Well, I just finished Heroic Slave Pens the second time today. Of course, you can only run heroics once per day, but I did it with two teams.

Team 1: Prot Warrior, Resto Shaman, Ele Shamanx2, Fire Mage

Team 2: Prot Pally, Holy Priest, Demon/Destro Lockx2, Ele Shaman

The tanks are Kara geared, the healers both have about +1600 healing, and the DPSers vary between 600 - 950 spell damage.

That's the first time I'd run my guys in those groups and I must say, Prot Pally + 4xShaman is much easier than either of these setups. Selecting which keys make which abilities function on each class and coordinating them all is hard work.

Some observations:

Tank: Overall, it seems like the Prot Pally is much easier to tank with (no surprise there), the Prot Warrior's battles were much more chaotic with trying to get devestate up on as many mobs as possible while using Improved Thunder Clap as often as it came up and still DPSing and healing.

Heals: Seemed like the Resto Shaman was easier to heal with than the priest, because when he pulled aggro he'd survive a bit longer. Also helped to have him in a group with a couple other shammies that could chain heal him if a mob was beating on him and my warrior was overwhelmed.

DPS: I was surprised to see my +800 spell damage mage losing out on overall damage to my +650 spell damage ele shaman. Was using a rotation of Fireball, Fireball, Fireball, Fire Blast vs Lightning Bolt spam. My +950 spell damage lock slaughtered everyone else on overall damage with shadow bolt spam.

I would like to be able to take both these teams on the heroic daily with some consistency, but don't know if they'll be able to handle some of the other Heroics. With my Pally + 4 Shammies (easy mode) I had SP, SV, UB, and Ramps on farm.

A couple of questions:


  1. That was the first time I successfully ran a heroic on my warrior - any other warriors have tactics to share for generating enough aggro on 4 targets so heals won't pull one of them off in the first 4 seconds after engagement?
  2. Anyone else have comparisons between priests and shammies as healers for this kind of team? Haven't played my priest nearly as much so I'm probably missing something there as well.
  3. Anyone else seeing mages underperform and locks overperform in DPS vs ele shammies?

Thanks, and I'm looking forward to learning from all the discussions in this cool new thread on instance strategies.