Heroic

Tuesday we finally made our long awaited foray into Heroic Raiding in WotLK with 25 instead of 10s. Things got rolling so well, it felt like we should have been pushing to start earlier. Well, a number of people were, but the holidays threw everything off.

Sartharian went off without a hitch. Well, one disco, so we 1-shot him with 24. Then off to Naxx and rolled through the Arachnid quarter without a wipe and then the Plague quarter with a fairly smooth trip to Loatheb. It did get a little harder -- we lost a bunch of people due to dancing trouble on Heigen. And then we finally wiped once on Loatheb.

We only had 24 in the raid again for Loatheb, which was a concern since it's a tough dps race. And at least 2 of us were putting out pretty low dps. Myself included, we had formed up with 5 tanks, so I tried respeccing Ret, but between slightly out of date gear and lack of practice, I wasn't very effective. I'm not even sure I couldn't have done better overall dps as prot spec in dps gear.

A few people suggested bringing in another non-guild player to help. I deflected the request, but I actually was leaning towards setting a hard and fast guild policy of no non guildies in the raid. I didn't annouce it because I didn't want to lay it out there on the spot, but I still feel like I'd rather wipe short handed and stick to guild raids right now.

Best of all, we didn't wipe again. Everybody stepped up and we pwned Loatheb on the second try.

Our second trip last night was less simple. We moved slowly through the military quarter with wipes on both Razuvious and Gothik. I decided to go holy spec and be a bad healer instead of bad dps and actually spent most of the night feeling slightly overwhelmed with finding the healing rhythm since it's been a long time since I raid healed. Given our excess tanks, I think there's some chance holy might be a regular role for me in 25s.

Being a relatively weaker healer and having tank experience, when we got to the 4 horsemen, it made sense to have me try to "tank" a caster since I could theoretically stand there and self-heal. But it didn't go so well.

First pull, I ran straight into melee Lord Keliek and discovered his holy bolt hits for 9k and I got 2-shotted. That was a bit disturbing, so for the next few pulls, I ran in trying to carefully find his aggro boundary while also making sure Quisha was still in range to heal me. I also ran in with my fingers poised over the self-heal buttons since I was going to need to cast right away. What I didn't realize was that these bosses are not like Ragnaros or Murmur that just need somebody in range, but I actually had to get on the aggro table with a Holy Shock first. That led to a handful more wipes and the end of the evening.

I probably should have read up on the encounter myself, but I was too distracted with finding and enchanting my holy gear, respeccing and redoing my UI starting a bit before the raid. Most of the raid I spent peppering Barantir with questions and trying to vaguely keep track of who I should be healing while missing people asking me to set things up in raid.

Fortunately, it'll be easier when/if I do it again next week. I'm a bit up in the air as to whether I should do our 10 person runs as tank or healer for practice this week. Probably it will depend on whether Stupidrenren is around and/or if Dethnotronic gets called into work.

There's a part of me wondering why we are even bothering going back to 10s for the rest of the week. I suppose in theory, we'll get better loot by 2x clears. Also, it hadn't occurred to me that we had a chance to clear Heroic Naxx our first week there, so I didn't even consider the idea of a full-bore switch. I thought we'd be chipping away at it for a night or two for a few weeks. I guess it really isn't that hard.