I would like to disagree about the CC is critical on 25 Faction Champion fight.

The only thing critical for my guild is to handle the melee mobs. As stated before in the thread having 2-3 people tank the rogue, warrior is critical. The paladin and DK can also be tanked but the most important is the rogue and warrior. Make sure to check why you are dying and control that aspect.

If they are tanked then no clothies are getting 2 shotted. CC is ok but we only do it for the pull more or less the rest is just brute nuke tactics on healers.

After the healers are dead we focus on the rogue since he can shadow step and pretty much kill someone directly.

We also position healers and ranged at the far back of the room spread out.

So
Melee including one DK in centre of the room. Tanks stand at the entrance door. Healers at the far back. Ranged dps between healers and melee. We pull with the 2 or 3 tanks aggroing. One DPS DK will then deathgrip the first healer to die to the melee dps and we start nuking.

This is the only thing we are doing and i cant say that we are pros in anyway and if we can kill it without any deaths last weeks then any guild can do it.

To be explicitly clear (assuming you were responding to my post), I was referring to Heroic mode.

Being a rogue, I tried something on Beasts which proved useful for the heroic version. During Icehowl, if you use vanish right as he casts his Massive Crash (1 sec cast time), you don't end up getting hit by the knockback and the resulting stun. On a somewhat related note, if he targets you for his charge, but you've just vanished he'll stop his charge at the location that you were standing when he targeted you.

In other words,
-I was standing near the outer part of the star on the ground and vanished during his Massive Crash cast
-Icehowl targeted me after I vanished, and charged
-I moved out of the way, and he got stunned at the location I had vanished from

Seemed pretty odd, but I do wonder if there are any other class mechanics like that that would do the same thing. You don't get stunned, so there's absolutely no way you can't get out of Icehowl's charge.

Paladin bubble is immune to the stun/knockback mechanic. I don't remember the exact circumstances that caused me to do so, but I bubbled and a few seconds later he did Massive Crash and I remained in the middle of the room attacking. However, I was not targeted for the charge, so I cannot comment on it.

I would assume any immunity (such as Ice Block) would also function.

Our pally was targeted for charge while bubbled and the same thing happened, Icehowl charged a spot on the floor and was stunned there.

I got stunned through Killing Spree and just stood there in the middle, barely making it before he charged someone else. So that one doesn't work.

Even on heroic mode you do not need to use extensive CC.

Provided that you have 2-3 rogues, you can keep the healers + the occasional caster almost perma-interrupted via FoK (at least until 3.2.2).
This allows you to ignore the healers until you've killed the more annoying DPS (Hunter, Rogue, Warrior, DK to a lesser extent).
Once the "Gib" classes have been killed, you're left with 5 minutes of fun dps.

I had the same thing happen when I popped invisibility just prior to the stun. I was not knocked back and wasn't stunned. He didn't target me, so I can't comment on the "charging a random point on the floor".

And, for what it's worth, with 25 attempts remaining (A Tribute to Great Skill), you get the weapon, Anub loot, and 2 trophies.

Not specifically relating to heroic mode, but can anybody suggest a way (preferably a realtime mod) of displaying how much of the Twin Val'kyr's shield remains? Even a method for post-attempt analysis would be useful.

The best I can come up with for you at the moment is RecountGuessedAbsorbs. It will add a "Guessed Absorbs" tab to your recount add-on, where it will track all absorbtion effects (it uses a lot of guesswork to do so, but as far as I can tell, it is mostly accurate, so long as you don't have too many absorb effects stacks on the same player/entity). Have recount also collect data for enemy targets, and have Guessed Absorbs showing realtime.

This might give you a good idea of how far off you are.

Our mages never reported a problem - apparently it stays in manchicken form and doesn't shapeshift out. We had boomkin again this week and again no issues with sheep on it. (Possibly it's more intelligent on Heroic).

Only issues we've seen are grounding totem requiring an extra cast (or two) for a CC, or one of the dispel-types not locked and removing CC. This is part of the reason we use 3 groups of 10 seconds instead of 2 at 15. Much further from diminishing return Immunity territory if a few extra casts have to be used.

We normally keep the paladin healer interrupted, not CCed - oddly it doesn't do much sheep or fear cleansing.

CC this complex isn't necessary, but as a guild we're not huge on burst DPS and this has really made control of the fight manageable for us.

