Thursday (5 Aug) - Sleeping Dragons and Deadly Elevators

Thursday (5 Aug) - Sleeping Dragons and Deadly Elevators

This is a continuation of the ICC 10 raid started on Wednesday and posted as "Cashing in on Frost Emblems"

Valithria Dreamwalker is a sleeping dragon in Frostwing Hall, the third wing of Icecrown Citadel. Wild hasn't made it to this boss very many times, but there is one thing that Wild knows about it for sure - it's his favorite boss fight in ICC by far. Wild and healing partner Ch have the best assignment you could want for a boss fight. Our job is simple - stand in front of Dreamwalker and heal her as fast and hard as we can. When Dreamwalker opens a portal, we enter into a shifted world where it's just the two of us with Dreamwalker. We get to fly around in this very safe zone and capture bright, lazily floating orbs. When our portal period ends, we are released back to battle going on outside, but again our role is to heal Dreamwalker. We do this over and over, making sure we never, never, miss a portal opening.

The rest of the raid is dealing with five different kinds of mobs, exploding holes in the earth, and all kinds of other madness, doing all they can to keep those mobs from damaging Dreamwalker and extending the fight. Poor Pl is healing like a madwoman to keep everyone else alive - Wild and Ch? We heal Dreamwalker. Because when we heal the dragon up to 100% health, we win.

That is only a little simplified. Wild, when he is out of the portal, also takes two global cooldowns (gcd) to pop rejuvs on Pl and the main tank to help with their survival, and when Pl drops below 50% mana Wild will toss her his innervate to keep her battery charged. I'm sure Ch does a little raid healing on the side when she is out of the portal as well, but neither of us can take too much time at that because the monsters will keep coming at us as long as Dreamwalker is below 100%.

It took us four attempts to start to find a rhythm. We got Dreamwalker to 73% on that fourth attempt. We pushed that to 81%, to 83%, and, on our 8th attempt, to 87%.

Wild and Ch were monitoring our healing. With the buffs we get from the orbs in the portal, our healing numbers become insane. Pl, healing the entire raid non-stop and without the buff, was averaging around 3700 hps, very good for this fight. The healing numbers for Wild and Ch - Well, each of us started with around 9k hps at the beginning while we were still settling in. As we got better Wild took the lead for awhile, as I was getting 11-12k healing pretty consistently. Ch hovered under 9k, and then found her own rhythm, taking off around attempt #7 and pacing (and sometimes passing) Wild.

We never gave up and never even seemed to get tired, although I can't say that for the rest of the raid that was battling mobs that whole time.

On our tenth attempt we saved Valithria Dreamwalker. Wild's healing was 14,903 hps and Ch passed even Wild with 15,638 hps. It was truly awesome, and was Wild's first kill in ten man, along with more than half the raid. Our little G2 raid can now say we've down 7 of 12 bosses in ICC.

One of the drops from our lovely dragon was [Lich Wrappings]. This is a cloak. An i251 DPS cloak with +hit on it. Wild's DPS cloak for his moonkin form is i226 ... and it's a pvp cloak to boot (pve raids don't like to see raiders wearing pvp gear). Wild rolled on it for off spec, and shockingly no main spec DPS caster needed it. Wild won it. For Wild's moonkin gear, that is a very good upgrade, worth the nearly three hours we took to beat the encounter.

We were all prepared to end our evening at this point when the raid leader idly suggested that if we felt like it, maybe we could go see Sindragosa?

Sindragosa (yes, another dragon) is the 11th boss in ICC, the main boss between our raid and the Lich King himself. Of course we really weren't ready to tackle that dragon, but wouldn't it be fun just to make faces at him? Wild had never even seen him. Neither had 7 other raiders.

Did we all stay to check out Sindragosa? You bet we did.

Opposite the chamber where we rescued Valithria Dreamwalker is a large enclave where several large hallways meet. On the other side of that enclave is a huge circular elevator. Like many elevators in Warcraft, this one is diabolically clever and mischievous. Two raiders died taking that elevator down into the deep bowels of ICC where Sindragosa has a chamber with a ceiling so high she can fly completely out of our view. A whole story could be made about elevators and all the lives lost taking them. Blizzard has a wicked sense of humor sometimes.

The chamber in front of us was empty. On the opposite wall was a closed door. We entered the chamber. Once we reached the center, large spiders began dropping from the ceiling on long threads of web, and the walls literally burst forth with mobs. It was called a gauntlet, but we didn't really move through it since there was no where to go. For the next five minutes wave after wave of mobs poured into us, and we went into a killing frenzy that turned my entire screen into explosions of pyro-technics plastered liberally with blood, gore, and body parts. In other words, we had a blast!

Eventually the mobs had enough and the door on the opposite end opened. We rushed through it, only to be confronted by another chamber. We all stood at the top of a wide but short set of stairs. Two large groups of mobs guarded the left and right sides. Behind them were two mini-bosses, the dragons Rimefang and Spinestalker. We took each group, and then each dragon, in turn, killing them all. We had been warned ahead of time about a key piece of information. When the last mini-boss fell, which was Rimefang, Sindragosa (who was flying around over our heads making us nervous) would dive down to attack us. Having just killed two large groups of mobs and two dragons, we would not be in any position to take her on. So our strategy when that happened consisted of - run for the elevator shaft! No, not the one across and beyond two chambers, but the one up a winding corridor to one side of Sindragosa's chamber. Ten raiders screaming bloody murder (our own) charged up the corridor for the supposed safety of the elevator room at the end.

Sindragosa hit the bottom of that corridor with a thunderous jolt that shook the whole area. She filled the corridor with her girth, teeth and wings and claws and piercing eyes. She crammed herself into the top of the corridor outside the elevator room and snapped madly at cringing raiders. Then she turned and stomped her way back down and took flight once more. All ten of her potential morsels had managed to elude her.

We all returned to the chamber, listened to the strategy, and made a real attempt to kill her. We wiped, but it gave us a first look at how the fight worked. We'll be a lot more ready for her the next time we meet.