Levelling Through Raiding in Season of Discovery

I've kind of stopped caring so much about my alts in SoD and have been more focused on just continuing to level my priest at the moment. I hit level 40 during a Scarlet Monastery run that was funny because in Cathedral, we had so much dps that we bugged out the last fight and Whitemane died from dots and totem damage before she could actually revive Mograine, something I didn't think was possible. This bugged out the fight so we only got one piece of loot and no quest completion, but most of the group was happy to just reset the instance and go again.

Also, I noted in my last post about SoD that buffing a full group with fortitude "still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD", so I was rather chuffed when one of the bosses in SM dropped a priest scroll that reduced the mana cost of fort by 50% while also extending its duration by the same amount. This is the kind of change I can get behind!

Once we were done in SM, I manually legged it back to Brill in anticipation of getting my ground mount. I wasn't sure whether I was actually going to be able to afford it since I didn't have 90 gold yet, but I was hopeful that with how much certain things had been streamlined and sped up in SoD, the price might have been reduced and I would be able to afford it anyway. This turned out to be correct.

At this point I thought I should maybe start focusing a bit more on getting my professions and runes caught up before doing more questing, but I hadn't yet been fishing for half an hour when a warlock whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go to Gnomeregan (the raid). I replied that I hadn't done it before but was up for it and quickly got an invite, which was followed by a summon only a few minutes later.

We killed the first boss with no issues, but wiped on the second one due to massive AoE. The warlock (who was also the main tank - what is it with warlock tanks in SoD?!) just went "adds?!" and rage-quit the group. I thought that was quite funny, considering he'd been the one to actually put the raid together and didn't seem to have any issues with inviting people who openly said that they'd never done this before. Talk about giving up quickly.

The rest of us hung around and tried to get a replacement, but without a summon we knew it would take a while for them to arrive. We spent about fifteen minutes sitting around waiting for this shaman to make it to Booty Bay for the teleport, just for them to notice the level 60 we had in the group and go "oh, never mind, I just wanted to come for the XP" and leave again. (I think they were worried that a 60 in the group would nerf their XP too much?) We just nine-manned it in the end and had another wipe, but once people finally understood that the adds had to die, the fight was easy-peasy and we were able to move on.

Crowd Pummeler seemed pretty straightforward, and I commented that the XP was pretty good even with the level 60 in the group. That remark clearly jinxed it for everyone, as on the next boss, everybody but the level 60 died, and he shaved off the last sliver of the boss's health all by himself, which meant that none of us got any XP for it, being dead at the time.

On Menagerie (an encounter completely new to SoD) we wiped once because people didn't make sure to get the bosses down at the same time. On the second attempt we were successful, but then Thermaplugg spawned right in the middle of the room and even though we'd been warned about that, someone immediately aggroed him and we wiped again. At this point the level 60 and two others quit the group, but the new raid lead valiantly made an attempt to find a few more replacements, including another level 60. In the end we gave Thermaplugg a few more tries with nine people, but we only got as far as the third phase with basically no mana and immediately dying to massive damage at the start of the phase, so we eventually called it there.

I didn't get any loot but was still happy to have had the opportunity to see the raid. Even though I recalled Blizzard buffing XP gains in BFD when phase two launched, I wasn't sure how common it was for people to actually run the low-level raids as levelling content. The XP was indeed very good, even with the level 60 in the group and me only being alive for four boss kills, as I gained more than a full level of experience from that run. I'd kind of like to go again at some point to see whether another group might be a bit more successful (and with me having the advantage of actually knowing the fights now) but I probably won't put too much effort into finding a group since there are plenty of other sights to see still.

Season of Discovery Phase 2 Preview

Season of Discovery's phase two is less than a week away, and Blizzard decided that in spite of the discovery aspect being key to the concept, they didn't want us to go in completely blind. A recent news post on the WoW website goes into quite a bit of detail about what to expect. I won't go into all of it on here, but I did want to highlight a few items that I found interesting.

The Gnomeregan raid has been confirmed to come with six bosses, which aligns with the number present in the regular dungeon, which means that unlike in BFD, nobody got eaten I guess. The news post shows some of the new items to look forward to, but the only one that really stood out to me was the Automatic Crowd Pummeler. The Manual Crowd Pummeler from the regular Gnomer dungeon is a mace with three charges of an on-use effect, which due to the janky nature of Vanilla's design, is actually the best max-level weapon for feral druids - until the charges are depleted that is, at which point it's time to vendor it and grab another. This means that competitive feral druids need to spend a lot of time farming the Gnomer dungeon, which is... bizarre. The new item has a cooldown but unlimited charges, which should get rid of that meta - though it does make me wonder whether it'll still be the best weapon for ferals at sixty in SoD too.

