Gearing up for heroics

So my 5-man druid team is 79 - 80 is in sight. Woot. But now I've been pondering what I need to do to be able to solo heroics. I have another druid that's my main and is a very well geared tank, so I have to gear up my resto druid and the boomkins to be decent. Any advice? My current thinking is do Wintergrasp whenever I can, possibly make a 5 man Arena team and get spanked, and targeting some of the easy heroics (lol - I'm not real sure what those would be for multi-boxing). Any advice would be appreciated.

remember that you can do heroics as long as everyone is doing 2k or 2500 dps each, probably even less but at that point you need to have a slightly geared tank or healer to allow for the slower killing times.

If you know the mechanics then you can do those things with lower dps. I'd say try some of the easier ones and see how they go or just farm the regular ICC 5 mans for the ilvl 219 stuff and then start with the heroics... :)

EDIT: Just remember everything is going to be a learning experience based on your group makeup. you'll have to find out what works for you at all levels of gear and when you heavily outgear stuff it'll be a lot easier ;)

With the tank being pretty well geared you should be fine, he will just take more of a beating due to slower kills.
Only fights that will be an issue is ones where there is a lot of AoE damage that your healer would need to work hard at. Overall I think you should be able to run heroics, although with the expansion on the horizon I would think of it as a learning experience rather than gearing up for the sake of gear due to it all being wiped with the expansion.
A bear tank can use quite a few PvP items due to their gear being a lot more stamina oriented, due to being automatically being crit immune..

yes, get any epic from the AH and pvp you can find until you are eligible for the normal 80th.

then I would focus on normal 80s (pit, forge of soul, hall of relection), you get ilvl 219, emblems and its non-stop repeatable.

heroics at the lower level dungeons are not so desirable, only the last boss will have an epic item. some of them take really long trash lines.... hall of reflection on the other hand can be done in 25 minutes. I only do heroics for the daily frost emblems... and ilvl 232 from the 80s heroics

I felt that the most difficult part was learning movement - there are a few bosses where spreading and outhealing won't do the trick. For me the turning point it was the devourer of soul, after you can do him, you pretty much can do all bosses machanics in 5er.

the second most difficult part was keeping aggro on large crouds - halls of reflection is the archetype, once you understand it, it is a peace of cake - before a sure wipe :)

fortunatly, no 5er requires independent slave movement or action- with the required ilvl you can do all 5er content after some training.

Haven't done it while boxing.. but thought toc 5 man normal would be a fairly easy quick way to get a lot of easy epics

Wow, a lot of good info here. I'll definitely do the normal 5 mans of ICC (duh, should've thought of that). Thanks!

I'm partially doing this to learn how to solo heroics for Cataclysm, but primarily I'm doing it because it's fun. Multi-boxing breathes new life into a game I've been playing for years. (As I'm sure many folks here can understand).

Any tips on movement for the tricky bosses? With my main druid I've MTed all of the heroics and have a lot of tanking experience. So I'm not too worried after keeping aggro and all that. Coordinating my slaves to do what they have to in the various fights, however, does make me nervous.

if you can strafe or move your team separately from your main that should cover it for heroics (you may not even really need it if you over gear them). This allows me to keep tanking on my main and move my team independently. I have a 2 keys for left and right strafe that moves my all my slaves but do nothing on my main. This makes it easy to get out of fire / poison / black circles, you know all that good stuff we aren't supposed to stand in.

Personally, I would say that you *shouldn't* buy epics off the AH unless and until you find that you cannot make any progress in heroics without them. My reasoning behind this is pretty simple:

Cata is right around the corner. You'll be replacing anything you get from the AH or heroics pretty quickly, I think. Gold, however, will still be useful, so you'd probably want to stockpile that.

My advice would be to just try some heroics and see what happens - you say you have a well geared tank, so that should go VERY far to helping.

With the resto druid, it's pretty easy to get at least adequately geared (you can use cloth as well as leather, so you have lots more options) for healing heroics, and wild growth + tank heals *should* be enough to keep your tank up and handle any incidental AoE. Yesterday I took my resto druid out of mothballs and ran through some dungeons & other heroics with another boxer, and wild growth was almost always sufficient to handle keeping the DPS alive - the tank usually needed lifebloomx3 and uh, the other instant healing spell and was fine. I never ran out of mana despite being in a leveling clownsuit and, according to conventional wisdom, not ready to heal heroics; the tank was OK geared, though he was working out some itemization, spec and rotation issues, so I had to do a fair amount of healing on bigger pulls.

As to specific dungeons, you should be pretty good doing UK, UP, DK, and maybe Gundrak, Nexus to start with. CoS might be painful since the wandering zombies will start attacking your DPS and you don't have PBAoE on them that's easily targeted. HoL & HoS might be iffy, but you should be able to handle at least one of the bosses in them. Normal FoS and PoS you should be able to at least kill the first boss in each for a badge.

