Sindragosa’s Frost Breath Post-4.0
I hope you all manage to put up with me for another week, because Rhidach’s on vacation yet again. Geez, does that guy ever raid?
Let’s talk about Sindragosa.
This fight has been massively buggy since 4.0. We’ve had some crazy issues- our first night raiding post-4.0, the 30% buff disappeared on us entirely. I’ve heard reports of tanks getting frost tombed, although we’ve never seen this, and supposedly it was hotfixed. Mystic Buffet debuff durations seem to be a few seconds longer than they should be in phase 3, which makes All You Can Eat a slightly larger pain in the ass than before. But doable.
The biggest bug, in my opinion, doesn’t seem to be a bug at all. I suspect the devs stealth buffed her breath. It’s a bit stinkier now.
Frost Breath Blues
Frost Breath is both the frontal cone attack and the 90 second attack and movement speed debuff that stacks on your main tank. In a pre-4.0 world, the debuff was just a very minor annoyance and fell off the MT by the end of each air phase. Now, it doesn’t. It appears to last about 20 seconds longer than each air phase.
I’ve seen a bunch of different explanations for why this is happening, ranging from “the debuff was always meant to act this way” to “the debuff is bugged and counting down one stack at a time” to “Paladins used to get 30% snare reduction from Toughness and they don’t anymore.” I don’t really care why it’s happening. The point is, if your MT just keeps stacking that thing up until phase 3, you’re pretty screwed.
The solution is to tank swap.
Tank Swapping Side Notes
Swap on every air phase. We also swap right as Phase 3 pops so she starts Phase 3 with an undebuffed tank.
For the swap, I highly recommend taunting the dragon before she flies into the air – instead of waiting for her to land after the air phase. Your post air phase pickup will be much cleaner.
Call for Hands of Freedom liberally. Our raid has 7 pallies. I use my own all the time on this fight, but I really like to get other people to pop theirs on me and then chain mine on the end. The pallies in our raid are already used to HoFing the tanks all the time and rarely do I even need to ask.
Use your Rocket Boots. Oh, wait… not everyone is gifted with the most glorious profession in the world, Engineering. I am so glad I powerleveled Engineering a few weeks ago. I dearly love that speed boost.
Bad Breath Won’t Stop Us
We’ve done both heroic Sindy 25 and All You Can Eat since the patch without much trouble. For All You Can Eat, the first tank swap is still a bit sticky, and we ended up holding DPS on the dragon to transition her right after an air phase. If you transition her at the “end” of a ground phase, one of the tanks will have 2 stacks of the movement debuff. If you transition her right “after” an air phase, it works much better- one tank is clear and the other is almost clear.
I don’t mind tank swapping at all. Actually, I like it better! Pre-4.0, this encounter really sucked for the off tank. It was my least favorite fight to OT (with the possible exception of being third tank on Putricide).
I’ve seen people argue that this encounter was originally designed to require two tanks the whole time. If that is true, I sort of wish it had been like this from the start.
Armory Feed
I have also noticed this, although since I never tanked her before the patch I thought it was always this way. My paladin is unfortunately not at the level cap so I have been using my death knight as a tank.
I found a neat little trick for all death knights who want to avoid the majority of the debuff.
The ability anti-magic shell has a reduction to incoming magical damage, more importantly is the second effect which prevents the application of harmful magical effects. This allows me to ignore one of the breaths and allows the debuffs to fall off.
We still use one tank up until P3. She’s really a lot easier after patch, raid DPS on Sindragosa, specifically, is much higher. There’s more damage overall from DoTs from all classes, so DPS doesn’t tend to be hurt by the debuffs as much.
Paladins can HoF during the air phase, then bubble off stacks at the start of P3 – without locking out DP or AD. No reason to tank-swap, really.
@Anafielle
10 November 2010 at 4:05 pm #
Bubbling off the stacks would be the pro way to do it…. cough. Don’t tell Rhidach though, because without the swap I would be bored again on Sindy. >.>
I’m with Meloree on this one. Before I moved up in the guild world and stopped raiding for the expansion, I did both All You Can Eat and Heroic Sindra again. Each time we used exactly the strategy we had before. Being able to bubble a debuff off without locking yourself out from major–and minor–cooldowns means you can get away with it much more often. I’d bubble off the Frost Breath on the first tank swap in P3 and it would be nigh un-noticable for the rest of the fight.
