Well having gotten down over half of the heroic difficulties so far I thought I’d take this time to list out the progression path I feel a new guild should take for non-heroic and heroic content. These are based on the gear requirements for the boss and the mechanic difficulties of learning them.
Progression Path:
- Argaloth – Baradin Hold: Easiest fight to learn. Just need healers who will dispel (you can 2-heal this if your healers are fully blues) and DPS to do about 10k DPS each. Downside is this boss will most likely drop PvP epics which you’ll probably be using for your DPS initially anyway. Tanking is extremely light so maybe a all blues or mostly blues with a purple will cover tanking.
- Halfus Wyrmbreaker – Bastion of Twilight: This fight will largely represent a gear check. 10k DPS per DPSers, which you should have already from Baradin’s Hold. Difficulty will vary by the week so with the only thing being continuous is the need for a hit capped player to do interrupts.
- Magmaw – Blackwing Descent: You will need mostly ranged from here on out. Challenge is pretty light just make sure you are bringing classes with powerful AoE. Roughly the same difficulty as Halfus. Single tank this fight for a higher success rate.
- Omnitron Defense System – Blackwing Descent: DPS requirements for this are lower than Magmaw and Halfus. However co-ordination requires are slightly higher. DPS need to be aware of when to stop DPS (50 energy) and make sure no dots are ticking after that 50 energy point. Healing is very light and tanking is very light.
- Conclave of Wind – Throne of the Four Winds: The damage on this fight is pretty weak except for the tank/healer on frost. The only big thing challenge wise for this fight is having a healer and DPS for the Wind platform who can dodge tornadoes and a spinning cone attack. We had a healer jump on this platform on heroic without ever having done it thinking it was easy and 4/4 of our first wipes were to her just getting shot off, so it takes some getting used to.
- Valiona and Theralion – Bastion of Twilight: Healing on this fight is pretty extreme, but if you can heal it you can kill it with as many DPS dead as you want. It’s also single tank so don’t be afraid to throw in some extra DPS. Fight will require minor co-ordination regarding stacking, unstacking and moving as a group. Nothing you can’t handle by this point.
- Atramedes – Blackwing Descent: This fight is easier DPS wise, healing wise, and tank wise than any fight you have done so far. It can and has been 5-manned (1 tank 1 healer 3 DPS) with great success. It is the only fight in this dungeon that gets harder as you add more players. This fight is personal responsibility so people with high sound will die. As well you’ll want to bring some classes that can move fast to kite and hit gongs appropriately. I’ve solo healed this in half blues, tanked this in blues, and DPSed this in PvP gear.
- Maloriak – Blackwing Descent: Two phase/two tank fight with very simple boss mechanics. Only remotely challenging part is in the final phase where you need a competent tank who will be able to kite the boss appropriate without getting hit by lines of fire.
- Twilight Ascendant Council – Bastion of Twilight: A lot of the mechanics of this fight are simple. Phase 1 is largely just splitting up DPS appropriatey. Phase 1 is switching between being in the air (hitting tornadoes) and being on the ground (earthquake). The whole fight is basically getting the mobs down low enough so that phase 3 doesn’t last as long. If you can master phase 1 and 2, phase 3 should be a one-shot.
- Chimaeron – Blackwing Descent: Little bit of an asterisk by this boss because he’s not that easy for healers. Tanks have a pretty simple job and DPS just have to spread, stack and DPS. Healers on the other hand have to time heals appropriately and make sure they land appropriately. The gearing requirements for healers and tanks on this fight is insanely low because of how the boss mechanics work, however if people are not precise about what they are doing it is a wipe.
- Cho’gal – Bastion of Twilight: Lots of boss mechanics to worry about here. Much like Atramedes there is a bar measuring you messing up so you’ll not want a bar of this stuff before the final phase. It took us five attempts to get this on alts (adjusting to our new roles). It’s not a terribly hard final boss but you will need to figure out what you have for snaring ads, AoEing ads, interrupting people channeling Cho’gal and killing ads effectively in the second phase of the fight.
- Al’akir – Throne of the Four Winds: Challenge level on this fight is pretty high because there’s quite a bit going on at once here. If you get phase 1 down getting phase 2 down is insanely easy (since it just requires timing killing ads). Phase 3 is a little hard to get used to as most guilds are probably not telling people to look for tells. Hint hint: in this fight the tell for moving up or down is a transparent storm cloud forming where you are.
- Heroic Halfus Wyrmbreaker – Bastion of Twilight: Yes, heroic Halfus is easier than Nefarian. All drakes will be up in heroic so you will need geared healers, tanks and DPS. I’ve written a guide on how to approach the drakes already.
- Nefarian – Blackwing Descent: The final boss for Blackwing Descent is no walk in the park. Every aspect of this fight needs to be well tuned, planned and precise. I’ve written a list of tips that will help kill the 10-man version of this boss. Just make sure you balance DPS on your platforms in phase 2, push three crackles in phase 1, and make sure your Onyxia tank is able to kite ads.