With movement on tricky bosses, that's actually pretty easy, if you're using something like ISBoxer - just make keys that will move all windows but your main one and have 'em strafe (faster than backing up) out of fire/void/whatever spots. For fights like Bronjahm in FoS, where you all need to be close to the boss at one point, of course having an Interact With Target key bound will help you run up to them, and also with facing issues if you have to move. Tip for facing: I have my IWT key right next to another key that will have my toons back up; I hit IWT which makes them face the target and begin running at it, then I immediately tap the back up key and they stop running at the target so now they are facing it but still at range and can nuke away. I also have my mouse scroll wheel to click up does IWT, click down does back up and that's pretty good, though it can cause trouble when I fumble it.

As far as Cata heroics go - I think they will be very different and possibly more challenging to boxers because they *seem* to want to move away from the WotLK "just AOE everything down ASAP" model of dungeons and go back to the vanilla "crowd control is very important" school. Learning how to handle movement and facing and character control now will help a lot, but I guess I'm just saying that once Cata comes out, be prepared to have to do a bit more management of your abilities, crowd control, etc.

And keep something else in mind: it really is pretty challenging when you first start handling these things so just accept that wiping and the corresponding frustration is part of it, and even fun :) I had a REALLY hard time when I first started running heroics (all of the advice I just gave you was given to me by other people because, hooo was I doing it WRONG) but got to a point where I was able to handle all the ones I suggest to you and a couple of others as well. Had it not been so close to the next expansion coming out, I think I would have been willing to invest the time and effort to start trying raids or just the harder heroics.

Good luck, and keep us posted!

Edited: Druids can't wear mail, just cloth and leather. :D

An update. First thanks for all the suggestions! They really helped.

So I started on Trials of the Champion and managed to win the joust (thanks to the sticky on the forums) and defeat the group of 3. But then I got stuck on the second boss and gave up. I tried Forge of Souls and got smacked hard. But each attempt I learned things.

Some things that are obvious to some but I had to learn: I mapped to the same key a good tanking rotation on my main and a good DPS rotation on my DPS so I could focus exclusively on healing. When I no longer really had to think about the others and focus on keeping people alive, my success ratio went way up.

Also, some tips for druid multiboxers specifically. I went and have kept an all druid team because you can, in a pinch, stealth through trash. There have been some trash pulls I could beat but it's a risky thing. It's much easier to just stealth past and continue. Also for boss pulls, I always have the Starfall and Forces of Nature cooldown available. I have a macro for both of those that starts with "/stopcasting" and they become strategic AE. This comes in handy a lot - oh noes, the boss just summoned pals hit Starfall. For Forces of Nature I hit that key and have a repeater region set to all my slaves where I can transmit a mouse click to get the treants in play. It makes it easy. That makes it possible to put up big DPS on bosses and burn them down.

Kate's comment above about movement and Interact with Target was crutial. Up until that point, I was so screwed any time someone feared me before I got in the habit of hitting my IWT key and then a step back.

Long story short by the end of the weekend I cleared Nexus, Drak'Tharon Keep, Culling of Stratholme, and Utgarde Keep. I also killed a boss or two in several other heroics before hitting a wall. I also got some upgrades along the way. It's the most fun I've had in WoW... well, almost ever. And the most challenge.

A follow up question - the bosses that are my consistent road block are any that put goo on the ground you have to step out of. Like the Construct thingy in Gundark (grr). I tried doing what Kate said, but it required such fast reaction times and it meant that I wasn't paying attention to healing or anything else. The tank would have to move and the rest of the group, too. And my brain couldn't handle moving two separate groups in different directions and healing. Should instead I group everyone together and run around in circles or something?

Congrats on progressing, can't wait to get my team to 80 and do the same.

You've setup movement keys to control all but your current toon? I've got the home/del/ other keys around there set to move my other toons. So it's simply a matter of strafing out of stuff generally.

i found that buying a few of the ilvl200 blues (boe drops in heroics) from the AH helped to get started.
they cost literally nothing (1-2 dailies :-) and are not too bad.

ICC normal modes too, but beware. you might find normal HoR to be harder than most northrend heroics.

Glad to hear it, Ferret! Sounds like you're kicking butt!

That's a great tip, Zub. I went to "Wow.com" and looked up a gearing up for heroics thread and got all of my toons geared in cheap blues and reputation gear I qualified for. That definitely helped. No one said anything about it, but doing the Wintergrasp weeklies can net you enough honor points in order to buy a PvP piece pretty much right away (plus I won the WG game with 5 catapults smashing the last tower, multiboxing for the win - hee hee).

And thanks, Kate!