Originally Posted by Aliena
Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Icecrown Citadel Raid Guide! My name is Aliena and in this video I'll cover everything you need to know about the heroic mode 10-man version of the Sindragosa encounter. I will assume that you're familiar with the normal version of this encounter. If you're not, I suggest first watching our guide to the 10-man normal mode to learn about Sindragosa's base abilities.
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Sindragosa comes equipped with approximately 14 million health in her heroic incarnation - that's roughly 3 million more than her normal 10-man version sports. This means you'll most likely be faced with an additional air phase.
To this fight we bring two tanks - one of them with a frost resist gear set, although that's by no means a necessity it seems to help us out a little in phase 2 - 3 healers and 5 DPS. I would not recommend attemping this fight with two healers until you greatly outgear it, just because of the RNG of ice tombs in phase 2.
Naturally, Sindragosa hits harder and all her abilities deal more damage. Her frost aura deals 4500 instead of 3000 damage every 3 seconds, her frost breath deals roughly 40000 unmitigated damage instead of 30000 - and Blistering Cold and Frost Bombs do 45k damage and will instantly kill any non-tank if hit.
The main mechanic change done to this encounter will become obvious to you straight away. The debuff inflicted by Unchained Magic - Instability - now deals 20 yard AoE damage when its timer is up. Naturally, you want to avoid blowing up your entire raid on top of all the other raid damage that's already going on, so to counter this mechanic we have our raid pile up at the bottom of the entrance stairs to Sindragosa's Lair while people afflicted by Unchained Magic move further up the stairs to the left and right of the other raid members.
Fortunately, thanks to a recent in-game hotfix Instability now only lasts 4 seconds instead of its original 8 second duration, so handling the debuff got a lot easier, especially for healers.
The real test in this encounter, as in the normal version, is phase 2. This is where positioning and on-the-fly-thinking becomes crucial. To handle Unchained Magic and ice tomb placement at the same time, we have four different spots assigned. Tombs are alternately placed to the left and right of the raid pile and Unchained Magic targets, as before, move to the left and right further up the stairs.
It is of utmost importance not to let your instability stack high in phase 2. Frost Aura and Mystic Buffet combined already deal a lot of damage as the stack grows, you don't want to add a huge AoE explosion on top of that. This phase is all about survival, not max DPS.
Another difficulty you'll be faced with in phase 2 is tank switches to reset Mystic Buffet and the RNG of healers getting encased in ice tombs or afflicted by Unchained Magic. Good communication is crucial. Your tank healer should aim to only reset his or her stacks on every second or third ice tomb, and make sure to call out when he or she does so another healer can temporarily take over tank healing.
Tank cooldowns should be utilized if you get unlucky enough to, for instance, have one healer encased in an ice tomb while another one is dealing with Unchained Magic. As mentioned, communication is key in phase 2. If your raid doesn't work as a team, deaths are very likely to happen.
No other changes have been made to this encounter, but you'll find that introducing an AoE explosion on a fight that favors stacking up will introduce an array of new problems - and potentially a lot of hatred for your shadow priest that loves stacking up Instability and then realizes Dispersion wasn't up. Good luck!
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