Sunday night pug musings

Last night I took my death knight out to pug a few instances, to balance the large amount of solo-play that I've been doing lately. Since I gave her a tank spec I've found grouping with her much more enjoyable - I just think that melee dps is kind of annoying and boring. In fact, I've generally started to warm up to her a little.

I've complained in the past that I didn't like death knights because they felt too much like pre-made characters to me and getting all those abilities right from the start just confused me. However, after (very, very, slowly, over the course of nearly two years) gaining sixteen levels since her creation, my death knight is finally starting to feel a bit more like she's truly "mine", and I also couldn't help learning at least a little bit about the class's abilities after two years of playing with other death knights - I suppose you could call that mental osmosis. So things aren't quite as bad now.

But to get to the pugs. They were actually all pretty pleasant, and I don't think we had a single death, but that's not to say that nothing interesting happened. I started the night by queuing for a couple of specific Outland instances, since the dungeon finder won't let me do random normal modes anymore at my current level.

I expected a bit of a queue even as a tank, since healers tend to be the bigger problem in that level bracket, but I actually got a group very quickly. My first run took me to the Arcatraz. I don't know what it is about that instance, but I swear every time I run it these days it elicits cries of joy from at least one member of the group. People love the bickering demons, laugh at Millhouse Manastorm and gasp at Harbinger Skyriss. In this case our priest was particularly fond of them all. It's really weird in a way, because I remember that instance not being one of the most popular ones back in BC, especially on heroic mode, since it had a lot of absolutely murderous trash pulls, and Zereketh the Unbound was without a doubt one of the worst heroic bosses of that expansion (even if he could be skipped). It's funny how our perceptions of what's fun can change.

I also noticed that our healer had to drink a lot, which is perfectly fine and I was happy to wait of course, but I realised for the first time that this is another one of the things that I miss about crowd control - it gives the non-casters something to do while the mana users drink. I mean, I stood there in front of the next trash pull, trying to be patient but admittedly being a bit bored, and found myself thinking that I never had that problem back in BC because back then, while the healer was drinking, the tank and dps were marking up the next pull and discussing strategy. I do think this is why nerfing mana regen and requiring more crowd control have to go hand in hand in Cataclysm - because just forcing the healer to drink after every pull while everyone else taps their feet and waits to be able to do more AoE wouldn't really cut it I dare say.

Anyway, my next run took me to the Old Hillsbrad Foothills. I had run that one before, but went again because I had forgot to complete the Nice Hat quest. Two other people in the group had it too and everyone was perfectly happy to take a quick detour to get it done. I miss that kind of co-operation in many runs these days.

I was also really hoping that I could get people to continue to the Black Morass right afterwards but had no such luck. I've said in the past that Escape from Durnholde is hard to get a group for these days because it requires you to do a boring attunement quest that nobody tells you about, in a zone that's way out of the way when you're in the right level range, but after careful consideration I've come to the conclusion that Durnholde isn't so bad. Black Morass is much worse, for the simple reason that it requires you to do all the things you have to do to unlock Old Hillsbrad, and you have to complete the Escape from Durnholde quest, and you then have to be at least level sixty-eight to enter BM, by which point most people are already off to Northrend.

My last Outland instance for the night turned out to be the Mechanar. Again we had a pretty smooth run, though one thing pissed me off: When the other death knight in the group, level sixty-seven and dps, looted the crystal from Gatewatcher Iron-Hand, I told him to hold on to it because we'd need it later. Then, after we killed Capacitus, that same death knight suddenly announced that he would leave because he felt that he was too low-level for the instance and couldn't hit anything, and anyway, we should get a replacement quickly. I thought this was a slightly strange, but not entirely unreasonable complaint, but quickly typed out "wait" in chat because I wanted that crystal first. Too late, he had taken off already, taking our key to the loot chest with him. Grrr! Damn you, cross-server pugs and the way you allow people to just vanish into the nether!

After these three runs I decided to finish the night by giving Utgarde Keep a go. Even though I was level seventy-one by then, and keep in mind that I'm the kind of death knight who actually bothers to collect defense gear before starting to tank, my health went up and down like a yo-yo throughout the entire run. In the previous instances I had sometimes chastised myself mentally for not using my survival cooldowns enough, but in that UK run I was spamming them like there was no tomorrow. Being so squishy was just scary. It's really ironic how the normal Northrend instances are so much tougher at level now than the average heroic run of the same place. I have to give massive kudos to our priest healer, who never let anyone die even when the going got tough and who pulled through even though our dps was rather low.

That was the other interesting thing about that run - why was our dps so low? Right after we entered, I noticed that our "dps" paladin was sporting a sword and board combo. I inspected him and sure enough, he was protection spec and not changing. I asked him why he was dpsing if he was geared and specced to be a tank and he said that he just hadn't felt like tanking when he signed up. Now okay, I get that a tank might not always feel like tanking, but maybe he should make sure to also gather some dps gear then? The really daft thing was that it turned out that he was actually dual-specced prot/holy. Why in the world would you queue as the one role out of three for which you have neither gear or spec?!

