Sounds like your experience reflects most 1st nighters:
http://elitistjerks.com/422473-post393.html

Along with a couple other posts in this same thread.

I'm still curious what the reasoning is behind screwing casters. Is it just to make the melee feel better or something?

As if melee really had it so bad in forward progression, they're honestly the strongest raid dps without stupid amounts of stacking (ie: mage with sp/sham + multiple innervates). All melee need is WF/SoE and they become a large bit more destructive than casters ever will be. I dislike mechanics that make you useless (specifically) for x number of time and those that beg for respecs and such.

There were definitely some early anti-melee friendly fights; but more or less I'd agree. Melee are exceptional on most fights (especially bt/Hyjal). You pay a price for what they offer sometimes though.

Archimonde is way worse then Mother Shahraz, atleast for us,

If your healers are having manaproblems over the ordinary at shahraz try to bring more restoration shamans, and do mana tide rotations for the healers.
Chain heal is superior on Shahraz

Well, BT was fun tonight, an hour of general chat bitching about how dumb Shahraz is as Aurora and us were both doing her.

It says something when on a boss that hits as hard as Shahraz, we opted to go with Curse of Recklessness (and not once did it cause a wipe), just because any way of speeding the fight up minimizes the odds that the RNG decides it's time for us to lose. Half the healers thought I was crazy when I suggested it.

I know this number is going to vary a fair bit but could anyone give me a ballpark figure of how many Heart of Darkness' to expect by the time the average guild gets to Mother Shahraz.

Basically, one of our members want to use them for a craftable piece so if we're absolutely definitly going to have to farm them, I don't mind so much. He's an exceptional member and I personally want to but if it means the difference between farming trash and not farming trash, I'm less inclined to do so. It'll also open the floodgates of everyone wanting them.

How did other guilds handle the craftable epics vs shadow resist priorities?

If it's relevant, we're 4/9 in BT, 2/5 in Hyjal and planning to finish that off before moving onto Gurtogg Bloodboil and beyond.

150 Hearts is the number to aim for, IMO.

6 per person is a full set minus legs. Add one good green or a Glyph's non-SR helm + flask and you're at cap. Legs are the last piece you should make, and only if there's a good reason for it.

But you're using 9 healers, as EJ. That is like a 15 healer equivalent!

I think its a good idea, ONCE you learned the fight.

We crafted 2 non-SR items before we realised just how much SR we were going to need.

Our second (I think) week in BT involved doing 2 bosses then clearing trash to akama, bloodboil, teron and then taking a break (respawns) and starting again (without killing the bosses)

This went on most of the week and I think a saturday/sunday mammoth farming session, needless to say most people were well on their way to exalted when we had enough hearts.

I think everyone got 3 pieces of SR and some random green/helm enchant.

I think allowing people to use hearts for craftable gear is a bad move and will slow you down in the long term, get the SR, kill shahraz then start using them for other gear.

It's not that easy to tell without hard numbers, but generally, I think this is a bad idea, unless you can guarantee that a +25% armor buff will be up on the tank for the entire duration of the fight.
As you do the fight more often, the raid gets better at handling FA. Sure there are horrible port spots, but its' nowhere near 'bad RNG, we wipe'. There are always combat rezzes etc, and she is very killable with 20 people at the end. Tank kills are still possible though, CoR only promotes that.

The only times I died when CoR were up were when 1/2 or more of my healers were dead to begin with, it really didn't give me as big a problem as I expected it to be.

Edit - Also to add, I took less average damage than most of the other tanks that I see when you search Mother Shahraz (6024 per hit compared to 6200-6400 I see elsewhere). Kind of odd, but that is what it's showing.

Average damage does not mean that much, there are too many random factors in each attempt (% of the hits taken being Lashes since those are higher than normal melee, AC buff uptime, etc). Besides, this is about burst potential anyways.
Of course CoR isn't going to just get you killed all the time. But you are adding more 'RNG-wipe' potential to something that can already be a problem at times. And for what, making the fight 10 seconds shorter? I'd much rather extend the fight by 10 seconds than add more burst potential to a mob that already hits like a truck, at least at this point. Unless of course you have max buffs and debuffs up the entire time.

First off, we have all the shamans using HW1 on the MT whenever raid health is stable, which helps Ancestral uptime. But mainly, looking at actual numbers, CoR only increased the hits taken by 300-400. The deadly spikes are never just pure melee. They're melee+Lash or melee+Beam or melee+Lash+FA. And out of those, melee is the only component affected. So realistically the maximum possible spike is only changing by a few hundred points, or maybe 3% or so at most (let's say a 23k spike becoming 23.8k or something). On the other hand, incoming melee damage, looking at fairly static indicators like average Revenge, average Evisc, average pet melee, etc., was increased by literally 10% due to CoR. We bring 3 hunters and 5 melee DPS (last night, 2 rogues, 2 DPS wars, and one enhance shaman) to Shahraz when possible, so that's a huge increase.

