It's a fine idea in practice - except that Holy vs. Shadow would be an extremely annoying combination - no one's doing Holy DPS, and the fact that TWO classes do Shadow damage would be quite the catasrophe.

In retrospect, learning this fight -- with so many "unlucky" scenarios -- was the hardest part. And if you are rolling some bad dice, Mother is not too forgiving. After killing her, it doesn't feel so bad. Port in the raid, "We'll get her next pull." Before it was just cursing and hate for the randomness, where those events compound on the fact your raid is still learning to cope with the standard abilities.

It's amazing the attitude change our raid experienced this week, when dealing with early ports between ranged / melee or ports into geometry. Knowing it's a kill without that luck is all that matters. We also used CoR and had in-raid ports on our kill this week, and that's really a testament to how Mother can bring the best out of your raid and its spirits.

I enjoy the fight, in its current form, even as a shadowpriest who bandages the raid 50%+ of the time. But I'm not going to forget what a nightmare luck played on our learning experience, like I believe some horn-blowers have done here. The changes will be well received, and I don't find they will take any value from kills henceforth. The old Mother will always have a special place in my heart -- that sexy bitch.

Killed her for the second time tonight and it was a one-shot. We were lucky and had no fa in raid or sinister on mt, half raid dead in the end but she died

You get infractions for being a dumbass, not for making a point.

Anyway - I'm not sure there was much that was truly unique about mother. I still believe it is basically 10 abilities given to a rather ordinary boss, almost all of which we have seen before. Give each random timers, and call it an encounter.

FA is basically meant to be the fight - but the collision of all the other abilities ends up making learning and sometimes repeating a kill frustrating at best. And getting FA's on the raid, or not, dramatically changes the difficulty of the fight. Sure you can "Spread out" - but when 75% of the time you can have 1 group and 1 melee group that never gets FA, you set the fight up to be potentially much easier. It reminds me a bit of the old doomfires - where you could kill archimonde and never have a doomfire within 80 yards of your group. Although my problem with this fight isn't really FA's on the raid (although FA's on the main tank is pretty bad at times).

It would work but you'd have to make the ratio really ridiculously high, so that a single volley of holy shocks and Surge of Light smites with no spellpower is enough to re-normalize shadow, or drop the debuff back to something very light. Basically, something that wouldn't hinder normal raids but would still provide a decent bonus on dmg on the fight to raids set up like Blood Legion.

If you really wanted to make it complex they could work in a ring, so that if you have a relatively equal threshold of damage incoming in each school, all caster damage is increased.

I have to agree that using a multiple camp strategy makes Shahraz much much easier. We spent our first night working on Shahraz, and by the end of the night I could tell that basically everyone understood what was going on with the fight (the abilities are all simple and easily understood), and was dealing with the FA's when they got ported pretty well. However, whenever there was an FA on our single ranged camp, things would just kind of explode. Even if no one died, the raid healers couldn't really catch back up, and it would eventually lead to a wipe.

The next day we went in and decided to use a 3 ranged camp strategy, and killed her on the second pull. At least half of the FAs land on or near one of the camps, but people move out of the way and keep themselves up appropriately, the rest of the healers keep up the tank, and we got a very clean first kill. We killed her on our first pull this week, again, with a lot of the FAs hitting one part of the raid or another. Looking at our parses we got an average number of Wicked Beams both weeks as well. We only had 8 healers this week as well, the raid damage increase due to having FAs constantly hitting about a fourth of your raid, is pretty easily dealt with, with the ranged DPS helping to heal themselves (bandaid frequently, hp / pots used for survival).

We don't really stack melee either - one enh shaman, one hunter, 4 rogues, 1 dps warrior (one more melee DPS than on a normal fight basically, and I usually prefer to give the extra rogue's spot to a healer, we were just short one). Didn't use CoRex as we were kind of short healers for the fight.

The changes that are planned seem like they will make Shahraz pretty trivial TBH.

I don't see how one strategy is easier than another. I think you just came back the next day - fully understood the fight, and as most people do - almost 1 shot the boss the next day (countless guilds one shot new encounters on their first few pulls of the following night - we one shot every Hyjal boss our 2nd night basically - and we 1 shot shahraz on our 2nd serious night of attempts - I don't really count farming/testing a mod to be a serious night).

On the one group strategy, you are putting your eggs in one basket - but typically the raid never gets FA'ed in our case, so I cannot see how 0 FA's on the raid is harder than some FA's on a spread-out raid.

We wiped 5-6 times last night, and all of them were due to things like FA's into furniture, or triple FA onto the melee, or both OT's being ported simultaneously, followed by saber lash.

