Clipping Sindragosa’s wings

Wednesday night my guild took down Sindragosa on about the seventh attempt of the night. I made several tweaks to the strategy (as I detailed in a previous post) which I think made the difference. That is, in addition to the experience we had built up the last two times we faced down this frosty dame. Here’s how we did it:

Pre-Game

I used AVR to around a scene of seven meshes. I’ll go into further detail on how to do this in a future post, though it’s pretty simple. Put five raid symbols on the stairs–skull, cross, triangle, square, and circle–and arrange them with three in the front and two in the back. Put 10 yards between each symbol. You can test distance by drawing one and having someone stand in it, moving 10 yards away (checking a proximity detector to confirm distance) and then dropping a new symbol.

We also put two green circles out on the main floor. This is where people would be dropping frost beacons in phase 3. More on that in a bit, of course.

Sidenote: When people are positioning themselves on AVR-drawn objects, make sure they pan their cameras straight down. Because the stairs are on an angle the AVR meshes don’t sit well on them, kind of float, and can look like they’re in a different spot if viewed at a weird angle. Just pan the camera down and they’ll be in the right place for everyone.

Phase 1

When picking up Sindragosa you want her sitting on top of the west-east line that crosses the area horizontally. When she’s coming down stand in the southwest corner of the circle and swing around to hopefully position her in the proper place.

You melee want to stand at max melee range (to prevent getting Tail Swiped) and your ranged want to park themselves directly behind your melee. The reason ranged need to be so close is because when everyone gets sucked in for Blistering Cold, those that are farthest away are going to land after everyone else does, and thus have less time to run away from the aftershock. The closer the ranged are the bigger their headstart is.

Likewise, if you find your raid is having trouble running out of Blistering Cold there are two tricks you can use to give them some breathing room. Have a warlock put Curse of Tongues on Sindra, and the cast time for Blistering Cold will go from 5 seconds to 6.5. Also, when everyone lands, have a hunter turn on Aspect of the Pack, and then quickly turn it off right before the spell hits everyone. We had issues with some slower people and coupling those two changes made a world of difference keeping everyone alive after a Blistering Cold.

Also, I noticed that when Curse of Tongues is up, Sindra won’t lunge forward after casting Blistering Cold like she usually would.

Phase 2

After a period of time, Sindra will go up in the air and mark five people to be turned into ice blocks. We had DBM enabled on a raid assist and that threw up marks on each of those five players. They then ran to their respective spots as delineated by AVR.

Everyone else who was no marked was instructed to run to the wall of the stairs and hug that spot until the blocks went up. As soon as blocks formed we jumped in, knocking down the back two blocks, then the front three. You’ll find the farther apart the blocks are, the harder it will be to get them down in time. Splash damage goes a long way in this phase.

As the tank I was watching the timer while dpsing my own private block. Sindra casts four frost bombs and as soon as that fourth one hits you want to run out into the wider area and prepare to pick Sindra up and position her like you did when first aggroing her. Remember: on top of the east-west line is ideal.

Rinse and Repeat

Phases 1 and 2 will cycle until you hit 35%. For this reason you probably want to use Bloodlust/Heroism right off the bat, to get the best and most use of it, and hopefully restrict the fight to no more than three air phases. More than that and you’ll have Enrage timer issues.

Phase 3

This is where the fight gets interesting. Sindra will stay permanently grounded, but you’ll still get a frost beacon regularly. For this purpose we have those dots on the floor past the stairs. That’s where you want beaconed people to run and drop their block. Everyone else should be parked on the north-south line to avoid being caught in a chain block.

Have two to three dual wielding melee (we used two rogues and a frost DK) to be on permanent block duty. They’re going to have issues dpsing Sindra thanks to Chilled to the Bone, so we maximized raid dps by having the blocks demolition crew occupy themselves with that task while the rest of the raid only used the blocks to drop their Mystic Buffet stacks.

Train your dps and heals to watch the timer of Mystic Buffet, which has an 8 second duration, so that they can just park themselves next to a block and continue to dps or heal, and only break LOS when they have 2-3 seconds left on their timer. Once the timer expires, if LOS’d, they’ll drop their Buffet stacks. They might as well continue to dps/heal because just hiding behind the block and twiddling their thumbs won’t make Mystic Buffet fall off, the debuff has to tick to 0 first.

Phase 3 is not a dps race, it’s an endurance test. If your raid panics and starts blowing cooldowns you’re going to get chain blocks and wipe. Just reassure them to pay attention, exercise situational awareness, and always stand in the middle if they’re not dropping a block or their stacks. Slow and steady wins the race.

As for Frost Resist

I made everyone in raid wear two pieces so we could work on surviving to the end of the fight. On the sixth attempt we reached my big goal: wiping to the enrage timer. The seventh attempt we killed Sindra with a few seconds left on the timer (although, funnily enough we were 24 manning it because one guy had to go pick up his daughter–I never expected that to be the attempt).

Now I think next week, since everyone has seen a kill, we can dial that back to one piece of FR and probably none in a few cases. I’ll let the healers make that call.

Personally, I wore Belt and Boots again for little more than 300 FR. I’m happy with damage intake with that number.

Aftermath

Killing Sindragosa was a huge morale boost for the guild. We’d been kinda stuck on her for the last two weeks and now that she’s down I’m sure the next kill will be a lot easier.

After dropping her I was so happy to be able to lead the raid up to the Lich King. At that point we were mostly farting around, without much effect (although Phase 1 is kinda down now, haha) but I was just happy to let everyone see the fight and the area. There was much “ooing and ahing” from those that aren’t party to my 10man runs.

Somehow I need to figure out how to finagle the schedule so we can get some meaningful attempts on Arthas every week. I suppose if we start three shotting Sindra every week that’ll be about two hours every Wednesday to learn him. That could work.

Moreover, the guild’s designated Shadowmourne person completed the last of the Unholy/Blood/Frost quests and will start collecting shards next week. Very exciting!