Yeah mother was a giant bitch for us last night. My new favorite thing to hate on this fight is her turning to do a beam, instantly getting like 10 parries from the melee and 1 shotting the tank... I'll post a screenshot later but it was something like 32k damage in 1 second. Coupled with a 1% wipe, having to kill her "twice" last night will certainly not be the highlight of my week.
At least you can blame game mechanics for 1% mother wipes.
We have nothing but ourselves to blame after wiping on Illidan last night at 2% because someone can't figure out how to not get hit by parasites while trying to kill them.
I do NOT recommend anyone uses snake traps. They cause massive parries and will kill your tank.
Incidentally after accumulating over 100k melee hits, HS hits, and SS hits over my character and pachwa's data from WWS, I'm reasonably convinced weapn skill is totally broken for parries.
The default parry against a boss should be 5.6%?
I'm getting 10% almost exactly with 360 weapon skill, plus or minus a standard deviation of under 0.8% per fight.
I'm starting to check non weapon skill tanks today - but it almost feels as if weapon skill is causing more parries, not less. I've yet to see anyone under 5% parries on any meaningful sample set who has weapon skill.
I think perhaps the "blue" post that indicated the changes to weapon skill was straight up wrong.
The blue post on weapon skill claimed:
I wouldn't say it's useless.
Let's say you increase your weapon skill by 4.
Against a mob 3 levels higher than you, you get: 0.8% lower chance to miss, 0,4% lower chance to get dodged, 2,4% to be parried, and a 0,8% higher chance to crit. That means a 4,8% net increase.
or in Cryect's words (but not reflected on recount):
0.23% Avoidance Reduction per point of Weapon Skill Rating (0.2% Miss 0.1% Dodge 0.6% parry per Weapon Skill so 0.9% per Weapon Skill and 3.9 Rating per Skill so 0.9%/3.9=~0.23%)
0.06% Avoidance Reduction per point of Hit Rating (1% Hit per 15.8 Rating so 1/15.8=~0.06%)
Anyway I'm not seeing it.
at 5.6% base parry vs a boss, with 10 weapon skill that should be a 6% parry reduction, 1% dodge reduction, 2% miss reduction. I might buy the miss and dodge reduction, but not the parry. However 5.6+6.0 sure matches the data better than 5.6-6.0.
Of course it could just be that the default parry rate is 16% or so... but I've not read that anywhere.
I would go as far as to say weapon skill is once again a terrible stat for a tank. You are likely better off with the aggro-increasing set bonuses. Unbelievable.
Hmm kind of depends how you are using snake traps. If you have 3-4 hunters all drop them you will suddenly have a mob surrounded by snakes and yes get a ton of parries. Having 1 hunter drop a trap from behind really doesn't cause any additional parries other than when a mob flips around to do an RSTS which you get melee parries at that point anyway.
I completely agree that the extreme combos need to be removed, but I think their frequency really does not justify the amount of complaints. My post was in response to a guy claiming the fight was FIFTY percent luck.
So if I'm a Saber Lash tank, and the other offtank and I stand with our back to Shahraz for the first 3 Saber Lashes, get 3 misses, and then port on top of the main tank with an immediate Saber Lash on said MT for 21K.....
So if I'm a Saber Lash tank, and the other offtank and I stand with our back to Shahraz for the first 3 Saber Lashes, get 3 misses, and then port on top of the main tank with an immediate Saber Lash on said MT for 21K.....
we obviously just played poorly.
I think it is a reasonable assumption to say that the degree to which people complain about this fight and preach about it being so luck based is directly proportional to the number of runs your guild has been fucked by bad luck.
So, if your guild has had wonderful *LUCK* on Mother, congratulations to you, most people haven't and as such we reserve the right to bitch about how broken this encounter is. But seriously people need to stop saying it isn't entirely luck based when you yourselves are the lucky ones not to have been screwed over by uncontrollable factors.
P.S. wasn't referring to you Edgewalker just agreeing with you
Incidentally after accumulating over 100k melee hits, HS hits, and SS hits over my character and pachwa's data from WWS, I'm reasonably convinced weapn skill is totally broken for parries.
The default parry against a boss should be 5.6%?
I'm getting 10% almost exactly with 360 weapon skill, plus or minus a standard deviation of under 0.8% per fight.
I have 350 weapon skill, and I'm seeing an average parry rate of approx 12.8% vs archimonde. I picked Archimonde because I've got a lot of data on him >.<
Looks like I'm hitting almost 3% more parries with 10 less weapon skill than the number you're quoting.
A possible explanation is that your assumption of 5.6% base parry rate is incorrect and that weapon skill indeed drops the parry rate. You simply start at a higher number.
I think it is a reasonable assumption to say that the degree to which people complain about this fight and preach about it being so luck based is directly proportional to the number of runs your guild has been fucked by bad luck.
