There is a time in a tier cycle where things start becoming smooth. On our last raid reset we were able to clear out 2 wings on Tuesday and the rest of the farm content on Wednesday with an hour left in raiding. This gave us a lot of time to work on our latest challenge, Sindragosa. We spent the last hour on Wednesday, all of Thursday and Monday working on this boss.
Like any boss encounter the first couple of times are very sloppy. Sindriagosa is basically Sapphiron 2.0. Phase 1 consists of basic Dragon mechanics. Stay away from the front to avoid cleaves, and frost breaths. Stay away from the tail to avoid tail smash so basically everyone is dpsing her hind leg. In addition to this there is a raid wide frost damage aura and every 30 seconds she will pull everyone close to her and do Blistering Cold. The raid has about 5 second to move away before she does Blistering Cold which will kill anyone but a tank. During this phase she will randomly cast Unchained magic on the ranged/healers forcing them to stop casting for a few seconds so they don't take to much Backlash damage if their stacks get to high. The melee have their own version of this called Permeating Cold, where each attack will has a 40% chance to make them take damage over time also stacking They will have to stop attacking after 5 or so stacks or they will take to much damage This is also a very hard fight for me as a tank when it comes to threat. As melee Permeating Cold forces me to stop dpsing every so often. Also every Frost breath that I don't resist will put a 2 minute debuff on me reducing my Melee swing time by 50% a stack. This is all while wearing my frost resist gear which has no threat stats on it whatsoever. Every 90 seconds or so she will enter the air phase.
In her Air phase she will randomly select 5 people that will get frost tombed. Unlike the Sapphiron encounter the people who get tombed have to be broken out. The purpose of the tombs is to hide behind from from bombs but again unlike Sapphiron where it was one big bomb in the center you get 5 of them in random locations so you will have to adjust your line of site to the bomb. Originally we would have 5 people line up in a row and try to bring them down to 40% before breaking them out. The problem with that is people have an issue with throttling their dps so they would break out early before the last frost bomb went off and the other frost tombs were still close to 100% by the time she landed. We adjusted our strategy to have 3 people at the bottom of the stairs and 2 right behind them. This allowed us to go crazy and break out the first 2 and by the time the 3 in the front were close to dying she would have cast her last frost tomb and start landing.
Once she gets down to 35% she enters phase 3. After a few attempts we were consistently getting past the first 2 phases without and issues. The last 3 raid nights we spent just trying to get past this final phase and we still haven't been able to defeat her yet. She remains grounded on this phase but she starts doing Mystic Buffet. It's cast every 10 seconds and increases your magic damage taken by 15%. She will also casts frost tomb on 1 random person in the raid. We would assign that person to be close to her head but far enough away from cleave range. Everyone would run behind it to drop their debuff before it got to high and we would swap tanks back and forth while we also dropped our debuffs. During this phase we would have a ton off issues. The first frost tomb would be in a good position but during the second frost tomb we would have multiple people getting frost tombed or frost tombs going down to quick for people to loose their buffs. Slowly we would just loose people during this phase and we got to a point where there were to many people down to complete the encounter. We'll head back into it this week and get her down.
They have released the patch notes for 3.3.3 as well as confirming a whole bunch of other mini patches before the release of cataclysm. Looks like we will have the Ruby Sanctum in 3.3.5 as well that promises some new loot and a bunch of trinkets to look forward to. We will also be taking back Gnomergon and thwarting off the Twilight Cult. With it as well tanking stats are changing a descent amount for Cataclysm. First defense is going to be completely removed and you will get uncrittable by going into "tank mode" such as putting up Righteous Fury. This will be good if you are ret/arms/dps dk and don't have a secondary spec but you have some gear for tanking. You can now enter an instance and do well enough to get you through a dungeon or heroic.
Also parry is getting a pretty interesting change. Instead of being a clone of dodge it will reduce the swings damage by 50% and the next one by 50% as well. Because there is no more defense we won't increase our miss, dodge, parry, or block by a small amount because of it. Usually once you get beyond 540 defense you would gain about 10% avoidance due to miss and dodge/parry. Blizzard wants to reduce avoidance across the board. Right now a good tank can have up to 60% avoidance. That is only 40% of the time where you actually take damage. To challenge us they have to make the boss hit extremely hard or add a magical component to the attack table. In cataclysm we'll probably be closer to 15-20% dodge and about 5% miss. We'll be parrying 50% of the damage and when we block we will mitigate 30% of the hit as well. So as a tank we will be constantly be getting hit but we'll be mitigating more damage instead of just avoiding it. This will allow healers breathing room and us as tanks to better gauge when to use cooldowns.
I'm liking a lot of what Blizzard has planned with Cataclysm. A stat that excites me is mastery. Every class/spec will gain something different with mastery. It will probably end up being 3 different thing s as well. With retribution it will probably be strength, crit, and possible reduced cooldown time. With protection it will probably be armor, dodge, and some form of damage reduction. So regardless of what you play it will always be good for you. Bosses wll also scale in different tiers. Probably the first tier of raiding you will need 5% hit to cap, and probably have a 3% crit suppression. When you get into the next tier it will probably be 8% hit cap and 5% crit suppression while the bosses get expertise so the tanks loose 2% dodge and parry. This makes gearing less about pure "power stats " and keeps you desiring more as you move on. While I am really enjoying IceCrown Citadel I want the next expansion. I want to see all the world changes and I love getting upgrades. I am sitting at mostly 264 gear right now so there won't be much upgrades coming in the next month. The idea of exploring new dungeons and gearing up for new raid content is exciting. How long do you think we will have to wait?
