Momma Mia!

We had already passed out the Mother gear, and Black Temple was going to reset the next day, and we had a little time left, so we figured we would go ahead and see what Mother’s trash looked like.

This time the door was well and truly open.
Our first issue was the Sisters of Pleasure and Pain. These are mobs that come together. On every pull we would lose at least one if not two tanks on these mobs. Is there some trick we didn’t know about to not get killed fighting them?

The whole Mother area is reminiscent of Maiden of Virtue’s area in Karazhan with similar Succubus type mobs.

Mother’s trash contains several AoE type pulls. The challenge is nearly every mob in these pulls has a stun. I would pick them up with Consecrate, and use Retribution Aura and Holy Shield to try to hang on to them, and then have to get the refresh of my abilities off in-between the stuns.

There was a scary moment when I went into pick up the group, but they got a stun off before I could get my Consecrate out.

“Honors, put your Consecrate down”, our new Holy Paladin (Welcome to Dominion!) said.
“I’m working on it!” was my calm and measured reply.

Yeah, a couple of mobs got loose on that pull. I might need to drop some gold on some Free Action potions.

My favorite trash mob had to be the mini Mothers. They look just like the four arm demons that walk around Blackheart’s room in Shadow Labs. What they do is put a debuff on your that has a chance of making you do 10% more damage and healing, and making your grow.

Huge Tree is huge.

I guess Fares wants Mother to pick on someone her own size.

It was funny to see our teammates suddenly the size of Boss mobs. It was nice break to the tension and pretty fun. Well done to whatever designer thought of that dynamic.

Finally we were ready to face down Mother Sharaz herself. A poster on the MainTankadin boards explained that Mother is a 2 Phase fight. The first Phase is gathering up literally hundreds of Hearts of Darkness to make resist gear for the entire raid. Phase 2 is actually fighting her. He felt Phase 1 was the more difficult phase to get through.

My job was to help offtank Mother by soaking Saber Lash. If you’ve ever done Lynx Avatar in Zul’Aman, you’ve seen Saber Lash, because he has the exact same move. Whereas Lynx’s Saber Lash is split over 2 tanks, Mother’s hits up to 3.

In between Saber Lashes, I would throw a Flash of Light or two.

Mother has a Chromatic Aura which gives here less damage from one school, for example Frost, while giving her more damage from another school, for example Fire. I would wait until she was taking extra damage from Holy, then I would drop my Consecrate, and hit her with Exorcism provided I wasn’t silenced.

Yes, every now and again she does an annoying Silence to everyone within 30 yards of her.

But that’s not her worst trick. From time to time she ports three people together, and they start doing Shadow damage to each other until they are far apart from each other.

We had everyone install a mod that would put symbols over their heads. What was described over vent was that arrows would appear to show you what way to run. That wasn’t entirely accurate. One person would get a skull over their heads. A skill is white and white means run west. Another would get a square. Square meant run south. The third person would get an X which would mean run east.

Of course everyone forgot what the different symbols meant and ran the same way, sometimes even towards the tanks.

We tried a couple of times, but ended up losing either the Main Tank or one of the offtanks.

Each time we improved. We went from 80% on the first pull to 30% on the second pull. It was getting late and our Raid Leader was concerned about pushing the raid, but we really wanted another shot at her.

So we pulled ‘one last time’.

The attempt was going well. I used every trick in my book. Moroe’s Lucky Pocket Watch, my Healthstone, and my Health pot were all on cooldown. At 20%, Vlad (Warrior offtank) switched stances and popped Recklessness. I made her my primary Flash of Light target. I kept Consecrate going as much as I could between silences. The damage from Saber Lash kept my mana pool nice and full.

And Mother Sharaz fell. 7/9 Black Temple.
Amazingly, we had gotten two progression kills in one night!

We checked the loots: 2 Conquerors and 1 Vanquisher. I felt really bad for my coTanks (both Warriors), however, I was really excited because I was about to get a Conqueror token.
Our loot system gives priority to our Main Tanks and Main Healers on Tier tokens. It means Vlad and I defer nearly every tanking upgrade to Kee, but at the same time we get our Tier tokens. The whole idea behind the system is to make future kills smoother so everyone gets any piece of gear they want.
I remember the drama caused when I received my Tier 6 gloves, but now we can't hardly give the token away.

As soon as the raid was over, I took the port to Shattrah and headed to Lower City and took the port to Caverns of Time. I grabbed two Empyrean Sapphires from the bank and cut them to +15 stam.

Compared to my Tier 5 Shoulders, it’s a nice increase in both Health and Armor, with a little added Spell Damage. I give up miniscule amounts of mana and spell crit from slightly less intellect. I lose less than a point of defense. The change in avoidance is from the gemming. I had Dodge and Stamina gems in my Tier 5 because of the Stamina socket bonus, but I went with pure Stamina in Tier 6 because I don’t care about a +3 dodge rating socket bonus.
So here is the new look Honorshammer.
Now it’s time for me to start reading up on Illidari Council!! I can't believe how close we are to the ultimate goal, Illidan Stormrage!