Amonra

Has anyone found any neat tricks to reduce the number of deaths from FA? We've killed her a couple of times but had plenty of wipes on our third try tonight. Sometimes we get wiped by people getting ported onto the raid or burst damage on the MT. We accept that those are going to happen, but when we get lucky and these things don't happen we should surely be winning? However most of the time our wipes are caused by a trickle of deaths from FA building up to a wipe.

Our strat for people getting ported is to run away from the other two who got ported. It's fine in principle but when a couple of people run off in the same direction they end up taking a pretty large amount of damage before they can work it out and thats when people start dying.

I have wondered whether giving people assigned directions to run ahead of time would reduce the possibility of them running in the same direction. Or basing it on the bigwigs announcement (e.g. first name runs east, second west, third north) but people seem to think that the bigwigs announcement is too slow to be useful.

Does anyone have a better method of dealing with FA, or are we just bad at running and/or using consumables to stay alive?

 

Sebudai

We use general 'tactics' like melee dps runs left, healers run straight etc. but obviously that won't cover every situation and people still need to react. We tried coming up with a mod that assigned each player a raid icon and players would run a specific direction based on that icon, but it didn't really work out.

We make sure the first thing people do after being teleported is drink a Major Shadow Protection Potion(unless they're using Super Mana Potions) and then use a healthstone. It also helps to have 1-2 healers assigned to healing the FA'd players. Even as enhancement spec I can normally land 1-3 quick heals, and it is very often the difference between living and dying.

Lastly, make sure players are using all of the tricks their particular class might have. Priests should shield, druids can Barkskin, shaman can use Nature's Swiftness, mages can use Mana Shield and Blink, warlocks can use Shadow Ward, warriors can switch to defensive stance, rogues can Sprint, paladins can use Divine Shield to mitigate the damage to themselves, and I'm not certain but I think hunters can use Aspect of the Pack.

 

Foofer

We've had some luck with healers standing still and healing themselves when they get ported. In the case that two (or three) healers get ported, they would move once they realize it, but they should do fine healing through it until then.

 

◊ Quigon

I can't even describe how precisely this echos our experience.

We tried presets of melee east, healers west, dps north - and then had a mod doing it with tells. But just going with "wing it" ended up being vastly superior. This is also what I would recommend new guilds do - just "wing it" and you will acclimate and improve on this aspect of the fight over time.

We also crafted about 100 shadow protection cauldrons and use one on each and every pull - it works wonders.

Still, when you get a triple port on the tanks... and 2 of them are your offtanks, I'm guessing you're dead.

Or perhaps if you get ported inside the couch the main tanks are in, get stuck there so badly it requires all 3 of you to be ported out.

I took a screenshot of our last shahraz night. I edited it slightly so as to reflect what I think people were thinking.

 

Dots

Good to know that a male cow in a pink shirt was thinking of me...

We use some general guidelines like melee strafe left, ranged strafe right, healers stand still and heal. But for the most part, it still comes down to using consumables and correctly reacting to the situation, not running into camps, standing in bad spots, and so on. Especially on the triple healer port.

Players do get a lot better with practice though, 2 of our last 3 kills were one-shots. Last week we had to reset twice because of massive player errors. One of the OTs decided he did not like his spot that much on the pull, resulting in 24k Saber Lash on the MT (other OT had yet to do any offensive actions on Shahraz). The other mistake was a new healer incorrectly assuming that standing still under the mob with FA on was a good idea. I guess those general guidelines that we use can backfire... it still went reasonably well, but a few people died to that and we had to abort at 40% or so because of the domino effect.

Maybe I am indeed a lucky charm and you would have won with me there.

 

Skulli

Thats from the latest ptr notes.

 

Hand

This. This fight kind of reminds me of bloodboil with fel rage when someone dies, and it turns out they forgot aspect of the monkey, inner fire, ice armor, barkskin, etc. Like he said every class has a little trick they can use to help them out (warriors can also intervene). I'm pretty sure we haven't had a single death due to FA ever unless someone either forgot to use their trick, or they had a lot of shit on cooldown. I can't recall anyone ever saying "I went defensive stance, used my pot and healthstone, intervened to someone, but I still died!" It's always "I forgot to healthstone/pot" or "Everything was on cooldown because I got ported three times in a row."

