Renew

It really comes down to people getting used to the FA ports. We went in Thursday this week at the end of the raid night and people were just plain bad. We came back Sunday and killed her in our second try.

As one of the outside the raid healers, conc aura helps a ton. I know that when I initially was in this role I was giving Devo to the tanks and the difference is night and day.

Tomorrow she should be easily repeatable if you are killing her now on attempts when RNG doesn't crit you for more than your max HP.

Confidence is not Arrogance.

 

xyruul

For whoever asked for the druid wws before:
Wow Web Stats

We used 3 hunter chain-dropping snakes. A total of 66 parries from snakes and 64 from me, totaling 132 parries (2 from an OT) all together and she hit me 50 times so it's likely it was up near every swing. I was never remotely close to dying even with a couple ports near me. Interestingly her total shadow damage done via beams was a little over 600k. Snakes ate slightly over 300k of that, as well as soaking 3 lashes.
Looking at other top 20 kills with similar 5m kill times the MT incoming melee damage ranges wildly from 500-700k, with a few as low as 370k. So a net gain of 100k less raid damage using snakes versus the lowest figure and up to 400k less damage using the highest. Most of the damage is funneled into a single 25k hp soak with snakes as well, that is easy to heal rather then all over the raid which can be challenging at times.
Definitely worth the snakes.

 

Dawme

There's really no real way to say "do this or that" to be better with shahraz imho. It's one of these encounters where your raid needs to experience the fight again and again before getting better at it. It can be slower or faster but eventually, you'll have less FA dead because people will click the damn shadow prot instantly, then will split up fast, etc...
It's a bit like heigan, you can explain it how much as you want on boards etc, but in the end, players need to experience it by themselves to handle it. Then again, you had people mastering the heigan dance after 1 try and people who just always died even months after your first kill...

 

Lodekim

Just a question/comment, it looks like in the WWS that while there may be ports near you, you only took 3 ticks total of shadow damage from people with FA on the kill, were the other attempts where you took significantly more FA damage more spiky on you as a tank?

My biggest concern with using a druid was always the fact that FA would do more damage, and wouldn't leave any emergency buttons, personally as soon as an FA is near me my fingers start hovering over Shadowmoon Insignia and Last Stand, and I know a druid doesn't have those options.

 

xyruul

Part of the benefit of using snakes is that fewer people get ported most of the time. In the 7 attempts (4 real 3 resets and 1 auto leash) I think 7-8 times people got ported near or on top of me, but almost every time it was 1 or 2 people. I could always trinket for another 13% dodge should there be some on top of me, but my paladin OT's were instructed to bubble and spam heals on me should that happen, as they would die themselves should lash him them then. I only have 25k hp right now, and I could easily top 26k should the Anetheron mace ever drop and we we're always running in negatives with blue gems. The one time I died from a FA+burst when 2 of my healers got the FA and one was silenced was worth the other benefits.
Anyway it won't matter either way with 2.2 today.

 

Lodekim

If the Pally OT's bubble from ports on top of you, wouldn't that mean a lash would hit you for full damage? That seems like a crapshoot to me, since they'd bubble because there was extra damage on the tanks, and a full damage lash plus FA plus melee seems very dangerous.

Anyway it's interesting to see you siting snakes, we never got those to affect FA ports, but maybe it was just bad luck, we just decided it wasn't worth it for the parries. Good to see you got the kill, congrats.

 

xyruul

I actually don't know if bubble would make lash not hit them, maybe that is why 3 snakes got hit by lash? A long time ago on my mage while learning C'thun I once ice blocked to avoid chaining a beam between groups, it jumped right through me (doing no damage) and still multiplied to everyone else, so I always thought bubble worked the same way. You can't be the primary target of an ability but secondary effects of that ability will hit you regardless if you happen to be in their range. I never researched it or anything, so I could be totally wrong. If not then I must have dodged every lash when they had bubble up as I never got hit for more then 7-8k.
On a semi related note, we happen to have a lot of paladins and we use 5 of them on Bloodboil soaking almost every boil. About 2 weeks ago they must have hotfixed the boil as it no longer targeted the paladins on the 4th set when they had bop/bubble up, when in previous kills it did.

 

Lodekim

Yeah I'm unsure on if it would target them or not, we've never tried with pally offtanks so I figured I would ask.

 

kraj

Well I hate to gunk up the thread with requests, but I'm really itching to see a WWS of the new shahraz to see the state of caster dps/damage taken/etc. So basically I'm curious if anyone got one for tonight?


I've heard from R&D that the fight has become rather trivial, but I necessarily can't judge the R&D epeen factor.

 

Strifen

No WWS here but we one shot her Tuesday night and as I can recall from my swstats the meele still came out on top for this fight but the casters weren't lagging very far behind. I remember we had an elemental shaman at 4th on DPS for what it's worth.

With that in mind, the encounter felt much, much easier. One of the biggest changes to the fight is the FA port damage. The reduced damage is very noticeable and with proper potting it's not hard to stay alive. If you die from a normal 3 person FA port either you didn't pot/healthstone or you blatantly ran along side the other people who got ported with you.

Another huge change was the fact shadow priests can now return respectable amounts of mana. I went from scrapping the barrel on mana last week to ending the fight with over 80% this week. All in all I enjoy the fight in its current (nerfed) mode, it seems much more controllable and I'm not dreading repeating this fight like I once was.

