draxon0012

What kind of spell damage are you guys running in your Mother sets?

The Armory

850 strikes me as a little on the low side.

Also, stack stam? or more spell damage. I can stack about 700 more hp but I'll lose about 80 spell damage. Worth it?

 

◊ Praetorian

Focus on providing water and AI to your raid because that's why they brought you.

 

Lumi

Wear stam and let the melee bring it home =/

 

spronk

Why is Shahraz such a caster unfriendly fight? Is it the prismatic shield? Does it switch up so fast that basically all schools of magic get high -dmg% modifiers?

 

◊ Praetorian

1) You are wearing SR.
2) There is a periodic 1k mana burn that hits up to 10 casters; you can resist the damage from the burn, but not the mana loss.
3) Every 15sec she gains a new set of resistances, ranging from -10% to -90% damage taken, to each element, based on how much damage she took from that element during the prior 15sec.

On the other hand, physical DPS faces no impediments whatsoever, besides SR gear.

This is a pretty typical WWS parse as a result:
Wow Web Stats

 

draxon0012

Well as a Mage I have 3 schools of possible dmg, untalented frostbolts and fireballs are subpar at best but hey its better then being below the main tank on damage.

Another question... Was looking through the mess of other threads, and I notice you guys situate your raid on benches/other environment items to avoid bad teleports. Are you guys getting relatively quick repeat kills every week on her with this strat? Or is it a complete crapshoot every week Archimonde Style?

 

FAME

The reason i think they are all behind the benches is because that is one of the possible port spots when tanking her against the chair. If you get ported there its almost a guaranteed death.

 

◊ Praetorian

We don't stand there. The screenshot positioning was commentary on how stupid FA can be at times. And I'd say still firmly in crapshoot territory regardless (Archimonde is a quick and reliable kill these days, by contrast).

 

◊ Asgorath

That's some impressive wipe recovery, 16 attempts (including the kill) in a little over 90 minutes. Wish my guild was that efficient.

 

• Snowy

A lot of them aren't wipes per se -- if a FA goes bad and you lose 2 people at 90%, you might as well reset the fight. Same thing if you're down 5 people at 65%. And so on.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

◊ Praetorian

You can leash Shahraz. If your first FA goes poorly, there's no reason not to reset immediately.

If you couldn't leash Shahraz, as Quigon noted in the general BT/Hyjal thread, this boss would be so horrible.

 

◊ Asgorath

Yeah, figured it'd have to be something like that. I'm only skimming through the BT/Hyjal thread right now, since it's so far off for us, guess I missed that particular post from Quigon. Anyway, as always, thanks for posting your WWS links.

Edit: Bah, missed Quigon's nice writeup of Shahraz. Nice information, sorry for the derail.

 

Trouble

I'm seriously considering just speccing holy while we work on this, from the horror stories I keep reading from shadow priests. It sounds like I'd be a hell of a lot more useful healing.

 

• Snowy

I think you still want a shadow priest or two. If you look at the WWS link Gurg provided, on that kill I gave back 6640 mana, which is basically 3 mana pots. I think that's better to give to your other holy priests + resto shamans than to spec holy yourself with (I'd imagine) sub-standard gear for late in a T6 instance.

One thing is for sure though, shadow priests go to healers and hunters on this fight. The fight still sucks to DPS on, but on the other hand you can concentrate bursts of 15 second DPS, and toss around shields and bandages during the other 15.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Stormheart

Isn't it possible to simply rotate the casters so that everyone unloads fire damage, then rotates to shadow/arcane, then back again to mitigate most of the shields effects? Just curious since we're going to be coming up to her in a couple weeks.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yes, that's exactly what you do, but the DPS loss is still tremendous. And of course some nukers (shadow priests, elemental shamans, etc.) don't really have viable alternate elements.

