And all the first 10m HC council kills were exclusively without mages... I am very well aware of the cheese/useful tools mages have to avoid shit for themselves, however I was talking about hardcore progression, not only in ToT, but also beginning in Mogu. Sure, by the end an Sha of Fear HC, a mage was a useful DPS cannon (especially when 5.1 hits), but at the start of MoP, 15 groups from the top20 10m HC bracket werent using a mage in their first kills, including paragon, moonz. Whereas EVERV top20 10m had AT LEAST ONE (some even 2) priest and druids and paladins in their setup, and EVERY group had a warlock (or two) and a hunter. Every group in top 20. Only worse of than mages in participation were rogues and shamans.
So yeah, I know what I'm talking about because we were 3 mages in our 10m group and if we've ever tried to put more than 1 mage in it got messy. (talking about mogu, by our sha firstkill 2 mages were fine). It got messy because the raid dmg was too high, some spikes/bad rng could kill us, and the lack of hybrid healcds is unforgiveable in 10m HC progression imo. We could do it eventually, sure, but it makes the fight unnecessaryly harder, and that is nothing you want for progression.
Also, our ToT HC council firstkill was with 2 mages, and we almost didn't make it because of Khazra'jin Dmg reflection coupled with +dmg debuff...