With Frost damage at 464 and 6.7k health unbuffed, my 70 Mage donning the Epic Shadoweave set augmented with quest and dungeon Blues listed himself in the LFG tool for the first time for a Heroics dungeon run.

As usual, I listed myeslf for a few options, but with the Daily Heroics quest being for Blood Furnace, it was that one that I ended up getting into.

First Try - Healer Undergeared, Group Disbands

The first invitation was a 70 Rogue who stated he already had a Tank secured when I inquired about the existing party status. Since we were looking for a healer and one of my healer guildmates had been talking about trying a Heroics PUG, conversations went on about gearing and concerns on both sides, and it was decided to give it a go and see how it went.

The tank was a Warrior who had 11k health unbuffed and was right spot on 490 defense. With the stamina buff (and I don’t know if he ate buff food as well, or took buff potions to help his case) he had just under 14k health.

After the first 2-pull (with one sheeped while we downed the first) it was apparent this was not going to work, as the tank went down to under 2k health tanking only one mob at a time.

Our healer was a Holy Priest with +1100 healing (buffed) but still has some BOE greens 66+ and one epic - he was lead to believe that +1100 was good for Heroics, so now has some additional researching to do and some general gearing up before trying again.

At any rate, my guildmate backed out of the party and left himself, and the leader of the party asked if anyone else knew a healer - then within five minutes, the party was disbanded.

Second Try - Smooth Sailing

Less than 10 minutes later, I get another whisper, this time from a Druid who I neglected to “interview” before accepting the party invite. Normally I ask if the party has a Tank and/or a Healer secured, but this time I just jumped in… and then ventured over to the Armory to look up the Druid and Priest who started the party membership when I joined.

Turns out the Priest was Holy but the Druid was Balance. A Warlock was added to the party (incidentally a lock who was in the previous failed group with me) and before I could think to ask about the Tanking situation, the Druid said he was respec’ing and would be right with us.

The first piece of gear I looked at in the Armory for both the Priest and the Druid were from Gruul’s Lair. I was suddenly very confident that this would be a good Heroics group - if me and the other DPSers didn’t screw it up.

The DPS Team

… Consisted of a DPS Warrior, Frost Mage (myself) and an Affliction Warlock. The Warlock and I were the two “outsiders” with the DPS Warrior being in the same guild as the Tank and Healer.

The Run: WoWWebStat’d

The results of the run can be seen here in anonymized format (ie: with fake names). There was one complete wipe and a few other deaths here and there, but all in all the run went very smoothly and we downed every boss and cleared the instance.

I came out with two new pieces of gear - Embroidered Cape of Mysteries and The Willbreaker - the two combined brought me up around +120 more frost damage than I had going into the run.

The Lessons Learned

Well, for one thing, I was one-shotted for just over 8k health as one of my deaths. I didn’t pull aggro very often (at least, where I couldn’t Ice Block my way out) but still found that on occasion a mob wanted to take a swipe at me.

I noticed after that death that if I had my Ice Barrier shield up, mobs tended to only get one shot at me before the Tank had aggro back, so my shield saved my life a few more times that run.

Another thing I noticed was that people who messed up were first to admit it and nobody had to “tattle” on someone else for wrong moves that break crowd control or gain extra aggro that causes a wipe. The DPS Warrior broke sheep a couple of times within the first pulls and the Healer asked out loud what was going on with the sheep, in a “why aren’t they holding?” way - and the Warrior immediately owned up to it and didn’t break sheep any further throughout the run.

I’m quite looking forward to more Heroics runs of this calibre!