Some WoWCombatLog.txt lines

9/14 21:02:09.636 SPELL_MISSED,0x0100000000329D55,"Shootemup",0x514,0xF1300086C00038FE,"Eydis Darkbane",0xa48,53352,"Explosive Shot",0x4,ABSORB,3325
9/14 21:02:09.725 SPELL_MISSED,0x0100000000238945,"Samatra",0x512,0xF1300086C00038FE,"Eydis Darkbane",0xa48,47486,"Mortal Strike",0x1,ABSORB,3828
9/14 21:02:09.931 SPELL_MISSED,0x010000000024C1B2,"Ecksen",0x514,0xF1300086C00038FE,"Eydis Darkbane",0xa48,48577,"Ferocious Bite",0x1,ABSORB,7168
9/14 21:02:10.087 SPELL_MISSED,0x010000000281BD8E,"Zup",0x514,0xF1300086C00038FE,"Eydis Darkbane",0xa48,42833,"Fireball",0x4,ABSORB,18042

I couldnt find an explanation of what each column means, but the last one could be absorbed damage? (In that part mele was dark and ranged was light). Maybe it's time to write a fast perl parser to see if it adds up to the full shield on a sucessfull interrupt.

We've been experimenting with combined strats and have found no ill effects, so it seems that the only reason to separate them would be if your positioning calls for it. In my experience, one tank having to be an opposite color of the melee isn't a big deal at all, as a tank can easily just stand there and eat the Vortex damage, never having to change.

I'm not really sure what causes the stacking haste buff, it doesn't seem to go off when we fail to break the shield but it does end up getting thrown out during wipes. Perhaps whenever one twin doesn't have a melee threat target?

She gets some sort of damage buff. I wasn't paying that much attention as she still was doing trivial damage to me but I believe the unshielded twin gets a damage buff during the Shield.

Aren't they tanked seperately on Normal mode because, when close to each other, they cast Surge of Darkness - Spell - World of Warcraft and Surge of Light - Spell - World of Warcraft constantly on the raid? In Heroic they have to be close to allow for fast enough switching to burn down the shield but on normal this isn't needed.

The surges are a passive that is active from the fight's beginning to end. It's consistent raid damage that needs to be healed. Half of that being absorbed by your current essence. There was a bug where they didn't cast it during the first week but that has been fixed.

In my experience, the haste buff applies on one twin while the other is casting an ability. But, since I don't have access to my combat log at work, this is purely anecdotal evidence. Also, with regards to the damage absorbed by their shields, it is entirely possible to see the damage being done to the shield as you do damage. Just take Mik's Scrolling Battle Text addon as an example. During Twin Pact, the absorbs scrolling across my screen also have captures of how much damage was absorbed from the attack. In this case, a complete absorb of something like Shield of Righteousness shows up for me as Absorbed <6570>.

Power of the Twins - Spell - World of Warcraft - Power of the Twins

This is the buff that the twin who isn't shielded gets for the duration of the cast/shield. Dual wield, stacking haste buff and just general anger. When healing 10man hardmode as Disc, I would usually put a Pain Suppression on the tank who had to deal with this debuff. If pain suppression was on CD, I would certainly focus heals/shields on that tank. I have yet to see how much of a difference this is in hardmode 25man.

I wrote a small perl parser adding up the values in the last column. I don't want to discuss the heroic 25 twin valkyrs because it isn't opened yet, but the added damage is way below the official value and also fluctuating from shield to shield (+/-10%). EG (fantasy numbers) we fail to interrupt shield after dealing 700k damge to it, and the next shield we break & interrupt after dealing 800k damage. Might be a bug in my parser tho.

It is open now.

Ah, now I understand. The stacking haste buff is also a proc from every swing during this buff. Because we've been tanking them together, I have always been targeting the shielded mob during Pact (unless we're busy wiping and I happen to see these buffs going up).

I honestly don't feel like I ever dip in health unless several balls have just crashed into the melee pile at once, so it's not really a noticeable DPS increase. We've used anywhere from one tank healer to two raid healers who are assigned to also watch a tank, and the two of us have remained the most stable targets in the raid. We actually briefly considered solo tanking the fight, but there's no way to pull that off without having everyone on one color as the threat cap would be terrible on one of the twins.

Actually, it's a large increase in DPS, but they don't hit hard to begin with. But the question you want to ask is, do you really need the cooldowns for anything else?

Are you referring to one specific mode? Or has the fight been hotfixed recently for that to be the case? On my first Twins kill on 25m, they used the same ability (I think it was Dark Vortex) two or three times in a row, and I've had kills on 10m where we've seen some abilities twice and another ability never happened. That said, last week's run we did get all four abilities before anything repeated, so it may be a recent stealth change. (Or not stealth, and I just missed the post about it.)

After numerous heroic attempts last week we never got the same ability repeated before all 4 had been used at least once. Anecdotal I know but we went through a good 20 attempts. Seems unlikely that it was just "lucky". It certainly does look like they use all 4 abilities before they start repeating now.

They can repeat same ability after they finish their full cycle. Say, Light AOE, Dark AOE, Light Heal, Dark Heal -> at that point, anything is possible. However, getting such combo means that 4th skill will always be Dark Heal so you can switch accordingly before it happens. Didn't fail us during quite a few attempts. Of course, it's bit hard to calculate this on the run and you can't predict much except 4th ability, but it is helpful in some cases.
Heroic Twins go through every ability twice - well, almost, 8th is berserk and instant wipe due to auras.

