That is correct. You wait out most of the timer when the first person has to bite another player in your raid.

One of the biggest mistakes is to let the 1st bite debuff run its almost full duration. The result of this action will be hitting enrage timer and wipe.

In order to reach the enrage timer, considering you run with 6 healers and a decent dps crew, is to have the bites occur as soon as they are available, thus pushing the last 8 bitting people phase earlier into the 330 seconds enrage timer mark.

We had to learn it the hard way and will be having our last 2 tries today with the correct changes to the raid and strategy.

You can't make a statement like that and make it sound like an absolute. While it may be true for your raid, raids with more capable DPS have no problem doing the first bite at the last second to reduce the problems with biting during the air phase.

I disagree.

It isn't a direct correlation between "waiting the first bite" -> hitting enrage timer.

Consider this, either way, if you bite "as soon as possible"; you WILL have to wait anyway during the first fear in 25man, or second fear in 10man.

Talking 25man, if your first vampire bite as soon as he get frienzed , more or less 1 minute later they will have to bite again and it happens almost *exactly* during the fear, meaning they spend their first four seconds running around feared and then 6 seconds running around searching a precise dpser ( if you assigned a precise bite order, which is likely).

Either way, at the very least you will delay 4 seconds on the second bite if you don't delay on the first bite, so subsequent bites will still be staggered.

If you still meet the hard enrage, it wont' be these 10 seconds to make difference, unless the wipe is on a very low percentage, I'm talking below 800k wipes.

If you meet the hard enrage above that, changing the bite order and/or moving to 5 healers and/or replace "low" dpser is more likely to make a difference than biting earlier on the first bite.

Suppose your average dpser do a sustained damage of around 7k, it mean that when bited he generates 7k more, the 10seconds difference assuming no other delay is at best 8people -> 560k damage.

At worst you "gain" *one* person, the second bitten one, because if the first vampire bite as soon as possible, the second bite is bound to be delayed by the fear, so subsequent bites carry on from that delay.

Change the bite order to have your top dpser bitten first, that is effective, or bring one less healer.

Safe net: mileage may vary, but in my experience if the hard enrage is on anything above <1%HP, the 10seconds "bite time" isn't what would make a difference.

This should not be an issue if you give fearward to the person who gets the first essence and (if he is not undead) to the person who is going to be bitten.

You would need 4 fearwards then, since at the time of the first fear, there are two vampires who have to bite two targets.

Yes of course you can also counter fear with one FW and a well placed tremor totem etc. but stalling the first bite for 8-10 seconds really accomplishes more or less the same and you can fearward healers to compensate for the whril damage.

Berserker rage and fear ward both do the trick and therefor a dps warrior is a good second bite target. For the two that are to be bitten. Either tremor totem or every man for himself work nicely if enough fear wards are not available.
At least in our experience waiting more than eight seconds before biting ran the risk of failing to bite. And the time you have to bite after she is done whirling was very short in an allready chaotic phase.

Both strategies should work, but the chaotic nature of the fear->aoe-splash makes me lean towards getting the bite out of the way early on so people can focus on spreading out.

If you then wait 7-10 seconds to bite the third time (4->8 vampyrs) you will buy yourself a few extra seconds after the second fear/whirl-phase.

Every guild should cater to their own strengths I suppose, and for us the raidkiller was the whirl-splashes.

This phase was the cause of the majority of our raid deaths as well. We attempted to ensure that we could mitigate as much raid damage as possible during this phase by chaining a pair of shadow aura mastery cooldowns together as well as situation four healers on each "point" on the circle in the center of the room, as well as having one healer stand in the dead center of the circle as our last healer went right up the throne platform to keep the melee up. We thought that having this healing placement would allow us to have at least two healers who could hit any given side of the room while the aura mastery effects helped shave off some of the constant shadow damage. While it did seem to help our healers manage the frenzy of healing somewhat, and the use of aura mastery helped the constant tick of raid damage, we still seemed to lose about four to five people each attempt. Is there someone here who really has this phase "down" who can illuminate me if something seems terribly wrong in this strategy? Has anyone experimented with having their pallys use divine sacrifice to help with this phase?

jarlelin, you mentioned that the boss will cast bloodbolts into the melee stack, regardless of the number of people in range. After looking through my weekend's logs, I can corroborate that claim, however we found that with about 10 people in melee range at all times (including tanks) one shaman with wild growth support from our druid was enough to keep all the melee DPS well-healed.

As another aside, if any guild is noticing that their mirror tank is taking shadow damage, we found that increasing shadow resist on the tank doesn't seem to help at all. We did find success in having our mirror tank stack stamina to the point that he lost some avoidance/mitigation and found that it made him easier to heal.

I was under the impression that Blood Bolts were physical damage, not shadow.

Edit: And it appears I was mistaken. Wowhead shows the damage as shadow. Huzzah, you may have just carried our raid through to a kill if we can go back in tonight.

We were working on her last night and at first struggled a bit with the OT. Our first few attempts earlier in the week had a feral as the OT, last night he wasn't available so we had a pally and a warrior. After some digging, it looks like the core damage the OT takes (mirror and delirious slash) aren't affected by pretty much any mitigation effect other than absorbs. So the OT can/should stack hp over pretty much all other tanking stats, since you can't seem to block/dodge/parry any of the OT-specific damage. Someone correct me if I'm wrong there, but that was what we observed last night while looking through logs between attempts (fwiw, we ended up having the prot warrior MT and the prot pally OT, relying on the warrior to mitigate as much damage as possible and the paladin with stam and Ardent Defender to aid in his survivial). This also points to a feral being somewhat ideal as the OT, as they (well, at least ours) tends to have higher health plus Savage Defense.

Looking through our logs, I found that not only melee are able to be targeted with bloodbolts, the tanks also can. While shadow resist gear can be used to reduce the incoming damage from it, it's probably easier to spread the tanks without breaking the blood mirror's link. I will suggest this to one of our 10 man tonight, see how it goes.