So, if your guild has had wonderful *LUCK* on Mother, congratulations to you, most people haven't and as such we reserve the right to bitch about how broken this encounter is. But seriously people need to stop saying it isn't entirely luck based when you yourselves are the lucky ones not to have been screwed over by uncontrollable factors.
The number of whiners is also directly proportional to the number of people that like to blame bad luck because they can't figure out what went wrong.
Sure this encounter has some problems, pretty much all of them will be gone with a single fix (Saber Lash buff applied even if it is avoided).
So right now, maybe one in ten attempts at most, you will wipe because of air-lash, ported OTs or whatever else the result of a missing SL buff might be. That would make it 10% luck. Not 100%, 10%. Calling this encounter pure luck is just taking it a bit too far.
Regarding parries, I have been under the impression that most non-caster bosses have a 10% parry rate now. They probably get another 0.6% or more because of the level difference. 0.6% parry reduction per skill point sounds a little too good to be true, but with 100k hit samples, you can probably figure it out.
Also if she double and single ported all night, which some guilds have seen - won't every guild basically win then?
Fix her ability to single and double port, fix sinful beams or FA, fix wicked chains, fix saber lash, fix furniture ports. The points about what is and is not luck beyond that are worthless to any discussion, and are not constructive - and it has already been discussed 100 times over.
It amazes me how far people will bend a kowtow toward blizzard - in the blatant face of a dumb encounter that should be fixed for the betterment of the game. Nuke it from orbit.
Of course the constant bickering about the randomness of Shahraz, WoW and life is totally constructive.
Many of the things you listed don't really wipe the raid. In most cases where they did, players probably made mistakes that lead to a wipe. I agree that this fight needs some tuning, it's just not as bad as some people make it sound. Furniture ports? Have yet to see any. (hint: we don't fight near the furniture)
I for one don't want this fight to become the dull easy-mode farming mob that it will most likely be after all those 'fixes'. But I guess looking for a slight challenge in WoW might be asking too much. Anyways, the loudest voices will prevail.
I assure you far more people want to see Shahraz fixed than those who do not. This goes beyond the loudest voices here.
On our first pull last night our tanks started with their backs turned, and both got ported, with an instant saber lash after that.
On the next pull 3 MT healers got ported and sinful beamed.
You've got multiple combat logs on this thread which isn't even about MS showing deaths in 0.1 seconds.
You've got tanks wedging themselves into stupid positions cause of the bugs.
They're not doing this just to prove a point - they want to not die.
Everyone here wants a challenging fight - what we don't want is a fight that places many elements out of our control. In terms of difficulty - I enjoyed all of the hard fights in Naxxramas, which incidentally were much harder than the fights in BT, and yet they didn't rely on randomness to get it done.
Do you really think people want Shahraz nerfed because we don't like difficult encounters? Maybe the loudest voices are the ones who can skip on their own image and perhaps ego and say what needs to be said about basically broken and stupid encounter. Did Gruul 1.0 seem appropriate to you? Perhaps Hydross 1.0? I have no reservations about speaking my mind about what I consider a terrible encounter.
I likewise also would be more than happy if they could find a way to make encounters harder without relying on the random number generator. You know as well as I do that no two shahraz attempts are the same - especially over the long term. The difficulty between two specific pulls can be enormously different. Yet, reliquary and Illidan seem to keep the formula far more consistent without taking a hodgepodge of abilities and potentially creating disaster in 10 ways.
Shahraz and Illdari council sums up a few of the mistakes of TBC raiding (simplification). They're both essentially "dodge this" encounters with a myriad of abilities. If you slightly downtweak shahraz's abilities it becomes a much simpler encounter. If you slightly uptweak the damage on the Illdari council's abilities you're definitely going to get unavoidable deaths with a much more difficult encounter. Yet the player skill remains consistent, and the encounter is not better for it. This is a terrible way to make an encounter hard - similar to adding fear on a fight like Archimonde, remove player control and call it done. Archimonde is more than 1 shottable now - but it could be a MUCH better encounter if they made it more difficult through execution. Remove the fear - add a second positional phase - add raining death - anything but a fear.
Compare the difficulty of 4H to Illdari council - the innovation in style and execution. Illdari council is less interesting than Maulgar - and shows some of the brain drain that pervades this expansion. People are desperate for a hard encounter and will even latch onto Mother Shahraz I suppose to keep one.
You are right, no two Shahraz pulls are really the same. Which makes the whole thing a little more interesting while we wait for the next instance.
You seem to read between the lines that I love this encounter because it is perfect and has no flaws. That is not the case. But I still prefer a few random elements over some of the 100% repetitive encounters. They are the same as last week, the week before and the 5 weeks before that. The challenge is for 25 people to not fall asleep and remember the 1-2 jobs they might have.
