In my opinion, the most important part of BBB’s advice: bring the dps. If you don’t have the first pack down before the next pack comes, leave your party and do some dailies.

Quick note: As a warrior tanking, you can use heroic throw coupled with the Gag Order talent to bring the Shadowcaster closer. It will silence them due to Gag Order and cause high threat with the Heroic Throw.

First group, burned down fine. Second group, burned down fine. Third group, the boomkin’s trees, the DK’s ghoul, and the warlock’s pet all went after the boss before the third group was pulled.

This caused us two wipes and got really frustrating.

The third time, nobody was allowed to use pets and it went smoothly.

Just something to watch for – I’ve never seen it happen before and the pets were not set on Aggressive.

TLDR version: Word to the wise, let them come to you on their own, don’t try to chain pull the packs.

On the plus side, I now know why Death Grip doesn’t work on skirmishers when they switch aggro to me. Apparently it’s not just taunt that they’re immune to while enraged.

The best advice I could add to this, btw, is that the 3 watchers each have one unique ability in addition to their shared skill set.

The far left one sprays poison on the whole group, which should really be cleansed ASAP. Poison Cleansing Totems helps a bunch with him, but it doesn’t really hit hard enough that I’d consider it a necessity.

The watcher in the center group simply enrages periodically, but unlike most mob enrages, while his attack speed increases by 300%, the damage he deals per swing is cut in half. Net result is a paltry 50% increase in damage, and at least one of the other mobs should be dead by the time that happens anyhow. If you can heal your tank while he’s being beat on by the previous packs, you probably won’t even notice this guy does anything special.

The watcher in the far right group has possibly the worst ability, “Blinding Webs”, which disorients your whole group for 5 seconds. Not only does this mean that your healer won’t be able to heal your tank/group, it also means that your tank won’t benefit from any of his avoidance for the duration either, so he’ll be taking some pretty nasty damage. Short of having a tank with truly prodigious amounts of stamina, the only other way to ensure you survive this is to make sure that either the tank or someone with heals can trinket/racial out of the disorient. (Humans have “Every man for himself”, I’m not sure what else works, but I know that does. Fortunately for us, our regular group has a human tank *and* human healer, and this fight still gives us hell.)

Honestly though, I have to agree with some of the others on this. Heroic AN is *the* gear-check heroic, just for this event. Highly skilled and well prepared players might squeeze through a little earlier (gear wise) than most, but I really can’t see any way you could clear this with a “heroic entry level” group simply for lack of the required DPS to drop each group in the time allotted.

On the plus side, once you can get it down consistently, Heroic AN takes about 20 minutes, so I love seeing this as the “Proof of Demise” daily now. It’s not quite the “Mechanar of WotLK”, but it’s close.

Next step: The “Watch Him Die” achievement. :)