I do love me some Hand of Freedom though. It’s reflex to hit that bind whenever I’m slowed/snared. It’s gotten me into some trouble on my hunter, where it’s my Disengage bind.
@Anafielle
10 November 2010 at 9:59 am #
Shrug. Tank swapping makes it more interesting, and it’s easier that way imo, but to each his own. I cast Hand of Freedom probably as much as you do, but I just don’t like stacking the debuff up so high, even if I’m going to bubble it off before phase 3.
I guess I just hate being the OT on that fight so much that I got excited about having something (anything) to do.
Yeah, HOF is such a nice button. I went back to do Freya hm with some guildies the other day, and they started calling out for DPS on the roots when freya threw roots. I was like…. “There are four pallies in this raid! Just freedom them out!” HOF is awesome.
Part of the problem for me was that my former guild’s offtank was atrociously bad. He’d been picked up primarily to get his girlfriend, a disc priest, as he had little-to-no experience. We were also in need of a tank and our unholy DK/ret Pally were sick of OS tanking. The general idea was that I’d get him up to speed quickly and it’d all be peaches and gravy.
Except he managed to stay bad, consistently. I had to explain rotation four or five times, including a few hours at the dummies and wading through parses. He never quite perfected it. I had to help him re-enchant all of his gear (some of which I did out-of-pocket). I had to lead him by the hand through reforging. I sent him links to Maintankadin all the time, tried to discuss theorycrafting basics with him. He just wouldn’t pick it up.
The most frustrating moment, though, was on first transition of LK25: I’m holding two Shamblings and ALSO picking up the Raging Spirits, because if I left them to him, people died. Every. Single. Time. Turns out the kid was tanking sans nameplates. When I called him out on it, honest to god his answer was “I don’t need them, I have skill.” I nearly cried.
Moral of the story: I didn’t trust his ass to do it right, so I did it myself. Which is probably the basis for my hesitance to tank swap. I need an Anafielle for my offtank, please. Are there more of you?
@Anafielle
10 November 2010 at 12:09 pm #
Ahahahahahaha! TY for the compliment.
I totally understand. I did a lot of that in my 10 man because my OT was an offspec war who was vastly undergeared and didn’t have the highest RA in the world. I considered trying to solo tank H-LK because he couldn’t handle being the LK tank and there was no way he would ever do shambler tanking. It was pretty bad. (I never actually tried it; the strat seemed too complicated and too prone to error)
“I don’t trust anyone else to do this so I’m doing it myself.” Is that a tank thing? Because I definitely think that all the time.
Tanking without nameplates….?! Is that possible???
Life is very very different when you have two tanks working as a partnership, as opposed to one tank who is The Tank and the other is really sketchy. That’s too much pressure on you, too! You need a trustworthy OT!
Thankfully the piss-poor offtank issue should be no more. I recently made the climb up nearly 4000 world ranking spots to a top-300 guild. While it’s looking like we’ll be going into Cata with two ‘new’ tanks (myself and a druid) as far as the guild is concerned, we’re both experienced, know our shit, etc. I can’t imagine having to carry anyone in a guild that can and will give you the boot for not carrying your weight.
I think the control-complex is definitely a tank thing. It takes a special kind of crazy-person to enjoy the role, I think, because of the perception a lot of people have: it’s the tank’s fault if things go poorly, but we barely contributed if they go well. And if other tanks are anything like me (which it seems like, from Maintankadin), half the fun comes from the preparation–raids are just testing that week’s theories/gearing changes/etc.
As for pressure… 100% agreed. A large part of what drove me to make the guild switch now as opposed to the very end of the expansion was that I was too pressured. If I couldn’t make a raid, stuff didn’t get done. If I did, I was essentially solo tanking things. Do you have any idea how hectic it can be to solo tank LK (aside from P1), including every single Raging Spirit, while also managing cooldowns, hands, battle resses, and working out who can and can’t soak Vile Spirits? Total insanity.
