153: Almost "Done"

Well, I've now killed ~150 heroic bosses.  I have the i245 headpiece, tanking ring, dps ring, shoulders, and the i232 T10 feral chest piece.  I have some bracers from 25man Flame Levi and a staff from 25man XT.  I still have a couple blues and a couple i200 pieces, but it's safe to say I overgear all the non-ICC heroics.  It was extremely fast and super easy to get to this point but now I'm at the point where I'm looking toward raids - I'll probably be kitty DPS for those.


My DPS is pugs is picking up.  Pushing ~2.8k now and hopefully I'll be breaking 3k before long.  One thing I was worried about when switching from my paladin was that I wouldn't be able to stroke my epeen as much on the damage meter in heroics, but it's looking like I had nothing to worry about.  Ferals do solid damage and when I'm no longer in blues I'm sure I'll be able to give my paladin a run for her money.

Now, there are a few heroics I want to talk about:

Forge of Souls
I've gotten thrown into the first two of the new ICC heroics for the first time this weekend.  They were actually a lot of fun and definitely more challenging that anything blizzard has given us so far from a 5man perspective.  Forge of Souls was easy from a tanking perspective but there was significantly more damage flying around than in other heroics so I was glad to have a solid healer.  The packs with a couple casters are fun because I group up on one caster, throw a few swipes/mauls and then charge/interrupt the other to keep aggro and keep damage intake down a bit.  It's not a huge deal, but it's always fun to throw in a few little tricks to make runs even smoother.

Pit of Saron
I hadn't read up on these new heroics before getting into them as I was expecting to need a little more gear before I'd get assigned them.  So I always had to ask the party to let me know anything important.  Pit of Saron was  a lot less intuitive to me than Forge of Souls.  The huge open landscape had me wondering where I was supposed to go, but luckily the group pointed me in the right direction.  The trash and first two bosses are super easy though even though I was intimidated by the bigness of it at first.  They really don't need any explanation besides "hide behind a rock when he runs away" and "stay out of bad shit and run if he chases you".  They were both easy one shots.  The trash leading to the last boss was a bit harder for my first time there.  I didn't get a good explanation of the collapsing tunnel and wiped once because everyone sprinted ahead of me who didn't know it was a gauntlet type thing.  I'm fine taking the blame though.  After one run through that stuff I'm sure it'll be easy the next time now that I know what the expect.  The final boss wasn't bad, the only explanation I got was "he does evil stuff" so I just stood still and tanked him and he died.  Later I heard that I was supposed to kite him as some point but that didn't seem to be an issue at all.

Halls of Reflection is the last instance to check off the list, but I still need better gear before it'll unlock for me so that'll be for another time.

Occulus
Finally, I want to mention Occulus.  This is now the easiest and one of the fastest instances in WotLK.  Anyone who says otherwise has not run it recently.  If people know how to avoid the trash dragons, you only have to kill 1-2 the entire run and even if people are idiots, you should only have to kill 5-6.  Every boss leading up to the last one takes less than a minute to kill and the trash can be done without a healer.  Yesterday I had a group in which the healer left after the first boss and we proceeded to 4man the rest of the instance without him.  I hotted myself up before each pull but probably didn't even need to.  Everything dies ridiculously fast and you even get 2 bonus badges at the end along with some gems.  I still haven't seen the blue drake, but I'm sure it'll show up eventually.  But the point is, people should not be afraid of this instance, it's one of my favorite to get because of how fast it is and how many badges you get.