Cheesing the freeze - Sindragosa 10H

Well, we finally did it - Frostwing hall is down in Heroic. All we have left is Putricide and Arthas - and a few achievements for our drakes. All told, I think we spent 30 or so attempts on her - until finally we came up with a method that worked.

Stained napkins are bad

I love napkin math. Some of the best ideas/strats/setups I've ever come up with have been whipped up at lunch or on a piece of scratch paper on my desk. A crazy drawing that looks like it came directly from John Madden's desk, or some scribbled theorycrafting that has me running around in a 14/45/18 spec (yeah, I know the numbers don't work - roll with it) - I always learn something from the process.

Sindragosa was no different.

Unbearabull did a lot of math on resists, DPS times, Sindragosa health, etc. The theory was that if the raid could put out 7k DPS on Sin, with 3 heals and 1 tank, that with 550 FR he could solo tank Sin without dropping stacks of the buffet. The raid would have approx. 1:58 to burn her down before he'd need multiple cool-downs to survive the breaths.

In addition, the raid members all added 100 FR by changing cloak enchants to FR, helm arcanums to FR, and using resistance flasks (50 resist to all schools).

This plan failed.

So what happened?

First, while Unbearabull's math was correct, what he failed to consider was the reduced DPS put out by the raid. We were unable to keep up with the DPS requirements, partly due to RNG of debuffs, and at the 1:48 mark we were only at 18%. Our goal was to hit 10% by 1:30, where we could just ignore any debuffs/blocks and put the pedal down. We anticipated the raid blowing up after she died, because we'd all have 10 stacks of unchained and 9 stacks of buffet.

This wasn't going to happen, so our warrior went back to his prot set, and we settled in to do it the old fashioned way. The way that hadn't worked for us yet.

Where's my Sandbox Tiger?

Generally when we've been at something for a while, Mongrr will link the Sandbox Tiger as a motivator for the raid to pull our collective heads out and focus on the task at hand. This time though, it was an argument between our mage and the rest of the raid - regarding his FR choices and gear setup. We spent so much time cussing at each other that it was P3 (P2 for those that don't count the air as a 'phase') before we realized it. And nobody was dead.

Miraculously, in spite of the griping, nobody had died to a suck in, frost breath, overload, etc. Here we were, staring 35% in the face - and every CD was available. We hit the perfect storm almost immediately - with one healer being Frost Beaconed, one having unchained, our 2nd shaman having unchained (he was responsible for healing the raid in a situation like this) and Mongrr standing there with 6 stacks of Buffet he needed to drop.

Throughout all this, communication was clear; healers were calling out for tank switches, tanks were calling for cool-downs, and Reaganomics made the greatest LoH save in the history of the world. With one healer blocked, one dropping stacks, one with unchained, and Unbearabull catching a nasty string of poor resists at high stacks - Reaganomics bought us time with a 63k crit LoH.

It was, in a word, clutch.

The final word

This fight was, in my opinion, the perfect example of why worked so well. Even with all the chaos at the start, when it came time for a clutch LoH, or a Rebirth less than 5 seconds after Mongrr went down at 8%, the entire group came together to pull off an amazing kill.

10/12 H ICC 10.

This video sums up how that fight went.