Holy Brick Wall Batman!

[Mystic]

It is sort of funny how you forget just how difficult the northrend instances were when you tried them at level or just under level (toon level and gear level both), because once you get over the hump (higher level or much better gear), they become quite easy. This is true for the regular and the heroics.

Leveling via northrend instances is good practice and fair XP (overall, not per hour), but honeslty until you outgear/outlevel them, you are asking for troubles (unless you have a solid mixed team and are very talented with controlling them manually or via lots of clever macroing), and your xp/hr will be abysmal. Stick with questing, and if you have heirloom +XP pieces, you will zoom with questing.

If you insist on instances at level, make one of your toons a dedicated healer, gear him for healing specifically, and learn to heal with him.

Prior to northrend, all my box teams I took through any instance had no issues whatsoever doing them at level, and never needed a dedicated healer. Northrend instances at level this is not the case. You need to outlevel the instance, outgear the instance, or run a dedicated healer with on-level healing gear.

I will say that the four shaman and paladin tank were the easiest comp to take instances at level for me, even without making one of the shaman a dedicated healer. I struggled here and there, ended up making one a dedicated healer, but even with good healing reflexes, macros, etc, it still was less fun than just doing double duty dps and heal with all four shaman, so I switched him back to dps. Without a dedicated healer I could take most instances when I was one or two levels above what most non-boxed teams hit them at. They work so well at dual-duty because the dps gear works well as healing gear, since both specs require +sp. This is not the case with other non-mixed teams. You need two sets of gear.

Next team to take the whole way through was DK + 4 Rets. Northrend instances were definitely a brick wall. I tried UK at 70 and just plain took too much damage. It is not melee team friendly at 70 with normal 70 gear. Without a dedicated healer it was plain tough. I could limp through with a couple deaths every other trash pull, and a few wipes on each boss, but it just wasn't worth it. The Rets healed like crap with dps gear. I tried the dedicated healer thing again, but it's just not my style, so I just quested for gear, and went back when I outleveled/outgeared it a couple of levels. Same thing for heroics.

Now I just hit 70 with my 5x druid team. I steamrolled through all pre-NR instances, with all of them feral, 1 bear and 4 cats. I popped 4xrejuv for trash, or for tough trash or bosses I popped 4xrenew, at the start, and hardly ever had to pop back to caster to refresh them before the fight was over.

I tried UK last night with them, all geared on level, and I struggled through with them all feral (bear+4 cats), again with 4xrenew on tank, then pull, the caster/cat toggling to heal. It works well, but again, this place is not so melee friendly, especially without a dedicated healer. Too much AE/splash damage. I tried making the 4 dps into moonkins, with about 50% healing gear and 50% feral since I wanted to see if it was viable and I had no full sets of healing gear collected. My dps doubled, but I went OOM in a near instant, and got clobbered by the trash that was so simple with the 4xcats. OOM means no dps and no heals with oomkins.

It was very apparent that I forgot again just how tough these are at level without a dedicated healer. So, I threw in the towel on doing the intances at level and am just suffering the questing until I outlevel/outgear them. I'm just not going to pain myself with a dedicated healer when I can just quest instead. It's level 80 that matters anyway.