So, on maybe Saturday or Sunday we decided to take a swing at Shadow Labrynth. Some of the demons have a pile of life. The first boss is a pretty fun fight. We get to Blackheart and on EVERY MC 2-3 people disconnect. Some at the beginning, some at the end. After 15 minutes, he's at 90%, our mages are wanding, I've been able to tank him for about 3 minutes, and we're pissed off. We leave him and go work on Shattered Halls. From what I've read, a lot of people had similar issues. I went over the last couple days to a couple resources to dig up the cause of the disconnects. Last night, utilizing some of the tips, we beat him in about 15-20 minutes with 0 disconnects. We lost a mage to a quick charge -> MC to 3 of us pounding him. So, essentially, we 4 manned it. If you stay online, he's actually not too rough if a slow kill. A group with hunters/rogues/less mana dependent DPS will likely do it faster. So, did the patch fix him or did the tips help?

Tips I read:
1. The DC is caused by a large surge of UI info after the MC. Don't queue up a ton of moves during or just after the MC.
2. Disable addons - specifically things with shared channels like SWS/CTRraid that will update your whole party after the MC.

We had 0 disconnects the entire fight. Either the tips are excellent or the fight is fixed. Anyone still getting DCs post 2.0.6?

We just fought him (or zerged him, dont ask) and had 0 disconnects. no one was doing anything special either,so i assume he is indeed fixed.

The MC-disconnect bug appears to be fixed, in general. After power running Sethikk Halls and Shadow Labs ~8 times yesterday, we had no disconnects to MC totems or Blackheart. Disconnects when zoning still occasionally occur, but that may be tied to server stability (extremely laggy in Outlands, during primetime) when transferring character data between zones/server instances.

I thought he was more fun with the bug :( pretty trivial now

15 Minutes for a 5-man boss? What on earth? And I thought Sethekk Halls was fun. Definitely looking forward to this one =)

Was there a hotfix for anything recently besides the Khorium issue that they could've snuck a fix for this in with?

They fixed a forming party disconnect and some other stuff. It might be related to it in UI information flux capacity. This boss shouldn't take 15 minutes, but I do about 100 dps while tanking and 1 mage with 0 mana and 1 dead mage don't do much more. The other 2 people were paladins. I expect kill times to go down significantly with different group make-ups or approaches.

LOL, it will probably give you a DirecTV pitch while in your next instance run :)

He seems fixed, none of our group knew he was and he died in about 2 minutes without any DC's to the MC. Pretty dull fight really, kind of like the rest of shadow labs.. :(

We killed him early yesterday,no disconnects. On slightly offtopic,this is one of the funnest fights ive ever come across,right up their with C'thun.

Edit: He's fun due to the group MC. Not only was the Ai smart enough to howl of terror and coil my buddies,but i dotted their ass up with siphons.

Worked fine for us -- didn't down him but we had no idea what to expect. We didn't really have an optimal group composition for it I think. But it's SO fun.

As it stands, the fight seems a bit too luck based. Soon enough we'll have proper specs and better gear and he'll be trivial, but with 68-70 mixed groups and levelling specs, the whole fight rests on what abilities he decides to use. The first couple of tries tonight he blew all my mana with holy nova on each MC (with no players nearby) and did some strong damage with the mage. On the last attempt he just made my smite a bit, so it ended up being easy.

We wiped a few times before telling our mage to be a good dog and sit in the corner on the opposite side of the room.

Seeing a combustion mage charge a pyroblast then blink in an dragons breath and two shot half the party earned lots of rawr

Went with a destruction lock and a full fire mage last night. They took out our paladin two wipes in a row, then the tank in the next one, then thankfully each other in the attempt we killed him. Much easier with rogue/warr/pally all doing bugger all damage to each other when mc'd :P

I spent each time MC'd spamming either flamestrike or blizzard, on myself. Once I did toss a pyro at a locks felguard though. Having your tank kill your only healer sucks. Well technically I think he came out of the MC at ~3% HP and got gibbed by the boss, NS being used during the MC of course.

Entertaining fight to say the least. :D

Entertaining or just hopelessly random and annoying. Have your pick.

I have a feeling that I won't truly enjoy the boss until we outpower it so much that the MC will just be hilarity instead of a potential random wipe.

That could be it as well, we lost the druid and just burned the rest of the boss down. Don't get me wrong, this will proboly be annoying when we run in for the 50th time, but right now it's fairly amusing.

My recent experiences with MC include spamming my error frame with "You must have ammo equipped in the paperdoll slot"

Resto druids in tree-form are easily the best healers for this fight, as the AI won't cast any beneficial spells (all they can cast). So they just sit there and don't run OOM like all the other casters - makes the fight more trivial than it already is.

Unless you also have a warlock, as I learned the hard way.

Bring rogues. Every time I've been MC'd the AI has popped CoS and I break it.

It really feels like the AI is scripted to use all of your abilities with the longest cooldowns. Whenever I get MC'd, I pop rapid fire, deterrance, and volley. Maybe it thinks long cooldown means the most powerful!

You never noticed this before? That's exactly what it does, though it may have gotten a bit less stupid in TBC (maybe?). That's why having Intimidating Shout up is deadly in MC fights -- it's a long cooldown and always one of the first to go. Similarly, MC'd orcs will tend to use Blood Fury (2min cooldown) consistently, shamans favor chain lightning over lightning (it has a cooldown), etc.