Like any boss encounter the first couple of times are very sloppy. Sindriagosa is basically Sapphiron 2.0. Phase 1 consists of basic Dragon mechanics. Stay away from the front to avoid cleaves, and frost breaths. Stay away from the tail to avoid tail smash so basically everyone is dpsing her hind leg. In addition to this there is a raid wide frost damage aura and every 30 seconds she will pull everyone close to her and do Blistering Cold. The raid has about 5 second to move away before she does Blistering Cold which will kill anyone but a tank. During this phase she will randomly cast Unchained magic on the ranged/healers forcing them to stop casting for a few seconds so they don't take to much Backlash damage if their stacks get to high. The melee have their own version of this called Permeating Cold, where each attack will has a 40% chance to make them take damage over time also stacking They will have to stop attacking after 5 or so stacks or they will take to much damage This is also a very hard fight for me as a tank when it comes to threat. As melee Permeating Cold forces me to stop dpsing every so often. Also every Frost breath that I don't resist will put a 2 minute debuff on me reducing my Melee swing time by 50% a stack. This is all while wearing my frost resist gear which has no threat stats on it whatsoever. Every 90 seconds or so she will enter the air phase.
In her Air phase she will randomly select 5 people that will get frost tombed. Unlike the Sapphiron encounter the people who get tombed have to be broken out. The purpose of the tombs is to hide behind from from bombs but again unlike Sapphiron where it was one big bomb in the center you get 5 of them in random locations so you will have to adjust your line of site to the bomb. Originally we would have 5 people line up in a row and try to bring them down to 40% before breaking them out. The problem with that is people have an issue with throttling their dps so they would break out early before the last frost bomb went off and the other frost tombs were still close to 100% by the time she landed. We adjusted our strategy to have 3 people at the bottom of the stairs and 2 right behind them. This allowed us to go crazy and break out the first 2 and by the time the 3 in the front were close to dying she would have cast her last frost tomb and start landing.
Once she gets down to 35% she enters phase 3. After a few attempts we were consistently getting past the first 2 phases without and issues. The last 3 raid nights we spent just trying to get past this final phase and we still haven't been able to defeat her yet. She remains grounded on this phase but she starts doing Mystic Buffet. It's cast every 10 seconds and increases your magic damage taken by 15%. She will also casts frost tomb on 1 random person in the raid. We would assign that person to be close to her head but far enough away from cleave range. Everyone would run behind it to drop their debuff before it got to high and we would swap tanks back and forth while we also dropped our debuffs. During this phase we would have a ton off issues. The first frost tomb would be in a good position but during the second frost tomb we would have multiple people getting frost tombed or frost tombs going down to quick for people to loose their buffs. Slowly we would just loose people during this phase and we got to a point where there were to many people down to complete the encounter. We'll head back into it this week and get her down.
They have released the patch notes for 3.3.3 as well as confirming a whole bunch of other mini patches before the release of cataclysm. Looks like we will have the Ruby Sanctum in 3.3.5 as well that promises some new loot and a bunch of trinkets to look forward to. We will also be taking back Gnomergon and thwarting off the Twilight Cult. With it as well tanking stats are changing a descent amount for Cataclysm. First defense is going to be completely removed and you will get uncrittable by going into "tank mode" such as putting up Righteous Fury. This will be good if you are ret/arms/dps dk and don't have a secondary spec but you have some gear for tanking. You can now enter an instance and do well enough to get you through a dungeon or heroic.
Also parry is getting a pretty interesting change. Instead of being a clone of dodge it will reduce the swings damage by 50% and the next one by 50% as well. Because there is no more defense we won't increase our miss, dodge, parry, or block by a small amount because of it. Usually once you get beyond 540 defense you would gain about 10% avoidance due to miss and dodge/parry. Blizzard wants to reduce avoidance across the board. Right now a good tank can have up to 60% avoidance. That is only 40% of the time where you actually take damage. To challenge us they have to make the boss hit extremely hard or add a magical component to the attack table. In cataclysm we'll probably be closer to 15-20% dodge and about 5% miss. We'll be parrying 50% of the damage and when we block we will mitigate 30% of the hit as well. So as a tank we will be constantly be getting hit but we'll be mitigating more damage instead of just avoiding it. This will allow healers breathing room and us as tanks to better gauge when to use cooldowns.
I'm liking a lot of what Blizzard has planned with Cataclysm. A stat that excites me is mastery. Every class/spec will gain something different with mastery. It will probably end up being 3 different thing s as well. With retribution it will probably be strength, crit, and possible reduced cooldown time. With protection it will probably be armor, dodge, and some form of damage reduction. So regardless of what you play it will always be good for you. Bosses wll also scale in different tiers. Probably the first tier of raiding you will need 5% hit to cap, and probably have a 3% crit suppression. When you get into the next tier it will probably be 8% hit cap and 5% crit suppression while the bosses get expertise so the tanks loose 2% dodge and parry. This makes gearing less about pure "power stats " and keeps you desiring more as you move on. While I am really enjoying IceCrown Citadel I want the next expansion. I want to see all the world changes and I love getting upgrades. I am sitting at mostly 264 gear right now so there won't be much upgrades coming in the next month. The idea of exploring new dungeons and gearing up for new raid content is exciting. How long do you think we will have to wait?
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