Also another thing that helped us a lot was telling people that its ok to run into the camp if you get FA. We use a 3 spot strat so running into a camp isn't immediate death, but even with a one spot strat I think this has some merit. Back when we were learning the fight we had a lot of cases where people would get ported between the melee and the single camp (back when we used this strat) and they would often all run the same way and die, and the excuse was "i didn't have anywhere else to run" Running into your camp(s) isn't the end of the world if you get FA, if only one person does it there really shouldn't be anyone that goes below 2/3rds health. Having people all run the same way guarantees death, whereas having one person run onto one of your camps might be a lot more raid damage going out, but if it breaks his link faster and the result is 0 deaths, then it's definitely worth it.

 

Natural

Ticking for 750, 1500, 2250, then 3000 will completely change the fight. It will still be a shadow resistance check, but this makes FA ports (and FA bombs) entirely survivable.

 

Urraca

So with the WF 'hotfix'--how much does DPS suck on mother now? Seeing casters were LOL in the first place, now warriors + rogues take a significant nerf across the board.

 

Skulli

Wow Web Stats
thats from our yesterdays kill and i think it was with the wf fix.

 

Trouble

The nerf isn't as big as the WoW forum trolls are making it out to be. I think you'll see your Mother Shahraz kills vary more based on which if any melee dies and how often they get ported than you will from the WF nerf.

 

Lodekim

Trouble is right, this weeks clear I didn't even know about the WF nerf until I think council or illidan, and we actually had better dps on illidan this week than we had for any previous attempts, or previous kill.

 

Namaste

Taking some advice in this thread into consideration, here is our kill from last night: WWS

Added a shaman to try keeping AF up fulltime as well as a holy priest trying to help whenever possible. This kill took 6:02 and the previous was 5:04 with the main differences being OT's not attacking nearly as much as well as some pretty bad luck with FA's landing on the raid. Good awareness, quick movement and use of healthstones/consumables allowed us to survive the FA.

Like Saabik said, it's still a hectic fight but as we've experienced many of the bad things that can take place during the encounter we've had less issues dealing with them. I don't know if I'd ever go into the fight expecting a 1shot but a kill in less than 5 or so attempts seems doable, about the same as Archimonde.

edit: seeing the PTR notes posted above, perhaps a 1shot will be in order. FA on the OTs and FA on the raid has been the cause of almost every wipe we've had (save for a few instances of crazy burst dmg to the MT) and those changes look like they will help those wipes become kills or near-kills in the future.

 

Ghando

A neat trick we've been using is this: Resto Shamans keep Totem of the Maelstrom equipped and are specced 5/5 Tidal Focus (pretty standard for any full Resto build). Whenever we have a spare global cooldown we toss a Rank 1 Healing Wave on the MT. With 5/5 Tidal Focus and the Totem, those rank 1 heals are literally zero mana, but they heal for ~450 (grats bugged Healing Way buff) and can proc Ancestral Fortitude. They also allow us to drop out of the five-second rule and get some extra regen. With 2-3 Shamans using this trick, AF uptime on the MT is dramatically increased and it's done during the small breathers you get between FAs and beams.

 

Elvenstein

I've read through this thread and didn't see any information about this so I thought I'd ask. Do the offtanks for saber lash wear max SR? I ask because we're currently gearing up for the encounter and I don't think I've seen any information pointing either way. Any way to save hearts and bring us closer to actually attempting the encounter would be nice. My assumption is yes in case of FA's onto the tanks.

 

◊ Quigon

Our offtanks wear about 250 buffed SR. You can simply WWS it and do a very quick calculation over 15 or so pulls of how to maximize efficiency.

If you're concerned about burst damage, add more SR (although warrior OT's can compensate a number of ways). If you're concerned about efficiency try to find a nice mix.

Our offtanks tend to only die on shadow burst combinations - and that is when a triple FA gets stuck in the couch we're tanking on, or a triple FA on our tanking spot that is combined with a vile beam, sinister beam, saber lash, or any combination of those. I haven't died as a main tank in a while outside of 2 spectacular deaths earlier this week (I do mean spectacular).

