Immediately after Meg was beat, you could hear two things in Mumble: elation and relief! We had not been working on Meg for very long, however you could sense that everyone felt 'it should be down by now' and so 'the sooner the better'. It is a fight that, at first blush, seems quite simple on the surface; however, under the covers, it is a bit more demanding than you'd think both on the healers and on the dps.
As a tank, it is business as usual: establish and hold aggro, immediately face [your part of] the boss away from the raid, rotate CDs accordingly, move when and as needed.
As a dps, there is a tremendous amount of reactionary movement that is punishing to the healers if you linger more than a split second on your reaction times. In the final stages of the fight where the boss is hitting harder and more frequently, cast-time casters have a hard time getting a cast in before they have to move, again.
As a healer, the performance of the raid and it's ability to react to the situations that develop are what drives how difficult this fight is for you. The first half of the fight is deceiving in that the boss is hitting slower and not as hard, however the second half of the fight accelerates the rate and increases the damage done by the boss requiring the healers to increase the rate at which they heal and the oomph with which they are healing - right about the time when their mana pools are bone dry.
After Meg was down, I asked if there was anything we did on that attempt that was different (so that we could do it on every attempt, obv), however the general consensus was that no, nothing was done diffferent than our usual strat - just that we needed to polish the execution until we got it all working together.
Frankly, I think that is the essence of raiding - being willing to show up and try things until you find what is likely to work for you, polish it until it works, and have fun together doing it. Granted, there is a balance between pure fun and pure progression - progression being fun "in a way" but largely being stressful while you are doing it! There is a reason why you hear elation and relief when a progression boss goes down.
Striking that balance between 'we want to have fun' and 'we want to progress and see the content' is dodgy, at best. People have to be pushed when they are least wanting to be pushed which is when they are already sensitive to being behind where they should be (which is why they need to be pushed if they want to stay in that fight at that time). Pushing progression too quickly is a 'fun suck' and it raises a bar of performance that might be too high for your group -- just because "everyone else is 11/12" does not mean your group should be, too. Then again, if people are not being mindful of paying attention to detail and performing good raidcraft, then yes, they need to be pushed.
But back to last night: progression, and fun!
About the only complaint that I had (other than the bludgeoning headache I had) was that the run back to Meg after wiping feels inordinately long compared to the other run backs -- yes, I know, there were longer run backs back 'in the day'; however, we've been nicely spoiled this xpac with zoning in almost where you wiped and I like it!
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