The Queen Is Dead

Tuesday night, it all came together.

The funny thing was, we had 2 PuGs last week that we replaced with guildies this week, and I said to myself, I said, "Joachim, we're going to spend some time catching these folks up to Phase 3, so be ready for a few wipes."

"But Joachim," I said to myself, I said, "I don't understand, we just spent a while learning the fight, I don't have the patience to sit through two hours of wipes again!"

But of course, you do what you have to do, so I girded my loins, took a breath, skipped Plague and Blood wing entirely, and dove right into the Frost wing. We approached Dreamwalker with our usual swagger and realized that we'd done her on 9-man before, so we could easily get Portal Jockey, and I volunteered to catch the 3rd portal (we typically have 3 healers, 2 taking every portal, our magnificent Guild Leader heals the raid on her Holy Priest, while we use one tank to tank everything, 1 DPS on the Suppressors and everyone else eats everything else).

Since we could obviously afford 1 extra DPS doing nothing I decided to take the portal. Of course, I never realized the portals move around so when the 2nd set of portals spawned on the other side of the room, I missed them while killing a Blazing Skeleton and there went the achievement. Oh, well. Next week.

After the Elevator Boss and Spider Room of WTF we came up to Sindi, and pulled. First two attempts were cluster fucks. People spreading tombs everywhere in the air phase, people not LoSing the Frost Bombs and I hit that vent button, like I meant it, and I said, "I don't know what the hell is going on. And I don't care. Now shape up, or ELSE!"

Else what? I dunno. But the threat worked. And the next attempt we get to phase 3 with no deaths or anything. So I go, FINALLY! And get ready to start calling out names for people to move and do what they need to do but.... after about two tomb runs I realize I don't need to because everyone, including the 2 folks who've never seen this phase, and doing everything right!

People move out, ranged switches over to explode one, then clip their debuff on the other, people give each other room, when we get a double tomb at one point, nobody panics and they clean up both of them. At about a minute to go, while I'm LoSing, we loose the tank but somehow I was still 2nd on the meter so she rushes up the stairs at me, I pull her into place away from the raid, raid gets to her side, I realize her health is down to 1% and two more seconds later, she's keeling over, and the raid is spamming achievements.

It was a good night. We went and cleared through a few more bosses before calling it a night. Tonight, we kill Putricide, and then the blood wing, before going in to work on the Lich King.

I am fucking excited. And really proud of my boys and girls. Way to go, my turtles. Way to go.

The Sindragosa Blues (again)

Sorry I've been away. Was on vacation and then work ate my life.

Anyway. Now that we have a (relatively) stable group, we've been working on Sindy for two weeks now, last night was our first serious series of attempts and we got her to ~10% on our best try.

Previously, Icy Grip was the bane of our raids, people would die and I'd gnash my teeth but after much thought, I changed our positioning to hold Sindy horizontal to the stairs and have people just DPS and heal from the stairs things worked out very well. It gave people a very specific point to run towards (up the stairs) and dropping blocks on the stairs makes Ice Bomb dodging trivial.

So, ever since the first attempt last night, I saw that Phase 1 and 2 are down rock solid, we barely ever lost a person to Icy Grip, and we got her into Phase 3 right after her 3rd air phase with 3 full time healers.

But people seem to panic on phase 3.

We manage to hold it together for about 2 or 3 blocks, I assigned 2 melee burn 'em down, people clipped their debuffs, tank swaps happened whenever the other tank's debuff dropped, and then either an Icy Grip or a misplaced block would disrupt the process and then we'd fall behind and never catch up to switching to the boss because blocks start coming too soon and then, we hit enrage with anywhere from 15% - 20% left to go.

Our best attempt got her to 14% or so, I think, which was still a solid million and a half hit points.

I think our current strat will work, we just need to spend a little bit more time on her and focus our energy.

On a side-note, I'm especially pleased with the guild's membership right now. Lots of friends, both old and new, and only one or two trouble spots that I think will settle down soon. It's good to be in such company in pre-Cata days.

Sindragosa

The once noble prime-consort of the Blue Dragonflight, Sindragosa was killed by Neltharion and left to die in the glaciers of Icecrown. Full of hatred for everyone that let her die, Sindragosa's bones lay buried for thousands of years until she was raised by the Lich King as the ultimate Frost Wyrm.

You might have seen her trying to aggro you through the log-in screen for the last fifteen months or so. She also tried to murder you in the Pit of Saron before Jaina or Tyrande yanked you to safety. Now, finally, in Icecrown Citadel we have a chance to strike back at her for all the endless cycles of flap-flap-roar as we waited for the crawling queue numbers to tick down to zero.

After possibly the most annoying trash in the entire raid (I actually liked most of the trash in ICC until I encountered this colossal waste of time and mana), the murder of some frost-wyrm hatchlings (which - explain to me the point of baby dragon skeletons? They're dead so it's not like they're going to grow up to be eviler or anything... I mean, they're cute and all, but still. WTF?) and two mini-boss dragons - one of whom is Rhimefang of Pit fame and another dragon with a name but if she's a named mob from somewhere I'm forgetting it - you finally get to pull the boss... oh, no, wait, she'll actually agro as soon as the second dragon dies. Nevermind.

Also, holy run on sentence, batman.

Pro-tip: Pull the second dragon to the stairs so the raid has time to adjust positioning and the tank doing the pull can get into place without a freakout-scramble-clusterfuck.

Thankfully after that first pull (and wipe) she'll fly up above the platform, patiently waiting for you to descent onto the platform below the stairs.

Anyway. We put in about 2 hours and change on her last night, including a ten minute break where I ran and grabbed my Frost-resist set, realized I hadn't touched it since Hodir, and re-gem'd with Dragoneye's and Epic gems on the spot. Our DPS is generally pretty fucking awesome, and they were epic as always last night, but we still kept running into multiple sub-5% enrage-wipes.

The primary culprit was the 3rd phase unleashed magic mechanic and the tanks (the raid lead, Alex is the main tank, and the bum who's writing this blog, me, helps out) were swapping every time a tomb came down. At the end, we were trying to clean-up even the smallest clip on the DoT pulse to try to get the tombs down faster - trust me, when you wipe at 440k with the entire raid alive due to hitting the enrage, you'll gnash your teeth, fist-pound your keyboard and bemoan getting clipped by the DoT just before you stepped around the tomb.

Anyway, the raid timer ticked down, we were a half hour over the time we normally run so the raid was called and I had a severe case of the blue balls.

She's going down next week. But I still look like I have blueberries danging from my scrotum.