It was a risk before the nerfs, but not anymore. Don't underestimate the effect of high avoidance (and more hitpoints/AC to boot).

Avoidance vs Mitigation on that fight? Ok...

Especially considering every extra peice of real tank gear you wear helps drastically over the SR, usually the couple peices of tank gear over SR will allow you to save atleast one crucial cooldown that you would have otherwise used during the course of the fight so that you can pop that if you do start taking heavy shadow damage.

Physical avoidance vs magical mitigation, that is correct.

The magical damage spikes are also very predictable, both for the healers and the tank.

I think the fight is overall fine at the moment. My philosophy on resist gear fights is that they pretty much suck if you make them hard because you can't even wear your best gear for them. To me the hard part about resist gear fights should be getting the resist gear. Once you get it, it should be a really easy fight and if they want to slow down progression just make the resist gear harder/take longer to get. If you had to go into mother with 225 SR (or greens with terrible stats) then yeah it should be hard. But, when you cap your SR off the BT epics you shouldn't still be having difficulty with the fight.

Regarding MT shadow resist gear, I'll still wear my 205, I don't lose anything with bracer/cloak/neck, only gain some survivability against a MT port. MT ports can still be fatal combined with melee/lash/beam combo.

I guess it depends on what people feel the intended difficulty level should be. I think that right now Shahraz is probably around Azgalor's difficulty, which is I suppose reasonable. Just a far cry from what she used to be. But I guess in 2.1 you could argue that she was really out of place when compared to Azgalor and Council, the other t6-dropping non-end-boss encounters.

Just confirming the above impression, we killed her in our 5th try ever after our second ros kill. She felt like she is at azgalor's level now, only without all the 8 waves of trash. We used a sr cauldron and suddenly noone died to fa at all. We only had 1/5 waves to fa deaths, the rest were the mt dying due to either healer slack or bears not getting into position at the right time and mt absorbing all of the saber lash. We also used that arrows addon someone suggested before, which unless your people are tards and follow an arrow through the middle of the raid is very helpful.

Any chance for the name or a link to that arrow addon? Thanks.

Quigon posted about it on page 15, here's the link:

WoWInterface Downloads : MotherArrows

Just takes the randomness of where your people choose to run away even if creates dangerous situations if they decide to follow it religiously and run towards their arrow through the raid. Then again, you propably shouldn't have that kind of people on Shahraz and I swear I didn't do exactly that one try before the kill.

Just what any good encounter needs:
Arrow mods and wheelchair ramps.

Glad to see they're useful, we never wanted to change our working formula.

We tried assigned directions, it didn't work well. People take longer to react to the mod/arrows/FA call then they do to spin their camera and wing it in our guild.

I don't know if it has been reported in this thread already (tough i read it completely a few weeks ago), but we had some trouble with Saber Lash hitting all of our three tanks.

On our first kill last week we had 2 tauren (MT+sponge) and 1 orc (sponge) and the orc tank just didn't get Saber Lash damage at all and was ported quite a lot. Being told by a GM that this was a known bug we just did it with 2 tanks and a Nightfall-swinging deftank in Shahraz' back.

Returning to Shahraz this week we expected to have a bugfree encounter. But bringing 1 tauren MT and 2 orc sponges we got some nasty insta-gib Saber Lashes on the MT. After switching MTing players around we noticed it had to do with race/model of the MT.
Feeding the Tauren MT some Deviate did the job for us. Ninja MT + 2 Orc sponges got the Saber Lash damage equally distributed and brought us the kill a few tries later.

Awesome, yet another tauren model bug, you'd think they would account for stuff like this by now. Reminds me of tauren females being unable to zone into MC back in the day.

They propably thought noone would ever make a tauren female to bother with it :p

We run with Orc MT / 2 Tauren OT's usually

Our first kill was actually Druid MT with 2 Tauren OT's as well.

Suffice to say with that set up we haven't ran into any troubles pre / post 2.2 in terms of saber lashing.

