This seems highly unlikely simply based on game mechanics.

Shield of Darkness specifically states it is an aura which absorbs Arcane, Fire, Frost, Holy, Nature, Physical, Shadow. As the other twin does not have the aura, it would not be absorbing the damage. Shield of Lights is the same.

If you are not hitting the unit which has the aura, you are not ablating the shield.

Last night during a 10 man Heroic Faction Champs fight, I (a fury warr at the time) got instagibbed by the rogue.

He dropped me by 30k health in less than 0.4 seconds. He used fan of knives + blade furry.

The link to the log is here: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis then click on "DEATHS" then "More."

It this just unlucky, or is this bugged? I just can't get over how one NPC could intsagib me in less than 1/2 a second.

Thanks.

Blade flurry procs once per main hand hit of fan (edit: mechanics may be different for the npc rogue, but afaik this is how it works for pc rogues). If you were, by some freak chance, the only person in flurry range while 17 people were in fan range, then every hit of bf would be focused on you.

The NPC rogue did have Blade Flurry up during that time. Specifically, the rogues FoK hit you, Chatown, Lefeinish, 7 Venimous Snakes, 7 Vipers and 2 treants and since you were the only thing left alive in melee range you got all of the Blade Flurry procs.

It would appear that you got gib'd by what PvE raid rogues have been using to gib trash. I'd suggest you stay away from the hunters using snake traps in the future as it seems to be one hell of a liability when the rogue is around.

Common sense would suggest that, however not all game mechanics fit common sense. Moreover, it may be a side effect of their shared health and there are only a handful of examples of that mechanic in the game so it isn't terribly well-studied, let alone the many inconsistencies that have plagued absorb mechanics in the past.

Actually, the shared health could indeed account for fluctuations in shield strength.

If Lightbane has 1000 hp and Darkbane has 1100 hp, whenever the normalization occurs, they should both re-balance to 1050hp. You saw this all the time on Illidari Council where one NPC's health would jump back up (smaller than an uninterrupted heal) when it rebalanced health across the group.

So if Lightbane get a shield, it is taking no damage (the shield is).
DPS on Darkbane is directly impacting.
When it normalizes between, it "inflicts" half the damage to Lightbane, which instead ablates a portion of the shield, and "heals" Darkbane half the damage.

Therefore 1/2 of any damage inflicted to the un-shielded twin should logically reduce the shield.

The light/dark buffs appear to increase damage by 50% (I compared some World of Log fights of Twins vs the same people fighting other Coliseum bosses). How much does it reduce vs same colour?

50% of 150% = 75% normal damage would inflict against the shield if you remained on your unshielded target. If attacking same colour reduces by more than 25%, it is superior to stay on target unless you also swap buff.

This is theoretical and would require testing to prove.

This shield issue should be fairly trivial to test. Let a shield come out, blow all dps on the unshielded target and see if the shield ever goes down. If it is in fact a damage increase there should be no real issue of destroying the shield. I guess we can give it a shot tonight.

I do kinda doubt it since it doesn't take an unreasonable amount of damage to destroy the shield without switching colors so if this method DOES work it will certainly trivialize that aspect of the fight.

Update:

We did 10 man normal ToC and it certainly seemed like we could dps the OTHER target and the shield still died. We tried this on 25 man heroic and could not replicate it.

Now on heroic it was a dark shield which we generally had trouble burning down. However, if the theory that you could dps the OTHER twin to take out the shield was true, the dark shield should have been JUST as easy as the light shield to kill using the "stay on the twin opposite your color" strategy.

Since we only did it once on 10 man (since we killed them) its possible that incidental AoE or people actually targetting the shield are what took it down. Another conclusion could be that it depends on WHEN their health tries to get normalized meaning it wont be consistent. A final thought is that it only works on 10 man and not 25 man but that seems like a very outside chance, at best.

I'm tending to side with the "it doesn't work at all and someone in my 10 man fucked up" explanation though.

Does anyone know if Improved Kick actually silences for 2s in 25 heroic faction champions?

Our rogues are throwing spec, but still seem to be having trouble locking down the healers... That 2s of silence would probably make a huge difference if it actually works. It seems as if that would be one of the mechanics that blizzard decided to make them immune to, though.

You can't break shields by dpsing unshielded Twin in Heroic 25. We completely ignore white shields and keep hitting Darkbane during entire Twins Pact - it never breaks even though we do at least 5% damage during that time, which would be around 2 mlns.(give or take, but I'd say it's a minimum, we easily break dark shields)
It might not be optimal strategy, but it's easier to execute for us - you do lose around 15% on each heal, which is 30% worst case, but it means people only change colors twice during entire fight and barely move, except soakers(and if they wear PvP or even tanking gear, they can afford to make a lot of mistakes). DPS would only be an issue with multiple deaths and double heals(or second light heal being before second dark). Given that it's possible to predict their next skill to an extent, you could blow Hero or change colors just before it happens, removing that one disadvantage.

Edit: Obviously, the damage is not absorbed and both Twins lose hp that way. My logic here is simple - trying to kill shield and failing to do so = 20% heal *and* around 1 mln dmg wasted. Ignoring the shield : 20% healed and 5% dpsed = 15% heal. Same reason why it's pointless trying to break final shield when they are on very low hitpoints. There's still place to improve that, but so far - it works.