I do have to admit that this annoyed me and I kind of wanted to get rid of him, but at the same time I felt that I should at least give him a chance. And to be fair, he did behave himself - he didn't use righteous fury or tried to pull aggro off me, he just attemped to do damage. Unfortunately he was still very much dead weight, as he only did about two hundred dps, which was about a third of what I was doing while tanking very amateurishly. On Prince Keleseth we must have gone through about ten frost tombs, that's how slowly he died. I couldn't hold it against the healer that he bickered at the paladin to pick it up, but the latter assured us very earnestly that he was trying. We did complete the instance despite of the paladin's rubbish performance, but I felt bad about the healer basically having to make up for the other guy's fail pretty much the entire time. Going into group content with strangers while intentionally gimping yourself is just wrong.

More Outland instances revisited

I'm very fickle with my WoW playing right now. An instance run here, a raid there, some questing on an alt on another server... nothing can hold my attention for very long. Today I decided that I felt like playing my level seventy night elf druid once again and that I wanted to run a couple of BC dungeons.

I was quite surprised by how quickly I managed to get into groups each time. At level seventy the dungeon finder is practically trying to push you into Northrend, with "random Northrend dungeon" being the default option and "random Outland dungeon" not even being available anymore, but for some reason there are still enough people who actually bother to join for the old level seventy instances to get a full party together every now and then. I guess running nothing but Utgarde Keep and the Nexus for several levels gets old after a while.

First I tanked Shattered Halls. I had found a quest for it that I couldn't remember doing before (though I probably did), which intrigued me. Other than that however, it was pretty damn boring. Shattered Halls was never the most exciting of dungeons, but back in BC the large pulls were at least challenging. Nowadays you can just run from one end of each hallway to the next while spamming swipe the entire time. /yawn. Several people in the party said that they had never done the instance before and asked me to tell them if there was anything special that they should know about, but there simply wasn't anything worth mentioning. Except for the assassins that spawn in front of the stairs leading up to Kargath Bladefist's little area and massacre anyone who stays there after you engage him, but I had forgot about those myself, so our healer got mauled. We finished just fine without him though. At level! We're all just stupidly overpowered compared to even one expansion ago.

I requeued right away and ended up healing an Arcatraz run, tanked by the death knight that had been doing dps in Shattered Halls with me only a few minutes ago. I was the only one who knew the instance, but everyone had a blast. We laughed at Dalliah and Soccothrates bickering at each other, we laughed at a stealthed succubus almost ganking us, we laughed at Millhouse Manastorm. At the end of the run people agreed that "this dungeon was awesome". I had to concur, but at the same time I was slightly bewildered because I remember the Arcatraz being one of the less popular instances back in BC (not counting runs that had people making a beeline for the third Karazhan key fragment without killing any bosses). Probably because the key requirement used to put people off, and because it was really hard on heroic. Zereketh was a nightmare if your tank didn't have shadow resist gear from Black Temple and Skyriss was nigh impossible as well until he got nerfed. I remember spending hours in there, wiping over and over... but looking at it now - yeah, it is an awesome dungeon.

I started to do some quests in Nagrand but soon joined the queue again. This time I had to wait a bit longer until I got a popup asking me to heal the Steamvault. Woohoo! I accepted but told the group that I needed a second as my bags were bursting with rubbish from questing. One dps dropped from the group almost immediately, and the tank decided to start pulling without a healer. I managed to reach him just in time to save him from certain death, but even as I did so another dps dropped without saying a word. The tank continued to pull even with two dps down, got feared into a patrol, and as I frantically spammed heals to keep him alive I hardly noticed the fact that he was running towards the door... then the group got disbanded completely and I got beaten to death by the loose mobs as everyone else ported out, leaving me to corpse-run all by myself. I still don't have the faintest idea what was up with that. A copper for people's thoughts when they pull crap like that...

After repairing and selling my rubbish I tried once more and got an offer to tank Magisters' Terrace this time. As it turned out, that instance is still hard even in times of AoE tanking. Yes, you don't need the crowd control anymore, but it will hurt and some of the pulls are still annoying. We wiped twice on the bridge right after the entrance alone, first because I had forgot about the patrol, they aggroed onto the priest healer and she feared them into another group, then again because the balance druid's treants decided to pull another pack just as our healer was suffering from a brief DC. Then we wiped again when I tried to pull some of Selin Fireheart's trash and got too close to him. I felt like a complete noob.

Surprisingly the next couple of bosses went well. I pondered whether to discuss strategy for Vexallus but couldn't actually remember off the top of my head what all the stuff with his adds was about anyway, so I just pulled. In the end I killed all the flares on my own and grew to massive size. Go go giant bears! We had one big overpull on the way to Delrissa as the dps warrior didn't pay attention to where he was going, but somehow we managed to survive. The priestess and her entourage went down on the first attempt much to my surprise, though we managed to wipe on the last big pull in Kael'thas' room right after. The healer scolded me for standing in an anti-magic zone; I apologised and we tried again. I did tell people what to do on Kael, but just after I pulled, the balance druid DCed and the other two dpsers weren't doing so well on those phoenixes, so we wiped again. At this point the priest dropped group and I had to go as well since I was running late for my raid - as much as I hated leaving an instance run unfinished. I'll get you next time, Kael'thas! Not sure I'd want to come back repeatedly though, as the dungeon felt a lot more annoying than I remembered it - but then that might have been due to the people I was grouped with as well, as none of them made for particularly pleasant company.