Sindragosa Is a Terribly Designed Fight

All right, I'm biased because I've spent a combined 8 hours wiping on her, but I seriously hate this fight with a passion.  I get really frustrated with raids that have some sort of trivial mechanic that can one-shot people in the first phase(s), and the actual execution difficulty is in the second phase which is fundamentally different than the rest of the fight.  If the second phase doesn't even happen until several minutes into the fight then it's even more frustrating.  I basically don't feel like I get the repetition I need to work on the fight and improve.

I'm not saying any fight with multiple phases is bad.  Kel'thuzad doesn't match this type of raid encounter because the first phase with the adds is only a couple minutes long and it's trivial to survive.  Professor Putricide doesn't match this fight because the execution is in the first two phases, not the last.  I used to think the quintessential offender of this type of raid encounter was Malygos, because getting to Phase 3 wasn't trivial and happened several minutes into the fight, and then all of a sudden you had to figure out how to use your drake on the fly.

But Malygos doesn't have anything on Sindragosa, which has two mechanics for one- or two-shotting players (the air phase and Blistering Cold).  Between Unchained Magic and air phases holding up DPS, usually even a flawless execution of Phase 1 still means getting to Phase 2 seven minutes into the fight, and that's where the actual hard part of the fight begins, where the raid needs to figure out iceblock placement and movement.

This fight would actually be easier if Phase 2 started earlier, because even though you would execute the iceblocks longer, you'd actually get more attempts to try it out.  As the fight is currently constructed, with some bad luck and/or raid brain-farts during attempts, it can be 20-30 minutes before your raid even gets to Phase 2, where they actually need lots of repetitions to get it down.

I'm not saying I want easy encounters or that Sindragosa shouldn't have a Phase 2.  But if you're going to make part of the fight hard, don't make it so agonizing just to even begin tackling those hard parts.