Without gear changes involved, and the same group composition in terms of buffs, pretty much all those classes did an extra 100+ DPS vs. last time. The #1 hunter last night did 1464 DPS in full SR gear, which is pretty crazy.

I know it sounds insane, but for us, CoR is the way to go and something I'll definitely have us do in the future.

Edit: Also the "average" damage he's talking about it purely melee hits from WWS.

Last week Shahraz's average melee on Paches was 5852, 7932 max. This week it was 6024, 8120 max. That's with quite a large sample size for both, so it's a pretty good indicator.

I know we'd considered using CoR, but ended up not, in most cases I'd agree with Gurthock, it's not going to cause a wipe, but I have seen myself live with sub 1k hp from a burst several times, and recklessness would have been a death, so at that time we didn't go with it.

However, given a higher melee raid than we had for last week when we were talking about it, it might be worth it to cut down on fight duration. It can lead to a spike going from just barely surviving to dieing, but it could also lead to that fatal port onto the MT never happening.

Eh, we had a few new people last night, and the first 45 mins or so was pretty sloppy. Our wipes there were caused by our poor play. Then after that people were playing well and dumb FA deaths stopped. We then had a bunch of low-% wipes over the next hour that really just were the RNG. 3 tank healers ported into a bench with the paladin's bubble already being used, all 3 died. Tank death shortly thereafter. Port directly onto the raid at 30%, no deaths from it, but mana is very tight, people all HS/bandage to try to get healthy enough not to die to a beam or whatever. Next port, at 20%, directly on top of the raid, with everyone low on mana, injured, and having blown all their timers -- killed basically all of us. That sort of thing.

Also we tend to be pretty druid-light, with our only druids often being the ferals who are OTing Lashes. They can brez anyone who happens to die nearby, but they can't really get up and run 30yd away to brez a healer who died after being ported into some random corner.

I know not to blame the RNG when it's poor play that kills us. A number of our wipes were definitely due to player error. But we also had wipes where no one died to anything they shouldn't have. We were just happy to be able to move on within one flask timer, before respawns.

We did Kaz'rogal tonight and found out he as a new move called Cripple which reduces attack speed or miss rate or something by 75% and strength by 75%, i can't really remember too much. caught me by surprise when i pulled agro off our tank who probably produces the best threat of anyone i've ever played with. Also you lose quite a bit of rogue/melee dps from the debuff. It sort of makes the fight more interesting seeing as we one shot it the first night then caught us off gaurd with this new ability, not sure if anyone else has noticed it.

Has it always been applied on the tank though?

I assume it could be anyone in melee range.

You really should consider having your warlocks spec Felguard for M. Shaz if they have the gear to support it. I don't generally like Felguard builds because of the high shard requirements and micro management, but 7/43/11 or 1/41/19 work wonders on this fight. With 2/5 T5 and a Void Star Talisman my Felguard has 380 Shadow Res and I can pretty safely run Soul Link as well. Pretty much any time the pet died, it was on a bad FA port and his death probably saved my life. Resummon and get back at it. The static spell damage from DK is far more helpful when you are already gimped on spell damage, and the 35 resist from MD allows me to use a Supreme Power instead of Shadow Fort flask. FG locks can hang with rogues in this fight if no one fucks up the rotations.

Oh an for what it's worth we ran CoR from the second pull on, it was obvious that melee damage contributed a huge chunk of our raids DPS and the amount of physical damage actually effected by CoR was easily offset by the faster kill.

Sure you can die to bad luck, but there is almost always room to improve. Better use of consumables and cooldowns, better healing, faster reaction and so on. All I see is that guilds who have been killing her for a while are getting better at it. Most likely because someone improved a bit from the previous week.
Going by your WWS, CoR is about an 8% damage increase, resulting in ~20 seconds saved with a raid that was already somewhat heavy on physical DPS to begin with. I occasionally see myself at 1k health, adding another 800 damage to her burst potential (or even 1k+ on a parry streak) just doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Either way it's just a minor difference. Guilds kill her without cow tanks or without gearing up their MT first, all those little things, it's just not that big a deal.

By the way, WWS counts Saber Lash towards the average hit because it is a physical attack.

Edit: and another by the way, are you using only 1 ranged camp? In that case, wiping to ports on the raid isn't just bad luck.

EJ says they have absolutely no problems related to tank deaths. Isn't that exactly the place you surely want to use curse of recklessness, regardless of other elements?

Oops, right. Well, looking at Shahraz's damage out lets you isolate melee hits only. Average melee hit last night was 5857, max 8120. Average last week (no CoR) was 5724, max 7932. Very minimal difference when it boosts raid DPS by so much, no?

We do only use one ranged camp, but so do most guilds I think(?). It seems to me that you're just trading off the severity of a bad port for the frequency. We could use 3 ranged camps, but then by definition you'd have an FA port into a camp 3x as often.