possible moment to happen.

@FA location: To me it seems totally random. We had the teleport happen towards every angle, looking from the boss and with greatly varying distance from her position. I really did not see any sort of pattern and having 1 big camp sounds like playing a game of russian roulette.
Given that the fight has a certain amount of randomness (hey, you are still a 5-1 favorite in russian roulette after all!) and if you know your players react fast enough to actually survive the worst case scenario of FA right on the one camp, it might be the right way to go. But we had 17-18 ranged guys and given our raids usual reaction speed to this kind of stuff, I'd consider using a full cthun spreading and just hope healers spam the 1-2 guys in FA range before I'd go with 1 camp.

Yeah, as I review more logs, I think it's just a matter of micromanaging healing better. Because mana can get so tight on the fight, healers can't just mindlessly spam for 6 minutes straight or they'll go OOM. A large number of the deaths weren't to unhealable damage, but simply to 3-4 heals landing, overhealing, and then having 7.5k/8k/7.5k over the next 2 seconds just from hit/lash/hit, with maybe one fast heal landing in there. Basic stuff, I suppose.