Sure there are some exceptional encounters that are interesting beyond the second replay without relying on randomness, like Kael'Thas. A lot of stuff going on, different assignments for everyone, long fight, etc. But realistically, we won't see too many of those.
Lastly, something about truly horrible encounters. Encounters that should indeed be eradicated from the game. For example Void Reaver or Shade of Akama. Akama at least has a good design idea behind it. These encounters are simply way too easy to be where they are. But nobody complains, these are free epics after all.
Eh, if you consider Void Reaver to come before SSC I wouldn't say he's too easy. He's certainly harder than Gruul. He's easier than Magtheridon (his DPS requirement is probably higher, I think, but there isn't the whole 15 things to coordinate at once aspect going on) so maybe that's a touch off, but how hard should he be? Harder than Lurker? Morogrim? Leo?
He should probably be switched with Al'ar in placement though (first boss in the instance being the one you do first).
(I won't speak for Akama though as I haven't fought him and it does sound like early BT versus Vashj and Kael are somewhat out of whack.)
Every encounter becomes so much easier once you've beaten it a few times that I don't really see how they can make encounters that stay hard without those encounters being either ridiculously frustrating to get a first kill on or ridiculously random (in which case you can be treated to either a cakewalk or RNG says you lose, depending on the day). I would like to see some more originality though, hard as that is to come up with at this stage (Gothik and Four Horsemen, though I got to experience neither, both sound like amazing and elegant encounters with their unique mechanics, for example).
We literally one-shot or two-shot (i.e., quick leash) Shahraz every week, and have done so since our third kill (took 7 hours of wipes for the first kill, 2 hours for the second, and smooth since then). We're good at the fight and yeah, strategy and execution will get you past almost any "bad luck" event. And I can't wait for the fight to be nerfed and neither can the rest of my raid group.
Proof, btw, just in case anyone thinks I'm exaggerating about Shahraz:
So that's 8 pulls to kill her over the last 6 weeks combined. We spend an average of 10 minutes on the fight weekly, if that.
Yes, the fight can be hard, and it can be exhilarating to deal with things like multiple ports on the raid, repeated 3-ports of MT healers into bad spots or onto the melee, or into corners, etc. Our kill yesterday had 11 deaths total including a couple of brezzes, but we still killed her in one pull.
That doesn't mean that fucking casters is excusable, or that it's ultimately good design to have people potentially instantly killed through no fault of their own. Yeah, if it doesn't happen to your MT, you can manage to kill her anyway. But it's still not good design that a corner port and bad resists, or a 3-port + Sinful Beam can pretty much kill you instantly. It's certainly not good design that mages, shadow priests, elemental shamans, affliction warlocks, etc., do less damage than the tank sometimes. That can't be changed soon enough.
Yes, it'll make the fight "easier" but there are better ways for Blizzard to design a hard fight than the one employed with Shahraz. I'd rather have a trivial boss than one that's frustratingly designed.
How hard / complicated is something like Kael'Thalas compared to fights in Hyjal / BT? We got our first Kael kill recently. If it's not too much to ask, what stuff in both would you consider a gear check vs. coordination?
How hard / complicated is something like Kael'Thalas compared to fights in Hyjal / BT? We got our first Kael kill recently. If it's not too much to ask, what stuff in both would you consider a gear check vs. coordination?
Grats on Kael. If you can kill Kael you can kill Illidan. Have fun.
Shahraz is the major gear check -- nothing else is really too bad. (I mean Naj'entus is a gear check too, but if you're killing Kael you by definition pretty much pass this check.) RoS, Council, and Illidan are execution fights in terms of executing a predictable plan. Shahraz and Archimonde are execution fights in terms of having your whole raid needing to adapt to dynamic situations.
But like I said, if you can kill Kael, you have the coordination necessary to beat the rest of the fights currently in the game. Don't expect them to all just roll over and cough up loot, but you can do everything in there.
We literally one-shot or two-shot (i.e., quick leash) Shahraz every week, and have done so since our third kill (took 7 hours of wipes for the first kill, 2 hours for the second, and smooth since then). We're good at the fight and yeah, strategy and execution will get you past almost any "bad luck" event. And I can't wait for the fight to be nerfed and neither can the rest of my raid group.
Proof, btw, just in case anyone thinks I'm exaggerating about Shahraz:
So that's 8 pulls to kill her over the last 6 weeks combined. We spend an average of 10 minutes on the fight weekly, if that.
Yes, the fight can be hard, and it can be exhilarating to deal with things like multiple ports on the raid, repeated 3-ports of MT healers into bad spots or onto the melee, or into corners, etc. Our kill yesterday had 11 deaths total including a couple of brezzes, but we still killed her in one pull.
