Bault

I think mother in it's current form is just the kind of fight that'll surprise you with bad combos every week. Certainly to me the fight I dread the most in BT atm simply because of the luck based elements of the fight.

As far as MT healing goes, I found that a simple warning on ventrilo when multiple MT healers get FA really helped. Micro-managing heals can be difficult because you never know when healers are moving to dodge a close by FA port or silently at their post healing the tank. Undoubtetly need your MT healers spread around your raid formation to minimize that effect.

 

Dots

It comes down a bit to tank gear selection as well. Unlike what I said previously (200ish), I would now do it with 300+ on the MT, as long as you can take the loss in +def. It helps a lot with people getting ported on the tanks in addition to reducing the chance for knockbacks and damage from beams.
We typically only use paladins and maybe 1 priest for tank healing, but for this fight we also changed that around a bit get more +25% AC procs.

 

Dawme

We just began to try seriously mother yesterday and it was... hard to say the least. ~3 hours of attempts gave us a few tries @ 50% but nothing more than that.
FA is hardcore, caster dps sucks, mother's dps is insane... i hate this fight. I think we had the honor to discover all the wonderful features of the fight in one night like the kb on mt then saber lash for 28k or insane burst dmg like :

7/17 00:54:07.953 Mother Shahraz hits Urkas for 7547. (288 blocked)
7/17 00:54:08.546 Mother Shahraz's Sinful Beam hits Urkas for 6247 Shadow damage.
7/17 00:54:08.953 Mother Shahraz's Saber Lash hits Urkas for 9347. (288 blocked)

23k dmg in 1.0 sec, how fun is that Ok, no ironshield pot on the tank but come on, it's a bit crazy imo. There are so many random elements in this fight, it is very frustrating. I'm sur we'll kill her sooner or later, but there are many pulls where you will wipe whatever you do.

 

Lodekim

Yeah I've debated back and forth switching on a bit more SR gear, but I still hate the comprimise, because while it will help with getting ported on (and I've died to that), I've also personally seen times where if I just dropped 1000 hp I would have been gibbed by pure melee, it's the kind of fight where as you get more t6 level gear (since the god damn praetorian's legs don't count for this since I can't cap with em and SR) you can wear more SR and be more sturdy physically and the close call deaths become close call survivals.

For Dawme, pretty much standard for that fight, the ironshield and full buffs puts that down to say 21k and you live. I burned Ironshields every attempt every cooldown until we knew we were wiping, I used 29 on the night we got our first kill and over 30 for our last kill, plus several for the first pulls before we finished our SR gear. It's more or less worthless to even try without full buffs on the tank cause he WILL get gibbed.

 

RikkiP

I think using one ranged camp is not as bad as you may think. There are several limitations to where Mother Shahraz can teleport people, for example she has a maximum range she can place the people in and also she is unable to put people in a wall or a pillar.

With these pieces of information there are several spots you can put all the raid in and minimise the chances of people getting FA near the raid. Sure it will still happen, but only in around 20% of our attempts did we get it.

 

Derrida

Mother can't crush. We used a very well geared feral druid.

 

Xav

Yes. After many, many, many attempts on Mother Shahraz and careful analyzing of what happens and causes us to wipe, we made a few changes that helped a LOT. We typically bring in an extra paladin now (so 4 total), and have two paladins spamming Flash of Light the entire time on the MT. Literally. While with a spam type of healing you're going to have overheal, what the flash spam does as a paladin is guarantee your tank gets at least 1500-2500ish more health to live with if he's taking massive burst combos. (Hit, Lash, Beam.. as people have noted, these typically add up to around 22-23k burst damage, giving your tank a little bit of a buffer inbetween there CAN and WILL mean the difference between life and death. Also, tauren racial is amazing here I bet). Since we have two paladins doing it, it's double that health pool so 3-5kish health bonus every 1.5 seconds. That'll give them just enough time to live and the rest of the bigger heals to come in.

