I’ve had tanks ask before, ‘is the healer shadow?’ But their fears are alleviated after the first boss and some are stunned when I’m top of the damage meters I’ve had one tank that ragequit at the start (before any pulls), but that is very rare – 1 in like 100+ runs.

The only “downside” is that people have now become so accustomed to this sort of thing that most people don’t even blink and what I’m doing has no impact on them…

For any readers wanting to know how I did it, here are some tips:
1) Use your healing gear (you don’t need any +hit) for heroics. Healing gear will have nice regen.
2) Don’t be afraid to shift out of shadowform and heal.
3) Shield and PoM the tank prior to pulls (you can do this on the run). Renew is useful to top up people whilst moving.
4) Spirit tap should help regen a lot of mana.
5) Shadowfiend (3 min cd due to talent), Dispersion (1.15 min due to glyph) means that a shadowpriest has 0 mana worries.

4)

Paladin I have a tanking spec. Healing was just too sad, nothing beyond sacred shield to keep them alive without me watching and while i can almost keep anything as long as I am free to cast I still have to pay attention even if I am healing at 10% of max.

Just at this stage it’s hard to know what they could give healers to do that wasn’t dps, given that they’re moving away from important buffs and don’t seem keen to give more CC to healers.

But yeah, I’m not really thrilled with the idea of running heroics long after I am bored with them (which happens after about the 5th run I find). I actually prefer solo grind to that.

In fact, if you look at the ICC buff as an example, that tends to outweigh minor gear differences around the raid group. I’m just imagining every instance could have an aura like that (you’d probably have to make it a buff aura and balance the instance appropriately because no one wants to feel that they got nerfed because of having a newbie in the group) and be designed to be interesting at that gear level.

I am sympathetic to the argument that if you have to grind heroics, its more fun if they are easy and unfailable. But that’s a problem with grind, not why group content should be trivialised with gear.

Many classes actually have a lot of control, they’re all just relegated to “That’s just for PvP” status in WotLK ’cause they aren’t necessary in Heroics.

I have a hard time honestly coming up with a set of five classes that would be really hosed in an instance. A glut of priests in a demon-oriented instance might end poorly, but I also don’t ever expect LFD to give me three Spriests with a Prot Warrior and a Holy Pally. Then again, maybe the extra VE healing would help to compensate – I don’t know.

Of course, even in TBC you didn’t need perfect control on every pull. Good control was usually sufficient, and locking down just one or two targets could make a big difference. I do think that a little bit of damage resistance on all CC (Blind, Poly, Shackle, Repentance, Hibernate, and so many more break on any damage taken) would help, especially for those impossible-to-reapply saps that just suck to have break from a stray AoE effect employed to pick up the other three mobs.

There is a huge difference between enchanted heirlooms and green quest rewards. Particularly when people are used to a fast paced heroics, and not really having to manage aggro. It has made some of my runs a real challenge, especially horde side where I don’t have all the fancy gear.