heroic Shadow Lab

As a quick pre-comment: I went back into the raiding game. I joined Impact recently. Before TBC i raided a few times with them and they are a nice bunch of people. Currently we try to run two groups for Karazhan and as soon as people are geared up enough we'll peak into Gruul's Lair.
After our last Karazhan raid a group of us decided to adventure into heroic Shadow Lab. It takes much longer in heroic then on normal, so bring enough time and don't start in the middle of the night, like we did. :)

In SL there are some things that got changed for heroics. The first two rooms at the first two bossed are the greatest pain. The warlocks near Ambassador Hellmaw are four now and beware, they cleanse each other. So it will be necessary to keep them crowd controled out of LOS from each other or a loose one can free others. I recommend using a warrior tank who stance dances for the fearing Felguards, they hit hard enough to one- or two-shot people if the tank gets feared. We had good success with using a hunter to kite them a moment and then feign, should the tank get feared. Ambassador Hellmaw has nothing new to show, just his fear seems to be longer.

The next room with the large groups (up to six mobs) requires good planning and use of CC abilities, especially as they cause more damage on heroic. If you have a priest, he should MC a mob even if hes the main healer. The acolytes (sp?) have powerful healing spells, so he can heal with them as well. We had trouble to kill Blackheart the Inciter with only one healer, so i suggest to take an off-healer with you as well. The fight is just too chaotic and one healer will struggle to keep the group up.

The next interesting challenge causes Grandmaster Vorpil. The voids will spawn much faster and his hellfire does more damage. So jump from the platform after a teleport in a split second or you take huge damage. One new trick he learned is that he'll banish a random player, can even hit the tank. As this fight is a faster time race on heroic, we found the best tactic for us was to have the tank in DPS gear (as Vorpil hits like a wuzz) and DPS him down fast. Should the voids become too many, we tried to kite him down south and when he teleports us, take him north afterwards. In total this should give you enough time to kill him.

Murmur is a nice awareness check in heroic. His touch will now work like a magnet for the other group members, so you have to spread out quickly again or else you'll take damage from your team mate exploding. Beside his Sonic Boom, he now got another AoE ability which will hit you, if you don't run back into the circle fast enough after the sonic boom. So basicly you spread out inside his circle. Watch if you get yanked from a touch and when the sonic boom comes, you run out and directly after the cast you run back in. As this fight is very boring in normal, they should have done this for normal as well - finally makes it a challenge. Unfortunately we were so tired when we reached him, that we wiped at 4%, 5% etc. After a few tries we decided to call it and get some sleep. Next time we'll take revenge. ;)

I just discovered that ItemSync seems to have problems catching all items from eg. chat. Some items it just can't remember. As the author is busy and did not fix that problem yet, i decided to switch to AtlasLoot Enhanced for the moment. Basicly it's a database with loot lists for the various instances or faction vendors etc. I tried it and very much like it... it's quick to check for certain drops and it keeps extra lists for heroic as well. In addition i upgraded my Atlas. AtlasLoot Enhanced will integrate itself into the Atlas maps, but as not all maps are in Atlas, you're better off using the own interface to check for drops. As there are several beta versions and older versions floating around, here are the two i installed (those work together perfectly):
AtlasLoot_Enhanced_v2.04.00_Beta4
Atlas 1.9b1