• Repeek

Get the NPCs involved on rage, our first was a struggle..our 2nd kill with the majority of the NPCs on the trash was a breeze.

 

Flamingcloud

Actually what I am worried about is having minimal tanking (re 2 prot tanks and a resto druid respeced to feral, or maybe 2prot and a fury war, some people gonna be away fri-sun) I am not very worried about limited dps as we had like 5 warlocks 3 rogues on the kael kill.

 

LiteSabre

If you have a decent prot pally, he can tank every non-abom non-caster by himself. Shackles and sheep can take care of the rest. The mobs before Winterchill, at least, are easily tankable even by non-tank spec classes like fury wars, or even rogues in a pinch. Don't hesitate to blow BL (Heroism in your case) if you think you're getting behind; you can easily pop it even twice and still have it up for Rage.

Oh, and be sure to /assist heal on Winterchill. :P

 

Masq

Regarding Mother Shahraz, I was curious how much raidwide shadow resist people received their first kills with? We went through most of BT relatively quickly, and we're only sitting around 50-60 hearts of darkness, so obviously outfitting the entire raid in epic SR isnt viable at this point.

Aside from scheduling additional trash farming nights, is there any 'benchmark' we should be aiming for, in terms of shadow resist?

http://www.aftermathlb.com

 

◊ Praetorian

As already stated, you pretty much want cap SR or close to cap on everyone. 340-365 on nontanks.

That means 6 hearts per person (bracer/boot/belt/cloak). Add enchant on cloak, and a good item of Shadow Protection and/or a glyph on a non-SR helm, resistance flask if needed, and you're there.

 

Lodekim

I'd really say if you're not capped, or close to it, it's not worth your time. We had nights trying it without capped resist on everyone, and it was a waste of time, it's really better just to schedule some trash farming.

edit: beaten, but yeah what Gurgthock said, just schedule the trash farming, it's probably necessary.

 

Masq

Ahh I see, well thanks for the quick responses.

Sounds like we'll be having some trash farming fun! I've read that Shahraz trash is 'very rewarding', is this in terms of hearts or epic drops?

I was just wondering should we leave Gurtogg/Teron/Akama trash up, and farm that. Rather than doing the Shahraz trash? Any insight would be welcomed.

http://www.aftermathlb.com

 

Buiden

Some anecdotal evidence of just how easy Rage Winterchill is. This week we were kind of on sleep mode as we started hyjal and there we basically 20 NPCs meleeing in front of rage. Long story short I got parry-loled to death at 90%. All our tanks had switched to dps gear so we're left with no tank at all and we wiped at 3%, on what could have been a kill anyway, with nothing but evasioned rogues, kiting after death and decay, etc. Anyway he's cake, just make it to him!

Also, if you need extra prep time before any hyjal boss get a rogue or 2 to distract them, can help a lot. 3 Rogues can keep a boss locked down indefinitely if they don't get resists, but they usually do.

 

◊ Quigon

This thread just kinda went south.

You are going to have to engage anatheron up the hill slightly and back him up when the knights add if you fear windfury like bursts - it puts the npc's behind him, and is a trivial move.
However, I've lately taken to letting as many as 10 npc's beat on him from the front, because his DPS output just is weak enough that I'm okay with gambling on it.

 

Buiden

It isn't exactly hard to just walk backwards until the NPCs are all behind him...

 

• Snowy

What makes the Shahraz trash so profitable is there's just so many of those packs. That's a lot of shots at gems, etc. When we farmed, we would do a clear, then port out and do what ever you wanted for a half hour to let the zone soft reset. Then go back and do it again. We did this 3 times, and pretty much everyone got to walk away with an epic gem that day, for example. Epic drops are a bit harder to quantify but I'd say on average there would be at least 1, if not 2 drops.

Not sure how you're handling the gems but for us it was a nice little perk to get some epic gems for personal use.

Finally you really don't have to bring your whole raid to farm Shahraz trash. We've 8 manned it the entire way, in about 50 minutes. That might be a bit extreme, but if you only get 15 people interested in farming don't think that you can't do it -- because you easily can.

Benefactors' Bar, where you get free English lessons:

 

LiteSabre

We took the time to get epic pants as well for 20 of our raiders, and we got our first Shahraz kill yesterday with everyone but the tanks at full SR. We did, however, have some good luck with the FA ports (FA port directly on the MT... with one person) but it was still a relatively clean kill with nobody but a mage or two dying to FA.