There will be some new runes, though as far as I'm aware it hasn't been revealed how many there will be per class. I was surprised to find that I'm kind of hoping it's not twelve again. Finding new runes is fun when you just start out, but because of how powerful they are, it turns into an exercise in "needing" to acquire them all pretty quickly.

Runes aside, they'll also be introducing some quality of life spells via new spell books dropped from dungeons, such as giving rogues the ability to move combo points and enabling shamans to move their totems. I find it quite interesting how the Classic devs are trying to square the circle in SoD by keeping a certain degree of inconvenience (which was simply part of Vanilla) while also attempting to introduce some quality of life changes without making things too easy and smooth. It's interesting to watch.

They also revealed more details about the new Stranglethorn PvP event, which will apparently turn the zone into a free-for-all once every three hours (though there is also a way to opt out). Grouping is allowed, but converting to raid will apparently be punished in some way. I'll fully admit that I'm less interested in a PvP event that requires actual PvP in a vanilla setting - then again, the free-for-all nature should make it less one-sided on PvE servers than the Ashenvale event has been. I don't know, I might try it once just to see what it's all about, but I tend to quickly get tired of getting killed in open world PvP.

As an aside, they'll also change the Battle for Ashenvale to simply occur once every three hours to make it more predictable. I guess that'll make it easier to join in, though there was definitely something very vanilla-like about not knowing when the fight was about to happen unless you were already in the zone or got intel from someone else who was.

In a move that took many by surprise, the news post also announced that they'll be disallowing GDKP runs from phase two onwards - I wonder if they have enough GMs to deal with the whack-a-mole of ban-hammering that's likely to require. I don't have strong feelings on the matter as I've been lucky to always play on servers where GDKPs are not a thing - I just always hear the horror stories about how ubiquitous they're supposed to be on PvP servers ruled by gold buyers. I suppose it's at least going to be fun to watch the various types of drama that are bound to arise from this.

The news post finished with a paragraph titled "It is Not too Late to Join in Season of Discovery" - presumably a play on the meme of people asking "Is it too late to play [game]/[patch]" five minutes after it's launched. It notes that with the arrival of phase two, they'll increase XP payouts from the BFD raid and from waylaid supplies, and there'll be a general 50% XP buff up to level 25. I'm definitely glad about the buff to BFD experience, as I'd like to see it stay relevant while levelling, but I'm a little more conflicted about the general XP buff. I guess it's one way to battle the FOMO inherent in joining a temporary server like this, but at the same time, SoD is kind of meant to be about levelling, so it still feels a bit odd at the same time.

In spite of all these exciting news, I'm still not too hyped about phase two myself. Things haven't been working out too great for my era guild's little off-shoot on SoD. Basically people tended to fall into one of two categories: either they casually levelled a character just to see what the runes were all about and then decided they didn't care too much about the BFD raid, or they went all-in and farmed BFD with five alts every lockout. There are much fewer of the latter than of the former, so the ones still interested have increasingly had to look elsewhere to fill their runs and in-guild activity has kind of died down. So I'm not too optimistic that I'll actually get to experience the new content in a guild setting, and while there are pugs aplenty, wading into the giant pool of anonymity that is a mega-server holds a lot less appeal to me, even if I'm curious about the new gameplay.

Re-exploring Night Elf Lands

Once again, much faster than I expected actually, I've hit the milestone of reaching level 30. Does that mean that I'll lose my drive again soon? Hopefully not... I do have plans for the near future at least, such as revisiting Razorfen Kraul. I've seen enough LFG requests for it in world chat that I think it might actually be possible to get a pug for it.

I've been surprised by how much I've been enjoying redoing those low level night elf zones on Kalimdor. It's been long enough that my memory is very fuzzy and it feels exciting to re-visit all those stories, even if at times I've wanted to slap myself for making the exact same mistakes I made back in the day all over again (such as searching for a quest item in the wrong place and not realising it until I brought up a guide).

Stonetalon Mountains in particular has been a pleasant surprise. My memories of it back in the day mostly have it feeling very empty. It wasn't until I rolled my first Horde alt that I even realised that Sun Rock Retreat existed. As Alliance I don't really remember doing any quests there, just being confused by my druid friend being able to talk to an NPC that wouldn't interact with me, probably because she had found a breadcrumb somewhere that I had missed.

This time around I engaged in a whole chain around the Venture Co. loggers that had me fetching magical ingredients for a gnome all the way from Stormwind, and I could hardly believe my own eyes when I ventured forth into the Charred Vale with something like five different missions in my log that pretty much required me to kill everything in sight.

