Halion HM

So, I went in and put down a couple hours of attempts on Halion in heroic 10 man last night on my mage to study it.
Once again, mage mechanics are completely OP in this fight due to having blink, absorbtion, and an often unused ability mage armor. But let me get down to specifics of the fight.

Boss has 4.5mil or so more health.
In general abilities you should've avoided before, but didn't care much in normal, you now have to actually care about (where the debuff is dropped and how fast, standing in fire, etc).
Tail swipe appears to still just be a stun, though especially in twilight with beams...that can easily kill you.

P1 in 10 man doesn't really change at all. No fire elementals (25 hm only), just things hit harder and debuffs need to be dropped smartly so as not to blow up others in the raid.

P2 adds an extra set of spheres, so instead of staying in half the room, you stay in 1/4 the room. Other than that, nothing but the usual heroic mode (hits harder, has more health) is different. That being said, the twilight aura that ticks raid wide shadow damage is actually significant here, and took all 3 of the heals we had to keep people up.

Placement of the debuff drops is key. As the mage, it was easy, blink out, decurse myself, run back in. Others used rocket boots, and rogues/druids sprint/dash to get out quickly. In heroic though, if you wait too long, or you're too close, you will wipe the raid easily by not doing this. Stop mid cast as soon as you get the debuff and run. Maybe it was due to caring to run away, but the circles dropped appeared to grow much faster per time the debuff was left on than in normal.


Strategy:
We were tanking the physical realm at an angle along the edge, allowing for the whole room to run away into and drop the debuff, this seemed to work pretty well, with people generally stacked up near the middle. This becomes important for 2 reasons.

1) Debuffs have 3/4 of the edges of the room to get towards where they can drop the fire spot.
2) The fire spots left on the ground DO NOT disappear when you go into shadow (they do over time, just as if you were staying in physical though).

So, if you were not quite in the right place and you left a patch of fire on physical side near the middle...you've now made it so that melee either have to not dps at a period of time or wipe...and if you get the debuff in that same area (while spinning around with the beams), then you pretty much are gonna just wipe, since the debuffed person going to the edge will probably hit most people who are standing away from the fire spot, pulling them to the outside and wiping the raid.

We were using the strategy of tanking the boss in the middle in p2 and rotating it, much as we did in my guild's 25 man. This seemed to work fairly well...it was amazing when we didn't move until the spheres charged up, allowing full ranged dps for most of the time since not having to move, and allowing debuffs to be more easily placed next to each other near the edges. Other strats I've seen tank the boss here along the edge. I don't recommend this though, due to making debuff dropping harder (less space that isn't on/near somebody) and constant kiting.

We didn't make it to p3, but it was more than I expected for a pug, and a decent chance to actually analyze the fight in heroic. With guild tanks and heals being quite a bit better, I'm hopeful for a real chance at downing this next week on mains.