• Ren

We use a feral druid as our Mother MT and 2 hunter pets specced with high armor and stamina as Saber Lash OTs. With the aoe damage reduction the pets have, they take less damage than a 2 protection warriors/feral druids. Having pets OT also allowed me to DPS and the other feral druid to go resto for the fight. The only downside to using pets to OT is that they're fragile (10-11k HP) and that FAs near the melee or tanks usually means a wipe.

A druid takes far less damage than I main tanking. Mother Shahraz hits a druid for 4.5k-7k while hitting me (chain-chugging ironshields) for 6-8k.

 

Gokey

edit: delete this, I misunderstood an aspect of the fight.

 

Wintern

I would have thought that would be reason enough not to use pets as OT's no? Sounds really strange to me, but whatever works for you

 

Dots

On a single melee swing, sure. But what about overall damage? Druids take more spell damage and have far less avoidance than a warrior (not to mention no Shield Wall at 10%). Do you have any WWS/armory profile to compare numbers?

 

cladnin

Why would it be useful? The debuff reduces the damage you deal, not adding resistance against a school.

 

Skulli

Reached her today for the first time and after 1hr we already had an 35% attempt but then a lot of 70% etc because mt got sinister and saber or fa on mt.
After 2 hrs we were lucky and killed her

 

• Ren

Unfortunately no, I don't have a WWS link for our kill. MT healers just said it was much less stressful to keep up the druid over myself, even after the issue of extra spell damage taken was brought up. They said something to the effect of "persistent small hits are easier to handle than huge spikes," and there were no issues sub-10%. I can give Armory links but neither of us are in SR (we wear about 210) and I'm specced for PvP.

Warrior: The Armory

Druid: The Armory
Missing items: Thunderheart Gauntlets 15 stam gem and 15 agi enchant.
Belt of Natural Power 2x 12 stam gems

 

◊ Quigon

I'm hitting nearly 30k armor myself when tanking shahraz. I definitely take significantly less damage according to WWS parses than our tier 6 equipped feral druid. He has about 37.5k armor (I get AH, he doesn't in our healing strats we used - due to cap proximity).
I think the difference was night and day. The 10 and 16% damage reduction on melee and spells is more critical than anything - as deaths are generally not from a lack of mana, but from a burst. And a warrior will simply burst for less. Further, wearing SR tends to be easier on a warrior as just dropping a cloak can mean 1200 armor lost for a druid - and you get SW/LS/trinkets/ironshields. The feral druid MT was the first thing we tried.

Honestly I think any guild working on this guy can kill him very early if the stars line up. However, it takes about 5-6 hours to get to the point where you need less stars to line up. Some are going to get lucky and get 1-2 man FA ports of the right people at the right place for basically the entire fight. Couple of the video's I've downloaded I noticed there wasn't more than 1 or 2 triple FA's, and none on the raid. Reminds me of doomfire never going into the raid. Obviously if your FA's are easy, it is not a coincidence that it also is a kill-video.

 

Ghando

We had a 1% wipe after a couple hours of attempts, though we got MUCH better at the fight before the kill. The funny thing about luck-based fights is...sometimes you get lucky

 

kaib

Even a dice with 100.000 sides DOES HAVE a 1. If you set yourself up to lose when it is rolled, don't bitch about it. After reading this for almost a week here in various threads, it starts to get boring.

 

◊ Quigon

You have got to be kidding me.

From a few weeks back:
The only thing that is getting old is reading stuff like yours kaib. Where after killing a fight 3-4 times you forget how retarded it is, and start letting your ego do the talking. Please, just don't "contribute" when your only point is that "its fine, stop whining." People here aren't idiots - people here aren't whining out of turn. There are a lot of smart players here, good players here, who want this fight fixed. What is getting old is people who have utterly no concept of scope and design beyond their own nose - spewing off about the joys of broken encounters with no purpose other than to protect their sense of accomplishment and pride.

I cannot imagine any rational person would post that Mother Shahraz is a good encounter - unless they've already defeated it, and then it should be obvious why they are saying this.

 

kaib

Well, you got that wrong. I'll try to be less cryptic:

"If you use one range camp, don't complain about unlucky FAs and excessive mana burn."

The stuff I brought up in that post that should be over one month old (that's a damn long time when it comes to wow content btw), still stands up. That the ability that prevents your tanks from getting thrown up just does not work is ofc a joke. But as someone pointed out before, it will rarely wipe you. Very,very rarely.
As Praetorian said before, the shield is extremely frustrating for casters and there simply is no similar effect that gimps melees as much in any wow content.

Those points have nothing to do with you picking a strat that exposes you to bad luck and then keep complaining about just that. Again, it might as well be the mathematically correct strat. Sometimes you have to call, even if you know that you are behind.
However fact is if you use several range camps, you give your raid a LOT more breathing room for bad FAs. If your healers have exceptional reaction times, you can always save some people. If your guys use CDs correctly, you won't have a ton of people dead if 3-4 FAed guys end up on one of your ranged camp. And if only 3-4 die, that is something you can recover from.

