Taking a backseat in a casual raid

While my main focus these days has been on my recently created horde character(s) on Mal'Ganis, I still occasionally play my alliance druid with some real life friends.

Now, when I had given up raiding on these characters, my guild was reasonably progressed given the server environment and time frame - most of the way through SSC, some progress in TK, etc. So, my druid has appropriate gear for that content. My buddies who I now play with, really do not. I've been helping some on a 3v3 team with them to get some points and thus their gear isn't completely lacking, but they have had issues in their attempts so far to clear heroics and tougher instances. This isn't a big problem for me when I play with them, as they are both fairly new to the game and only play casually so I don't expect them to be the min/max types.

Anyway, these friends of mine have other friends here in town that play WoW, and a few weeks ago they decided to all join up and form a guild so they could play together. A few of these other people have some experience in Karazan, but as far as I know that is the extent of their progression. Well, the new guild has been formed, and the decision was made to attempt the first boss in Kara. Now that attunements are lifted those who didn't finish the key chain yet were going to be able to go, so they'd have a full 10. I agreed to help in this effort, partially because I wanted to watch what was going to be many of these guys and gals first experience in raiding, and partially because I knew they'd need more healing.

So, I log on Monday night to join the raid and see how things go. The first thing I notice is that there are not one, but two level 69 players in the raid. Now, I was already a little nervous since I knew they had trouble in clearing heroics, but that set me on edge. Thankfully, one of the guys whose previous guild had been in Kara took the initiative to lead the raid. And I must say he did a fine job. We took things slow, partially because the DPS was low and partially because he was being very careful in setting up the pulls. Things went off without a hitch, we made it to Attumen and thanks to the AoE threat generation of our paladin tank had no trouble during the transition. Attumen went down, and the 69 rogue got an epic, good times.

Then, the decision was made to move on and at least attempt Moroes. Now, Moroes can offer some challenges for many raids. And I have some terrible memories of the table packs of mobs from the last times I ran Kara around a year ago. However, I completely underestimated the effectiveness of a paladin tank through that series of pulls. He had no trouble grabbing all the mobs, and heal threat was never an issue. I did manage to pull off of him one time, as he did not know what the brittle bones debuff actually did and I spammed heals to keep him alive. No worries, it's his first time in the place.

On to Moroes, well, the pull was set up, but with one fatal flaw. They forgot about the gouge. So I went down a few minutes into the fight, followed by the other healers as he gouged and went for the next person on the threat list. No big deal, the raid leader adjusted the pull and they managed to down him on the 2nd attempt. All in all it wasn't too shabby for a bunch of first-timers with two non-70's. And it's great that true casuals can take a couple hours and get their feet wet in a raiding environment. Thinking back to the casual vs hardcore debates from pre-TBC it seems that Blizzard has done a decent job of solving this on the low-end. As long as players are willing to put in a little bit of coordination they can advance in a casual raid setting. Next up, Maiden. Hopefully those 69's will have hit 70 by then...