I pace myself very very well and don't have a healer group for the fight (no totems, etc), so I'm just working off heal cancelling and chain potting, and I don't stop channeling. (If it's gonna overheal cancel and recast, no idle time) But with 2 second holy lights and downranking, from the time i cancel my last heal to the time my next one is about to land, the tank has died many times. The small buffer heals inbetween really did help a lot. It was our way of giving our tank the health they need to live for the 'actual' heals to land.

Aside from the healer micromanagement, it does just seem to 'get better' as people get more accustomed to playing in an absolutely horribly punishing setting. Like, it's really hard, death is itching at your heels, but you get better at it as time goes on. People will be more comfortable when FA'd and make it out alive, etc.

We used to literally melt whenever people were ported near a camp, now, everyone shifts a lot more quickly and people actually get healed in the process, so we live now.

This does not of course do anything to help against the stuff that is just guaranteed to fuck someone though (literally being ported underneath a couch that you can't get out of, chain wickeds, chain FA/knock until you die). But we've killed her with early deaths, and hey, if someone's important, there's always a battle res.

The fight is definitely one I hate and I originally thought it was going to be an absolute pain to repeat every week since you learn right away what kind of random shit can happen (and often) cause deaths. But there's a lot of other stuff that at first seems ridiculously lethal that you just learn to deal with. Not to mention it's honestly made people better healers I feel, because of how harsh it is as a healer. If you suck at all people gonna die, and you're also gonna oom very quick and be useless.

Oh, and Imp LOH rotation is ++. After being the only paladin with 2/2 LOH for ages, I told one of our other pallies to spec into it to try it out in a real rotation. We throw one up at 50% and the other at 25% and they last full duration till the end, and it's quite a nice boost to the MT's survivability.

 

Dawme

Downed tonight, after 3 more hours of attempts. We modified a bit our healing strategy, a fast heal spammer really helped with the tank healing. People improved their reaction with Fatal attraction, and after 2 or 3 wipes because of KB+SL (god I hate this), she finally went down Too bad it's reset day in europe so no council this week :/

 

Melador

For what it's worth, we got our fourth Mother kill last night and it was almost a oneshot -- an excruciating 1% wipe from a 8k/8k/8k combo (middle was SL, others were melee) in a 2 second span with Mother at about 5% and mana was waning. A couple non-early-leashed pulls later and she died, with well under an hour of total time spent on her.

Maybe we just had a couple lucky pulls, but I'd like to think that people are getting comfortable enough with the fight that it's getting pretty solidly repeatable. My panic reflex upon getting FAed was definitely more under control this week.

 

◊ Praetorian

Well, since I know everyone cares a great deal, when we went back tonight tank healing was pretty much rock solid. I don't think the tank ever died except when a bunch of healers had already died or some other calamity had befallen the raid as a whole. We changed up healing a bit to have a better mix of small and big heals, added a bit more SR, and a healthy dose of shaman HW1 spam to keep Ancestral up. And then we proceeded to come up with all new and innovative ways to wipe (my personal favorite for the night has to be FA on top of the main ranged stack at the exact same time as a Sinister Beam that somehow almost no one resisted, midair corpses are fun).

It was a hell of a relief to kill her, and I'm always wary of excessive complaining (I really enjoy Archimonde, for example), but this has got to be the worst fight in the game right now.

 

Schneeb

Sharaz is nothing compared to 3 'lasers' on the same side in a row on illidan phase 2!

Anywho, have fun with the council

 

heel

I think that three changes have to be made to make this fight less terrible.

(1) Replace the chaining toss with a chaining five second stun that also deals 3000 damage. This has precisely the same functionality as the toss, except it removes the instant-wipe toss on the tank/Saber Lash interaction.

(2) Reduce the maximum number of stacks on the magic shields to five, or otherwise reduce their effect. Emphasizing physical dps is a neat idea, however, the implementation is terrible: magic dps is worse than physical dps by such a degree that you simply don't want to bring any unless you absolutely have to.

