Hi there,
Our small, non-raiding guild is just starting to run heroics and I am the group's healer in tree form. So far we have completed heroic Violet Hold and we just completed heroic Utgarde Keep last night. Neither has been easy for us (we wiped twice last night and had a couple of single person deaths along the way). We have tried heroic Azjol Nerub but couldn't get past the first boss (actually it was the triple pulls before the boss, demoralizing to say the least). We tried heroic Nexus and wiped twice to the first boss (the one who whirlwinds) before we got a strat and downed him on the third try only to wipe twice on the mage boss and call it a night.
For what it's worth, I'm running around 1900-2000 healing in tree form (can get up to 2200 now that I have my badge item for the "ranged" slot). Our death knight tank has 28k-29k health and is over 535 defense. The rest of our group can differ depending on who is online at the time we start the run, but typically consists of either a) boomkin, b) rogue1, c) rogue2, d) mage, e) hunter. Most of our dps has a solid gear core of blues/purples. The hunter has a great gear set (the best in the guild).
We are seriously hurting for other buffs besides druid/mage (some folks have drums which we use and we always use stat food), and we don't have a good way to dispel debuffs (other than curses and poisons) and/or remove boss buffs.
I read while leveling up that Northrend heroics are weak sauce so I'm puzzled why we're having such a hard time of it. Is it because we aren't reading up on the strats ahead of time? Will that make a huge difference (admittedly it did on Ingvar last night in heroic UK)?
I don't know what our dps is as none of use damage meters and I have yet to find one built into WoW itself (despite all of the target dummies...am I missing something obvious?). I'm hopeful that once we do heroics more we will get our strats down and not have troubles, but I worry that some fights may be beyond us given our group makeup (especially after failing miserably in AN). Any obvious thoughts that might help us out? Thanks!