Tol Barad is the. Most. Poorly designed. PvP zone. EVER.
If you haven’t seen it or read anything about it yet, here’s how it works, in a nutshell. There are three spots in the zone that start out capped by the defenders. In order to win, the attackers must cap all three. Simultaneously. I.e., if you are attacking, you have to hold all three at the same time to win. If you don’t, the defender wins when time runs out. (Locations are capped by means of the Alliance/Horde slider like you had at the workshops in WG.)
This is *almost impossible *to win as an attacker. All the defender has to do is hold a single point, or take back another one you’ve capped as you’re attacking the third, in order to retain control of the zone. Wow. Just wow. What the fuck was Blizz thinking? This is *massively *imbalanced. As an attacker, you could have held all three locations at various points in the match and have had more total time in control of each point than the defender, and still lose.
In other news: further proof last night that having good players in your group is essential to having runs go smoothly. I ran Deadmines and H-LCTV and they both went pretty smoothly, with only a handful of wipes due to people being unfamiliar with the fights. I was especially impressed with the second run, since we got a PUG healer in his first Heroic, wearing a lot of greens. But I was just careful to CC more things than I had in Deadmines, and he did a great job of not only keeping everybody up but staying out of the fire himself (he’d never even been in LCTV on regular).
As a bonus, I picked up the best possible tanking weapon for a woman: a rolling pin. 
Probably a good time to remind everybody: If you’re not familiar with an instance or a particular boss, including any boss you’ve killed on regular but not Heroic, it is **your job **to inform the party before the pull. If you warn them that you don’t know the fights and they pull without explaining anyway, that’s their fault, and it’s generally a good idea for the group leader to verify that everyone knows the fights, but it’s still ultimately your responsibility to either research fights ahead of time on your own or let the group know that they’ll have to clue you in to important mechanics.
One of my guildies wrote up an excellent cheat-sheat for all of the bosses in the new instances. (Some bosses have notes about their Heroic changes; unfortunately the list does not include SFK or VC.) Does the BDL forum still exist? If so, I’d be happy to copy it over for people to reference. That list is actually how I’d gotten through the majority of my dungeons. (It’s also handy for copy-pasting important things into party chat for people who don’t know the fights–saves you a lot of typing. :D)
IME, the #1 measure of how successful a Heroic will be is whether the group members are good at avoiding unnecessary damage. Because if they’re not, the healer will be constantly wasting mana, probably go OOM on boss fights, and then comes the wipe.
That is beauteous. Thanks!
Are you using an addon like Decursive? I highly recommend it for any class that has any kind of dispel, because it (a) pops up an alert you can’t miss and (b) gives you a handy interface for using your various dispels by right/left clicking a box for each party or raid member.
Does he cast the triangle faster on Heroic or something? Because it goes up soooo slowwwwly in regular that it boggles my mind that anybody could fail to get in it if they know that’s what they’re supposed to do.
Chalk me up as another person who’s never seen a school of anything but Deviate Fish (and only in those three Barrens oases) or one of the varieties of Sagefish.
