Heroics in Warlords - First Impressions

I've now run every dungeon on heroic on my main, the Paladin Tank. There's far too much to go into on a fight-by-fight basis, but here's my general impression:

They're not too hard. In these early weeks, you're definitely going to wipe a couple times, but the real difficulty of the dungeons isn't much of an issue - it's more about learning how to do the fights correctly. There are some mechanics that come close to instant-kill, but these tend to be something fairly obvious that you can do something to mitigate. Admittedly I've been finding things a lot easier with a new computer - just being able to process everything that's going on allows me to be a far more reactive tank.

Many of the bosses are only buffed in heroic, though there are a few interesting mechanical changes (Bonemaw in Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, for instance, becomes a lot tougher.)

The major difference this time around is the prerequisite: Silver in Proving Grounds. Beyond hitting 610 item level (which is not terribly hard to do,) you need to prove that you can handle some tricky mechanics. The stuff in proving grounds is not terribly complicated, and certainly not everything is directly applicable to every fight, but it's basically a "can you pay attention to these things" test. The tank one tests you on mob positioning and keeping aggro on multiple targets, while the DPS one tests your ability to interrupt and your situational awareness. While the achievements for these are account-wide, you'll need to do them again in order to queue for heroics with strangers on each character. I haven't done the tank one on my Death Knight yet. If you're having trouble immediately after hitting the level cap, bear in mind that the mobs only scale down to about 610 item level - you'll want to hit that floor first, though it's not impossible to do earlier (just a little hard.)

This system has caused for some complaining in my guild chat, but honestly, I think it's been wonderful as a way to refine the people you're running heroics with to those who at least have the ability to pay attention. As such, my first couple heroic runs were actually easier than the level-cap normal dungeons.