Ice tombs will line of sight the pull, that is easy to confirm. You will also get hit by blistering cold while behind a tomb if you are too close.

This was my experience as well. Important to get this sorted for raiders with lower spec hardware.

@Funkybro: As ranged, I fully resist a Blistering Cold once every two or three pulls. Nice when it happens.

Has anyone tried (or used) unusual setups for killing Sindragosa, particularly for hard mode. The reason I ask is due to thinking about the mechanics of Unchained Magic and Permeating Chill.

Permeating Chill affects all of the physical dps (i.e. melee dps + hunters). The effects are the same regardless of how many physical dps you bring (although fast hitting melee will be worse affected).

Unchained Magic on the other hand pretty much cripples the first three caster dps you bring to the raid, but has no effect thereafter. There are some things that casters can do to mitigate the problem, but this gets much harder on the last phase where it’s impossible to avoid clumping behind iceblocks.

This suggests that maximum dps would be achieved either with no caster dps, or lots of caster dps. As an example, lets say you bring 8 healers, 2 tanks and 15 dps. Lets say the physical dps lose 25% of their maximum dps due to Permeating Chill – the actual percentage reduction isn’t that important, it just illustrates the principle.

With zero caster dps, you would effectively get 15 * 75% = 11.25 full time dps equivalents. With 15 caster dps you would effectively get 15 – 3 = 12 full time dps equivalents. But with a mixed raid of say 8 physical dps and 7 casters you would effectively get 8 * 0.75 + 7 – 3 = 10 full time dps equivalents. The worst possible would be to bring 12 physical dps and 3 casters when you would effectively get 9 full time dps equivalents.

That’s a pretty significant difference! I can see that there would be drawbacks to having all melee on the last phase due to time lost to running in and out of mystic buffet. I can’t see a lot of downside to having no melee dps however – normally some are assigned to killing iceblocks, but no reason some ranged couldn’t do that just as easily.

That’s the maths anyway – has anyone tried raid stacking and if so then what was the result?

If there are less than the required number of caster DPS targets for Unchained Magic, Sindragosa will target extra healers. This includes targets which are not valid at the moment of the cast because they are encased in an ice tomb. We saw this a few weeks on a 10 man hardmode attempt where we had 1 warlock and 3 healers, and two of the healers would be afflicted with unchained magic while the warlock was dead or tombed.

If you are in the business of raid stacking, going with all casters is the better way to go about it.

I can confirm that Sindragosa will target 2 healers on heroic 10-man if there is no living caster DPS.

Even though the title of this thread suggests the normal mode of Sindragosa encounter, I'll ask a question about the hard mode here. I don't want to get another infraction for creating a new unnecessary thread...

So my guild has started working on Sindragosa 25 man heroic mode. Apart from many other aspects, I'm especially interested in the tanking aspect, as I'm main tanking the bony hag. After the first pull I realised that my gear for normal mode needs a little tweaking...
So now I wear frost resistance set, with 510 frost res with the paladin aura (crafted chest, boots, belt, ring + head enchant + spell damage reduction meta + 2/2 in Improved Spell Reflection)). Thanks to some level 277 armor pieces I remain at 540 defense and at 60k health.
I resist quite a lot, I think I fully resist about 50% of Frost Breaths. Frost damage is basically a non issue, even when I accidentally get too many melee debuffs (like 6-7). But then, she hits like an angry 16-wheeler on overdrive physically! So what I managed to mitigate in spell damage I get twofold in physical damage... She hits me for up to 38k per hit. Needless to say, crafted frost gear demolishes my avoidance and armor, so it's not even surprising.
What seems to be the best gear balance here? Go for full frost resist, or aim for armor and stamina? I think I've seen examples of both. During most of about 20 attempts we made yesterday I drop very low quite often due to her physical damage. Any opinions?

I tried few options and settled for 1 FR piece (chest) and stoneblood flask. With pally aura I am at 295 FR. 62k hp and 38k armor. Basically you need enough FR to leave through frost breath using a cd.

Tank need to run out for blistering cold and healers need to be ready with big heals to land after each frost breath. Switch tanks after each frost breath to clear debuffs in phase 3. For each frost breath use cd or sindragosa trinket. Also we do it with 8 healers (3 get unchained all the time).

You probably still want to be aiming for something like 400-450 Frost Resistance. Being forced to rely on cooldowns for Breaths as early as on 3-4 stacks leaves you very vulnerable when the tank healers gets Unchained Magic, gets ice blocked, or simply need to reset their stacks. As long as you keep buffs and debuffs up properly you shouldn't be getting 2-shot if you have like 65k hp.

That seems like an excessive amount of FR to me. I've found going for only a bit of FR and stacking armor to be far more beneficial, although obviously I'm a DK, but still I've almost never seen the frost breath actually kill anyone, it hits really hard to be sure but with the cast time beforehand it's easy to be topped off, and have new heals incoming when it hits, conversely she hits like a mack truck and has the loveley tendency to melee + cleave at the same time, resulting in upwards of 50k damage in a second from physical, dropping armor for excessive FR (Especiall if it's costing you stamina too) sounds like a recipe for disaster. Just keep cooldowns up basically all the time. As best you can anyway.

Her cleave is a "next swing" attack and not an instant attack, so it's not actually dangerous for the tank. Regarding the amount of Frost Resistance, if you "always keep cooldowns up" i don't think you would die from the melee attacks either. Being forced to rely on cooldowns too early against the breaths is risky since healers gets taken out of the fight quite frequently.