Was speaking with a GM last saturday, as half of my guild could pick up the quest on saturdays and the other half couldnt. As already mentioned, it is on a 4 day reset timer. However the GM said it was a bug which is being looked into and that it was possible that some adjustments would be made to level the field in regards to how many times players had completed it.

The GM didnt confirm this but said that it was possible that the emblems / rewards maybe adjusted once the bug is fixed. I asked wether people may lose emblems / gear already purchased and the reply was along the lines of, Its stuill being looked into.

Knowing blizzard, i doubt that they will take away items already bought with these excess of emblems but maybe they would give you a negative number until everyone is equal?

That's fairly significant in that it should de-sync the fear and the biting. It does mean the bite will occur during the whirl and that the "2 bites 2" could be painful for the person being bit. Although perhaps with a slight delay on first bite, you could bite after the whirl.

Dispersion is a true formless cloud again. Shadow priests everywhere rejoice.

[Corroded Skeleton Key] and [Purified Lunar Dust] got buffed, from 3200 absorption to 6400, and from 153 spellpower to 179.

The Mutated Abomination on the Putricide fight was updated a bit. The Regurgitated Ooze (the slowing debuff) now only costs 45 slime energy, down from 50, and also now incurs a normal GCD with itself, meaning you don't have to worry about shooting it twice accidentally and using up extra energy.

Saurfang has changed his mechanics; not sure if it's a bug or a stealth buff. He generates 5 blood power every 3 seconds now after he puts out his first blood boil (I can't tell if he's just getting more blood power from every tick of blood boil and it's ignoring our discipline priest's shields now, or if it's just a flat, constant gain). He also no longer seems to gain extra blood power from Marks (though I did confirm that Blood Nova, beast hits, and hits on a Runed tank still give him blood power). So it's no longer advantageous to just let people die, since you lose a person and heal him for 5% and the only benefit would be less strain on the healers on a fight that was already healing-light.

As we're a more casual guild, we struggled with him, but we finally got him down; he had 10 marks on people after about 6 minutes (one of them died, the other 9 the healers kept up). Again, I don't know if this is intended behavior or not for him, now.

Same thing happened with us. I really can't see that change being intentional.

Yeah, we ended up having to delay our first 2 sets of bites by about 8 seconds each to have a comfortable bite/air phase interaction.

having some difficulty with blood princes, we know the empowered vortex is now raid wide, easy to deal with. But there's something weird about the flames I can't quite put my hands on. What's the best way to deal with the empowered ball of flame?

Normal and Empowered Balls of Flame reduce damage the longer they are in the air. The spell details (which I cannot find at the moment) make it sound like the Empowered could also lose damage more rapidly if it procs the Empowered Flare damage by moving past another member of your raid.

The easiest solution is to just turn and run when you see your name in the raid warning. By the time the Empowered Ball catches you it should be much reduced - ideally to its minimum of 10k (which I believe is pre-resist).

We have the melee run alongside the ball in order to shrink it.

I believe distance is the only factor in reducing the empowered Inferno Orb's size. Or, at least, it's sufficient; we never have anyone run along with the ball.

If you read the spell details it very clearly states that damaging other people reduces its final impact damage.

Empowered Flare - Spell - World of Warcraft

Depending on positioning, your melee are reducing the size as it passes over them to get to a ranged person. I have see Empowered Inferno Orbs go to a ranged without passing over our melee clump and not reduce in size at all from travel distance (granted, it was rather sub-optimally kited). I've also seen it quite reduced just getting past the melee clump because it went over the melee and they were tightly packed.

Distance definitely reduces Empowered Ball of Flame damage. Whether it is the sole source of reduction is debatable, but we've had low damage inflicted when it picked a target already at good distance who managed to run immediately. It passed only 2 other players close enough to shoot at them and traveled approximately 3/4 of the entire room's width (the longest dimension - Prince was about 1/4 from the east wall and it hit victim as they reached west wall).

I personally suspect each flare to another player acts as a modifier on distance, reducing it to its minimum damage more rapidly.

Visual is an easy cue. It's large and grows smaller as it flies. It reaches a minimum size. Further kiting/splash damage should not reduce the end damage after that point.

We too have never had anyone intentionally chase - 10 or 25man.

It looks like it was intentional, but possibly tuned a bit harder than they'd like:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> 25 Saurfang OUT OF CONTROL - BUGGED

It seems Prot Pallies needed some tweaks:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Hp stealth nerf or bug?

For what that means, here is what someone posted:
A pally tank I know lost 131 stamina.

GC confirms intended changes. 4% loss of stam to pallies, 2% buff to DKs.

Devilsaurs were changed so that they would no longer gain in size when using Monstrous Bite. They should no longer be any more annoying than a normal BM pet.

It seems they fixed getting ridiculous amounts of [Love Token] from vehicle fights like Ulduar FL, Icecrown bombing or the jousting dailies.

At least for my guild, this spell ALWAYS had a seemingly unlimited range. I would purposefully make sure I was 40+ yards from the boss, standing off by myself, and I would still get hit by the initial ~7k damage and see the white whirling animation on myself every single time. When I would go back to look at the WoL report, on every single one of our attempts/kills, every single living person got hit by the initial damage (so it wasn't just me always taking the damage). This was also true for any random top kill I checked from WoL's ranking page during the first week the encounter was released.

I more or less just decided that everyone just assumed it had a 30 yard range based on Wowhead's data mined spell info, and that no one ever really bothered to double check in the game.

The range was indeed 30 yards. Pre-fix you could cheese the Princes encounter by sticking Valanar in the corner and having a "no one melee Valanar" policy. With no enrage timer, there wasn't a big reason to send all your melee in on him to potentially kill themselves on an Empowered Shock Vortex when you could just ignore that mechanic instead. We did our first kill this way, but we've sent melee in on him since then.

Edit: The enrage timer simply wasn't an issue, so no "practical" enrage timer. Also, the 30 yard limit was removed with the 3.3.2 IIRC, though it might have been sooner.