I think once I wrap up Ashenvale however, I'll probably want to switch over to the Eastern Kingdoms for a while. My memory of Desolace is relatively fresh thanks to questing there on my paladin, but I never did much on her in Hillsbrad and Arathi...

I also got into Gnomeregan already, once again as a healer. That run was kind of funny in a way, as I realised pretty much the moment we set foot into the instance that there was no way we were going to complete it with that particular group composition, as the last boss is level 34 and we only had a single damage dealer above 30 - a warlock who didn't really seem to understand English very well and kept meleeing things with his staff. The tank eventually got sufficiently annoyed with him to kick him from the group. (I get why someone like that might end up in your group in an average MMO... but on a private server for a ten-year-old game it's rather bewildering.)

However, that same tank was also very determined to finish the dungeon despite of being only level 29 and pushed onward with great care. I swear I've never killed this much trash in Gnomeregan just to avoid pulling it by accident. We found a treasure chest behind a pillar relatively near the entrance that I didn't even know existed. And remember those tunnels with walkways on two different elevations, where you'd traditionally take the upper path while sticking as close to the wall as possible to avoid pulling the mobs on the lower half? We tried that at first and after it didn't work out for us, we kept jumping back and forth between the two lanes to clear both of them in their entirety.

We did remarkably well like that (the kicked warlock was quickly replaced by a rogue), but the final tunnel with the Dark Iron dwarves did us in one too many times. I mentioned that during my previous visit they didn't appear to be laying mines as they should, but this has clearly been fixed in the meantime so we kept dying to too much damage. (I'm still not sure the mines were behaving entirely as intended though... I had to laugh when at one point after I died, a mine "ran away" from me back towards the remaining dwarves.)

After the third wipe on the same pull or so, the replacement rogue abandoned us, but this actually worked out in our favour as we somehow ended up with a level 35 paladin tank instead (6 levels higher than anyone else in the party) who managed to carry us through that last bit until the end. In the end the run took up the entirety of my afternoon, but at least I managed to finish all my Gnomer quests in one go, including the escort. Of course one of them has a follow-up that asks you to go right back in there...

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.

Two Worgen Vs. The World

In the comments to my last post, mysteriously named commenter "R" asked why my pet tank and I weren't just setting out to duo instances together if I had reservations about using the dungeon finder to get a full group. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what I originally suggested, but I was rebuffed with doubts about whether two-manning things at level was even feasible. (And anyway, the groups we got during our first couple of runs weren't so bad, right?)

Gnomeregan ended up being a turning point.

When I last set foot into Gnomeregan shortly after the Shattering patch, I noted that it didn't appear to have been changed much, except for a couple of visual tweaks to some mobs and the removal of the old goblin escort quest. Imagine my surprise then, when we zoned into the instance this week and instead of a host of wacky quests telling us to collect punchcards and essential artifacts artificials, there was exactly one quest at the entrance - telling us to parachute straight down on top of the Viscous Fallout. We followed the instructions, even if they left us slightly bewildered... but when the follow-up quest told us to press on even though we hadn't even killed Grubbis yet, we balked and went back to do that encounter first. Our three damage dealers disagreed and continued on their own, with neither group struggling to kill things and stay alive, until we eventually reunited shortly before the last boss. After he had died and everyone else had left, my tank and I also went back to two-man the Crowd Pummeler, whom the dpsers had skipped too. I hardly needed to do any healing even with just the two of us.

We were left with an incomplete quest, seeing how we had been out of range when the Electrocutioner died, and a certain feeling of disappointment. Everyone's used to players taking the path of least resistance and wanting to skip things, but Blizzard adapting quest chains to actively encourage this behaviour just makes no sense. Usually dungeon quests serve to guide the group and lead players towards as much of the content as possible. Why Blizzard themselves consider their own dungeon bosses skip-worthy now is a bit of a mystery to me to be honest.

We re-queued for Gnomer in specific, and with the next group we just went with the boss-skipping flow so that we could at least complete our quest. Incidentally, this was also our first run where someone in the group brought up Recount. When they posted the dps numbers in chat, they showed that our warrior tank was doing more damage than the entire rest of the party put together. Low-level class balance is so bad it hurts.

The next dungeon on our list was Scarlet Halls, the first of the revamped Scarlet Monastery instances. We decided to give the dungeon finder another go and ended up in our most unpleasant run yet. There was absolutely no time to take in what was new about the instance, as the damage dealers rushed ahead as if it was their one hundredth run (which it very well might have been) and we struggled to keep up. I also clearly jinxed it in my last post when I breathed a sigh of relief about the lack of ninjas in our groups, as in this run we had not one, but two people rolling need on absolutely everything, which caused both me and my pet tank to lose out on gear that nobody else in the group could actually use. By the end of that run, I wasn't the only one fed up with the quality of pugs in Looking For Dungeon.