On Tuesday night we finished Heroic Jaraxxus at 40 attempts left, pulled down the Faction Champions to get the group makeup, and all took a mage port to Dalaran without engaging them. Wednesday we showed up with 40 attempts left and the exact same champions group composition. So, admittedly a sample size of 1, but our soft reset didn't change our group composition, and the soft reset with the champions already called down didn't lose an attempt. Could be useful information for guilds who want extra time to plan out a counter strat.

Pioneer, you can take your sample size of 1 and bank it. There is no form of soft resetting that will change the composition. Generally, this is moot as the instance takes <1 hour to clear on normal and guilds that are doing heroic probably have raid time left by when they get there. Beyond that I doubt people are up nights planning a counter. But that said, it's completely certain at this point you can't change your comp.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's not like you are able to flawlessly execute your normal PvE rotation anyway, between dispels/random CC/running away from bladestorm. Also, npcs have their moments of glory, randomly focusing people and hitting them for huge amounts of damage before you can react - reducing damage taken/improving CC and being able to survive sudden burst - I see no disadvantage.
Of course, if you only focus on survival, your DPS will suffer a lot and it will take you longer to kill most dangerous opponents - which increases the odds of something nasty happening. But, if you are unable to zerg one of them before people start dying - might as well go for control.

That, and /focus on Rogue for all healers. He's by far most slippery and annoying bugger and most of our deaths start from him shadowstepping someone and using cloak - while hunter delivers the killing blow.

We one shotted them the last 2 weeks using (almost) zero pvp gear. It's really all about crowd control. You will die regardless of pvp gear if you don't cc/kite the mobs when they focus you. Tell everyone to stand a good distance away from the melee mobs and run away from them if they target you. Preferably your hunters lay down frost traps in the middle of the room so that they are slowed (that's at least how we do it). You should be able to kite them long enough until they switch their targets again.

We always focus the warrior first and kill the healers after this. The warriors seems to be the most threatening mob for us and that's why we kill him first. However note that we *do* use some more effective specs for this boss fight. Our rogues switch to FoK interrupt spec (until it lasts it's really nice here), our priests use disc in favor of holy and I think our warlocks go demo. Your mages can go frost as well. In addition to our rogues, we assign an interrupter for every healer.

Funnily enough it works great for us if we keep our strategy simple: "Kill the warrior, interrupt the healers and we'll see what we kill next". People are randomly crowd controlling mobs as well, but without any deeper strategy behind it. Just tossing in a cyclone or a polymorph here and there.

Although we don't use pvp gear, I would recommend to use an insignia for some bad moments. It's really helpful and can save your life. Another important thing to stress is to dispel everything, not only your own raid but also the bosses. It's advisable as a priest to toss in a mass dispell every few seconds, even if some players are affected by unstable affliction or vampiric touch. The silence can be dispelled again and in our experience it's better than having multiple people getting constantly damage.

Last but not least make sure you don't play too offensive. They don't have an enrage timer to my knowledge and as long as you don't die you can fight them as long as you want, just play rather defensive and eventually you'll win. If you have a big problem with melee mobs killing you, deathknights can take care of them really well. Just keep chains of ice constantly up on them and if a melee mob somehow gets into your raid, he can death grip him back again.

I slightly disagree with the approaches listed above. Granted, while it's extremely important to have solid CC and control, your DPS should be as high as it can be. Don't use PvP gear, and only adjust specs on a couple people. Glyphs are also dependent on the trade off.

Our CCers generally change things up the most, while our DPS stays in high DPS gear / specs. If you drag the fight out longer than it needs to be, you're chancing people dying and things going wrong a lot more. The sooner you eliminate a couple of the dangerous targets, the easier the fight will become.

The fight is also drastically different depending on what kind of comp you have. If you get all the melee with the hunter, you're going to have a much more interesting time than if you get some of the casters. Same goes for the healer setups. You need to accurately and correctly identify which mobs are causing the most distress and find a solid way of dealing with them. There's no right answer, as sometimes it's better to CC something, and other times it's better to kill it first.

I've heard reports last night that damage dealt to the unshielded twin counts toward breaking the shield. Didn't have much chance to test it before getting past them this week but it seemed to hold true for the one shield that went up in 10h. That would explain the absorb totals fluctuating and also being way below official numbers. It would also mean it's a substantial dps loss to switch to the shielded target. Anyone else heard or seen this?

It should be rather easy to get a good first guess with just adding up damage done and damage absorbed during a shield. Perhaps Chack would be so kind and alters his parser to also count the damage done to the other twin.

We got scared by a melee heavy champ setup in ToGC (all the melee except the ret pally, plus the hunter), went a CC heavy route and wiped many times. Eventually we just said what the hell and went with a minimal CC setup and got through. From our experience, worrying too much about CC will leave you without even the dps necessary to counter the few heals that do get through + HoT ticks. Like many posters before me have said, burning down the critical hazards (read: most of the melee) will make the fight much more controllable than actually attempting to control all 10 champions. You can't keep all of them 100% CC'd, and with limited dps and an extreme emphasis on CC, everyone you lose will tilt the odds much more in the champs' favor than if you'd, say, burned down the rogue and lost a couple dps in the process.

As an aside: Does anyone know if the portals and volcanoes spawned by Jaraxxus actually have any armor? They die within the span of a 2 point expose armor, but our burst on portals is iffy at times and if they don't have armor I'd rather not even waste the 2 cp if possible.