This is the big leagues

AKA, this is where the shit hits the fan.

We got our first taste of heroics last night and...well, it went pretty miserably. In about 2 hours, we managed to down all of one boss. We had countless wipes and some attempts that were nowhere even close.

My priest hit 85 last week and I've spent quite a bit of effort getting her geared up. Within a few days I had her tricked out in a mix of rep gear/JP gear and some BoEs to get an item level of 346, just the minimum for the Zandalari heroics. Of course I wasn't about to set foot in there with the bare minimum, but I was able to heal through two heroics dungeons without any problems. Perhaps I had a good group, but I the characters I inspected mostly had the same ilvl as I did. My mana only dipped about halfway during boss fights. DPS knew the mechanics and everyone was pulling 10k or so, and both runs went very smoothly with only one wipe (hunter pet pulled boss while we were on trash).

So I felt pretty good about my healing and felt prepared for heroics. I really should have remembered that you can certainly carry one undergeared/bad player through a heroic. You MIGHT be able to carry two with a really good tank and exceptional single DPS. But you certainly cannot carry three undergeared players who do not know mechanics.

I think my friends were in for a rude awakening during the first boss in throne of the tides when they both stood in the geyser and promptly found themselves dead. Sure, you can stand in bad stuff in normal and it's really not a big deal, you can heal through that. But you do that in heroics and it WILL one-shot you.

This is exactly the thing that I'd been harping on and on about ever since our first dungeon crawl. I've been trying to teach the mechanics to them because I knew that while mechanics seem trivial at first, they will wipe the group in end-game. I knew from personal experience that the step-up in difficulty from normal to heroic is HUGE. This isn't wrath anymore and heroics aren't a joke anymore. This is Cata, where heroics are, in fact, heroic mode difficulty. The mechanics are brutal and very, very unforgiving. You can screw up once, maybe twice, but more than that and chances are the group wipes.

Even after the mechanics issue was more or less sorted out (people finally learning not to break CC or stand in bad shit), we kept wiping because the fights were dragging on too long. Cata is also very hard on healers in general; we can't just spam our biggest heals on tanks anymore because mana management is a big part of cata healing. We can't afford to top everyone off to full all the time, healers need to conserve mana as much as possible and mainly do triage. Even with meticulous management if the DPS requirement isn't there, the group will inevitably wipe as the healer's mana ticks down to zero. After about 5 attempts it was clear it just wasn't going to work. The adds were eating up everyone's HP because they weren't being killed fast enough, no one was interrupting a damn thing, and CC kept getting broken. The fight was going well past its normal duration and I was completely oom even after shadowfiend and hymn.

Next we tried Lost City, which went no better to be honest. We wiped twice on the first boss because people weren't watching their feet and stepping all over bombs. When you step in one bomb it tosses you into - you guessed it! - more bombs. It was like learning how to do that boss all over again, this time on heroic difficulty where you REALLY cannot step on any bombs. You know, kind of like normal mode where you can sort of step on a couple bombs, but this time you REALLY REALLY can't step on ANY bombs. Sigh.

After a bit of struggle we did down him, but Lockmaw proved too much for us. People seemed to be doing better with mechanics (although do be honest I was too busy healing to really notice), but the DPS simply wasn't there. The baby crocodiles need to die very quickly otherwise it will chew up whoever it's fixated on, and they just weren't getting killed quickly enough. The AoE DPS just wasn't there (in which case they should've been focused down one by one, which was also not happening).

At the end of the night two problems were very obvious to me:
1. Mechanics are not being followed. This excuse is valid on the first attempt, but not the second. You should know by the second try to get out of the fire, to avoid tornadoes/bombs, to NOT break CC on adds, etc. The culprit is confusion, panic, and tunnel vision.

2. DPS is just not there. People generally consider 7k to be minimum for heroics, but that's assuming all THREE DPS are pulling 7k. And just because you pull 7k on a target dummy, it doesn't mean that you will on a boss. During these movement-heavy fights, your sustained DPS is likely well below 7k, which is what the group needs to make sure the healer doesn't go OOM or beat the enrage timers. If two guys are barely sustaining 6k and one isn't even doing 4k, then it just won't happen. The culprit? I could write a whole blog post on why your DPS is low, but I'll refrain since I don't know every single class inside and out. I do know this:

Bad Spec: the difference between a good DPS spec and a jumbled, crazy weird spec can be as much as 1-2k. The more talent points are wasted, the larger the gap gets. Those 2% DPS boosts really add up as you put more and more points into a spec.

Bad itemization: Seriously, this shouldn't be hard. If you're 85 you should know what stats you want and what to avoid. The whole "OMG it's an upgrade because it's blue and I can wear it" mentality has to go out the window. Know your class, know your stats. So often I see bad players saying "well this isn't technically for my class but it's a lot better since I'm only wearing a green ilvl 308 and this one is blue and is ilvl 333." Ignore the item level and see what you're gaining versus losing. If you're a warrior do you really think you're upgrading anything by gaining 100 intellect at the cost of 100 strength? All you're doing is upgrading your item level so you can cause more wipes in heroics.

Subpar or no glyphs/reforge/gems/enchants: A fully gemmed, chanted and reforged character can pull a few thousand more DPS over the same exact character in the same exact gear with none of these things. One of the biggest reasons DPS is low as a fresh 85 is that you're not getting hit capped. If 20% of your attacks are missing, you can be doing 20% more DPS by reforging/gemming/chanting until you get hit capped.

Rotation, rotation, rotation: This is SO important. If your rotation is perfect, you can most definitely pull 7k even in shitty cata greens. You know how I know this? I was pulling 7k in wrath dungeons when I was 80. And my gear back then had nowhere the stats as the gear in the cataclysm starter zone. You can, for a fact, be decked out in ilvl 282 gear just from the Mt. Hyjal quest rewards and still pull 7k. It is doable, but requires perfect execution. So if your ilvl is good enough for heroics, and your itemization is correct, it is a rotation problem. Go research your class. Go read what your moves should be (some classes have a set rotation, others have a priority list). Set your action bars to reflect what the rotation should be and go practice at a test dummy.

Ack, I'm getting horrible images of bashing my head against the wall trying to clear heroics back at cata launch. It was awful, just awful. So many people who were all so collectively confused...