Discovering the Level 25 Dungeon Endgame

I last talked about my priest in Season of Discovery in the context of her hitting level 15 after running Ragefire Chasm once and doing some questing in Silverpine Forest. I didn't want to spend too much time questing in the Barrens - I have no particular love or hate for that zone, but solo questing as a priest can be a bit tedious in general. It's not necessarily inefficient - shield, DoT, wand plus being specced into extra wand damage and spirit tap means that you can keep grinding mobs one by one with almost no downtime; it's just not particularly fun (in my opinion anyway).

At least for me, being a priest is about playing with others and forming a team that's more powerful than the sum of its parts, so I focused on doing the quests in and around the Barrens oases to get all the dungeon quests for Wailing Caverns. I was level 18 and about halfway to 19 by the time I was done with that... those raptor horns, man. Because of how busy it was, I actually found it hard to find many Scytheclaws alive, and a quick check on Wowhead revealed that they share a spawn point with ornery plainstriders, so in the end I just picked a corner with a lot of those birds and went on a killing spree to actually get some raptors to respawn.

With all the quests sitting ready in my log and my bags freed up as much as they were going to get at this level, I opened the LookingForGroup channel, expecting to find a group quickly, considering how many of them were running at all times. However, as is Sod's law, what I found instead was at least three other healers specifically looking for Wailing Caverns groups. I rolled my eyes at how typical that was, but then spotted a tank looking for dps and a healer for Deadmines instead. And I thought, why not? There are no quests for that on Horde side, but it still drops some nice loot, and it would be something different. So I ended up whispering him for an invite and made my way to the zeppelin tower.

On the zepp I actually met up with our tank in person, another shaman like I'd had in RFC. I wistfully recalled the launch of Classic and how I visited the Deadmines on a Horde character for the first time. I remembered getting there by swimming along the coast and was planning to do so again, but when we arrived in Stranglethorn, the shaman set off straight into the jungle, and my inner urge to trust in and follow the tank kicked in, prompting me to follow. Of course, I then saw him get eaten by raptors within less than a minute, which quickly caused me to swerve back to the coastline, but I hadn't counted on just how many crocolisks were lying in wait there, causing me to die quickly too.

However, my spirit then appeared at the graveyard in northern Stranglethorn, and I saw the shaman take res sickness and continue north from there. That actually seemed like a pretty clever idea, so I followed his example. He immediately died again as he got eaten by a panther, but his death allowed me to get past without drawing attention myself, and I actually made it into Duskwood without further incident. From there I just followed the road to Westfall and was lucky enough to not encounter Stitches or any other mobs on the road. The shaman followed a couple of minutes behind.

It took a little while to fully fill the group and get everyone to Moonbrook as we had no summon available, but eventually we were off, with a group of all melee (our shaman tank was supported by a feral druid, a rogue and a dps warrior). They killed everything incredibly quickly, as they were all above level 20 and pretty well geared already. I thought how interesting that was, considering that on a regular server, people usually try to run dungeons at as low a level as they can get away with, to maximise XP and gear rewards before moving on the next thing.

Despite a mess-up on the boat that led to a massive over-pull and two people dying, we finished the dungeon in something like forty minutes. Since we were already there, I was happy to just reset and go again, and so was the rest of the group - with the exception of the warrior, who had to go. He was eventually replaced by a hunter... who was in Orgrimmar, so it took something like another half hour until he was actually able to join us in person.

I tried to make good use of the time at least by doing some herbing and fishing along the coastline. I also learned that the Defias Profiteer on the first floor of the Moonbrook inn is happy to trade with Hordies as well, which was handy for bag-clearing between runs.

We then did the dungeon two more times, which is kind of nuts to me because I usually never chain-run dungeons like that. But it was just going so fast, and it had been such a pain to get there in the first place that it made sense to make the most of it while we were there. I didn't get much XP out of it, probably because of how high-level the damage dealers were, and I only gained about a level from the whole adventure, but I got very lucky with loot, picking up several greens as well as the Emberstone Staff and the Corsair's Overshirt. Those were huge upgrades and I could immediately feel the difference in my mana regen after I equipped them.

I'm now planning to spend most of the rest of my time levelling to 25 in Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep. I know that's perhaps not exactly in the spirit of making discoveries in the outdoor world, but it is in the spirit of being a healing priest, and I can always do more exploring later, once I hit the current level cap of 25 and have geared up a bit.

As an aside, when I said goodbye to my group, I did so without any expectation to see any of them again, because I'm such a slow leveller nowadays, everyone else always gets away from me almost immediately. But one of them said "see you soon in BFD" and it hit me that I actually might see them again, because at least for now, they couldn't out-level me any more than they already had. And that was an oddly nice feeling.