That doesn't mean that fucking casters is excusable, or that it's ultimately good design to have people potentially instantly killed through no fault of their own. Yeah, if it doesn't happen to your MT, you can manage to kill her anyway. But it's still not good design that a corner port and bad resists, or a 3-port + Sinful Beam can pretty much kill you instantly. It's certainly not good design that mages, shadow priests, elemental shamans, affliction warlocks, etc., do less damage than the tank sometimes. That can't be changed soon enough.
Yes, it'll make the fight "easier" but there are better ways for Blizzard to design a hard fight than the one employed with Shahraz. I'd rather have a trivial boss than one that's frustratingly designed.
Our experience with Mother has been pretty much the same. One-Twoshot (Hello Mr. MT port.) every week ever since we killed her. Still we stack the raid heavily with 6-7 melee and 9-10 healers. Also Rogues get spoiled with 2-4 bloodlusts. I don't know, the fight isn't hard in it's current incarnation just luck based at some points. (Also a awareness check. But you should have passed that with Kael'thas already.)
Council is a joke. It's long and boring.
Illidan I really like, almost as good as Kael'thas. (Yes, even though I play a rogue).
Fans glory to the Gladiators,
Gods glory to the Heroes.
Ports on tanks we can survive. Port on raid, not so much. Tonight mother hit the OTs with saber lash then the next saber she hit me for 25k. No one moved. Beams on the FA's is pretty lame. I've yet to see a parry streak kill me, although I imagine it will sometime. I've seen parry(6k) followed by a burst for 18k. Illidan has been the only one to turn and queued up a parry bomb.
Using snakes sounds like a risk I'd rather not take. Tonight was 25% port on raid killing 8, the freak solo saber lash, and then kill. The luck factor isn't as big as some make it out to be, but there are some things that could and should be changed to make it less aggrivating. I will deal with the ports on the raid if she didn't port the OTs and didn't beam the ported players. Only seen a port on the raid maybe 2 times and only once have we had players stuck in furniture.
We played around with snakes tonight, had 2 wipes to people being bad at ports and saw no less 3 ports, but plenty of parries (going in with 22.5k hp makes it much harder for a parry set to kill you though, so I lived through them all pretty easily) and stopped.
I really can't wait for a few of the changes in particular, the parry gib will be nice to get rid of so I can have my offtanks attack. It will be nice to get rid of the ports on the tanks (I think that the knock up is the same thing right?) We had one wipe today at 22% when she threw me in the air and gibbed me after missing 2 lashes and dodging one, then our kill I parried a lash while I was in the air and was so relieved (it was at like 8%) and making casters not worthless will be good, we can't really stack our raids with melee, we bring a bit more than usual, but that means like 1 extra rogue, and I'm tired of out dpsing half the raid.
Its funny that its just mentioned as I wanted to come here today and moan about the parry mechanics aswell, in this case on Teron. We killed him twice before but yesterday he just refused to go down (we had some 10-15% wipes which didnt end up with kill thanks to our incompetence, but thats different story). The frustrating part was that we had about 3-4 very nice going tries which ended up cause tank literally exploded after multiple parries from snakes (yes, he tried to avoid them hitting from sides / front). After that we used the snakes very carefully and on some tries not at all, however that didnt seem to help much. We still lost 2-3 good tries just on parries from melee when he turns on them to incinerate.
Is there any way to reduce the chance of this happening on Teron except the obvious positioning ( camp ----- MT -- Teron -- Melee) or do we just have to hope for a semi-lucky try?
There is very little to nothing you can do about this rsts mechanic, just have to live with it... I guess. You could split your melee on both sides of him I suppose, but that will not help a lot. Especially if you don't trust your melee enough to not stand in front of it and parry it.
People saying the nerfs to Mother are too harsh, but the fight as is really is simple. All the changes are going to do is make the fight more fun for some classes and take away most of the randomness that can prevent even the best guilds from 1 shotting her.
It's a gear check first off. This does not make the fight 'hard'. If you do not have the gear for her then that is your fault for not doing the fight as designed.
We killed her within 1 night of attempts (about 3 hours) due to having the information here on forums like this and also playing around a bit finding what works for us. Since then we have 1-2 shot her every week. Yes we stack the raid, yes the fight is way too luck reliant.
Even with that type of consistency I am looking forward to the changes so I can bring in the raid I use for 'Day 2 BT' to clear all the way to Illidan instead of doing alot of raid comp swapping after RoS dies.
People are desperate for a hard encounter and will even latch onto Mother Shahraz I suppose to keep one.
Mother is not nerfed because she is too hard, she's nerfed because she's probably the least fun and the most boring fight in BC. Off course, time will tell if she's nerfed too much or not and I agree that the game feels very boring these days and will feel even more boring after this nerf, but heh, we're used to it, that's the price you have to pay when you're one of the 100 first guilds to finish the content. Sunwell we need you !
09/06/07, 4:58 PM
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