 

Bver

Mother Sharandom more like it. This is the only fight we intentionally stack melee. With the % reduction to magical damage it makes it a very caster unfriendly fight.

oops

 

Dawme

Just bring bandages. A lot.

 

Bver

Yeah they can only dps 50% of the time on this fight which sucks itself. Sometimes the % magic damages get messed up and all your casters sit there for 10 seconds doing absolute jack.

P.S. I hate this fight

oops

 

Flamingcloud

So is the reason Mother Shahraz is the cockblock in BT that she is that hard? Or because guilds have to bring like 5+ undergeared physical dps more than normal and that raid dps is way lower than normal?

IE. If she didn't have the mana burn and prismatic shield do you think the fight would be significantly easier, bringing it on par to other encounters like say azgalor, requiem and gurtogg? Or is this not a problem for most guilds since they actually have more than 5-6 raiding physical dps that were geared up from the begining? This fight sounds like vael 2.0 in that you could bring 10 rogues to vael even if they were in half dungeon blues and trivialize the encounter.

Also what is stopping destro locks from swapping between fire and shadow every switch and atleast pulling off 70% of normal dps?

 

Bver

The fight isn't really hard in concept. It's honestly if you get lucky with FA's or not.

oops

 

LiteSabre

Because she requires extensive farming for resistance gear before she can even begin to be attempted, and because bad luck can screw you 20 ways to Tuesday if she decides she doesn't wanna bite it. Add that to the fact that she hits like a truck, healers along with DPS are all in SR gear, and she has several bugs - or at least, features which I'm fairly sure are not working as intended.

Mana burn and prismatic shield are just icing on the cake. It would be easier if they weren't part of the encounter, but the same goes for pretty much any aspect of any fight (RoS P2 without soul shock or Gurtogg without BB, etc etc). It's not HARD per se - if the fight worked exactly like it did now with no OTs being ported, no FAs into couches or trees, and no MT knockback, I doubt it'd have the bad rap it does - just horribly random and a real blow to morale when you wipe on single digits to pure dumb luck when everyone is playing perfectly.

Raid DPS is lower than normal because everyone is in shadow resist gear (~500 AP, ~120 HR and ~5% crit for me) that severely gimps their DPS output, not because anyone is undergeared.

 

◊ Quigon

When you clear to shahraz, you should probably give your shadow priests the netherweave cloth. I know it might sound like I'm bitching, but seriously - shadow priests will be worthless and bandaging almost half of the fight. Make use of this time with bandages.

As to Praetorians comments on positioning. Our tank is in the same spot. I believe overrated's tank is as well. Both guilds, along with celebrity and ours (and I know we have a kill in the bag, once we L2P/lotto) use 1 group clumped. The difference is we put our guild in the alcove from which they took their screenshot. Since doing that, and nearly 2 hours of attempts since doing that, we've only had 1 FA land in that alcove wiping the raid. We really now are down to the issue of dealing with simply FA (since the MT death is extraordinarily rare, but it will happen when FA/sinister hits me). FA + sinister is still a combo I haven't figured out how to deal with. We're going to give an additional FA healer in the open region, and continue to use pots/HS's on each attempt - but the latter 2 are not sufficient for this combo. I also think we got fairly unlucky on our "good" attempts last night. Frankly though, we could position almost anywhere and if luck is on our side, that attempt can, and will, be a kill. Some guilds position in the open, some guilds don't wedge their MT. It all depends on where you want to put your eggs.

 

thelastrace

Funny thing is he has most if not all tier 5 healing gear, and a lot of the other stuff from SSC and TK so he really isn't too far behind Damn Defender gear.

 

cladnin

Our shadowpriest outdamaged our mages, although we only had 1 warlock. I'd hardly say they're worthless, but this fight fucking blows ass as caster. Damage isn't bad enough in shadow gear, sustainability isn't bad enough in shadow gear: let's add a mana drain and a stacking -dmg debuff. Your casters can work around it assuming they have solid coordination, but its still fucking gay.

WWS