Had you changed strategies at the end of your first night and noticed an improvement - I might agree that strategy triumphed - but on fights like archimonde/shahraz, strategy really is not a big part of the fight (unless you call wedging your MT under a couch "strategy"). Individual execution, and a little luck tend to rule the day. And what works for your guild might not work for others - afterall there are guilds who did this over a month ago who used both strategies just fine.

Using Deviates to stuff Paches under a couch is strategy :P

As is standing on top of a rock and shooting nef spawns. Although in that case the ability is fucked up enough to warrant silliness. :P

Blessing of wisdom so all of the Nef adds would chase to Vael's room. Kidding? I'm not.

If not, enlighten me, that sounds fucked up. If you are fooling me, I'll get brian to slap you!

Killed today on first day of attempts, didnt use deviate, war+druid was on top of MT
Took us exactly 6:00minutes from misdirection to her death, like 3 people die thru the whole fight, clean kill.
Whats funny, highest person on dmg was a rogue with 500k (around 1400dps, if u divide dmg/time), and highest caster was a mage with 200k, and he used only neck+cloak from shadow resistance gear, so he had like 150SR buffed He survived whole fight also
The key for us was also the positioning, and taking additional healer. Tried with 9 healers, wiped on 12% and 15%, brought 1 more priest and she died on next attempt.

You have to mince the meat before packaging it.

On a more serious note, is this the first encounter where a gnome tank would be "teh win"?

As we're slow progressing and we're wiping on Archi(fun)monde at the moment I havent gotten to see the fight first hand yet

10 healers is the key to the fight, lovely. I suppose it's time to recruit a couple more....

8 is just fine ... If you can stack phy dps and healers, sure. But it's not really necessairy. It makes it a bit easier, but if people are stupid with FAs, an extra healer does not help either. And well after the patch I very much doubt more then eight healers is desireable. The faster the bitch dies, the less 'oh shit' moments you can possibly encounter.

We've tried it with 8, 9, and 10... and 10 was clearly the best setup for us. We have a MT healing strategy that makes it so the MT will simply not die outside of parry streaks, which contrary to some opinions, will kill any tank if they are bad.

Also, using 150 SR on this fight is probably not recommended. Even if it works (I love it when people tell me shit like "it worked last time")... it doesn't mean it will always work, nor is it reliable or a smart idea. I believe you're taking 18,000 resistable SR in your first second of FA portage.

Yes this is right. You get exponential returns on resists - for essentially linear item expenditures. More SR is increasingly better up through 295 unbuffed.
The last 100 points are worth the same amount as the first 200 in terms of relative improvement.

With the streakiness of the FA, I'd think you would want to stack every card in your favor - and that is how we do Shahraz. We stack our players, strategy, consumables, classes, and positioning to minimize the worst possible outcome.

Since they're changing the fight ill throw out a couple helpful suggestions that havent been explicitly stated.

1) The FA port is not entirely random. You can only be ported to a location that is within mother shahraz's LOS. It has a max range of about 45 yards.

Extending upon this, if you make the shape of mother shahraz's field of LOS very narrow in one direction and very large in another direction, you can strongly reduce the chances of a port in the middle of the raid, particularly ranged dps and healing camps. With some clever geometry you can keep 2 ranged camps in a very narrow swath of LOS on mother and a third camp of healers out of her LOS but within LOS of the tanks. All 3 of these ranged camps wont chain eachother on beams. There are a couple spots in the room where you could set up like this. We use the column in the north west. You can also position a healer outside the max range of the port near the "large area" to support soft and low initial health people. We use a very quick fingered holy priest(in max shadow and stamina gear, he takes a pounding) to give people that little bump they need to live. I'm too lazy to draw out a map, so if my commentary isnt clear and you'd like some clarification, let me know.

This setup captures the benefits of the 'single camp' and avoids the excessive beam chaining. The downside to this is that it makes melee ports somewhat more frequent then in a 'out in the open' position. The 'rare' narrow los port is pretty much a wipe. Overall though, it makes raid crippling FA ports far less frequent. 2 of our last 3 kills have been "one shot". I look at mother like a slot machine. Keep putting your quarters in til you win.

A final note regarding los...If you can hit mother mother can hit you. This isn't 'exploitive' losing, its firemaw style. Anyone this might help would probably realize that though.

We do it with 7 healers every week.

FA is also resistable, so by wearing full SR gear you may prevent lots of damage on your teammates

I guess that's why Quigon said it was resistable

I really wish we'd get to her this week so we got to try it out.

Yeah, 7 healers is doable, both of our wipes on 12% and 15% were when we had 9 healers in raid, and in both cases one healer died on first teleport, and the second healer when he had ~50k healing done, so pretty fast.
If we would have 2x melee dps instead of those 2 healers who died, they would manage to take those 15%s out of her
Wonder how long did your kill take with 7 healers 3 tanks and 15 dps - it had to be less then 5:00 minutes?