Mother Shahraz Question - Page 11

Trouble · 08/12/07, 4:32 PM

Originally Posted by 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?

Whoever gave you that info is making shit up. The Shadow Prot pots work just how you'd think they do, and they are by far the most valuable thing to use. We basically make it a requirement that you pop them on port for everyone except healers who absolutely need the mana pots.

Kettle · 08/12/07, 4:39 PM

Thanks, I thought so. We're still at the stage of people getting walloped by FAs and it's unlikely a SPP is going to save them just yet. Once we get people a little bit more comfortable with saving their own skins, then I'll start badgering them again.

Grunge · 08/12/07, 5:24 PM

Originally Posted by rits

Hi, first-time poster. I have some questions regarding the process of gathering shadow resist gear prior to attempting Shahraz. Figured this might be more appropriate in a new thread, but I suppose it can work here too.

From my calculations, the number of Hearts of Darkness you’d need for anywhere from 25 to 30 people (depending on how much of a cushion you want) to be in max Ashtongue shadow resist gear is between 225 and 270. Having been doing BT for about a month now, we’ve only had roughly 50 drop. We have made a point to clear every trash pack for a couple weeks now (up to RoS), but as of yet we have not resorted to soft-resetting to reclear packs.

What has your guild done to get around this? Is it simply a matter of dealing with whatever number of Hearts you have, and resorting to greens and maybe just brute-forcing it without full SR? Or have you grinded your way to 225+ Hearts through raid- and off-day trash farming?

I confess that since we have not yet attempted her, I don’t have a full sense of how much different amounts of SR affect the damage output of the encounter. Is there even a point to going into it without max’d SR on the raid? Will it just be a waste of time until we can get everyone full Ashtongue sets?

The Trash before Mother herself is a excellent source of hod's, you get 6-7 avg per clear and it can be done with the minimum of 10-12 people. We got 170+ within 9 days. We did farm it quite a bit though. So after you kill RoS you'll have plenty of time to farm them.

Clandestine · 08/12/07, 6:43 PM

The rumour that protection potions didn't have resists taken into account has been floating around since (and been disccounted since) Ragnaros, heh. I remember some people didn't think they were worthwhile when we were learning the fight so long ago. It takes about 15 seconds of testing to figure out it's just not true though.

Kettle · 08/12/07, 6:56 PM

The attempts certainly got a little better after a couple of hours today. Although I wouldn't say hit a point where everything clicked, we definitely got a feel for it. Pidgeon steps, I guess. People died less frequently to FA by the end and I think SPPs should save a lot of those close calls.

Our main problem (much later in the session oddly enough) seemed to be FA onto the 'one lump raid' when many were at less than full health which turned into an insta-abort more times than I could count. For the last few attempts we experimented with LoS, so people wouldn't get ported into healers and it definitely seemed to work. Possibly some geometry to be done tonight methinks.

One thing which was a minor dispute was Shadow Protection on the MT. Pretty soon after we started the MT had switched back to normal gear. Healing him, I didn't notice an enormous difference (to be honest he wasn't wearing it long enough to make much of a considered comparison either way....), although he did die to burst a couple of times yet said none of it was shadow damage. So are tanks wearing full SR mainly because of the ports onto them? If Lash makes him immune to beams, what else is he resisting?

Ghando · 08/12/07, 7:01 PM

If your tank is not wearing heavy SR, a port on top of him will almost certainly result in a wipe. Seeing as the one-camp strategy results in a wipe most of the time the big camp gets a port, you're doubling your chance to just outright lose. If everyone in the raid wears cap SR, the chance of a bad port (and thus a GG wipe) is pretty small.

Smoker · 08/12/07, 8:59 PM

We wiped today for our first time Alot on this encounter, god I hate it now.

We had insta saberlashes x1000 and everything you can possibly get.
In the end we moved our 2 camps to instead being south and north> west and east, so they stood on the path leading up to her.
When we did this we recieved way less bad ports and 2shotted her after the tank got insta killed once.
So next week we are trying that again to see if it really did the trick.

Whoever the sadist who created this encounter is I hope his need to make others suffer is filled and that he will release 2.2 soon.

◊ Praetorian · 08/12/07, 9:11 PM

On our end, we one-shotted Shahraz last week and two-shotted her this week after one leash at 75% or so. Both kills with zero deaths. We certainly stack the raid (10 healers) though we don't use a bizarre amount of physical DPS (one enhance/war/3x rog group and one 3x hunter group). Part of it is that we obviously are better at the fight in that we do not squander "good rolls" of the RNG, and 3 people being ported into a reasonable open space always results in 0 deaths. But the bulk of it is simply having no catastrophic ports (3 healers ported onto the MT, 3 people ported onto the ranged clump, etc.), and it's quite nerve-wracking staring at Shahraz at 30% with 25 alive and 55% raid mana and knowing that we could still wipe if we get unlucky.

