Alts alts and more alts

I first started playing WOW about a month after Wrath of the Lich King, which meant that when my first toon got to 80 and started raiding properly I quickly reached the now what phase. As I didn't have much experience in WOW I ground heroics over and over again for hours on end, with no particular aim. (I still have not completed glory of the Hero despite only having a couple of achievements left) So in the end I bit the bullet and leveled two alts (yes I actually detest leveling unless I have a very good tv series to watch at the same time, like true blood)
I think haveing a good set of alts is one of the keys to enjoying wow, as there is no better raider than one who understands all the mechanics of the fight, and has even tanked/healed/dpsed it. This is why I have two alts:

Thobas a Dk tank

Gloraa a warlock

What has truely surprised me while playing these alts is the variety in class mechanics that blizzard has managed to create. (I at the moment am resisting temptation to roll a arcane mage) I thought that I would be bored playing just a dps, but I absoloutely adore being able to flip between destruction and affliction at a moments notice.
I currently have Gloraa as my main raiding toon and I raid ICC 25 and 10 with her every week. The ICC 10 is either a pug which I have to lead, or our second guild ICC 10 run if sign ups are low. Due to this I have actually been able to get some pretty snazy gear on her, but I'm beginng to reach the phase everyone I know reaches with alts (provided they don't have legions of them) the now what phase. Gloraa has got every single item I really want from the first four bosses in ICC 25 and that is about as far as I can reasonably go with her for the moment. The last time we pugged ICC 25 and looked at Festergut it turned into a horrendous wipe fest, which I am truely scared to repeat.
So your faced with the problem when raiding with an alt. What do I do and there are a variety of different options from my perspective:
- I can try very hard to push the icc 25 I run further into Icecrown which has its benefits, but I have serious questions as to whether it is possible (rp servers raiding being what it is)
- I can just casually raid with her and not really worry about advancing her.
- I can try to enlist her in a 10 man raiding guild, but I have a distinct feeling that trying to keep to two raiding schedules is just foolish as who has that time.
- I could try to mainswap.

Of the above I'm personally going to try to drag my ICC 25 gdkp through festergut, though admittedly it is going to involve recruiting and replacing people.

Pid

Valithiria Dreamwalker Video

Valithira

First of all I'd like to apologise about the absurd gab between posts, my rl and online life have some unknown reason become allot more busier which really has limited my free time.

Well I think given the style of this fight every healing blog will be tempted to write about Valithria Dreamwalker. We had our night on her last week and I found it to be a fun if interesting fight.



For those that haven't done this fight i'll give a it a brief explanation. Waves of adds come from each side that have to be dealt with fast by the dps, and have a variety of painful debuffs/aoes. The aim of this is to heal Valithria to full health, to do this you send healers into a dream phase where they are able to get a stacking buff that gives them +mp5 and +% healing.

Initially we started with 5 healers going into portals and 2 healers (the durids) staying out. Vhan and I decided to split sides as the room is quite wide and I don't know about your dps but our tanks were forced to run into the corners to keep our dps alive. This meant we had to split the room 50/50. As we were getting used to fight we had a couple of wipes due to tanks running off, we then switched to rotating the 5th healer going into the portals, thus increasing the regen of the druids. Finally we bit the bullet and took a 8th healer and had 4 raid healers and allowed 2 mages to go into the portals (you should have seen there glee at the idea of damage increases + infinite mana).

What i'm truly looking forward to is seeing what tactic people settle down to on the heroic as that is going to be one interesting fight. I suspect you'll probably can't take 9 healers due to the dps but well we'll see. The main complications stem from the fact that you need the dps to take down the adds, I can imagine the aoeing add will be lethal on heroic, while you need the healing team to pick her up fast. This means that presumably on heroic you will use as many of her portals as possible with healers, yet at the same time can you really spare healers from raid healing. I guess this is one of the fights where good guilds will really shine.