We've only had one session on Faerlina, so I wanted to ask a few questions of people that have done this more times if I may.

I'll start out by saying that we have definitely have the raid DPS to take down Faerlina in three worshippers, and our tanks don't have a problem staying up for the entire fight. Where we're having a problem is working on the exact mechanics of Faerlina's enrage ability.

We feel fairly comfortable with MCing the first worshipper at 50 seconds into the encounter, and sacrificing it once Faerlina enrages. What we're unclear on, is when to mind control the next worshipper. The guide we're using states that it should be MC'd at 1:50, but we're assuming that that mechanics work as follows:

1) If Faerlina's uses her enrage ability, she has a cooldown of thirty seconds before she can use it again
2) Just because her enrage ability is off cooldown, doesn't mean she'll use it - this is what makes her enrage random
3) When you sacrifice a worshipper, it debuffs Faerlina with Widows Embrace which removes enrage and prevents it from being cast for 30 seconds. Silences nature spells for 30 sec. Reduces casting speed by 25%.
4) Therefore, if you debuff Faerlina with Widow's Embrace before she enrages, then her enrage ability is not on cooldown. She is only prevented from enraging due to the debuff, and so, when the debuff wears off after 30 seconds, she is able to enrage.
5) If however, you wait until she enrages, and then debuff Faerlina, she is debuffed for 30 seconds, and her enrage does not start to cooldown until the debuff is off, giving you a total of 60 seconds where she cannot enrage.

Therefore, would it not be more accurrate to say that the second MC should be done at around 1:53 - 1:55, bearing in mind that it's going to take the priest around one or two seconds to react, and that Faerlina is not going to enrage immediately after having her enraged ability available?

Are our assumptions in 1 - 6 correct please?

I always start casting MC 50 seconds after the last time I needed to use Widow's Embrace. So 3 seconds later I'm MCing, then a second or two walking up to Faerlina, then I start punching her with my add and wait for Enrage.

Fairly foolproof, even in the cases that I got hit by 2 poison volleys while casting I've usually been able to keep control until she enrages and I use Widow's Embrace. I'll add that I'm known to be a 'lucky bastard' when it comes to MC reliability by our other Priests though.

As far as I consider it your assumptions are, thus, correct.

I don't agree with 1 and 6, but it's really just semantics. I think she has a 60 second cooldown on her enrage, it amounts to the exact same thing. Since you only have one way of removing her enrage, there's no way to find out. However, I would think it an odd and unlikely move that her cooldowns are not counting down while affected by widow's embrace.

Remember that all your melee near Faerlina is getting hit by it as well, but they are not affected by any cooldown issues. It could be targetted only at enrage of course. It just seems too much hassle from a programming point of view to do this, when you could reach the exact same behavior in a much simpler way.

What are your problems though? Why do you need to understand her enrage beyond what you already have?

Ah, missed part of your post. Well, 1:50 is just a number thrown out there. You should have figured this out by yourself. She can enrage at the earliest at 2:00 and by that time you NEED to have a worshipper close to her, the closer you can make it with the entire MC + walking there + casting widow's embrace, the better. Mind Control is a 3 second cast, 1 second for orienting yourself in MC and 3 seconds to walk to Faerlina and 0.5 for casting it ... roughly 7.5 seconds to be safe? Experiment if you want, but it is possible to save a few seconds if you truly want to but I don't see why. In my experience Faerlina activates her enrage quickly after it goes off cooldown, so I wouldn't say there's much reason to optimize when you mind control. Just make sure your mind controller has +3% to spell hit.

Not exactly. The cooldown on her Enrage is 60 seconds. Widow's Embrace silences her for 30.

So, if you Sacrifice immediately after Enrage, she's silenced for 30 seconds, and then unsilenced (but cannot) Enrage) for 28-29 seconds, then she can Enrage at any point. If you Sacrifice pre-emptively, Enrage does not go on cooldown, and you she can Enrage as soon as silence wears off.

Sounds about right. If I'm reading your post correctly, it sounds like you may be having problems keeping the tank up through an enraged attack or two - one thing you may want to try would be to sac a couple of the adds early, for some extra calm in the middle of the fight (if in fact you do have the DPS for a 3 worshipper kill), either that or have your tank Lifegiving/Last Stand/Shield Wall at each enrage point to give you some breathing room.

We ran into kinda this problem two days ago on our second kill...

On our first pull we started off by silencing her, np there.

At the 50 second mark our priest MC's an add... Stands it by Faerlina...

