So I finally took Jarsus into the first of Mists' dungeon, Temple of the Jade Serpent, which is a very beautiful area in the Jade Forest (the only zone currently available on Pandaria.)
I was able to solo the first wing, with a Jinyu (fish-man, but more humanoid than a murloc) guy who's been corrupted by the energy in the water there. So doing that in a group was very easy. After that, things got harder. The second wing (technically I think you can do this first if you want) is a kind of library with Sha possessing various books. The trash here does't have much going on ability-wise, but I like the concept of the Sha animating old stories to fight you. The boss here I believe is a choice between two, but we got Strife and Anger.
This was where things started to really cause pain. Attacking one of them gives them a very quickly-stacking damage buff, making them pour out insane amounts of damage. So it's imperative that you only attack one at a time. Ignoring a boss will cause its damage to decrease, to the point where a healer could, over a long enough time frame, solo the boss, letting the friendly npc finish them off. The mechanics here are problematic. For one, it's a lot easier to just stick to one of them, let the buff build up, at which point the boss goes immune, and then just wait for the immunity to fall off and keep going. It seems like they should encourage target switching, but at this point if you do so the damage gets way too high.
The trash before the third boss is pretty easy, but my experience with boss 3, Liu Flameheart, was pure pain. Liu does a weird sort of debuff that hits for a huge amount of damage and then does an AoE move that again, does an enormous amount of damage. I believe that you can dodge the second one if you move right after the first - or at least take less damage from it, but without any sort of announcement, it's very difficult to see when it's going to happen.
There's no trash after that boss, you just go to the Sha of Doubt, which is a decent, if a bit simple fight. Essentially you fight the boss while it puts debuffs on random people, causing them to damage those around them, and then after a while it summons clones of each part member, which fixate on them (meaning you should probably save the tank one for last, if you have time to focus.) If these are not killed before they go off, they explode for huge damage, killing the whole party. Each of these waves increases Sha of Doubt's damage, so it gets tougher as the fight goes on.
Overall, the Temple is very pretty, if a little on the small side. However, seeing as they seem to want to go back to the Wrath style of quick instances, this seems about right (no more Grim Batol slogs through a million trash pulls.)
This was also my first time in the Beta actually grouped up, so I'll talk about how I feel about the new Paladin tanking kit. Threat-wise, I felt fine, though it was weird seeing Shield of the Righteous almost never critting. While I know that they want tanks to focus on more defensive stuff, it would be nice to give us a few of the Cataclysm-era passive damage buffs to keep things interesting. I've talked about Active Mitigation a whole lot here, and while I guess I don't mind being able to Word of Glory myself when I need to or get some extra block out of my Shield of the Righteous, it would be nice if they hadn't totally eviscerated all the fun damage and threat mechanics. Even if threat is supposed to be a given now, having the occasional big number pop up is just good fun (and makes soloing in your spec that much less tedious.)
What I find fun about tanking is being able to control the conditions of the fight. A huge part of this is threat and positioning. My biggest fear with Active Mitigation is that we're going to be focused more on our resources and cooldowns than the battlefield.
Still, constant Consecration is nice to have back.
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