I brought up the duoing suggestion again. Gnomeregan had proved that a single protection warrior was clearly all the dps we needed, and our experience in Scarlet Halls had shown that trying to get a good look at new content with a group of randoms was a futile endeavour.

"So, how about we do a Scarlet Monastery run old school-like?"
"Isn't the Scarlet Monastery really far away?"
"Hey, back in my day we had to walk there every time we wanted to run the instance, and before we even had ground mounts! Uphill. In the snow. And we liked it."

Thus it was settled that after questing exclusively in Kalimdor for thirty-odd levels, we were making a trip to the Eastern Kingdoms. It took us quite a while to ride all the way up to Tirisfal Glades, but it certainly wasn't boring, as we kept ourselves entertained along the way with random bursts of gathering, pet battling and archeology.

As I had expected, duoing the two Scarlet instances turned out to be no problem whatsoever, and while working our way through them at our own pace, it actually gave us a chance to read the quests and take in the sights, which was nice. As for the actual changes to the dungeons, I'm honestly not sure what to think of them. Condensing the four wings into only two separate instances was probably a good idea, and I enjoyed seeing Lillian Voss again. In the cathedral I felt kind of sad when I went into the secret room off to the side and High Inquisitor Fairbanks' corpse was still lying there, unclickable now. Everything else kind of felt... awkwardly over the top to me though. Since when do all the Scarlets speak with funny German accents? Why are they all so incompetent, getting eaten by their own dogs and by zombified corpses that they are clearly unable to even burn properly? Weren't they supposed to be a morally ambiguous and fearsome organisation? Oh, and Whitemane's new champion is some guy with an oversized sword and anime hair... I don't know.

In the end we decided not to write the dungeon finder off completely just yet, but to settle for a mix of duoing things when we felt like it and using LFD when we wanted to make progress quickly and weren't too concerned with the details. Doing Maraudon the old school way right after was certainly fun enough, and not even that inconvenient considering that we were questing in Desolace anyway. (Though we managed to miss the quest to kill Princess as we didn't take the exact path Blizzard prescribes to make the quest appear and we didn't bother to look up what had gone wrong until after the fact.)

Up next: Uldaman and Dire Maul.

From the Stockade to Gnomeregan

Apparently some people have already levelled two or more characters from one to sixty since the Shattering. Where do people find the time?!

My druid is still coming along nicely; I even managed to do some questing in Stonetalon without anything turning grey. I might write a post about that as well at some point. But first, more observations about what has or hasn't changed in low-level dungeons:

The Stormwind Stockade has been completely revamped like the Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep, but remains a fricking boring place anyway. It's a bloody cellar with some generic enemies in every room! Pah. I don't know whether the Alliance still gets the same quests as before for it, but as Horde we didn't even have a reason to kill any trash and with just going straight towards all the bosses, things went incredibly fast. Oh, and none of the trash mobs are called Defias anymore.

The new bosses are some random rogue type with a hat, a fire elemental (about a third of the instance has been invaded and wrecked by elementals, you'd think the prisoners would be a bit more concerned about that), and Hogger! I knew that the latter would be there because I happened to do the new Hogger quest in Elwynn Forest before, which ends with him getting taken to the Stockade. All the fights were fairly boring compared to DM and SFK, but Hogger at least seemed to be a nice exercise in learning to interrupt, as he keeps spamming an ability with a cast time that damages the whole group a little bit and debuffs everyone's damage output. Basically it's not vital to interrupt it (and unlikely that you'll manage every time anyway, even if you try), but considering how often it happens during the fight and that the spell affects damage output, even slow dpsers might eventually connect the dots and give it some thought...

This was also the first instance where I started to feel that our characters are clearly advancing in power faster than the dungeon mobs, despite of the buffs. Back in RFC the trash seemed tough, but in here our paladin tank started by pulling a group of both elite and non-elite mobs two levels below him, and all the non-elites got one-shot by his Avenger's Shield. Ouch...

Blackfathom Deeps has changed very little, apart from the mob buffs and new quest givers that all the instances seem to have received. The biggest change I noticed was that there is now a trapped fire elemental in front of the Twilight's Hammer cultist area who gives you the quest to kill Kelris. The old dying Argent Dawn guy in his cavern that used to give this quest before is still around but seems to have been turned into a member of the Alliance and wouldn't talk to me.

