I don't think that this would be remotely viable, for a number of reasons (foremost among them - I am almost certain that Saber Lash hits a maximum of three targets), but if it is, who cares? Getting your raid cycled in front of her to take a Lash would require a fair bit of coordination, and would be a reasonable tradeoff for toss immunity. It's not "cheesing" if you're given the option of executing some difficult maneuver to mitigate a future risk - it's a design choice that encourages different ways of approaching the fight, which is often good thing.

Hm, maybe I didn't express myself too well. I just think this was Blizzard's reasoning for making it only last 30 seconds originally.
It's funny that you asked for a 2 minute debuff though. That is exactly what it has been changed to on PTR: http://www.thottbot.com/test/s40810 (WoWHead has the 2 min version as well: Saber Lash - Spells - World of Warcraft)

Just make Saber Lash have two components -- an avoidable physical attack and an unavoidable debuff application. Decouple the two. It's not just the MT and Sinister Beam that's the problem. OTs can, despite turning their back to her and actually doing /sit, still get missed repeatedly and ported. It's messy.

The harder issue with Shahraz is how to intelligently fix FA port locations without making it trivial or exploitable. It really just shouldn't be an acceptable design element for her to potentially deathtouch 2-3 people if she feels like it. Yes, there are "bad" ports, like ports on top of the raid, ports into a corner, etc., which are hard and painful but can be handled with skilled play and consumables. And then there are "haha, you're fucked" ports like 3 people ported into a tree, into a bench, into a corner between a bench and a wall, etc., where you really can't even move, and it takes the lone survivor after the other two die another 5-10 seconds of turning and mashing jump to work his way out of that spot. That's terrible. If there's no way to fix the port locations, then I'd at least do what I suggested earlier and make the FA values start low and rapidly increase, so that you reduce the chance of unavoidable port deaths. If you have max SR and you die to FA within 2-3 seconds of being ported, you pretty much got screwed by the RNG. 7500 damage (base, before resists) per second from the instant of a teleport is just too harsh. With cap SR you can very easily take 8000-9000 damage in the first 3 seconds, and if you got teleported into a corner, there's no way to separate faster than that. On the other hand, if you die to FA 5-6 seconds after being ported, you screwed up as a player. I wish there were some way to distinguish between the two.

Just remove this stupid kb, and remove the even more stupid mana burn while you're at it. Make prismatic shield give a random +% dmg to 2-3 school and -% dmg to 2-3 schools, and call it a day.

Hmm, I don't know about random, that wouldn't really be an improvement, and would just dumb the fight down -- the mechanic is interesting, but right now it's just harsh. What if you paired up the elements -- fire/frost, holy/shadow, nature/arcane -- as opposites, and had a positive shield in one direction equal a vuln in the other direction?

So what if a 9-stack of a fire shield meant that Shahraz took 10% fire damage and 190% frost damage, but then as you applied frost damage, it'd move in the other direction. And so forth.

Yeah I thought about that but it would still massively screw up shadow priests (basically afk 50% of the time). Well, maybe it might be productive to play without shadow form though and smite her to remove the shadow malus :p.

AFK? No way! I'm like a bandage ninja on that fight.

Haha so true, I used like 50 bandages during our first kill :p

I bandage, and PWS anyone who is low on health or FA victims should they be within range.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. As with the the RoS fight, not everyone has perfect server ping.

Playing from the UK with slightly higher than normal latency doesn't help matters for me. Whilst it hasn't been a problem for any fight throughout the history of my time in wow, I'm taking 1-2 ticks before I can even move/realise I've been ported. And it's UNBELIEVABLY frustrating. I shadow pot/healthstone/etc like a fiend and sometimes even blowing it all isn't enough. Bench/tree ports are just icing on the cake.

How much SR did your bear tank have? Currently 170 something buffed, not sure if more is worth dropping sta/mitigation.

Heh if saber lash does not have a maximum amount of targets people should definately try everyone sitting on the MT.

Has anyone here had experience with only one person getting fatal attraction? I can only assume that it was either targetting people who were immune to it from saber lash or that it targets totems/pets.

We often have only one person with FA. At least once per long try. It ticks 1 time and fades.
Problem with everyone on the mt is the pbae silence. Even if you resist it very often, it's still casted way too much (every 15 sec or so) to be reliable.

