10 most difficult bosses in TBC

[Skandranon]

Just curious, what did you find difficult about Mother Shahraz? When we attempted her it took 3 tries and literally 20 minutes. But i am certain there were changes made to that encounter that made it quite trivial for us. We went in to that encounter with 325+ SR every member of the raid so we were well prepared.

Mother Shahraz, 2.1 release version, was one of the worst (quite possibly the worst) raid encounter ever designed. Right now she's pretty pushover, like Tidewalker difficulty, and I'm happy about that, but I can see how people who never saw the old version don't understand.

Let's go into why 2.1 release Shahraz sucked so much.

Beam selection: The current Shahraz selects a new beam from among four every 3 beams. The old Shahraz reselected every 5. The major issue here is that long streaks of the mana burn beam can basically end your attempt. Ten mana burn beams in a row is 10000 mana burned off at least some of your healers, and no one can absorb that kind of burn in a short period of time. Obviously, over time, one-quarter of the beams being mana burn is acceptable since over that long period of time, regen and mana potions and shadow priests etc. have time to get your mana back up. Ten in a row right at the start is lethal.

The old Shahraz, if she had selected mana burn beam, had a 25% chance to do five more right after her first five, making it ten in a row. The current Shahraz reselects every 3, so to get 10 in a row after mana burn is selected once is a 1.5625% chance. A 1.5625% chance to wipe the raid is exponentially better than a 25% one. (The old Shahraz had, as well, a 6.25% chance to beam mana burn 15 times in a row, whereas the new one's chances of doing that are negligibly small.)

Fatal Attraction damage: A fact that is moderately well-known is that the first tick of Fatal Attraction occurs instantly as the debuff is applied: in other words, there's no way to avoid the first tick, and unless you have godlike reflexes, you're not avoiding the second tick either. Nowadays, the first tick does 750 shadow damage, and the second does 1500, scaling up to 3000 by the fourth tick and staying 3000 thereafter. In 2.1 release, Fatal Attraction damage was 3000 per tick, period. The first two unavoidable ticks were 3000 each instead of 750/1500. Across the three FA'ed players, that's the difference between 18000 raid damage in 2 seconds and 6750 raid damage in 2 seconds.

This difference only grows if Fatal Attraction teleports people on top of other people, since non-FA'ed players take damage from all three FAs. Then it becomes the difference between 18000 damage and 6750 damage per player teleported upon. Needless to say, if you got an FA port on top of your main tank or on top of your main tank healers, it was an instant wipe, no matter how well you'd played up to that point. Simply, the two ticks of FA that people are most likely to take did 4x and 2x damage, respectively, in 2.1 release. If you weren't topped up and were selected for FA, a single bad resist roll meant that you would die effectively instantly, before you or anyone else could react. Finally, Prayer of Mending, the clear best way to heal this damage now, treated Fatal Attraction as a "friendly" effect and did not trigger.

Saber Lash immunity: In 2.1, Saber Lash failed to confer immunity to Fatal Attraction and Sinister Beam if the Saber Lash did not hit the target. Contrast now, where merely being targeted by Saber Lash is sufficient. The two offtanks had to turn their backs to Mother Shahraz in order to avoid accidentally dodging or parrying Saber Lash (incidentally increasing the heal load of this fight significantly). The main tank had no such recourse; furthermore, even with backs turned, there was a ~7% chance that Saber Lash would simply miss an offtank.

Where Sinister Beam, the vertical knockback, was concerned, this meant that Shahraz could Sinister Beam the main tank, knock him vertically into the air, and then Saber Lash him mid-air for the full amount (76000-84000 damage), instantly wiping the raid. Alternatively, she could Sinister Beam a missed offtank, Lashing the remaining two for sufficient spike damage to generally kill both. Or she could bounce both offtanks if both had been missed, and then Lash the main tank to death.

Similarly, a missed Saber Lash could cause deaths by way of Fatal Attraction. Shahraz cannot FA the main tank, but if an offtank was missed, she could and did teleport them away and Lash the remaining two tanks for lethal damage. In the worst case, and I observed this once, both offtanks had been missed and she teleported both away before Lashing the main tank for the full amount and death. The only workaround for the Sinister Beam portion was to pin all three tanks underneath a couch so they could not be knocked vertically very far; there was no workaround at all for having a tank ported away.

Fatal Attraction teleport locations: The workaround for Sinister Beam described above leads to the next point: Fatal Attraction could teleport people inside benches, trees, pillars, and other objects, rendering you immobile and therefore incapable of escaping FA, consequently leading to death for all concerned. Pinning the tanks under a couch often led to people who got teleported into the couch to kill all the tanks as well as themselves.

Adaptive Prismatic Shield: Nowadays, Shahraz randomly selects an element and takes -25% damage from it, and gives a bonus of +25% to the opposite element. In 2.1, Prismatic Shield was adaptive, stacking -10% damage debuffs (up to 90%) depending on how much of which element's damage she was struck by, and granting no bonus whatsoever.

What this meant was that Warlocks and Shadow Priests typically by way of dots and damage built her Shield up to -90% shadow damage taken and left it bouncing around -50% to -90% thereafter. She calculated and shielded elements independently, meaning that if she was hit with a lot of shadow, fire, and nature damage, her next shield phase would be -90% to all three. It was possible for her to have a -90% shield to every element. What this meant was that shadow priest mana returns were cut to about one-sixth of what they usually are and that casters of all kinds suffered an average 60-70% drop in DPS. That meant that the fight took about 50% longer than it does now, which is more strain on healers, and more chances for one of the many above things to go wrong and instantly wipe the raid.

I have above described at least seven independent ways for Shahraz to instantly wipe the raid regardless of level of execution. You also needed good execution to survive every survivable FA with the damage levels that high. What it meant was that you needed to match up a perfect-execution run with a run where none of the random ways to wipe the raid occurred, and that made Shahraz painfully, agonizingly difficult. All of these issues were corrected or significantly reduced in severity in 2.2, leading to the current Shahraz, and as much as I, as a bleeding-edge raider, occasionally resent the nerfs applied to raid content, I really have no problem with what was done to Shahraz, because no one should have to go through that.