Farming Hearts is one thing, handing them out is another. Your mages and locks may be a bit miffed, but I strongly recommend switching out as many of them as possible for physical DPS and healers. At least for a first kill (and probably for subsequent ones) stacking those classes is much preferred to caster DPS; rogues, hunters, warriors and properly specced druids/shamans can do more than twice the damage of equally geared and skilled casters. It's just that skewed.

 

◊ Quigon

We ended up trying Mother with comparing me tanking, and a feral druid who was nearly 38k armor (75% mitigation on a 73).

The warrior took significantly less damage, and is easier to get SR on without losing a ton of armor in the process.

The bursts were also much lower.

 

• Melador

Not to mention it's very nice to have a shield wall in your pocket for those last 10-15% when healer mana is running dry.

 

cladnin

What the fuck is with Mother porting my offtank because he missed him 3 times in a row and he was sitting the whole time.

 

Pachwa

Welcome to Mother Shahraz, enjoy your stay.

 

◊ Quigon

After a significant amount of experience on Shahraz now all I can say is this fight is basically broken. It is terribly overtuned, and basically unfun, poorly designed, and overall a really bad fight. They've taken unoriginal and random ideas - mixed them together, and called it a fight. I have to agree with Praetorian - this is a dumb fight.

That being said, the fight doesn't necessarily annoy me - I can tolerate it, but it is buggy. Somehow it doesn't even come close to angering me like Archimonde does, and yet this fight is worse than Archifun. There are a lot of serious issues that need to be fixed.

1. She can saber lash the MT even though OT's are in position because of crappy hit boxes (dealable, but still a bug).
2. Saber lash debuff does not last long enough - meaning a good tank can, and will, have the invisible protection aura drop - meaning OT's will get FA'ed, and OT+MT will get punted. (A bug)
3. She can FA a group of 3, and then sinister strike them, causing what is almost always unavoidable deaths - vile beam becomes close to unavoidable here, even with a HS, Pot, etc (I consider this a bug).
4. FA can port you into unavoidable deaths - geometry specifically (definitely a bug).
5. FA porting onto the raid makes the fight 10 times more difficult (a feature!).
6. Two back to back FA's can vary in damage by 3 fold due to luck (a feature).
7. The MT can be instagibbed a large number of ways. I can't even begin to go into all the combinations. This is a bug. This can be mitigated by SR on the MT, but with parries you can still be instagibbed (>24k in 2 seconds is instagib - this is a bug that is probably considered a feature). We have a healing pattern down that can sustain indefinitely - but when sinister strike/FA (or my personal favorite, both) enters the fray, you can see some magic.


Some ridiculous elements:
8. This fight requires you to max SR. It contains a mana drain as well. (dumb) Edit: I'm told this isn't even resistable...
9. This fight hits harder than nearly any other in the game. It is preferable to have SR on the MT. (dumb)

Even while you can manage to fix/deal with half of these, the other half can and will wipe you even if you play like the son of man.

- We removed some of the random elements in this fight after I was literally punted, flew up, and was PUNTED AGAIN, before hitting the ground... all while dodging 1-2 saber lashes that obviously would've been wipes (which hit us 3-4 times tonight). I intercepted, intervened.. didn't matter.
So to remove this insta-wipe, you want to tank under a couch/fountain (dumb).

- We use positioning that basically makes it so maybe 1 in 40 FA's land on the raid (in the alcove near where EJ took their killshot). We stick the tanks in the couch. This means that when FA lands in the raid, its a wipe, but its extremely rare (dumb!).

We probably will have this fight in the bag tomorrow, as we almost did it twice tonight, but I could just as easily see wiping for a few more nights until the stars align.

There are a lot of ways to fix this fight, but a few jump to mind.
Pick any of these, or a combination of these:

1. No mana drain.
2. Make saber lash last longer, and act more reasonably with hit boxes.
3. FA is fatal attraction - you shouldn't nuke yourself with it - I honestly think like the prior DnT poster that this is a bug that it still damages you once you've broken links. But whatever.
4. FA doesn't need to explode - it only increases the terrible randomness of this encounter.
5. (heres an obvious one) Make FA not tick at time 0. Make FA increase in damage over time, starting lower. Punish bad players, and reward good ones...

I know a couple of guilds who have done this for a few weeks now will explain about how this is a good fight and workable now, but no, seriously, this fight has issues that need to be fixed. Tuning, bugs? yech. I'd also invite people who like this fight to read their own guild's initial impressions here, which are quite amusing in hindsight.

Anyway, this fight is really everything that can be bad about a fight in 1 simple package. All it needs is a berserk timer.

