Seeing things from the other side

So far all my guild's attempts at ICC have been with pretty selective groups of mains. We have a core of about 15 toons that really have the gear and are backed by players with the skill and attention to detail to work on progression content. (Although both Festergut and Rotface continue to stomp us.)

A few of the players that weren't in our group that started ICC earlier this week wanted to get in for some rep and badges (and loot) last night. So a bunch of us jumped over to alts and we put together an ad-hoc group with a let's-see-how-this-goes attitude.

Our best Rogue and Resto Druid hit up their Paladin tanks. One of our better Hunters got on her Priest. We had a Mage healing on his Druid. I ended up healing on my Shaman. We had two Hunters with us who had never seen the place. 7 out of 10 toons had never stepped foot (or hoof) inside of ICC, 2 of them fronting players who had never seen it. A lot of us weren't expecting to even get Marrowgar down.

Before we had to call the raid because it was getting late we'd one-shot the first 3 bosses and had gotten Saurfang down to about 1M. And the one thing everyone kept saying (about the time we killed the frost wyrm leading up to the gunship battle) was how much fun they were having seeing current content from a new perspective.

Our two tanks were amazed at how different the fights looked from the front and (in the case of the Tree) up close. I believe "cooler" was the exact description used. (Which, in hindsight, should have earned a /facepalm after having fought a frost wyrm.) For me, seeing them from a distance was also a lot more interesting (even though I spent most of it staring at HealBot). I brought up my Shaman intending to make him a back-up raid healer, but until the new LFG tool, he hadn't really healed anything since Kara. And ICC was the first raid I'd been flinging Chain Heals in since then.

Now we may not be bringing many of these alts on our next attempts through the Plagueworks (or other inner-chambers of the citadel). But it's nice to know that if they can collectively hold their own through the lower portions of the raid, any one or two of them might be viable fill-ins for the rest.

Even beyond that, we all got to learn that we're better than we thought at our off-roles. And we had a lot of fun doing it. Which is what a game really should be about, amirite?