We also lost our offtanks about a couple times this week due to one or both of them being ported back-to-back followed by lash/sinisters (this is with their backs turned from the start). The double OT-port insta-saber lash wipe is something that is just epic to behold. Obviously there isn't anything you can do about this outside of dropping defense on the tanks - and is usually rare. But you're going to see tanks ported, and giving them SR for survivability makes sense.

Just answer the question based on healer mana and where your problems are coming from. We tend to usually NOT have issues of needing more SR on the OTs.

 

Dawme

Our offtanks use max SR. Saber lash is very predictable dmg, the only thing that can kill your offtanks is burst dmg and burst dmg might only come from shadow dmg (FA on top of them, beam not resisted...).
Announced changes for Shahraz are interesting but I'm afraid they modify her from dumb and way too hard fight to dumb and free epics. We'll see how it goes but with modified shahraz and RoS, there won't be really "hard" fights at all in black temple, except Illidan off course and in the mean time, Kael will still be harder than most of the game.

 

Dokos

I've yet to see a saber lash go off in less than 7 seconds after the previous one. If mana is hurting a lot.... Shift out HT barkskin shift back into bear. With capped SR you resist a lot of the silences.

 

Ghando

I think you should distinguish between hard and stupid-hard. Shahraz is challenging because of the numbers involved, the pressure on your healers and DPS to perform at a high level even in capped SR. But the real reason people fear her is not the challenge of the fight, it's the potential to get totally owned by dice rolls. The difficulty when you get lucky (no FA ports into furniture, no offtanks getting ported) is quite reasonable...in fact, last week we one-shot her with no deaths despite 95% triple FA ports, some heavy mana burning etc. Why? Nothing retarded happened, and we played very well. "Playing very well" should be enough for a kill. Hopefully that will be the case in 2.2.

 

• tsigo

This week's Shahraz DPS was the highest it's ever been for us. I believe it was just over 5 minutes, looks like WWS might be rounding it to 6.

Main melee group was Kamien, Crookgrin, Modrack (Fury), Sebudai and Arkadu, all sustaining 1100 to 1400 DPS with >= 365 SR. Grim was in a "bastardized" DPS group with Yugami (Arms), Crat, Sadris and I believe a resto Shaman, with Windfury. Now I'm pretty sure WWS doesn't yet eliminate Fatal Attraction from overall damage and DPS calculations like it does with Shatter, but even without its damage those numbers are still respectable.

So I don't consider the nerf a big deal.

 

◊ Quigon

The nerf is basically a deal to: Protection warriors, 2H MS dps warriors, and then rogues. Roughly in about that order of significance.
It is not a HUGE deal - but it is there.

You're still going to have stacked melee raids (like the ones jugg and our guild often run) just do absolute ridiculous dps. Jugg's wws is pretty impressive usually - watching that motivational orc go to town is a sight to behold (even if it is just logs).

 

Kettle

Sorry if this is a daft question, but we're in with Shahraz now and having problems with people dying to FA on every two or three ports.

I suggested using Shadow Prot pots on every port possible, but the idea was poo poo'd as the pot apparently doesn't take your SR into account before 'eating' the damage, meaning a health pot is more efficient. I wasn't sure if this was the case at all. Is this correct and if so, can anyone specify the advantage of SPP's over health potions?

 

Skulli

Advantage? Well you can use both as non healer.
Use everything to survive when fa. HS, shadow pot and your class specific abilties to survive.
Healers usually have pot cd from mana pots but all others should be able to use shadow pot.

We use one camp strategy but we have 1 priest at the opposite side alone and he casts heals/pws on people when fa close to him, rest of the time he is on the mt.
That person will get almost no beams and wont lose mana all the time by manaburn.

 

Jebraltar

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. My Rogue used to pop GFPP on Ragnaros that would stick around until the first Sons of Ragnaros phase (on the extremely rare attempts where I hadn't managed to get selected as the loser by his wonky aggro table before then). That never happened when I didn't wear my FR gear.

 

◊ Praetorian

Elemental protection pots absolutely take resist gear into account. On Sapphiron a GFrPP could buy you 20-30 seconds of immunity to his aura for this reason, if you got good resist rolls.

Shadow Prot pots are huge on Shahraz, and we make sure to have 100+ floating around the raid at all times when we do her. They're cheap. Take a few Empyrean Sapphires, cut them for +15sta, and sell them, and now you have mats for a couple hundred pots. Why would you not do this?