Between a nice little ability called Shadow Blades this strat isn't as viable as it sounds. Assuming you eventually learn how to micro manage shadow debuffs with this strat (again, quite insane considering shadow blades requiring nonstop gcd raid healing --- maybe more manageable with 3 CoH's). You still run into confounding + conflag which can pretty much just instantly wipe you.

From experience it didn't seem viable because of Shadow Blades.

I'm pretty certain it's just a matter of where you position lady sac. We were doing this strat yesterday and got lady sac to 6%. Near the start of the night the images were stunning our raid non stop, causing many early wipes. After taking a closer look at the videos and having our tanks tweak positioning we nearly stopped getting hit by the stuns all together.

We haven't gotten a kill yet but we're learning the fight doing sac first for what it's worth, seems a lot more repeatable then killing the warlock first once you get it down. P2 with Lady sac alive seems very dicey, where as P2 with the Grand Warlock alive is a lot simpler.

It might be because they are not on the edge, while the raid is. The difference in elevation may cause such "luck".
On the 2 groups thing: if there are people on the left side too, the shadow images can get up to them on the edge (they are closer) and thus stun the whole area, including people on the right side.

We were actually only getting stuns on one group at a time (so either left pillar or right pillar).

The reason the shadowfury adds look like they blow up but don't actually get their stun off is because of their uptime. Everyone at this point knows that the adds last a certain amount of time. If you keep Sacrolash in the right spot, the shadowfury adds will get to the raid, begin casting shadowfury, and midway through the animation, die off without actually getting the spell off.

What's more interesting to me is how the dark strike adds work. I don't know if anyone who has done the reverse strat with the raid hugging the raid top pillar has noticed this, but dark strike adds seem to get one hit off on the people at the top, and ALWAYS do their little vanishing act that signals them switching targets before dying off. Anyone who has done it in the "normal" way will notice that the darkstrike adds sometimes stay on targets, but I can't help but notice how they always do the vanish thing when you do the reverse order strat. Is there some mechanic here we could be missing about making them switch targets??

We initially thought that the shadowfury adds "spawn" based on boss movement. Initial attempts seem to confirm this, but after numerous wipes attempting to have absolutely zero boss movement ( which didn't go over too well...she constantly shifts not only backward, but also to her right, for some reason), we finally found out through trial and error that the shadowfury adds are primarily effected by the distance between the boss and the raid.

On one attempt that we positioned her "correctly" , we got the final eredar twins to 51% with a whole melee group dying before red is even halfway dead. We had over twenty attempts before that where we never managed to get past 40% due to shadowfuries on the raid.
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Anyways...has any tanks there found a way to ensure that she does not shuffle around? We tried standing on her face, max distance ( accounting for tauren hit box), and even everywhere in between. We tried variations of tanks stacking on top of each other, along with variations of Brutallus-style positioning ( one tank on the boss, while the other is around 90 degrees to the left side of the boss), but it always ended in one thing : the boss moving around, even if confounding blow or aggro transitions are not factored in. This makes for one hell of a constant, fixed positioning to ensure that shadowfuries do not reach the raid.

That is why in this strategy the positioning of the raid AND the boss are so important, one or two steps in the wrong direction, and your raid will get stunned from the little demons shadow fury. Once you get the position correct, no shadow fury stuns, and 1-2 melee hits from the melee demons are the most you will ever see.

She shifts/moves cause she summons adds. You can test this out on Elite ogres above shattrah, might also recall the Eredar patrols after supremus in BT, they also kept shifting to the side every time they summoned the shadowfiend adds.

Go watch the Aff Inc kill video. They have their entire raid below sacrolash eating blades. It actually makes healing easier since you are wiping your fire debuffs every 10 seconds instead of every 30. Meaning you don't run into those freak circumstances where one person got hit by 3 sears in a row and died. 2k damage every 10 seconds to 23 people means 138k damage every 30 seconds, even if you assume worst case scenario with 5 people every 10 seconds getting a 3 stack of flame touched that only adds about 70k damage from the remaining flame touched ticks. Letting flame touched tick on 5 people for 30 seconds is 135k damage, letting it tick on 5 more for 20 seconds is 90k and finaly letting it tick on 5 people for 10 seconds is 45k damage totaling 270k damage over 30 seconds. Now keep in mind this is a upper bounds on the damage done based on 6 stacks of flame touched per sear and assuming no one clears their debuffs early, but given both are represented in this way you are looking at 270k damage with using shadow nova to clear debuffs vs 208k damge having the whole raid eat shadow blades.

The strength of this strat as I mention earlier is that you have no chance of one person dying from eating multipe sears in a row in between shadow novas.

In terms of phase 2 this would completely take burst out of the fight and can easily be healed by two CoH priests solo every 10 seconds.

I'm confused as to which aspect of phase two you're referring to. There's no flame sear in phase 2, so taking shadowblades would only stack your shadow debuffs faster(and put you close to little shadow demons constantly). Conflag is the only fire damage in phase 2 of "Alythess-First" strat.

"Sarcolash-First" she only has shadow nova and flame sear.

While you will be cutting down on flame touched damage, you will be radically increasing the rate at which shadow touched stacks on your raid.

