Unbearably HoT

For those folks who don’t know, Mother Shahraz is a six armed Shivan who chills out in the Den of Mortal Delights. She’s surrounded by a lot of annoying AOE trash comprised mainly of Charming Courtesans, Temple Concubines and Enslaved Servants, who, effectively, are her bitches. A few other scantily clad shivans roam the hallways in pairs and are aptly dubbed Sisters of Pain and Sisters of Pleasure. To that end, “More ho’s coming!” is something I hear far more often than maybe I’d like to while we’re pulling.

Mother Shitbox is not a difficult encounter: it’s an annoyance. It’s a resist fight. As if druids didn’t have enough gear, Blizzard thought it’d be fun to throw in a few fights (RE: Hydross, Shahraz, Illidan) that’d dredge up AQ40/MC/Vael frustrations memories. While I’ve read reports of raids going in with less than 365 shadow resist, making sure that every person in your raid reaches the resist cap should be a priority so that you’re not taxing an already stressed healer pool. Fortunately, reaching the resist cap doesn’t mean hounding the AH for Greens of Random Shadow Resist Boners as every armor class has an epic craftable SR set. The mats aren’t terrible, but all the pieces require multiple Hearts of Darkness, which only drop off of BT and Hyjal trash. At the rate <Singularity> plowed through content, we didn’t even have enough hearts to kit out our entire raid; we borrowed from <Drow> and <Juggernaut> just to be able to start attempts. Barring a lack of hearts, a crafted cloak, the Medallion of Karabor and a Shadow Resist buff should round everything out. The crafted pieces are there just for the resist: there’s only SR and STA on them, and if you’d like any other particular stat to make you less useless, you’ll have to get it enchanted. Enchanting a resist set that’s only used for one fight makes me want to kill puppies, so I threw on the cheapest chants I could find for an edge.

Of course, when I started coming in for the Shahraz fight, I was also resto. While I’m not generally one to admit that being a tree has its flaws, Shahraz is a miserable fight for druids. On one hand, slipping into ToL seems ideal: by reducing the cost of your HoTs, you’re combating the ongoing mana burns and increasing the healing done to your group. On the other hand, you’re poorly equipped for moving quickly if Shahraz casts Fatal Attraction on you. What’s that? Fatal Attraction is a spell Shahraz casts on 1-3 players that teleports them to a random location while simultaneously dealing over 2k AOE shadow damage a tick to everyone in the area. This means that as soon as you’re teleported you need to run in the opposite direction from everyone else (i.e. the other players who were teleported and whoever you’ve been teleported on top of) or you’ll essentially blow folks up. Unless you’re extremely quick and have excellent latency, being teleported in ToL, shapeshifting to either caster or cat form, and then peacing the fuck out probably takes half a second too long. Thus, being a resto druid on this fight means standing around like a retard in caster form and casting Lifebloom whenever you have the mana to do so.

This week, after we’d cleared through the bitches and ho’s, I prepared to swap out for someone else. My DPS as a feral druid is just above abysmal in the shadow gear, and as a tank, I can’t reach crit immunity wearing that junk. It’s funny how often you put blinders on when you raid in only one capacity for so long; though we’ve been farming BT and Hyjal for a few months now, I’ve only been in there as a healer. I know what I’m doing, but I’m relearning as I go through as a tank. Which brings me to my point. Despite my warnings that I wasn’t quite crit immune in the gear I was wearing (why yes, I did tank in pants enchanted with Silver Spellthread!), our raid leaders had me set up as one of the offtanks.

Shahraz requires three tanks: one wearing normal mitigation gear to function as the main tank, and two wearing SR gear to soak up the Saber Lash. If you’ve ever done the Lynx boss in Zul’Aman, you know what I’m talking about—Saber Lash is a frontal cleave attack that evenly distributes its damage across three targets. In Mother’s case, it also provides a temporary immunity from Fatal Attraction every time it hits, which prevents the tanks from being teleported all over the place. How much damage are we talking about? Oh, 75,000 or so. Obviously it’s a big deal if one of your offtanks goes down since the 75k will only be spread between two, rather than three, people. The MT takes it like a champ (dat bitch hits hard , yo) while the OT’s sit there and collect free epics. No, really. The OT’s run debuffs on the boss and then sit back and relax. Supposedly, normal parry mechanics (as in if she’s parried she would attack faster and therefore pummel the MT) don’t apply to Shahraz, but everyone’s rather unwilling to test it and risk wiping.

In my SR, flasked and wearing every piece of +DEF gear I had on me, I was sitting at about 21k raid buffed with a defense rating of 405. To be crit immune as a bear, you need 415 if you have all 3/3 SotF. The reason that I didn’t die or take massive amounts of spike damage was because, as I found out later, Saber Lash cannot crit. In fact, Shahraz doesn’t crush either, and that’s apparently because the massive amounts of shadow damage, intense physical damage inflicted on the MT and periodic mana burns was barely enough for healers to keep up with. Let’s take a look:

The majority of her damage output is, as expected, put out by Saber Lash, but if you follow along with each column above, you’ll notice that she doesn’t have any recorded crits at all. Below you’ll find a damage taken parse from our three tanks (myself included). Even with my DEF and AGI totally lacking in that gear, I still had an exceptional amount of health and a reasonably high AC as well. As you can see, I actually managed to mitigate more of the physical damage than the T6 geared warrior above me. I just kept up Demoralizing Roar (which overwrites a non Improved Demoralizing Shout) and Feral Faerie Fire; additionally, whenever my trinkets came up, I popped those (Adamantine Figurine for extra soak and Badge of Tenacity for overall AC gain and Heightened Reflexes) and when she enrages at 10%, hit my Bearwall (Frenzied Regeneration) to take the heat off the healers.

While I realize most tanks who’ve already been through the Shahraz fight probably know this stuff, don’t let anyone dissuade you from bearing down on her because you’re crittable in SR gear. I’ll have to check the parses from this coming week, but it seems as though feral druids would be the best overall choice for taking the Saber Lash; it makes sense—we best mitigate heavy physical damage.

Keep the pimp hand strong.