The leash is the best part of Shahraz, how sad is that? Give this fight a runback, no leash, and don't fix everything above, throw in a berserk, and you'd probably lose half your raiding base. I honestly think the devs are idiots after seeing this fight - I mean these games DO die eventually, and it is always due to a loss of quality - quantity not quality = TBC? Tigole himself said he mainly cares about fights being fun. Nothing about Shahraz is fun. Everything before her is - and we'll probably end up spending as much time on Shahraz as RoS/Bloodboil whatever - but it'll have made everyone bitter/angry. It will be nothing but a huge relief to drop this fight, and nothing but dread to repeat it.

PS: Oh did I mention? Dps casters are screwed in the ass for no reason other than being DPS casters. Our crew is basically 3 hunters, 3 rogues, 1 enhance shm, 2 dps warriors, 1 feral druid, 2 prot tanks, 2 demonology warlocks, 1 mage, 1 shadow priest, 9 healers. I mean we stack this fight so badly it is nuts. We're on pace to kill her in 5 or 6 minutes which will probably be a record once we can win powerball.

They should rename this fight to Mother F#$@, because thats all I can think of when doing this fight.

 

Ghando

To a certain extent, if you're setting up the fight such that you accept a FA in the raid = wipe...it's hard to complain about FA ports wiping you. Yes, luck with FA and her beam attacks will make or break any attempt, but putting yourself in a position where you're GUARANTEED a wipe doesn't make sense. As for her instagibbing the MT, I don't know what to say. By the second night of serious attempts, Paches just wasn't dying unless we were already down some crucial healers. Yeah yeah, parry strings. The MT shouldn't die, he just shouldn't, and looking at a strategy where that can happen and saying "Good enough for government work" is probably going to make mastering the fight that much harder.
Just like Archimonde, it's very hard to make progress if something as basic as MT healing is in doubt.

 

• Snowy

Well Quigon, your #2 is already being implemented in the next patch (2 min debuff granted when you're Saber Lashed) so no worries there. I don't have a problem with needing capped SR, although of course screwing casters so badly is a pretty dumb design -- as I've said though, it's rogue revenge for Ouro. :P

So they can fix the caster issue, make FA a little more forgiving at the start (but ramp up to be harsher) and make the animation a little less obnoxious -- honestly one of the hardest things about being ported in the corner behind a tree or bench is that you can't see shit with the animation. Then by the time I figure out the direction out, I'm dead or nearly there.

I dont think it's that far off from being balanced though.

Benefactors' Bar, where you get free English lessons:

 

• Xaviera

Yes Quigon, everything about Mother Shahraz is basically fucking retarded. It's been said and rehashed here dozens of times, and I knew you'd be on the boat too, even after your comments saying "It can't really be that bad but I haven't been there yet!!"

A few things you mentioned are easily fixable, and the fight does get more repeatable in less time as you kill her each week.

But even with us killing her the past several times in less than 30 minutes of attempts, it's still a stupid fight.


It will probably certainly be changed.

Oh and yes if she didn't have a leash, learning her would've been about 1000% worse. Holy FUCK.

 

Schneeb

I like shahraz, if she gets nerfed beyond fixing sabre lash it would seem logical to buff the council as at the moment they are free loot :/

 

Beth

Mother Shahraz has a berserk timer (10 minutes).

 

◊ Praetorian

As has been said, yes Shahraz gets better as you improve. It's brutal to learn because unless you have a far better group of raiders than we do, as you learn a fight, you're going to make mistakes. Not all 24 other people are going to stay calm and react perfectly to every FA. But on those attempts where things do click and you're making no major errors, you still run a good chance of losing due to the RNG. And then once that happens, not only are odds good that you're not going to play as well next attempt, but also it's demoralizing and tends to contribute to a loss of focus.

But yes, as you practice more and more eventually the goal is to reach a point where your raid will never squander an opportunity at a kill through poor play. But it's still stupid that even playing perfectly, you can have situations where you will lose 100% of the time. That's pretty much the hallmark of flawed design right there.

But there is no question that the fight will be changed in some way. I mean as was pointed out to me, if you look at the 2.2 spell data, Saber Lash is a 2min debuff now. Obviously they are looking at these things, and of course that stuff never makes it into the patch notes. This is the first major patch since BT went in; I'm sure there will be substantial balance tweaks. They really can't come soon enough though.

Easy or hard, the simple fact is that every single person in my raid group dreads doing Shahraz every week. It's like an actively unpleasant thing you endure to get to the good stuff beyond. That shouldn't be the case, obviously.

 

Skulli

With the 2min duration of lash next patch, isnt it worth to let all non healers eat it every 2 minutes to get immunity?

 

◊ Praetorian

Lash has a finite number of targets, so no.