In addition every 30 seconds when a Shadow Blades and Shadow Nova come back to back the entire raid is going to be taking around 6k damage. This has a decent chance of killing someone.

Overall I think stacking directly on both twins in phase 1 for either strategy will lead to a lot of complications while not significantly reducing effective raid healing required. Just make sure every Shadow Nova is hitting the entire raid.

There is either no Shadow Blades or no Flame Sear in Phase 2, so not sure what you're trying to say.

It's not. We've looked a log and seen 20 people get hit by it at once.

Under this strategy, you would have people run out of the raid with Shadow Nova just like we do with Conflag. Keep in mind also that having the shadow debuff stack up on the raid isn't nearly as dangerous as the fire one since it simply reduces healing done, it doesn't do any actual damage.

The real question of whether this strat is viable is whether having the whole raid take Shadow Blades will cause 1 sec lag spikes like Shadow Nova does (but hopefully that will be fixed in 2.4.2 anyway).

My comments on damage were referring mostly to phase 1. In phase 2 shadow would stack slower since you would be forcing the adds onto one or two people both of which are far enough away to prevent them from getting too many. Every 30 seconds everyone minus those 2 would get 3 shadow touched debuffs then you can just clear them off using conflag. Although this would only need to happen once or twice during phase 2.

As for how to handle shadow nova is phase 1 while doing this you can always have people with it run out of the raid group to prevent it from hurting anyone.

No it's not. This was a common misconception we had while learning it as well but after some tinkering and some mistakes we firmly established that it is not a limited number of people. It will hit everyone in range of her.

Well the raid wouldn't get a shadow nova if you were doing a 'stand in the blades' type strat. If you're killing Sacrolash first, that is.

Cheeba, for one I'd be willing to bet its possibly the max amount of raid damage you will ever take (On top of the stacking -5%). We've compared WWS with similar lengths and 23 people eating shadow blades is significantly more than waiting 30 seconds for shadow nova.

Like I said, "If you can micro and provide the 3 CoH to keep everyone topped off for blades+Shadow nova"

Micro'ing seems like too much of a hassle. Doing it this way seemed extremely predictable, but their isn't really an effective way to clear your shadow debuffs and maintain the level of raid damage on the raid.

While I agree entirely that it is acceptable to run shadow nova out of the raid with this strat, I think it is unreasonable to deal with confounding + conflag on the same person (Probably synced up 5 in 20 attempts).

Doable with a moderate amount of luck? Sure.
Something I want to repeat every week? Definitely not.

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Intermission: It appears to be a PBAoE
EDIT: with unlimited targets

I've always enjoyed fights that allow for very diverse strategies. Having a "cookie-cutter" strategy that pretty much every guild and their mom can figure out from the get-go is typical these days. A fight like Eredar Twins seems to have many degrees of freedom to it that allow for some pretty interesting differences. The last time I got excited about theorycrafting something like this was back in the 4-Horsemen days.

Building a strat that involves luck is plain stupid. I sure as hell hope you didn't sit there on Brutallus and say, hey we just need burns to fall on the right people and everything else resist, no. You build strats the best you can to eradicate the luck factor. While "luck" may certainly come into play for a first kill of any sort on pretty much "any" new boss in the last 3 years, "luck" is not what lets you farm content every week.

Chain BA on healers was again, entirely possible and repeatable with the right strategy (healing wise in this case), and good players who could pick up the slack.

There isn't a single fight where you should hope for luck every week in order to down a boss. Not now, not ever.

Will try Hopefully that fixes the shuffling/moving problem. It's quite irritating.

Chain BA on healers was survivable, but not when you barely had the gear for the encounter and had no slack that could accept that kind of loss of healing throughput. Perhaps analogous, we use a single camp strat for Shahraz. A port onto the camp is now survivable, but for our first few clears we simply accepted that a port onto the camp meant leash and re-pull (and we wiped far more often to people messing up than we did to the dice falling against us - admittedly our choice of a single camp strat was influenced by the desire to keep it simple and maximize cross-healing to mitigate isolated incompetence).

Obviously you don't want your whole strategy to hinge on a coin toss, but relying on a certain degree of luck until you have the gear to mitigate poor dice rolls is not unreasonable.

I'm not saying you should hope to be lucky and not get confounding and conflag at the same time. There are ways to counter that, like have a hunter one of the ranged on top of the ramp be 3rd on aggro (he can buy your tanks 2-4 seconds to trinket out of conflag/disorient, assuming your tanks are using the PvP trinket), or even use 3 tanks and the confounding blow and conflag on tanks issue is eliminated. As I said before, with a blue first strategy, you kind of have the freedom to bring 1 less DPS than a red start.
But still, luck in boss encounters is something we've been dealing with for ages, let it be players targeted by boss abilities, spells resists or things like where infernals land on Prince encounter.

I read somewhere that someone said that Free action potion makes you immune to the conflag disorient, however I didn't test this myself, if anyone can confirm/decline, I think that would be a good thing to counter it on tanks (they still have to move out).

Conflagration applies "Mod Aura: Confuse" (Spell Effect: Apply Aura: Mod Confuse - Thottbot: World of Warcraft), which has no listed counters, and FAP lists only Stun, Root, and Snare as its immunities.