Edit: and about rekill experiences, we rekilled her yesterday in 1h30. Obivously, there's a learning curve with Fatal Attraction, and it gets better every try, but still, this fight sucks =)

Going to assume Belt, Legs, Neck, Boots about? I think that would be 290 with no head enchant. Trying to debate on cloak if I can afford losing all that defense.

Just curious as to his stats raid buffed if he knows them offhand. I think with Devotion I was about 32k armor (forget, but was hitting 39k with ancestral fortitude) 22.x HP and I forget my dodge atm, but on most parses I think I avoided 47-49% of all attacks - but like I said only 170 something SR.


It seems for us we need to crank up the SR for everyone to max, FA was slaughtering people who were around 300. 1500 ticks compared to 750 ticks is a huge difference when some of our guys put on 365.

You definitely _need_ capped shadow res on everyone except possibly the tank/offtanks (and even then they can get gibbed horribly by a combination of lash/port/beam).

The difference was pretty clear when we ended up with a shaman dying 4 times on one attempt (CR, soulstone and ankh) because after his first death he didn't get a shadow prot. Just reading out the damage he took made me realise just how much of an effect not having it completely capped makes.

Yeah, resistance mitigation doesn't scale like armor does. Your last 20 resistance mitigates as high a percentage of damage as your first 20, so the higher you stack it, the better it gets.

Hmm, this definitely makes me reevaluate a couple of things about our approach. We probably aimed for ~335 SR on most people, with some having 365 if they'd found a good green to use. Basically just belt/bracers/boots/cloak (+15 SR enchant)/neck on everyone, and then a 20 SR glyph on a normal epic helm. I think we'll try 365 across the board next week to see the difference.

I run under the cap, I've ran as low as 330ish on a succesful kill but most often is 348. I feel that healers have more control over their survivability than non-healers, so we can afford to run a little under the cap, if it means keeping on a really exceptional piece of healing gear. I don't have anything convenient that's good to slap a 20 SR enchant on yet, but once I do, I'll probably just do that and run capped. For whatever it's worth, our kills for the past two weeks have both been under 3 attempts each. It really does get better!

When a guild that's been killing Illidan for weeks manages to get Shahraz on pretty reliable farm, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the fight :P
I've been using 338 SR buffed, and mitigating ~65% of the shadow damage. I'm pretty happy with my survivability, but I could get capped with a green. We'll see how it goes.

The last encounter must not necessairily be the hardest/worst repeatable fight in there. :P

[quote]Hmm, this definitely makes me reevaluate a couple of things about our approach. We probably aimed for ~335 SR on most people, with some having 365 if they'd found a good green to use. Basically just belt/bracers/boots/cloak (+15 SR enchant)/neck on everyone, and then a 20 SR glyph on a normal epic helm. I think we'll try 365 across the board next week to see the difference.[quote]

I'm not that qualified on this subject, but as far as I understand it, the chance to resist something and especially to fully resist a spell does not go up linear (hope that's an english word, but it should be understandable what I mean. :P) with resistance. Afaik it works more like a stair. If you reach X resis, you have Y% chance etc. And the last few points of resis towards the cap are worth more then they are on paper.

If someone actually ran tests past this, pls feel free to correct me before I spread too much garbage.

This is the definitive thread on the topic, recently bumped: Resisting Magical Damage and its Relation to Resistance Levels

Is it natural to have an extreme dislike of Hyjal when first starting out?

We've thus far done Rage Winterchill twice and attempted Anetheron's trash once. For some reason we don't seem that great at it though I have no doubt that'll get better with practice. The problem is that the majority of my guild and I find the concept of clearing eight waves of irritating trash for one shot at a boss slightly idiotic and completely bereft of fun.

Black Temple on the other hand is overwhelmingly amazing right now. On our first night in, we cleared High Warlord Naj'entus and Supremus (half a raid at 80%, 8 people at 30%, what a joke of a fight) while finding our entire guild actually enjoying clearing the trash and wanting to do the optional pulls we could've ignored.

Contrasting the two, I find it hard to justify scheduling Hyjal over Black Temple at this point in time and use the reasoning that as we get high level gear from the latter, the former will become more forgiving. At the same time, if Anetheron is as easy as I believe he is, it would be quite beneficial to get another boss on farm...

Any advice on how to tackle our issues with Hyjal?