heroics need improvement

I had the fun the other day of participating in some Steamvault runs where we used exactly no Crowd Control on the mobs. The tanks weren't paladins either. We were able to just run in, DPS like hell, and kill everything without drawing aggro off the tank too much, and were able to deal with their special abilities. Our group was full of skilled players that knew what to do, and we didnt even have to mark anything. It was refreshing and fun, and since I needed Cenarion Expedition rep, rewarding as well.

Meanwhile you have Heroic 5-mans, are painful to me still, even with my raiding gear. The problem is that since the trash mobs have been elevated to stupid high levels of power, you can't reliably use offtanks anymore, and too many targets hitting on the tank is right out. You certaintly can't have anything attacking somone in cloth or leather. Ever. And any run with 2 dedicated tanks is going to run into trouble as the DPS will be lacking and the healer will be overstressed. The run then devolves into hoping CC goes as according to plan, and hoping your healer doesnt run out of mana. This also heavily forces thte group to pick DPS based on their CCing abilities alone.

In all, its no longer fun. The moment CC breaks, the monster will run off and probably kill one or two people before there is even time to react. All of the effort in the run is directed at figuring out how to approach and execute the trash pulls, and almost all the wipes are directly due to some mistake during a trash pull. Effectively, the effort the party spends on the boss is shifted over to the trash mobs. It's not that the bosses aren't challenging, its just that usually the trash pulls are far more difficult. The problem with this is that for the entire run, the only thing thats really worth killing are the bosses. They hold the badges, they drop the BoP gems, they drop the items. The only wortwhile thing left to be gained from killing trash is reputation rewards, but by the time you clear a heroic, chances are you could have cleared it twice in normal mode, receiving more reputation.

Itemization wise, most Heroic mode drops are worse than items you can get in Karazhan. While Karazhan trash may be strong, there are enough player slots to allow for multiple Tanks and Healers, and more CC options. The end result is that Karazhan is actually easier to do, and gives better rewards than Heroics, with the only downside of needing an additional 5 people to do it.

To their credit, Heroics do breath in new life to old encounters and bosses, and are good PvE endgame for people who are unwilling or unable to raid. For raiders, they are mostly overlooked, only gaining new life because of the Daily quests to do them. To fix Heroics for me, Blizzard would have to change the Trash from being their current "hits harder, has more life" model and implement something more interesting, by either changing their behavior/abilities, or introducing additional trash mobs to fight entirely.