60 second... Nothing.
65... Nothing...
70... Nothing...
75... MC on add breaks (Priest is wearing like +10 hit, but had held it for 23 seconds or so)
78 (or so)... ENRAGE

I tanked with SW for 10 secs, but the MC'ing priest got pummeled by his add (warrior fuckup). We should have been able to fix it, but fucked up a tad and whiped.

But still. It took just over 18 seconds (longest we've seen) from the enrage timer should be up til when she used it.

The try after it worked more or less like normal (enrage within 5-10 secs of the timer) and we downed her... Alltho i went down at last enrage and we had to burn her down tankless the last 19 or so % :p

In all honesty i hate the fucking random factor on both this and Instructor... Earlier same night on Instructor we had 2 adds back-to-back break inside 10 seconds (yes, +4 to hit, like 5 yards away from priests and alike)... The 2 remaning were ofcourse still debuffed and so we wiped.

Fucking moronic to rely on MC holding X seconds for an encounter to work imho.

Thanks for your responses guys.

Hamlet, I think that sounds about spot on - thanks for clarifying.

Dargoth - our MT is pretty well equipped (full wrath, AQ shield, AQ cloak, BWL trinkets), but you're right, he was going down simply because Faerlina wasn't being silenced fast enough.

I think we've got enough to work with here - fingers crossed for tonight

How would you debuff her with her own mallet?

Bonk her on the head with it until she calms down? BAD FAERLINA, BAD!

We had tried Faerlina with similar strategies to the above, but as our particular raid at the time was DPS heavy we thought we'd try the zerg approach.

2xOT's on the followers, leave them alone for the duration of the fight, tanked at the wagon.
OT's on the worshippers, tanked by the web-wall.
1xMT on Faerlina, tanked at the platform.

Keep her silenced and non-enraged and burnt her down. We used shield wall, life-giving gem, then tank went down, I evasion tanked for the 15 seconds, died horribly and at that stage we'd only lost 2-3 people (being MT and rogue + 1 other). Easy burn for the last 1-2% while she one-shotted the mage across the other side of the room.

Burn down the 2 followers, collect epics.

Edit: Noticed that Alexmeria posted same thing.

We do it every 30 seconds, but then our DPS is abnormally high.

True or false: The length of the period of time over which an Enrage is possible is greater than the duration for which one Mind Control can be reliably sustained?

Also, are we sure the cooldown is actually exactly 60 seconds? I could swear there are times when it goes off earlier than it's supposed to, and that makes the timing issue even worse.

Our MC'er usually casts with just over 10 seconds to go. Last night, on our first attempt, Faerlina waited too long, MC broke, and we wiped. Next attempt, I told him to cast it later ("the tank will have it waiting right next to Faerlina for you--just cast right before 60s to give yourself as much time as possible.") And of course, she goes before he's ready. Many people in the raid reported that it looked like 57s or so, based on both the LV timer (which I think triggers on PLAYER_REGEN_DISABLED), and an RDX timer which triggers when Faerlina first targets a raid member.

After that, we just got annoyed and blew it early 2 times. But it was messy--we ran out of time at 3% and zerged her down. So I'm really interested in how other groups handle the uncertainty in the timing.

One thing to keep in mind there is this: Was that on the first enrage, or one of the later enrages? It could be that her first enrage follows different rules from the latter ones, since technically for the first enrage there should be no cooldown ticking. I haven't seen it happen before her Enrage timer yet, nor have I seen it happen more than ~10 seconds after the timer was up, but my experience is limited with only 2 kills under my belt.

I could see sort of countering it by MCing a second add after 15 seconds of MCing the first so you have a backup add and blowing the last Widow's Embrace early.

Yes it gets very annoying when she has to "decide" when to enrage after her cooldown ends. We once had an MC up and ready to silence her awaiting her enrage and of course RoF + poison proceeded to own our MCing priest while he was holding it. Theres nothing like that randomness of an encounter to drive you bonkers.

I have seen enrage from 56 secs to 79 secs since the previous one.

Assuming the timers arent perfect we can call that a 20 second window, MC is in my experience stable upto 30 seconds. Starting the MC cast at 50 give me enough time to be in position for earliest enrage and enough channel time remaining to cope with a very late one. However if she hasnt enrage by 75 seconds I generally sac the add anyway as a break just as she enrages is very risky.

That said by far the most common times for enrage seem to be 60-65 seconds from the previous and the early/late ones are very much the rare occurance.

Goddamn, you just made my day.