Last night we had our second full night trying twin emps and got them to sub 50% a few times. Mainly failing due to poor healer movement and a lot of blizzards or a 1 off mistake.

We are however a little worried that changes to dps and tanking will make this fight a lot harder in 2.0. We use the warrior battle shout method with all mages dpsing and warlocks plus 1 warrior on the bugs.

My 3 questions are

1. Do the changes to hunters reduce their dps here by much? ie no arcane shot(is immune?), nerfed aimed shot, no multi shot(bug agro), no pet(40 person reset).

2. Can mages still dps much, using battle shout tanking on caster emp with the new battle shout changes.

3. Do any other fights seem noticably easier/harder? (other than for extremely obvious reasons such as decursive breaking)

We would like to enter Naxx if twin emps have taken a heavy up turn in difficultly we only raid 3 nights a week so wasting time is a big deal for us.

If you believe RnD most of NAxx is pretty broken right now too, certainly Raz, and Patchwerk are spawning threads of their own.

This is probably wrong, but some Warrior told me the more people buffed by the Battle Shout, the more threat generated, you could just make sure the Warrior tanking is in a group which will be near him the whole time to take the buff.
Like i say, it could be bullshit.

I really doubt "BS tanking" will still be possible.

you don't even need to do the shouts to warrior tank the caster. the proximity aggro when teleporting in is easily enough to stay above the healers until he ports out again. even without -aggro talents, bos or TA totem. ofc you can not dps him much. but having melee + hunters on the melee twin is plenty of dmg.

Why? The closest player to the Twin at the port will still be given a ton of threat. Even if BS only gave a very small amount of threat it should still be possible to hold agro with it, just tell your casters to only cast 1 spell at the Caster Twin, or not at all if your melee/hunter dps is enough.

Just seems like a nudge towards Warlock tanks. Yes you can probably still do it with Warriors via Teleport aggro, but it'll severely gimp your caster dps on Vek'lor, whereas those that do it with Warlocks won't notice any difference at all (except potential mage aggro snafu's)

I once watched a video of a Warrior melee tanking the Caster Emp as normal, it was crazy, i guess you could still do that.

We've always done this. Also if you're Horde you can give the warrior Flametongue totem.

Vek'lor does much less damage at melee range than at a distance. It's just spikier with Burst, but you quickly get a feel for healing through that. If a tank has >9k hp and has alert healers, Vek'lor at melee range is trivial, and fun from a healing perspective. Also it means neither warrior ever moves, neither emp ever moves. It makes things nice and stable.

We do basically what Gurg said, no dps on Vek'lor. We have the rogues/hunters pack it up from side to side and keep on Vek'nilash and the mages/warlocks handle the big bugs that come up. Unless something has changed on their side making them do more damage or something crazy (I wouldn't be surprised given Blizzard's track record with random bugs in random fights) I don't see why this fight would be any easier/harder.

How about coating weapons with stuff like shadow oil and fiery weapon enchants? Would those also let the warrior do a tiny amount of damage on Vek'lor?

I'm pretty sure they would yeah, the thunderfury proc does damage to Vek'lor, but you have to be careful since they made aoe effects like that aggro neutrals.

Heh, yeah, we had our tanks pack away their thunder furies for that very reason. Guess we'll have a shot at it with those swords back out :s

Judging raid dps at this point is sort of futile. A ton of people will have suboptimal specs, and have lost their macros and uis. I'd expect a 5-20% raid dps drop just from that, depending on how much they relied on macros/ui in the first place, and how good they are at theorycrafting. Give it two weeks and they'll be close to their potential again.

After doing emps tonight, yes it is harder to do dps on them. Especially if you don't use a warlock tank, due to the battle shout nerf and aimed shot nerf. Hunters are pretty much using auto-shot and that's it. Casters aren't dpsing emps at all (if so, extremely minimal). We took over 13 mins to kill them. To give you an idea of our regular dps, c'thun was 38% after the first vuln.

did them yesterday with 5 hunters, 3 rogues and 4 warriors (2-3 fury). if you have much less then that amount of physical dmg in your raid, your setup is badly fucked up i guess. btw 2 of those hunters were alts along with 2 of the warriors and had the appropiate gear (one hunter with blue gun, one with mc bow, one warrior with 2% dodge BWL axe etc) and we still killed them around 12-13 minutes without doing caster dps.

i was in another guild where we used to warlock tank them, its just much harder and a lot more stuff can go wrong imo. warrior tanking is simple + effective, wouldn't try anything else really.

we also do it this way as alliance, works easy enough... when we started we had to stack melee but now it doesnt matter much