The Blood Wing - Know My Hunger
Princes didn't give us much heartache all things considered, even if we ignored them for months (and months) while we were kiting things around in the Plague Wing. Blood Queen, however, was another matter.
The Blood Queen almost destroyed our guild. The queen started fights, incited nerd rages, and got people kicked from our guild. She scared away raid applicants, created new vent and wipe-calling rules, and organized walk outs. For more than two months she's terrorized us (two minute cooldown), and even on the weeks we couldn't get to her, she was still lurking overhead, reminding us that if we do get down Putricide this week, we'll be bowing before her.
Everything gave us troubles. Bite-addon insanity, bloodbolt whirl death traps, red triangles of doom, (creative) passive-agressive use of shadow trails, and the bites. Oh, the bites! I lagged, my target ran away from me, I got feared, 2 FPS, I didn't know who I was supposed to bite, I thought I had another 30 seconds, I never got the whisper, wait do I got to the bitee or does he come to me?, but you told me to bite the MT, and the ever popular "So what do I do when I get bit, again?".
We did some crazy things. Folks switched offspecs. My holy priest dropped her shadow off in favor of Discipline, and wins the "excellence in a new spec for a progression boss" award. We had healers make minor changes to glyph and spec, we had DPS make major changes to their offspecs to be available to heal (and I really appreciate it, even if they made all those changes for just one night). We recruited, we brought alts, we declared new mains, and we made it happen. Hurray for 30%!
A First Peek Into the Frost Wing
The best way to celebrate a victory on a boss you've been working on for months is (obviously) to go bang your head on a brand-new one. And herein lies the good news. We didn't get Sindragosa down, but we owned the hell out of phase 1.
All the people who had done this fight on ten had spent time warning everyone in G chat (for months) about how hard Sindy is gonna be, how this is gonna take REAL coordination and if they think BQ/Put/Princes is hard 'just wait till you see the frost queen'...
Compared to the BQ, our Lady Dragon is not frenetic, at least from a "healing through it" perspective. BQ is a fast fight, Sindy is slow. Five of the six healers had already beaten Sindragosa on 10, so I was ridiculously optimistic about Sindragosa. I knew our hardest parts would be Blistering Cold and Ice Block placement. The stacks of debuffs were absolutely no problem. Even the Phase 1 ice blocks were well-handled (turns out that stuff we've seen before is easier to learn than altogether new mechanics...).
I thought I would be prepared (cleverly) and I coordinated with all the paladins to give specific players their Hand of Freedom cooldown for Blistering Cold. It was a great idea, in theory, except for I failed often enough at it in the first few attempts I had to use it for myself.
Blistering Cold was not a problem at all once we elected a hunter to Aspect of the Noob. It really works. The tank gets stunned but nothing a roll of hots couldn't fix while the less mobile healers are fleeing.
I'm sure we'll spent weeks on Phase 2, but I'm prepared for that. Suffer mortals, as your pathetic magic betrays you!
Erm, well it was brought to my attention that there could be confusion with "my holy priest", who, does not in fact belong to me, and what I really meant was "the holy priest on my raiding team". Apologies.
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