More Lowbie Dungeons on Horde Side

It felt oddly satisfying to do Wailing Caverns on my hunter at level - I mentioned that I never managed to do this back in actual Vanilla times (probably because back then I was levelling my hunter shortly before BC launch, so most people were focused on the upcoming expansion already), so this sort of "better late than never" experience was oddly cathartic.

As you'd expect of these old-school dungeons, each run was quite an experience.

During my first run, things seemed to be going almost too smoothly for a while, until we had a near wipe deep inside the instance - me and the mage were the only ones to survive, due to him re-sheeping one mob while I turned my cat's taunt on and spammed mend pet on it until the situation had stabilised. The warrior tank and the warlock decided that they were going to wait for the healer to run back and res them, but in classic Wailing Caverns fashion, our priest got lost on the way back. He did eventually find his way back to the rest of the group (I think he dug up a map from the internet or something), but not until a good fifteen minutes or so had passed.

Killing all the bosses was also a shocking drain on my ammunition - and I'm not some noob who goes into an instance with a half-empty ammo pouch. It got a little nerve-wracking towards the end (I didn't want to have to start meleeing things), and by the time we killed Mutanus, I had exactly five bullets left. Dodged that particular bullet (excuse the pun)!

That could have been it if I had actually managed to get all my quests done in that single run, however for two of them I was still short on drops, which prompted me to look for another group several days later. Pro tip: While watching the chat for LFG requests, a great way to pass the time in a productive manner at this level is to fish at one of the oases in the Barrens. Deviate Fish sell quite nicely.

Just as I was starting to get a bit impatient and began to think that it probably wasn't going to happen that day, I saw a lonely tank looking for group for Wailing Caverns, quickly snatched him up, and about five minutes later we were on our way.

I was kind of amused when this tank asked if we all knew how Vanilla dungeons worked - he was apparently quite old-school and the healer soon commended him on his excellent pulling. The tank explained that in Vanilla, the art of pulling was what tanking was all about, prompting me to add that the art of dealing damage was all about not pulling, which earned a few chuckles.

About halfway through, our warlock disconnected and didn't come back, which prompted the group to replace him with a mage. Said mage actually showed that the tank's question at the start had not been unreasonable, because he had trouble finding the instance entrance and expected all the quests to come from the NPC at the door. We finished without any further issues, I got a nice new bow and managed to complete both of my remaining quests. We also must have killed everything considerably more quickly than last time, because even though we did the entire instance once again, I came nowhere near close to running out of bullets this time.

Once again, this could have been it, except that someone suggested that we should continue to Shadowfang Keep as a group since we were doing so well. Everyone but the shaman healer agreed, and he was soon replaced by a priest.

I'd forgotten just how packed with trash mobs and claustrophobic SFK was in Vanilla. More than once I actually found myself unable to shoot things and forced into melee range since I couldn't get to the minimum distance required to use my ranged attacks (damn those spiral staircases).

Still, initially things seemed to be going well, until our healer DCed somewhat suddenly. He had been saying something about his baby waking up, so we figured that this was the reason for the sudden disappearance. We eventually replaced him with a level 18 priest, which is a tad low for the instance but seemed reasonable considering that he didn't have to hit things. However, we soon ran into trouble in the room with the many stairs and ramps after Odo the Blindwatcher, where our healer's immense aggro radius caused way too many mobs to descend on us all at once. We wiped and tried again more carefully, but still got too many of them, simply doing too much damage to us. I eventually lost count of the number of wipes we had in that room - five or six perhaps - but eventually we had whittled the problematic group down to a manageable size and were able to proceed.

Sadly we didn't have much luck once we actually made it to Arugal, who once again wiped us in short order. (I suppose it didn't help that he was level 26 and I was the highest level in the group at 24.) I think we had two attempts on him, and then found after running back that everything up to the courtyard had respawned, which prompted several people to throw in the towel. Bit of a shame, but it was still a productive run overall - I got lots of leather for my leatherworking and as mentioned, my little tauren dinged 24.