my first heroic

Last night I ran heroic Sethekk Halls with a group from the guild, to help another druid finish his epic flight form quest. I had been on for a few minutes trying to farm primal airs for my Windhawk set when he started asking for another druid to help, but I was nervous about running a heroic so I mostly ignored his call. When he whispered and asked me specifically, though, I explained my anxiety then decided, "What the hell," and joined the group. Good decision!

The five of us were me (boomkin), two mages for ultra-uber DPS, a feral druid tank, and a healer on her first heroic (in fairness, an alt healer of a raider running her first heroic as a healer so it's not like she didn't know what was going on). This ended up being a really good group, with lots of CC and plenty of firepower. Plus, Bora's a really good tank and leader, so that made things *so* much easier.

We had a few little stumbles (FYI, the Ravenguards on heroic can't be sheeped...whoops) but overall the run went pretty smoothly. We had a bad strategy on the first boss and wiped but fixed that pretty quickly for the second time. He spawns these elemental adds and we tried to just ignore them and burn the boss quickly, but that wasn't such a good idea. We survived the first wave of adds but died as soon as the second wave spawned. The second time around we just burned down the elementals as soon as they spawned, and that seemed to work pretty well. They weren't elites, I don't think, so they didn't put up much of a fight.

The Raven boos, Anzu, wasn't a bad fight at all. For those of you not familiar with the fight, there are three statues that can be brought to life by a druid's HoT and give really nice buffs while they're up. My job: keep them up. At Bora's suggestion, I tried writing macros for each of the three but couldn't get the syntax quite right for whatever reason. The macro would target the right statue, but then wouldn't cast Rejuvenation. I'll have to figure that out sometime later. What I did last night, though, was to use my essentially-unused second hotbar for each of the targeting macros and the rejuv. Much of the fight for me was hitting 1, 5, 2, 5, 3, 5, repeat. :-) That's not entirely true, but it's pretty close.

Flushed with success after taking down Anzu, we progressed to the third boss. This fight was much harder but we got him on the first try. I say we, but I actually had little to do with the fight. One of the mages and I went down after the first arcane explosion (I think our pillar was defective) but the remaining three were able to take him down. Amazingly. These raiders are pretty good, I tell you what. I knew Bora wasn't going to be able to battle rez me during the fight, so I tried to run back in. Sadly, this didn't work. I got stuck at the entrance and it wouldn't let me "zone in while an encounter [was] in progress." Or something like that. Oh well.

We got some nice loots for the run. Three [Badges of Justice], hurray! My first badges! As the only leatherworker, I got [Pattern: Stylin' Crimson Hat] and [Pattern: Shadow Armor Kit]. Nice. I also picked up the [Sethekk Oracle Cloak], a slight upgrade, and a [Large Prismatic Shard] from a disenchanted drop. Not bad at all.

I logged off about an hour after I had intended to, full of excitement and confidence. I survived a heroic. I was helpful and brought some useful skills to the group. I'm still not ready for Kara, but I think I will start running heroics on a regular basis. All in all, a really good night.