I am not saying it's a better strat either. You do get a lot more bad FAs. 2nd last week bo wiped until trash was back up. This reset it was a 1 shot. But I am sure that almost all our wipes could have been kills if people played better/reacted faster. Just like in about every single wipe we ever had in any boss fight.

All of this is beside the point. You picked a 1 camp strat. It might be right, it might be wrong. That is hardly up to me to judge. But if you go with that plan, you will end up getting screwed by FA on your camp. And I have read that often enough by now. It's gonna happen. More often for some guilds, less often for others. That's life. Reading something about getting to a point where 'you need less stars to line up' just makes me sick.

And looking at this wall of text makes me sick too, I liked my original 2-line post much better.

 

◊ Quigon

Was this mob stealth nerfed? We 1 shot Shahraz tonight.

We got something like 3 1 ports, 4-5 2 ports, and the rest were 3 ports, none in the raid. Basically a dream situation.

Another guild on our server 2 shot her tonight. Perhaps we got lucky or got the right makeup, but it seems strange after all the pain we've gone through on her to just completely demolish it that much.
On another note, Illdari council is a nice change - repeatable and execution based, but perhaps a bit too easy.

 

Stormheart

I could only hope they nerfed it since it sounds bad and I'm not there yet, but you did say it was a luck fight about 50 times. Perhaps your luck finally changed?

In the end, every single fight has some luck factor. The goal of a strategy is to take as much of that out as possible. While I am not currently working on shahraz, my guild has begun work on archimonde, and while its not easy, I think a lot of the "luck" claims are blown out of proportion. I would be willing to attribute every failed attempt to strategy. Now, I admit some attempts play out much better than others, but that doesn't mean I think those others are beyond control with proper strategy.

In the end, 1 fight with a slightly higher luck factor might be frustrating, but is it really so intolerable that there is a small luck factor in ONE fight compared to not having to get world buffs like mad from pre-TBC, or farming 200 herbs for a pre 2.1 raid?

 

Clandestine

We killed her tonight after changing our strategy fairly significantly and our raid makeup a little, after our previous night's experience on it. We decided the odds of wiping to a bad FA on single ranged camp were untenable.

I sincerely doubt the fight is nerfed at all from yesterday.

 

◊ Quigon

We got about as lucky as you could probably get - unless the fight was changed, which is why I'm asking.
We removed the MT saber/KB - and put the raid in a spot that so far has only been FA'ed maybe once or twice out of 50 pulls. So it comes down to the MT not being FA'ed, and FA'ers not dying to attrition. Or the MT being just destroyed/chain wickeds/dumb ports - actually theres a few things that can go wrong. Its nothing but a relief, but just seems fishy.

 

Desall

We killed her for the first time yesterday as well and she didn't seem different from the day before.
Granted we are on a EU server so maybe there's a delay there.

 

berg

We were doing learning attempts last night and if they changed her, they certainly did not remove any bugs.

We got her to roughly 20% on our first night so we cannot complain too much but personally I got ported into a pole once and ported, punted. We also had our well geared tank get essentially executed on multiple attempts.

In the end there is no reason to complain, everything has been said already. Normally it is easy to offer constructive criticism of the encounters but Shahraz is just a disaster. I find it highly unlikely that anyone in any phase of the development cycle had anything good to say about this fight. It blows.

 

draxon0012

We're simply going to change our composition for next week, if thats how Blizz wants to play it, we're just going to stack 10healers (7shaman) 3 tanks and then a bunch of melee maybe 1 mage 1 lock 1 sp.

 

Trouble

The fight was just as bad for us last night. No kill.

 

◊ Praetorian

Did I see see you say on R&D you were trying with 7 healers? I'd sooner gouge my eyes out with a wooden spoon.

Just pay for people to respec. We had an elemental shaman respec resto last week so we could bring a 9th along.

 

Smoker

Yeah, 9 is a good number, and try to bring as many resto shamans as possible due to manatide and chainheal. (<3)

 

Trouble

We had our elemental shaman respec halfway through the night. We're trying to recruit another resto shaman too. But yeah it's pretty bad. We've only had 7 healers on the roster for a while as recruits keep turning out sour. It's a good thing we still clear SSC and TK every week I guess...

 

WiPe|Domin

Killed it total after total of 6h of attempts, basicy we tanked her against the furniture to avoid the lash in air, rest of raid in the bushes (literaly) and 2 priests in the field for FA heals.It was a kill when plp didnt panic during FA. 3 locks, 1 mage, 1 sp, 2 rogues, 2 dps wars, 1 feral dps, 1 hunter.

This fight is so bad i feel like puking thinking about next reset

 

heel

Incidentally, ten is also a good number. So is eleven. So is twelve.