- Heroic Atramedes – Blackwing Descent: If you didn’t need to kill Nefarian to unlock Blackwing Descent heroic modes, Nefarian would be further down the list. Atramedes on heroic is mostly the same except things that caused sound cause more sound, you have little imps spawning from portals that must be DPSed down and Nefarian will burn one gong for every gong you use (so you can only use them for air phase and hitting gongs). This essentially means that no one can screw up… however it’s REALLY hard to screw up on this fight because of how similar it is to regular (and how good you’ve become at farming regular).
- Heroic Magmaw – Blackwing Descent: As of a hotfix on March 15th, Magmaw represents the third heroic difficulty boss you will want to attempt. Blizzard massively nerfed the spew AoE and the second phase shadow AoEing in 10-man. I’m in the process of writing a detailed guide for this. Just make sure you have a mage or a hunter, three strong healers and some badass single target DPS.
- Heroic Chimaeron – Blackwing Descent: As hard as this is on regular the heroic version of this boss isn’t much of a step up. The main difference in 10-man is that he will do double strikes and his regular attacks during Feud meaning that you will need a lot of tank healing and raid healing going on during here. Another thing is he has more health which means Phase 2 lasts longer. For this you’ll want a hunter or a rogue to evasion/deterrence tank after you run out of tanks. Hunter/warlock pets can also take 2-3 hits as well if your warlocks/hunters feign/shatter before they take any damage.
- Heroic Maloriak – Blackwing Descent: This fight is definitely not easy. I’ve laid out a lot of the troubles you will have with this fight here. Most important thing for this fight to work on is avoidable damage while maximizing DPS. This is a list of our most recent kill’s sludge damage. Might seem odd that the DPS who are taking the least damage here are the ones who are doing the most damage.
- Heroic Conclave of Wind – Throne of the Four Winds: This fight is pretty extreme in responsibility and I have outlined them here. Everyone in this group should be pretty close to full epics. If you hit this point you’re at a progression point that will be pretty gear dependent. Some guilds have done it with weaker gear but that’s after 400+ attempts per boss.
- Heroic Valiona and Theralion – Bastion of Twilight: This fight doesn’t ramp up in difficulty too much. You use the same basic strategy with the exception of a tank swap. Of course, this fight is only easy if you have enough gear to kill Conclave on heroic. Otherwise you will find yourself having to use cooldowns for blackouts and some bad ass DPS to get this thing down before your healers OOM.
- Heroic Omnitron Defense System – Blackwing Descent: Much like the double dragons this boss will fall over pretty easily with gear. Without gear the healing will feel insane and DPS will feel like those slimes just never seem to die. But with gear you will feel like the differences in this fight are minimal. I’m sure by the time you’re here you will have a couple of weeks of heroic boss kills behind your belt so you’ll have a nice chunk of gear.
- Heroic Nefarian – Blackwing Descent: A lot of people suggest you move the boss to the middle and alternate his breath direction for heroic. This may be optimal but not necessary. Instead you should just practice your tanks kiting path so that he can kite in a circle. Another thing to note is that breaths hit like a truck now. Should also note his health doesn’t increase so the timing on crackles is going to be exactly the same.
- Heroic Cho’gal – Bastion of Twilight: Heroic Cho’gal will be a very easy fight for you if you are geared appropriately. The major difference is the need for AoE damage. Each time Cho’gal summons an ad he will summon two of them. This means that twice as many slimes will come out. This of course means that at that point where you had so many slimes you could barely deal with it…. well that time will come almost immediately.
- Heroic Twilight Ascendant Council – Bastion of Twilight: The fight on normal was pretty hard. So add in more health, more damage and scarier AoE this fight can get hectic. You’ll note that every single phase will last about a minute or two longer and phase 3 DPS will be tight. The two ads at the end of phase 1 and phase 2 have to be between 12-26% minimum for you to have a shot at this (dots sometimes push these mobs down even lower than 25% while they become inactive). Once again like a lot of these fights this one is left until later because it relies very heavily on gear.
- Heroic Al’akir – Throne of the Four Winds: This fight has a high skill base and gear base. Between this one and Nefarian you should do the heroic version of which ever one your guild does better on normal. A lot of people struggle with Al’akir in Phase 3. If you find Nefarian to be easier for you than Al’akir at this point in your farm week than by all means, do Heroic Nef first.
- Sinestra – Bastion of Twilight: After you have cleared every boss in Bastion of Twilight on heroic you unlock Lady Sinestra who is the primary Consort of Deathwing. It only has one difficulty and can only be summoned while your lock out is set to heroic. The only guilds that have successfully cleared this boss have done so after at least a full month of farming heroic level bosses.
Good huntin’
TheGameGuru.Me 
Hey man excellant job on the detailed strategys for the Heroic boss modes in Cata raids.