(3) Add a delay of one second before Fatal Attraction deals damage, and make the graphic less obtrusive. I am sure that this fight was tested internally on state-of-the-art machines on a LAN. Unfortunately, in the real world, latency and graphical lag do exist. One second of leeway (even half a second!) would help compensate for this.

 

DarKNecross

Looking at your screenshot, I've got to ask out of curiousity, did you use the geometry of the benches to avoid your Sabre Lash tanks being knocked up?

http://crimson-guild.com

 

heel

With correct strategy, it should be completely irrelevant where the lasers go.

 

◊ Praetorian

Personally I'd make the FA pulses start off smaller and quickly ramp up to be larger than they currently are. Don't punish people who have brief lockups when being teleported; if you can't code it so that she can't teleport people into a nook between a bench and a wall, then at least give people a fighting chance to get out. Similarly, reduce the "oops they got ported onto the raid... again" factor. If FA ticked for 1250, 1750, 2250, 2750, 3250, etc., instead of just 2500 every time, or some numbers similar to that, it'd be more punishing if you screwed up coordination of properly spreading apart, but less likely to just instagib you. Even with high SR, if you get a port into a corner somewhere and you get a few bad resists in a row, you can basically take 10k damage in under 3 seconds, even if you play perfectly. I'll be the first one to tell someone when they died in a situation they shouldn't have due to player error, but it's disheartening when there's really nothing to tell someone, or to tell the raid, besides, "Well, nothing to be done about that. Leash her and let's go again."

And yes, Prismatic Shield really needs some kind of an upside to it, to reward you for managing it properly. Instead coordination just means that your casters are somewhat less screwed.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yes. There's a million spots where you can reproduce the same effect -- in various corners and such, where the wall slants or there's an overhang. The couch/chaise/whatever offers the advantage of not squeezing you into a corner, so that there's more wiggle room on a bad FA port.

 

Schneeb

You would prefer your tank tobe stunned for 5 seconds? lol.

 

dukes

They just need to fix saber lash so it actually stops you being affected by the knock-type beam. If they fix that and do something simple like make Shahraz take 50% more magic damage by default (or fix stacks to 50% maximum) then it will be a much better fight.

As for lasers on Illidan, it's the one thing that seems uncontrollable about the fight. The fact it happens in a phase which is controlled by resistance (almost as bad as full-raid fears imo) it's a pain in the arse. Getting 3 lasers on the same side completely screws position and the amount of fire damage taken by that tank.

 

◊ Kaubel

Did you actually laugh out loud as you typed this?

 

• Shifft

Lol might not have been appropriate, but I sure laughed when I thought about a 5 second stun on a boss that's known for bursting tanks.

 

Dawme

FA should begin to tick later too, like 1 sec after the port or so. It's not a problem for people with good connections/pcs right now but if you just lag a bit, be it network lag or graphics lag, it's a disaster since you take 2k-6k dmg before even being able to react. That's stupid.

 

Dots

It does that already. In addition to being immune to FA, it's only possible for the tank to get knocked if you avoid all Saber Lashes for 30 seconds or longer. Fighting her at the couch might be a tiny bit better, but it's hardly necessary with a good amount of SR on the tank.

It is rough for that tank, but still 100% doable if he moves correctly and gets some extra healing.
You can see where the next Eye Blast will go down if you check Illidan's position in the sky and plan your movement accordingly. He will also only move to one of the sides for the next blast, never across the room (which unfortunately makes it more likely to get 3 blasts on the same side).

 

Schneeb

Alot of solutions people come up with are funny, this one tickled me most.

 

heel

Sure, why not? You can actually mitigate an unlucky stun with a PvP trinket, whereas with toss+lash, you can't do anything at all. It would make the fight more controllable and more interesting. Of course, an even simpler solution would be to have Saber Lash grant two minutes (or some other large number) of toss immunity, virtually guaranteeing that a well-geared tank can't dodge himself into wipe.

 

Dots

The problem with increasing the immunity time for Saber Lash is that you could simply put your whole raid in front of her every 2 minutes to get the immunity. I'm not saying that is a great idea, but I think the timer is only 30 seconds to prevent any sort of cheesing.