Been reading through the thread a bit, couldnt really find a precise answer to my questions so here goes:
Are leggings essential to craft? I seem to understand that you craft everything apart from them because of theyre high HoD cost.
If that is the case, should i purchase some "of shadow prot" legs in AH or keep going with the avatar ones? Being a healer, i suppose i can heal the extra damage taken from the FA on myself; but obviously i may be horribly wrong and should follow a different path.
Oh and before i forget, whats the bare minimum i should aim for without gimping myself too badly? Im currently aiming to hit 250 unbuffed for the record.

Our Shahraz firstkill happened with everyone in neck+cloak+wrists+boots. The rest to get 295 were filled with greens from the AH. Some lazy last-minute "oh my god i need shadow res?"-guys even gimped themselves with +11shadowres rings and tier2 parts...
So we pretty much gimped the raid to get everyone to capped resistances. Healing output (8 healers and only 2 tanks for Saber Lash instead of 3) was a non-issue.
Our dps was crap as usual and we lost 2 damage dealer right in the beginning and had no problem with fight length (bringing 8 caster-dps).
My advice: get everyone to capped resists (no matter how gimped they are), don't care about raid stacking and bring some deviate just in case...

I have been reading through this thread, and I found the tanks' gear choice quite interesting.

The first time we started Mother, me as maintank, I noticed the burst dmg potential of this boss on the MT with a few unlucky parry and sabre lash procs. The shadow dmg was of course also noticeable but it was not the source of "spike damage".

So, my initial reaction to this boss was "This is pretty much like Sapp. The boss hits hard, yes there is magical dmg incoming, but it is still best to use full tanking gear to avoid/mitigate as many incoming physical dmg as possible because that is the source of spike dmg here."

I, of course, tested using some shadow res as well just to see the results, but I quickly ended up switching back to full tanking gear, as, from my own experience, full tanking gear (high avoidance) provides more safety as mt in this fight. Thus, I been tanking this boss for almost 10 weeks now with no sr gear at all, and I didn't really have any problems so far.

Especially, with the new changes to this boss, the shadow dmg to the mt is much more predictable than the physical dmg.

How much shadow res do your Sabrelash Tanks wear?

Max it out for offtanks, I'd say. The difference between ~265 and 365 resist is very pronounced, and taking even 1k more damage per saber lash due to reduced armor (... unlikely though) still adds up to less chance of spike deaths.

Saber lash is on a predictable timer, and healer mana is relatively a non-issue now, so gimping avoidance and copping more hits for a less overall chance of bad spikes is a good thing.

Edit: Speeling yet again.

Our MT just wears the cloak, bracers and necklace I believe? He usually gets close to or around 200 SR but mostly wears normal tanking gear....

We tried full SR our first few mother attempt ever but the amount of damage he takes from melee in that gear is greater then any SR damage he'd take in only 205 SR from our perspective.

As for OT's I'm assuming full SR.

Went in tonight with between 300 and 330 SR on most of the raid (a few were between 330 and the cap, but not more than 5 or so), and proceeded to kill her on our third pull (80%, 70%, 0%)

I feel really bad for those that had to kill her pre-2.2. We had a few damage spikes on the MT, but I can only begin to imagine what it must've been like before.

Anyway, for the record, we used the one-ranged-pile technique, up against the wall on the left, as you face Shahraz. Tanks in that little corner, and ranged closer to Shahraz.

Seemed to work pretty well - tons of room for the FAers to move!

The two first pulls were using different positioning, but I doubt the sample set is really big enough to say that the up-against-the-wall position is the best -- but it seemed to work OK!

Oh, and the flasks of chromatic wonder are nice and cheap, and can help you get that last 30 points of SR, if you have the belt/bracers/boots/cloak + necklace, and the 20 SR enchant on your t4/5/whatever helm.

Edit: Our MT wore just cloak + necklace, and 2 druid OTs were wearing the 300ish that the rest of the raid had.

Also, we had the druids attacking, and snake traps, and no sign of 'insta-parry-death'. So it may indeed have been hotfixed. Or she got nerfed so hard it doesn't matter.