Zul'Aman - Was Kinda Hard :(

I joined a guild ZA raid last night with Solidstate, they had previously cleared 3 bosses so we went straight to Jan'alai.

On the way to him we managed to wipe twice on trash. The first time, I didn't sheep the Amani'shi Flame Caster continuosly, as I didn't know I had to. About 2 seconds after I sheeped it the mob broke the sheep and firebombed the raid. It seems you need to continously sheep the mob to keep it sheeped. Anyway between the damage from that and from another caster that was being DPS'd, I died and the raid wiped soon after. The second time a paladin forgot himself and consecrated the ground under the sheep...
After the 2 wipes I noticed the caster had some kind of buff on himself so I tried to spellsteal it. Whoa! 300 haste rating for 20 seconds! That was insane :) Needless to say, I had no more trouble keeping the mob sheeped :)

Throughout the trash on the way to Jan'alai I noticed we lacked healing (was getting healed late, long times below 50% health). The lack of healing was much more felt when we started trying out the boss, with the MT dying try after try and the raid having to reset the boss. To be more precise, we wiped one time due to bad luck - boss teleported us to middle before we could kill the add breaking the eggs, causing us to be swamped with Dragonhawk hatchlings. The other times we mostly wiped due to healing problems. Not that I was perfect, I died 2 times due to the bombs (which shouldn't happen) but a single DPS dying will not wipe the raid, while a MT dying will. In any case we finally got the boss down but the only piece of loot was Arrow-fall Chestguard which no one wanted (we had no hunter and 2 DPS Shamans who both passed on it). So we ended up sharding it :(
Of course we all got 2 Heroic Badges each from the boss.

Next up was Malacrass. On this try we had the following adds: Thurg, Darkheart, Slither and Fenstalker. This was a good mix for us as we could: OT and kill Thurg, shackle Darkheart, sheep Slither and banish Fenstalker. Kill order was Thurg->Fenstalker->Darkheart->Boss->Slither... at least in theory.
In practice, we managed to down the 3 adds but the damage from the boss was so insane the healers never had a chance, especially due to his spell pushback during his shadow bolts. The fact that two of the healers were paladins didn't help as what is really needed in this fight is party/group healing, the paladins had a hard time doing single-target healing when the entire raid was taking damage.
For me this was one fight that my T4 bonus (100% spell interruption resistance) was a blessing as I could case firebolts on him continuously even during the shadow bolts.

We gave up after 3 or 4 wipes, for a total of around 3.5 hours in ZA, 1 boss down, no new gear for anyone and only 2 Heroic Badges to show for our troubles. Oh, and a large repair bill.

Sometime raiding can be a real downer ;p