We gave Heroic ToC 10 a try.
It hurt.
For a while.
And in the end, we downed the Beasts. It was irritating and tough and everything you hate about content you seem to be smashing your head against, but it was also clearly within view. We COULD do it. We WOULD do it. In the end, we did. And it didn't take quite as long as it could have.
Once we'd downed Beasts, the call was made to pull out and do a normal ToC run. Which we one shotted our way through quite handily, and then we moved on to Onyxia, who we also finished in a single round. And then the raid was called, 20 minutes before the normal end time.
We raid for three hours at a time, when we do guild raids. So I think we made pretty good time, all things considered. Especially since one of our tanks was an alt (though well geared, his actual practice on some tasks was limited) and one of our DPS was a recent returnee to the game.
Two Paladin tanks, and for healers we had a Disc Priest, Resto Shammy, and Holy Paladin. Shammy was on raid heals. I was tossing Levitate around to all the ranged to prevent the fire patches from placing DoTs on us, and it helped a ton. Only one or two people got DoTs on them (say, if a ranged had a snobold on them) and there wasn't a huge band of fires to be careful of. I'm not sure whether it's intentional or accidental, but for the time being, it makes a very large difference. I assume it's not intentional, though... sadly.
Phase two with the Jormungar was ... ugly. It's just ugly, I don't care how practiced you are at it. There's enough "random" to the encounter that it remains very easy to just get killed without there being anything anyone can do about it. Though I suppose not snagging aggro at the wrong time could help a lot of instances of what seem like random death. Between the Paralytic Poison, the random inconvenient Burning Bile and the Jormungar moving erratically underground... things can go unexpectedly awry.
It's not impossible, but it does help to have everyone on their toes. Which we did manage.
And then Icehowl... he was actually cake, on his own. No one was stupid and forgot to move when he targeted them for his charge, and no one needed the speed buff to avoid the smooshing, which is yet another black mark against those who DO get smooshed - the only excuse I can come up with is lag or a computer freeze up or black out or keyboard or mouse malfunctions. Other wise, you need to stop admiring your fine self in the mirror.
I think we spent about an hour and a half working the kinks out of the Heroic Beasts - part of it was learning the new quirks to each of the encounters (DoT fires, how very important it is to get Snobolds off of your healers NOW, Jormungar hurt a bit more so don't bunch up, Icehowl's breath hurts more and you can't speed away... mostly the fire DoTs and the Snobolds, though), but made steady progress each time. Except ... you know, when something went horribly awry in the beginning and we knew better but just weren't quite up to Heroic speed yet.
We got into the groove, and it went very very well.
And then, let down of let downs, we were told to leave so we could switch to normal ToC 10 and do a full run there. Which was kind of depressing, after doing what many consider to be THE hard fight for the Heroic version. But the rest of the night was a breeze and easy tokens, so it was hard to complain TOO much. Though I don't really need any more Triumph Emblems. I have 185 of the suckers, and the only Triumph piece I want is my shoulders once I get another Trophy, which looks like it's going to take a while to get.
In the end, it was really really cool and exciting for me to participate in my guild's first successful step into Heroic ToC 10. I did around 4.5 million straight healing, about 2 million prevention with bubbles, and only 2.5 million overhealing (compared to about 7.5 straight healing from each of the other healers, and 5 million and 3 million over healing). I'm still a little under the other two for straight heals, but not so much that I feel like a dead weight - if I didn't have Guessed Absorbs running on my Recount, I WOULD feel like that dead weight.
I'm glad that this encounter allowed me to heal more to my potential than it seems I'm able to when we run high on healers - it's simply not a good idea to have too many healers on the Heroic version, because you won't be able to take the bosses down in time for the next phase to begin if you do. This felt like a better gauge of my abilities than most of our larger raids lately. I think I can be content with my performance - I'm not sure where else I can shore up or change my play style to do "better," while still assuming I CAN do "better." I suppose I've reached the point where "good enough" will have to do.
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