Javaed posted on August 12, 2009
So, last night I logged on to WoW and some of my guildmates were preparing a Heroic ToC run. I was interested in going myself, but there was a problem. None of our tanks were online. Luckily, my GM SamuelTempus (Hey look, he blogs as well) has a well geared Prot Paladin, so he volunteered to switch characters and I got an invite.
Well, I walked in, we got buffed up, and when I looked around I realized we had four priests in the group and we were all in Shadow Form. We started trying to figure out who was going to heal, when a suggested was floated. "What about Vampiric Emprace?" Well, VE does stack, and we were all in a group... the priests would get 40% of our combined DPS as heals, the Tank would get 20%, he could use Judgement of Light and we could keep PW:S up on everybody. So we gave it a shot...
The Grand Champions
So, the first boss wasn't too bad, except for some glitches at the start (Eressea didn't dismount). We had to fight Zul'tore, Mokra, and Eressea, killing them in that order. Eressea wasn't that big a threat, especially with 5 people being able to dispel her polymorph. Zul'tore was the biggest threat, and to my shame, I had to use a couple flash heals until he was defeated. After he went down though, I hopped back into Shadow Form. With VE and DoTs up on all three targets, and everybody focus firing individual targets, the healing from VE was pretty significant.
Technically it wasn't a one-shot, due to the dismount bug, but we didn't wipe after resetting the bosses, so I'm going to count it as one.
Eadric the Pure
So the second boss that we faced was Eadric the Pure. This boss and his trash were pushovers. The trash itself gave us no trouble at all, with the healing form 4 VEs being plenty to deal with their damage. Eadric himself was very simple as well.
We were a bit lazy, and didn't always avoid the Radiance damage, but we had the disorient effects dispelled quickly. Hammer of the Righteous didn't do anything significant to us, it was also dispelled immediatly, and plenty of hammers got thrown back at Eadric.
I didn't drop out of Shadow Form at all on this fight, though I did use some strategic PW:Sing at times. Nobody died, and Eadric went down in one attempt, so that's yet another one shot.
The Black Knight
So, this fight was a bit more challenging. During Phase 1, we burned down the Ghoul immediatly, then swtiched to the boss. The tank was taking some heavy damage, so I did toss a few Flash Heals on him, again still as Shadow Spec and still hopping back to Shadow Form to keep DPSing. Phase one ended with no real challenges.
Phase 2 wasn't that bad either. We got the Black Knight to about 70% before I had to heal again, but I was able to top off Sam and then switch back to Shadow Form for phase 3. The Shadow Priests were all at full health.
Phase 3 caused our first death on this boss (me) thanks to Marked for Death. Honestly, I didn't notice it was even on me, and the boss died soon after I did. VE healing was more than enough to keep the people without the mark up, and if I'd been smart I would have popped Dispersion during this phase.
All in all, it was very fun and not too difficult. I'm also going to be linking to this post whenever I see people complaining about this heroic =P.