Gearing up for heroics

[kate]

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.

[ferretb]

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?