P.S. For a while I actually considered moving servers and ES was definitely more than a blip on my radar in that scenario–though I did understand it would have to be either as ret or on an alt. :P
Ana, its a Tank/Healer thing.
I was the holy pally for our group for the longest time, pretty much up until patch 4.0. I was lucky that our guild had a good druid healer to 2 heal everything with me in out 10 mans. But when I would go into a friends guild to heal their 25s, I would NEED to Heal better because I didn’t trust people, including the raid healers, to do their jobs. I would beacon the tank that was taking damg and force myself to raid heal, then swap beacons when needed. There was multiple times where I had over 40-50% of the heals in a 25 man.
Recently, the tank we had been using for the OT has stopped playing as much, waiting for cata. This made me switch to Tank to give us a duel pally tanking 10 man team, and its working great. My cohort is wonderful at his job, and as soon as I made the switch, told me about this blog and I have been sucked in ever since. This is a great place to come to learn the craft, and I’m still learning, but I think given a few more weeks, we will be able tank anything together.
We were letting our main tank pretty much be The Tank for a few weeks, and he was in a terrible mood until I switched over. Having 2 competent tanks makes life all the better
Speaking of fun with Sindragosa, I’ve also noticed that its no longer really possible to reset her by killing the last frost drake then running out of the room.
She now comes barrelling through the wall and attempts to kill you. Sometimes she will despawn, sometimes she sticks around until air phase, then despawns, and once she came back inside after air phase and kept hitting us and we just had to wipe it.
Not worth the effort any more.
@Anafielle
10 November 2010 at 10:02 am #
Really? We’ve actually had less trouble with this since the patch. Pre 4.0, she would come into the room roughly 10% of the time and wipe the raid.
Post 4.0, she hasn’t done it once. Although we’ve found that killing the 2nd trash dragon down the stairs as opposed to up the stairs helps a ton.
You can reset her?
Could you always do that?
Did it cost attempts?
Man, I miss the boat on so much stuff.
@Anafielle
10 November 2010 at 4:04 pm #
ROFL. You never reset her?
Not once, I didn’t know you could – not sure that I would have anyway, though.
We even talked about it in guild, more than once, that it was cool for Blizzard to make an encounter that flowed organically out of the trash, and just threw you directly into the boss encounter.
I don’t know that it really gained you all that much by resetting her unless you were learning for the very first time and needed to demonstrate positioning and things. It just means that effectively the end of the trash is the first drake, and make sure everyone’s ready for the boss fight when you pull the second one.
Its always been a waste of time to try to reset her, in my eyes, but my raid insists on doing it.
Cass alot of people like to put out some good dps on the drakes and sometimes people get cleaved and such, so healers need to heal, so they are lower on mana then should be. and in a fight like that, lots of heals don’t feel good not having full mana
Tank swapping is probably the most efficient and reliable solution to this for non-paladin MT’s, but I still pop freedom running out for air phase, and again running back in right after the 4th bomb hits. When she hits the final phase, I sit there tanking as usual, and then I bubble and run out after the other tank taunts off me. Clears the debuffs and I’m good to go.
The only difficult part of this strat was making sure I was always behind an iceblock for frost bombs in the final air phase. But by that point I generally just pop AD if I think I’m about to eat one.
@Anafielle
10 November 2010 at 10:34 am #
Yeah, tank swapping isn’t a replacement for hof. I still need HOF to get my ass around even with just 2 stacks of that damn debuff.
My lazy bum gets 3 freedoms on each air phase- someone pops one on me as she flies up, I pop one on myself to LOS when the tombs go up, and then I pop another one on myself running back to the dragon.
Druids shapeshift.
DKs AMS the stack away.
Warriors have eviable mobility, and I think they can still clear snares.
Really, that debuff is at it’s worst on paladins, and it doesn’t really bug us too much.
Meloree’s last blog ..Re- Interesting- Funny- Random Picture Thread
I’m fairly sure AMS does not clear debuffs, just prevent the next application of them, so even if you prevented a stack of frost breath all it means is you end up with one less stack, its still a 1min+ length debuff.
AMS the last one of a ground phase, and the debuff will fall off before the next is applied.