1.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...er/Dhcp/simple Couple of heroic firelands achieves when it was current (including bethliac) raided the rest on normal and have been raiding on various other tunes at various other difficulties for years. NEVER I repeat NEVER had a problem with normal raids. I have heroic ToES (have the helm to but it doesn't track for some reason)
2. You can look through my guild. Some are server first actually. Got a death's demise enchance shaman. We are in almost universal agreement. Normals are the new heroics. Some of them are actually happy about this change. Others not so much.
3. The encounter is indeed not friendly to holy paladins and megara is only slightly better. The same problem that afflicts tortos afflicts megara by the 5th or 6th head. Constant running around, avoiding everything on the fucking field as an obstacle course and almost NEVER any time to hard cast a spell.
4. Tortos is not only badly tuned, it's mechanically overwhelming. I would suspect that the nerfs to previous bosses would suggest that the raid is poorly tuned (and in my opinion ill conceived mechanic wise) but I don't think you take that as evidence anyway. It's a couple things that make the fights unfun. If I avoid dmg from a boss mechanic I don't understand why I should still be taking dmg from it. Nobody actually get's hit by rock slide in the raid but guess what everyone takes dmg from rock slide, the same applies to megaras green explosion thing. The game is visually overwhelming now. Constant shit on the ground, sometimes it becomes very hard to see what you can and can't dodge (even though I still manage for the most part it is a strain). Finally the raids are just to busy. Seriously. Theirs just to much shit going on. Everything feels just complicated for the sake of complicated. They can't just through a couple of mechanics at you that you can master they have to punish you by constantly adding more and more. It's frustrating because it makes my job so much harder and I liked my job. Healing is fun. Well healing used to be fun. It isn't fun in ToT and I'm thinking about trying another roll or maybe quitting raiding altogether. I don't know I like my guild.
Look no offense you've only raided LFR apparently but you somehow have the temerity and the nerve to tell me that it's not the raids fault? You must be joking. Step into normals, get your ass handed to and then come back and tell me otherwise. My guild doesn't need your advice, were doing fine without it. We've been able to manage a steady boss a week but it hasn't been fun and we dread the future raids. Were not fucking cowards or pussies so we still get up and do it and we like each others company enough that even THIS raid as shitty as it is we still manage to get along well. We don't need to kill old bosses, we need BLizzard to design better new bosses. My suspicion is that once they start to recieve more "data" you'll see nerfs to the later fights as well.