◊ Quigon · 08/12/07, 10:05 PM

Originally Posted by Praetorian

But the bulk of it is simply having no catastrophic ports (3 healers ported onto the MT, 3 people ported onto the ranged clump, etc.), and it's quite nerve-wracking staring at Shahraz at 30% with 25 alive and 55% raid mana and knowing that we could still wipe if we get unlucky.

Yeah this is basically it. We had back-to-back stuck-in-or-near the MT's couch ports for nearly 5 attempts in a row. It was so bad we thought she was actually changed. Once this stopped she promptly died. I'm not sure what one can do about triple ports on the melee where half of the people are stuck - or take a few seconds to move. I could add more SR, but me dying isn't the problem - its everyone around me while they're taking 9k SR a second. Some people are going to take low resists, and even with lightning reflexes it is too much damage to take more than once in a 30 second period.
Our kill attempt she chained wickeds on us also - it was only because people were so good at FA, and none landed in the melee that we were able to pull it off.

I know so many people just do not look forward to this fight - and that IMO is a problem.

• tsigo · 08/13/07, 1:52 AM

So our first kill we used the middle of the path and had a knockback + Saber Lash fiasco that Sebudai already accounted. Then the second week we used the couch, and got through it. This week we started with the couch, and had 5 or 6 wipes from ridiculous FA ports - inside Shahraz's model hitting both the melee and the tanks, against the waterfall near the MT healers, on the healer pile, a number of times on or near the melee pile and the capper, in the corner, behind the tree and the bench, facing the corner, with 3 people.

We then went back to the middle of the path and beat it on the second attempt. I think the knockback and Saber Lash is the lesser of two evils for us at this point, and less likely to happen.

Eir · 08/13/07, 2:26 AM

Originally Posted by Praetorian

Part of it is that we obviously are better at the fight in that we do not squander "good rolls" of the RNG,

First night of attempts and we squandered quite a few good rolls on learning. We had one attempt which went something like 1 FA, 1 FA, 2 FA, 1 FA and all away from our camp. :P

Now that we're a little better at it, I'm hoping for some lucky rolls in the near future.

pooclops · 08/13/07, 3:48 PM

Little side question.

Though it Rarely works on bosses, Mother is so bugged any ways I figured I would ask, Has any warlock tried nether protection out?

It's probably a long shot, but god that would be nice.

Ziggurat · 08/13/07, 5:53 PM

How exactly does this happen? Wow Web Stats

Mother kill by The Core. In the entire fight, she only cast wicked beam 3 times? (Or maybe only once, and it just hit 3 people?)

◊ Sayoz · 08/13/07, 6:03 PM

Originally Posted by pooclops

Little side question.

Though it Rarely works on bosses, Mother is so bugged any ways I figured I would ask, Has any warlock tried nether protection out?

It's probably a long shot, but god that would be nice.

I specced Destruction while learning Shahraz and picked up Nether Protection to see if it worked. It's pretty helpful, but not as good as you might think.

Nether Protection procs from getting hit by beams and being targeted by the initial Fatal Attraction spell, but doesn't proc from taking damage from Fatal Attractions. If it procs from the initial Fatal Attraction, though, you'll be immune to FA damage for Nether Protection's duration.

There's also a cool bug that you might see. If you get targeted by Fatal Attraction while Nether Protection is up, you'll get teleported but won't get the FA debuff, resulting in a pretty easy Fatal Attraction port. The chance of this happening is very rare though - you'd need to get hit by a beam, have Nether Protection proc, then get targeted by FA within the next 4 seconds.

Ghando · 08/13/07, 7:51 PM

Originally Posted by Ziggurat

How exactly does this happen? Wow Web Stats

Mother kill by The Core. In the entire fight, she only cast wicked beam 3 times? (Or maybe only once, and it just hit 3 people?)

Dice rolls yaaay. She fires 5 beams of any given type in succession, at random targets with bounces. I'm not sure how many times they bounce, but the range seems to be ~10 yards. You never see beams crossing the gulf between the melee and a single ranged clump, for what it's worth. Anyway, if she targets the melee cluster with Wicked Beam...nothing will happen, because the only people in melee range with mana are Enhancement Shamans. Notice there's one Enhance Shaman on the parse (Berg). Now, WWS doesn't let us see how many times he got hit by Wicked Beam but my guess is he accounts for those 3 hits, and had the beam just skip him the other 2 times she fired it. I've personally seeen Shabadu (our Enhance Shaman) get hit by Wicked Beams as the only person taking damage.

A Shahraz pull where she drains a total of 3k mana from the entire raid during the fight is a golden kill opportunity, unless FA really screws you.

Klorox · 08/13/07, 8:05 PM

I don't dread this encounter so much anymore. Yeah, bad luck can happen, but this week it was 3 pulls and she died. I didn't wedge myself under the couch right, too many special ed moments on FA, tank death. Our luck has been pretty good on not getting bad ports. It's still retarded, don't get me wrong, but it's repeatable barring any bad luck. The encounter becomes pretty easy on the lucky 1/2 ports. I know that's going to change, but with the reduced damage I don't think FA will be a problem. The only time we lose people on FA anymore is when they all run with each other.