The Faction Champions genuinely aren't that bright and don't use their abilities that effectively, the main issues are spam heals stymieing your DPS or assist-trains of 2 or 3 NPCs jumping the same target and effectively killing them in a GCD.

Depending on your guild style you can easily burn quick with absolutely no CC, CC-lite 1 or 2 targets (temp or perm), or go for full on CC rotations to (more or less) permanently take certain NPCs out of action. And there are a lot of CC options, even down to specifics that work only on one type (such as Banish on Tree). No one tactic is universally best - refine what's working to make it the best version of that technique.

I think the reason he mentioned that was because Moonkin players are immune to sheep. I'm assuming from your post that the Faction Champion's Moonkin isn't immune?

Regarding the Twins absorb thing - I'm wondering how difficult it would be to write a mod that calculated it. There's an emote that states when the shield begins, and surely it wouldn't be that difficult to use that as a trigger to start recording/calculating damage from the combat log similar to a damage meter - as the shield is a set amount. It might not be possible - I don't know enough about LUA coding to know, or to code it myself.

This. Druids can only be sheeped when they're out of form. Boomkins, Kitties, Bears and Trees are all completely immune to polymorph effects. We've always approached Faction Champions on the basis that druids can't be CCed by mages, but if you're saying they can that's good news for shutting the Tree down too.

TrickOrTreat captures the exact damage done during the period of a buff on your TotT target, and spits out a report of how much bonus damage was obtained as a result. Using that as a reference point, it's not much of a stretch to assume someone could capture the amount of damage done when the Twins Pact cast begins and ends.

Tree is an elemental, it should be immune to sheep. Apparently moonkin is a humanoid (beast?) and can be sheeped, odd but logical.

Our experience in the faction champions is that the mobs zerg a player only when he's low on hp. We had rogue/warrior/hunter as the gib team, and moonkin/priest/warlock as casters. Throughout the combat, at one point a player would drop to half hp from dots, which is very possible when an UA covered SWP ticks for 6k; and that player would die to whichever dps was out of cc before anyone in the raid can even notice. Only when a priest literally spammed mass dispel (and get dispelled off UA silence) we could survive those gibs, since they basically never happened.

I am quite sute TrickorTreat does this by counting the damage someone actually does while they have the buff, and then multiply it by ~0.13 to get the proportion that came from TotT. There is no method in the game currently to count damage towards a shield before it breaks. All fully absorbed hits only appear as "absorbed" without any kind of report how much damage was actually absorbed. I am not sure how the absorb guessing addons work, but i suppose it is by adding up the shields that got fully absorbed, which would make them totally useless against the valkyr shields.

Only thing I can think of vs twin shields would be using raid-dps and time shield is up to calculate roughly how big it is. Not that it really matters much

I'll have to talk with our mages - they never commented a single time. Obviously I could have used that CC elsewhere for actual effect.

Thanks, all. I had been unaware boomkin were immune to sheep. I had only thought the tree was (because tree becomes an elemental which then worries about banish). The boomkin doesn't have the boomkin buff (which states immune to polymorph). Neither does the tree, but it's explicitly marked Elemental (as opposed to Humanoid).

That's not what I was asking for and I'm pretty sure thats not what Jagiya was commenting on. What I was suggesting was a simple combat log mod that parses damage done to the twin who is shielded - it would start "recording" damage when the twin emoted that it was shielded and preferably display how much of the shield was remaining (since we know the shield absorbs an exact amount of damage). My reasoning behind this is we had problems breaking shields this week on heroic and I was interested in how much of the shield remained each time.

It's my understanding that damage done to twins during the "shield" phase isn't actually recorded in the combat log as "absorbed" - otherwise rets wouldn't generate any mana through JoTW - if that's what you meant by your post.

Enhance shammies can't proc windfury or maelstrom weapon on the shield, as well as all damage being recorded simply as 'absorb' just like regular shields. Which is why such a mod would be impossible as explained. Edit: It could have just been World of logs combat parser not being specific enough with the absorbs even if more data is there, i'll take a look tonight.

Was there ever any particular reason to keep Twins separated? I always heard something about some supposed damage buff, but didn't notice anything like it in 10 man - and our 25 man strat so far keeps them separated. If there are no drawbacks, I don't see why not get some extra AOE damage - limited as it might be on same color twin. I only noticed attack speed boost on Twin's Pact, but that's easily solved by using some cooldowns.