Sinestra slain!

We have just managed to kill Sinestra 25-man in heroic mode. We reached the boss as the second guild in the world. This was a bit disappointing, but we just had to suck it up, lick our wounds and push forward. Overall we spent five full days theorycrafting, practicing and relearning the fight.

The encounter itself was quite unfinished, especially on the first few days. There were some absolutely massive bugs that were obvious from the first pull; Shadow Orbs sweeping the whole room and killing everyone in the raid. The Dark Simulacrum (and other reflects) & Wrack was probably the biggest one. You could literally hit the boss for 1 billion damage with a single GCD - it was pretty damn scary watching Sinestra almost die to it by accident. Blizzard however fixed this within an hour or two after receiving the report.

Luckily this was hotfixed right away by Blizzard

There were still a bunch of hotfixes even between attempts; a tactic that could be used to handle a part of the fight wouldn’t just simply work at all on the next and just left us scratching our head. At these points, we often took theorycrafting breaks even up to an hour before figuring out what exactly we’re supposed to do next. Some people got pretty upset after the first sub-10% attempt, finding out that the tactic we used was unintended and hotfixed right afterwards.

This screenshot is from our first days on the boss, the adds haven't been able to be cc'd anymore for a couple of days.

Overall just a very weird raiding experience. Some good stuff, some bad stuff, some unfinished/buggy stuff, but definitely very stressful. Personally I’m not sure what to think of it quite yet.

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All in all, this tier of raiding in my opinion has been the hardest tier of raiding overall. There haven’t been many pushover bosses on Heroic difficulty, there hasn’t been any gating, there haven’t been any attunements and such - it has just been one big absolutely brutal grind.

Probably the biggest difference between this tier and the previous ones have been the various bugs and exploits, sadly enough. There are also a lot of completely baseless rumours going around of us exploiting various bosses. Even some top guilds have made some pretty sad and misinformed comments based on nothing but hearsay and quotes from forum trolls, who have absolutely no first-hand knowledge at all.

We didn’t use any exploits/bugs whatsoever on Cho’gall. We didn’t use them on Nefarian. We didn’t use them on Sinestra. I’m not sure what all bosses there are even rumours about anymore, it’s hard to keep track of with the amount of trolls absolutely exploding everywhere.

It will all be completely obvious once we have time to get the videos done.

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