Kettle · 08/13/07, 9:00 PM

Originally Posted by Klorox

I know that's going to change, but with the reduced damage I don't think FA will be a problem. The only time we lose people on FA anymore is when they all run with each other.

Our problem is still the regularity with which this happens. It's getting better though...at least I think it is.

We were playing around with a LoS strategy tonight, using a column to basically protect ranged and healers from ports, which initially seemed amazing. However after a 20% wipe (screwed port attrition more than anything, totally player error...), our luck ran out a little and almost every other port seemed to land right on top of the melee group. Hey, there's always tomorrow, joy joy joy!

Namaste · 08/13/07, 9:11 PM

Originally Posted by Ziggurat

How exactly does this happen? Wow Web Stats

Mother kill by The Core. In the entire fight, she only cast wicked beam 3 times? (Or maybe only once, and it just hit 3 people?)

To be honest I don't know if it's our positioning or whatever it may be, but even in our wipes I almost never notice wicked beam hitting our ranged stack very often. Looking back at that and seeing our enhancement shaman and ret paladin taking triple the damage of the rest of our mana users leads me to think Ghando is probably right and the only casts just hit 1 or 2 of them.

Our kill this week we took 91 wicked beams and the incoming damage was more spread out (using the exact same positioning), if we knew how to reproduce only 3 beams each kill we'd do it :p

Klorox · 08/13/07, 9:13 PM

We should setup FA better, but for reference, we wiped terribly for 2 hours when we put shadow pots into the rotation on FA. Apparently when ported, running and clicking a shadow pot is too many steps. We lost more people on FA when we tried to use shadow pots than we do without them. I'm not joking either. Too many people spent too much time trying to click instead of running. I'd hate to see what happens if we gave people a direction to run.

◊ Quigon · 08/13/07, 9:17 PM

Originally Posted by Namaste

To be honest I don't know if it's our positioning or whatever it may be, but even in our wipes I almost never notice wicked beam hitting our ranged stack very often. Looking back at that and seeing our enhancement shaman and ret paladin taking triple the damage of the rest of our mana users leads me to think Ghando is probably right and the only casts just hit 1 or 2 of them.

Our kill this week we took 91 wicked beams and the incoming damage was more spread out (using the exact same positioning), if we knew how to reproduce only 3 beams each kill we'd do it :p

We've taken 40 wicked beams in the first 15% of her health before, and then taken less than that on a killshot.
I believe they're attempting to reduce this variation with the fixes in 2.2.

Wickeds should bounce 15 yards - and you can see them crossing large gaps if your camps are spread as opposed to clumped but spread. This is one of the main advantages to spreading out, but you have to be careful not to link camps.

This beam is really only an issue if it is chained. It can literally fire nonstop for a full minute - and if this happens very late in the fight, or after an FA in the melee, you're going to have problems.

Eir · 08/14/07, 3:42 AM

You know, reading this thread I was pretty convinced that 1 ranged group and tanking against the couch was the best way to go, but for some weird reason we did much better tanking in the middle of the pathway and using 3 ranged groups even on our learning attempts.

I guess it goes to show that you really need to do what's best for your raid, even if it sounds less optimal in theorycraft.

• Sebudai · 08/14/07, 4:06 AM

I really do think tanking her in the middle is best. As was posted earlier, we killed her once in the middle, but almost wiped at the end of that winning attempt due to a KB fiasco that had not happened on any of our learning attempts. So the next week we moved her to the couch and killed her that way. This last week we once again tried the couch, but just kept getting bad FA locations. Eventually we just got fed up and moved her back to the middle and killed her handily.

Bad FA port locations are absolutely more likely to occur when you tank her next to the couch and I don't think you can really chalk those up to bad luck. Like 30% of your FA ports will be to locations that fall into the bad category when you put her there.

Klorox · 08/14/07, 4:10 AM

We tried many different places to tank her. We tried not using the couch and first pull I got punted and saber lashed. We tried having the raid on the path/road to her with me at the couch and the raid got ported on too many times. We moved the raid to the right of the couch and immediately things got better for us. Just experiment I'd say.

Every time someone in the raid brings up how this or that guild did it, it annoys me. I like to have an idea of the encounters, but we're not that guild in that video or write-up. Maybe we're really lucky or maybe the spot our raid is at is really good, but I at least feel we can repeatedly kill her instead of relying on the "luck of the RNG". Shit happens, but for us it isn't as often as some people say it is for them.

Ons · 08/14/07, 4:23 AM

We killed Mother for the first time tonight and I gotta say, any nay-sayers about shadow priests in this encounter needs to clarify which priest race...

Night elf hoooooo! Finally after 2.5 years I have use for my racial!

lol :-(

Ons - WWS