Mother Shahraz was no different for us compared to 2.2, FA did the same amount of damage, parries still decreased the time until next swing and so on. The only thing that stuck out in the WWS was an absurd amount of parried pet attacks, even though they are supposed to attack from behind. I noticed that on some bosses the pets appeared to be right in the middle of the model and might have actually just been hitting from the front.

You will be taking extra damage? That's the fucking understatement of the year, you will be taking upwards of 9k damage per second if people aren't fast. I don't remember any FA ports on top of the tank though, yet. I sure as hell wouldn't like to see it on a tank with no SR what so ever though.

Something that helps on Shahraz is to disable, or move, SCTD. Together with SCT you will receive absurb amounts of spam and that can make it difficult to see where the others are going.

Ports on top of the tank are not really an issue anymore with the reduced initial FA damage. As long as you're vocal about it, healers can expect a spike (that sometimes doesn't even happen). In order for those 9K/second bursts you're speaking of to occur, you have to have three morons sit on top of the tank for more than three seconds. If there are raid members (plural!) like that in your guild, you probably wouldn't be at Mother Shahraz.

I tried tanking her with some resist stuff but overall tanking in full tank gear is much better at least for us. I never died due to ports onto my position - but taxing your healers even more on the long run due to gimping your avoid can cause severe mana shortages. If the crap hits the fan its always possible to trinket/LS/SW this one out.

Yesterday, we tanked her at the spot opposite the water basin right under the inclined wall. We had very few tank ports but quite a few right on top of the raid.

Nevertheless, people have been experiencing a lot of trouble running into the "right" direction, especially when three are ported. Whatever strat we used, someone tends to run poorly. We tried using the addon "Mother Arrows" but we apparantly need to adapt it to the German client many of our raiders use.

What different options are there for spreading out besides using an addon and fast-reaction-combined-with-common-sense?

Not a lot I'm afraid.

Just pick a random direction to go in and have some other people who aren't FA'd call out if 2-3 symbols are running with each other (DBM/BigWigs puts raid markers on all the people FA'd...so for example someone would say "skull and moon are running together, split off).

What I do when I get ported is I call out that I'm going a certain direction, implying that the others shouldn't run that same way :P

I have a few questions about using the snake trap. Will she target the snakes like other pets and totems? Also will they cause her to parry? Do all the different poisons from the snakes work on her? Thanks in advanced for any replies.

Sorry if this has been answered in the thread already; however I looked through an EJ WWS for this encounter and was curious as to why their OT warriors don't do any damage during the encounter? I noticied that they didn't have their back turns to the boss to guarantee being hit by Saber Lash; so my only assumption was to prevent their attacks from being Parried? Is my assumption correct?

Ideally I wanted to do this fight with a Prot Warrior MT, Feral Druid OT and Paladin OT if possible. Solely because they can provide extra damage.

edit- here is the WWS I viewed; Wow Web Stats

I can't speak for EJ, but what you describe sounds right.

For Saber Lash, you no longer have to turn your back (which almost guarantess a hit) in order to avoid knockbacks. Now as long as you were a valid target for the Saber Lash, you'll be immune to the knockback and FA, even if you dodge or parry it. This was changed in 2.2. However, since Shahraz still gets hasted attacks when she parries, having those OTs NOT attack is still recommended in my experience. She's obviously still capable of putting out massive damage spikes that you're better off avoiding.

From: WoW -> Patch Notes -> 2.2.0

"Saber Lash tanks will no longer be knocked back by Sinister Beam or hit by Fatal Attraction, even if they dodge or parry the attack."

The OT's don't attack to prevent Parry bombs on the MT. We usually have a prot paladin and a warrior OT, with the paladin helping heal while the OT warrior maintains TC and DS debuffs.

Does anyone know on what basis the number of people who get FA is calculated?

Usually we get three, sometimes only two and on rare occasions even only one person ported. Someone here mentioned that totems can be targeted as well, but then - since we always have 12 totems up - there should also be cases where no one gets ported at all.

Is this just a random factor or does it have to do with spell resists?

Would be great if there was a way to influence this number ...

It can also target pets even though they're immune to it.

The general theory on the single and double ports are due to one of the OT's or the MT being targeted. Similar to the "MT picked for Doom on Azgalor" type stuff. Since they are immune due to the Saber Lash debuff, nothing happens to them and everyone is happy. Pets are another possibility, they don't have the saber lash immune debuff, but could of been intentionally designated "permanent immune", although that would mean the devs left in the option for them to be picked in the first place. Generally my raid only has 2-3 pets out so it would be hard to get a decent idea. Perhaps if a guild decided to test out 3-4 hunters and 3-4 locks on a few kills they could get a decent guess as to "can pets be targeted". I would however say almost certainly totems cannot be targeted.. 8 or 12 totems up at a time generally in my raid and we certainly average more than 2 people per port.

As for all three tanks being picked - you're looking at about a 0.04% chance of that happening. Certainly this falls into the category of "something most people will never see" and for the rare guild that gets this once. Its entirely possible no one would notice or it would be assumed something glitched, people would be happy for their good fortune and keep dps'ing, healing, dieing, etc.

Short answer - you can't really influence that number.

If pets can be targeted, you could drop snake traps to increase the number of 2 and 1 person ports.

...and exponentially increase the number of parries on Shahraz.

That was one of the strategies many guilds used pre-nerf. Never was sure if it actually worked or not.. the snakes tend to die fast I think and often, despite best intentions, end up parry-raping your tank.

Saber Lash can target a maximum of 3 players including the MT.

I've been curious about what causes FA's with 1-2 ports too. Main suggestions so far seem:

- totems
- pets
- binary spell resists

I tried to do some fast math on the chances, assuming that every target that can get picked, has an equal chance to get picked. There are 22 eligible raiders (MT+2x OT are immune).

For totem / pets:

# of targettable totem/pets = T
# of targettable players = P

The amount of 3 port FA's should then be (1-(T/(T+P))^3)*100% (1 minus the chance of a nonplayer port ^3 ). With a T of 12 (totems from 4 shamans) and a P of 22, that value is 27% 3man FA's. With a T of 3 (3 hunter pets) and a P of 22, you'd get 68% 3man FA's.

If it's a binary resistable spell, and a shadow spell, you should be resisting 25% of the time, assuming the whole raid is at max SR (Not 100% sure i'm correct on this, anyone able to confirm this?). This means that you'd have (0.75)^3*100% = 42% chance of 3 man FA.

All 3 of these values do not correspond with my experiences. If I'd have to guess, you get a 3man port about 80% of the time. Haven't tracked it or tried to get numbers out of WWS's though. If it is one of the 3 above, my guess it's probably be the hunter pets (Who can die during the encounter)

I think the probability of a 3-player port should actually be ( (P) choose 3 ) / ( (T+P) choose 3 ), which is the number of possible 3-player port groups (choosing 3 out of the set P) over the total number of possible port groups chosen (choosing 3 out of the set P+T).

Another way of looking at this is that for a 3-player port she must first pick a player, then a different player, and then a third also different player, making the probability: ( P/(P+T) ) * ( (P-1)/(P+T-1) ) * ( (P-2)/(P+T-2) ). Both of these ways of looking at it will give the same result when you put some numbers in for P and T.

My guess is that she can't target totems and pets, also can't target the MT, but will target the two (immune) offtanks. This makes P = 22 and T = 2 for a 3-player port probability of 76.1%, pretty close to Dorlog's guess of 80%.

Nope. From earlier tonight:

Wow Web Stats

I have heard that LOS may avoid FA, is that right? Does anyone tired it before?

I wonder where exactly do you want to stand to be out of los on this boss fight.