Gnomeregan and Gnolls

I feel like I might have hit a crossroads. My priest hit level 30 last night, but I'm not really happy with the way her levelling is going right now, as my plan to level mostly via dungeons hasn't been working out very well. For one thing each run gives even less XP than I anticipated, but more importantly I'm finding it harder than expected to find groups. It's actually kind of absurd, considering that part of my reasoning for rolling a priest was that it should make it easier to find instance groups, but for some reason there seem to be way too many wannabe healers levelling on Darrowshire (as the Elysium PvE realm is now called), at least around my level range on Alliance side. Almost every time I play, all I see in world chat is "LFM tank (and sometimes dps)", with the occasional "healer LFG" cry from a lonely healer thrown into the mix. I should have screenshotted the one who was trying to make a case for why she was the best choice to heal a level 30 instance because of her raid experience and mana management skills. This is the kind of competition I'm dealing with here.

Mind you, I did get a Gnomer run done not long ago, and that pleased me very much as I completely skipped that instance while levelling on Kronos. It was super smooth as well, even though I was only level 27 at the time, which is... six or seven levels lower than the final boss? We only had one near-wipe on the very last pull before the end, but fortunately I survived with a sliver of health left and was able to res all the others. I did notice that the scripting didn't seem entirely true to the original, as we only encountered a single one of those alarm bots that could quickly get you into trouble, and I remember that the biggest issue with the tunnel of Dark Irons near the end was that they put down mines, which they didn't seem to do here either. Still, it was a good run. Hard to imagine that this dungeon used to give me such nightmares back in Vanilla.

I also tried to get another BFD run in to finish the one leftover quest I still had there, but unfortunately that one turned out to be doomed as a server shutdown was announced shortly after we had started the instance, so we only had time to make it up to the murloc boss before getting kicked off for an unspecified amount of time. I also learned that Elysium is rubbish at doing countdowns, as their server shutdown countdown went from twenty minutes left to five minutes left in the space of four minutes.

I tried my hand at PvP for a change of pace but remembered why I hated it on Kronos too and almost made a post about that at one point. First off, crowd control without diminishing returns is totally out of control as a sufficiently bored mage can literally keep you sheeped indefinitely, but more than anything the UI is just totally useless. "Just install some add-ons, everyone does," you might say, but this is one area where I've been spoiled in the last five years: If an MMO can't present me with a UI fit for purpose right out of the box, I simply cannot be bothered. And the Vanilla WoW raid UI is just a hopeless mess. Specifically the lack of any sort of range indicator makes it impossible to keep an eye on who's even near enough to be healed by you. Just terrible.

This was my Kronos PvP experience. Been meaning to use that screenshot forever.

So I've been spending the last one and a half levels farming gnolls in the Wetlands. Yes, I actually found a spot that was quiet enough that I could have a bunch of mobs all to myself. Mostly I wanted them for their cloth, to work on my tailoring and first aid. It's actually been pretty zen, just killing gnolls while I put a podcast on in the background. It's not really what I want to play Vanilla WoW for though.

Maybe it's time to take a break again. I think it's just something about that level range, as I lost steam for a few months when my paladin on Kronos hit 30 as well.