Quick modification to the parses, it seems that when the damage done to both bosses is added up it reaches indeed the 1.3 - 1.4 million mark the shields are supposed to have (i think). Tho the shield only seems to break if at least 800k - 1000k damage have been done to the originally shielded boss. Either we were very bad at switching or my script is bugged, but sometimes we deal 8 million to the unshielded boss and 600k to the shielded one and we fail the interrupt. If someone more skilled in perl then me wants to take a look at the script feel free to pm me

Unimproved kick locks out the school from which the healing spell is cast for 5 seconds. Nothing about improved kick can extend that time.

Silence effects suffer diminishing returns. Very rapidly FoK silence will push all the NPCs in range to immunity for 15 seconds - it would become an interrupt, but no longer silence for 3 seconds.

Well, someone would have to confirm this who still has the talent, which was generally worthless otherwise.

When I >used< to have Improved Kick, I don't recall the silence taking effect unless the kick actually worked to stop a spell. And, regardless, it's still unclear why 2 seconds of pre-emption would exceed 5 seconds of the healing school being locked out even if you can pre-emptively silence.

Someone can confirm either way.

It should be noted that the instants people care about are generally druid HoTs which are easily dispelled and perhaps the priest fear, which is cast rarely due to the long cooldown. I still don't see any scenarios where you want rogues to respec to get this talent.

I was under the assumption that interrupts like the untalented kick were different from silences and as such the DRs wouldn't be linked. Are you 100% sure they're on the same DR? I was trying to find info on this an all I could find was references to silences now having diminishing returns as of 3.0.8. The silence effects I could find listed that shared this DR were Arcane Torrent, Garrote silence, Improved Counterspell, Improved Kick, Silence, Gag Order, Silencing Shot, Spell Lock, and Strangulate. No mention of kick anywhere that I could find.

The five second school lockout on normal kick isn't a silence. If you kick a fireball, that will lock out fire for that mage every time but without Imp Kick he isn't silenced. He is more than able to cast Cone of Cold immediately after a normal kick.

There may be some argument that kick may be a silence for those that can only cast from one school but in those cases, those classes are hybrids that have other actions they can take.

If you spec kick it applies a secondary 2 sec silence effect called "Improved Kick". This however has no effect on the original effect of Kick - Interrupting casts and giving a school lockout for 5 seconds. Only the silence is on DR and not the lockout. Also i would not suggest speccing it, as it will put alot stronger silences (Strangulate) on DR and eventually will make mobs immne to silences.

All of the NPCs are considered +3 level raid bosses. This means you need the full +8%/+17% hit in order to not miss attacks on them. Using pvp gear will result in a significant dps loss and can also result in important attacks (kick, poly, CS, etc) missing at critical times.

Equipping the Wintergrasp DPS PvP trinket is probably worth it, especially if you don't need a +hit trinket, but a full switch to PvP gear is probably not a good plan.

As far as I know, the only class that has that problem is a paladin. Painfully evident during hard mode Jaraxxus.

Revised parser (thanks to Yoma) shows heroic 25 twins' shields absorbing 1087455 - 1201094 damage for the logs from my guild. The best "combined damage" results i got when i assumed that the shield takes 33% of the damage done to the other boss. Range is then 1215877 - 1305610. There might be some weird mechanic that the shield takes damage equal to the "unbuffed" damage done to the other boss, meaning you can fluctuating results depending on the stacks in your DPS camp. Or it is alot more simple, meaning the shield just is within a random range.

I can pretty much deny this. Our strat on H25 has all ranged with dark essence (minus 2 healers and 2 hunters soaking) burning the light twin regardless of shields on the dark twin and the shield never popped.

Looking at the parse in more detail it looks like we only did 3 million to the light twin while shield was up on the dark twin so IF 33% of the damage does get transferred we wouldn't have done enough to break the shield (1.2 mil).

We got our first clear of 10 ToC last night. Our biggest struggle was the Faction Champions as some of our members rarely pvp. We had no priest for mass dispells and no rogue for interupts. We found we could burn down the shaman quickly if we kept CC on the paladin but then we tried a half dozen times to take down the holy paladin which turned out to be nearly impossible with our group comp.

What finally worked was downing the shaman, then focusing down the warrior and DK. Melee seem to be the most dangerous in this fight and smashed our healers very quickly if left unchecked at all. With the warrior and DK down it was easy to finish off the last 2 dps and then we all piled on the paladin.

Having our healers 1 or 2 shot happened all to often and it wasn't untill we had a mage go frost and slow everything down constantly that we had our clothies live long enough to do any good. Does anyone have a better idea of how to keep the melee from instagibbing our healers? The mage helped but I can't help but feel that we just got a little lucky.

Our group isn't exactly lacking, we took town the Twins our first shot after this and then got Anu'barak in 2 tries once our druid tank decided to avoid the debuff from the scarab adds during phase 2.

I havn't read anything exceptionally concrete so far. Save our healers!

Make sure all the enemies have big marks over their head, and any time a healer sees an unsnared melee moving towards them start running away and yell for a peel. There's really nothing more to it than that. The "I got instagibbed" comments, at least from my own guild, tend to come from people who are completely oblivious to mobs until they're right on top of them. That isn't RNG, that's a lack of spatial awareness.