 

kraj

Thanks, I'm kind of bummed we didn't get our first kill last week with our 19% wipe (WWS on the last page), but it sounds like the fight should be easily doable this week with casters actually doing stuff and really limited FA initial death-causing damage.

 

Cohren

If your guild had the fight on farm before 2.2 this fight is more or less trivial. The only thing that can really wipe you is people doing poorly on FA. Even still, FA is nerfed, we use the single group strat and we had 3 unlucky FA's into the raid and if this happened last week they all would of caused a wipe but tonight no one died on all 3 of those bad FA's.

No more insta-gibs on the MT gives off the feeling like Gruul did that first time after they nerfed him. In regards to guilds who haven't killed him yet or are not in BT yet will find learning this fight on a lot smaller learning curve and I'm willing to bet that the Hearts will be the second biggest thing holding guilds back behind learning how to survive FA, but I hear there are mods that help now.

As for caster DPS, I don't have a WWS but pre 2.2 all we were in the 300 DPS range and would make fun of those that finished below the MT and tonight all of our casters were between 800 and 1000 DPS for the fight. Melee still do really well on this fight but the gap has definitely shrunk.

Like Strifen said, our healers said they had no mana issues this time.


I didn't see anyone post a confirmation to the spell combos so here they are:

Fire/Frost
Shadow/Holy
Arcane/Nature

 

Dawme

So how does the shields work exactly ? -25% / +25% and they are removed with damage from the bonus school ?
I'm still wondering if it's the first fight where a shadowpriest might do better dps without shadowform or not.

 

Cohren

They are chosen at random and they last for the same duration as before the patch.

 

Dawme

Ok, no love for holy dmg so It would have been fun to smite hard to remove the shadow penalty for warlocks !

 

Horu

are they always 3 ports for FA? or are there still 1-2 ports?

 

sosonz

Out of curiosity, does Prayer of Mending now proc off of FA damage after patch? Any info on this would be appreciated.

 

Dawme

Ok so we killed her tonight :
- There are still 1-2 FA ports.
- PoM works (and is wonderfull : you can't die on a 3 ports with a priest holy, it's like another shadow pot).
- FA dmg were massively nerfed off course.
- Major change is definitely the fact that casters can provide real dps. It was weird to check omen during Shahraz as a shadow priest .

All in all, the fight is definitively better in this incarnation. We did it without making a specifical raid so 8 healers, many casters, and it was np.

 

• Snowy

Basically, if you had killed Shahraz before, you will find her more or less trivial now. Not that this is a bad thing, it was a crappy fight the way it was implemented before. It was very refreshing for casters to do more damage than the MT...

If you haven't killed her, you'll have a much better learning curve at least. FA is far more forgiving and repeated ports on groups of people shouldn't wipe you anymore. A healthstone and shadow pot is still very valuable for learning of course and should buy you plenty of time even for modest reaction times.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

deanx

Would you consider taking a raid fresh from a RoL kill into shahraz with a minimum 250 SR on everyone, or should we still shoot for capped with the new changes?

 

• Snowy

250 is still too low. However, it's not quite the end of the world anymore if you aren't completely capped on SR.. i.e. 340-350 instead of 365. Some classes (healers maybe?) might be able to get by with less, since they could just stand still and heal themselves on FA ports.

If your guild is not good at reacting fast to stuff, shoot for capped still though.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

deanx

Ok, thanks for the response. I think what we'll try for attempts this week is dropping the legs from everyone's HoD needs, that should put everyone right around 300. Would getting our tank into 215-250 still help and should I look at getting our offtanks into the same?

Thanks for any help.

 

• Snowy

See if you can get people to get a random green SR item to wear. I think it's definitely worthy to go give her a shot primarily for the reason that her trash is a good source of drops -- and while you're at her, why not at least pull her and get a little comfortable with the fight? Get people a little familiar with it, round out the SR in the next week, then buff up and kill her then. I think for serious, serious attempts you still want as much SR as possible, just it's not quite as punishing if you aren't capped -- but you still want to be close to it.

For tanks, everyone has a different opinion on it and that probably hasn't really changed. I don't remember the exact number ours runs with, but definitely uses some and it made all the difference for us. Your mileage may vary.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Russta

Did it tonight, can echo the sentiment that it's now very simple.

Would've one-shot but we had three healers ported on top of the tanks.

Now if only they'd fix Illidari Council being a 15 minute session of watching paint dry.

 

◊ Quigon

I think snowy's advice is fair on the SR. When you are learning you will still be taking those 3000 point shared ticks.

I think he most eloquently described how the fight is now. It is easy for those who have the fight on farm (and I'm hearing quite fun now since you do not have to stack your raid, can bring in casters, and can finally properly rotate people for loot as a priority). It is also going to be a much nicer learning curve for new guilds as the elements are mostly present to the fight - but the bullshit insta-wipes for doing nothing wrong are basically gone.

As to how hard it is for a new guild to learn - well who knows. We killed shahraz on our 2nd or 3rd night of doing her - she wasn't overly difficult, it was just the consistency that made it suck for us - and wipe after wipe after wipe of attempts where we should have been "practicing" with SR pots, or positioned differently. I'm personally a big fan of not wiping when you execute the mechanics of a fight well.