Ghamoo-ra has roughly doubled in size and been given a scarier model, presumably to justify a turtle being a boss. (Kresh in WC was still the same though...) Lorgus Jett is still around too, but contrary to what I had hoped he still isn't a proper boss, and the quest to kill him seems to have gone as well from what I could tell, so I'm not sure why they kept him in. Maybe for the Alliance? Oh, and Kelris lost his annoying tank-sleep ability I think. The devs did mention wanting to get rid of that kind of thing.

Gnomeregan again has hardly changed at all, which I found particularly disappointing considering that the story of the gnomes has been advanced so much otherwise. In fact the only changes that I noticed at all were that the Viscious Fallout has been doubled in size as well to stand out from the crowd of smaller elementals in the same area, and some of the sludges have been changed to a new, "blobbier" ooze model. Oh, and the goblin escort quest seems to have been removed, presumably because it kind of broke the "flow" of the instance, forcing you to go back to the entrance.

Scarlet Monastery next!

Zalazane's Fall vs. Operation: Gnomeregan

So I want to talk about the world event that started with the latest patch, partly to simply record my thoughts on the matter so I'll be able to remember them later, but also to share them with others. This post will be pretty spoilerish, so if you haven't participated in Zalazane's Fall or Operation: Gnomeregan yet and want to be surprised once you do the associated quests, don't read any further.

I started off with Zalazane's Fall since I mainly play Horde and my main is a troll as well. They also happen to be, if not my single favourite race, then at least tied for first place with the tauren. I also really like Vol'jin and hate how he always seems to get treated as nothing more than Thrall's appendix, so this event had me pretty thrilled. I even put on a set of roleplaying gear before I went to Sen'jin, something I hadn't done in a while.

The first quest for the trolls has you collecting frog critters and imbuing them with magic at the local shaman's sentry totem. I can only assume that this was meant to be a nod to shaman players and their love/hate relationship with what's undoubtedly one of the least useful abilities in all of WoW. That made me grin. You then get to ride a bat and "deploy" the magic frogs on the islands to work as spies. Frog-bombing... I thought it was funny.

Meanwhile the local captain also sends you to Razor Hill to gather some troll volunteers for the cause. I was childishly delighted by the fact that the NPC followers I collected were clever enough to mount and dismount in accordance with what I was doing.

Back in Sen'jin you get a quest that imbues you with a tiger spirit, which makes you look like a sort of were-tiger and allows you to walk on water. In this form you discover a hidden troll druid on the Isles who agrees to join your cause. One of my guildies complained about this, saying that he thought it was a "lame" way to introduce troll druids. I'm a bit undecided - I liked that Blizzard bothered to give them a lore introduction at all, but does this mean that these druids won't join the Cenarion Circle? Since their shapeshifting was apparently learned elsewhere... would be a bit of a shame.

Finally you were supposed to consult the spirits for support, but I hadn't even figured out what I was supposed to do for that quest when I already got a "completed" message. Apparently the point is just to trigger some NPC talking, but he was just finishing up from someone else starting it and I got credit automatically. Oh well.

And then came the actual battle: it was a lot like the Battle for the Undercity, which is a quest that I consider overrated, as I mentioned before. I have to give credit where credit is due though and admit that I liked this quest better, and not just because it's about trolls. I think the main thing that made a difference for me is that due to this being a limited-time event, everyone is doing it at once and you're likely to almost always have quite a lot of people around. This means that everything dies quite quickly, so the event doesn't take as ridiculously long as the Undercity battle, and being surrounded by lots of other players generally makes the whole thing feel more fun and like a real battle (as opposed to some NPCs soloing everything while you can pick your nose).

That said, I still didn't feel like I was making a meaningful contribution, especially as a healer. I was actually trying to heal people at first, but with the massive survival buff nobody needed it anyway. And throwing piddly smites at zombies just didn't feel very satisfying.

Eventually I decided to just lean back, run along and try to enjoy the story being told. There were considerable NPC walls of text (though they were fully voice-acted also, which I found commendable), and those are always a mixed bag. I mean, I was absolutely willing to get into it and tore up a little when Vol'jin emphasised that he was asking the help of the spirits only for his tribe, not himself, but other players interjecting with random comments about how bored they were (one guy felt the need to yell "BLA BLA BLA" for example) was rather off-putting. And this is with Earthen Ring supposedly being a roleplaying server! It was rather shameful.

Still, overall I enjoyed the experience and I'm looking forward to seeing what the Echo Isles will look like in Cataclysm, fully taken back so to speak. Operation: Gnomeregan had a lot to live up to.

I started the Alliance version of the event with a slight sense of embarrassment: the letter in my mailbox told me to help the gnomes in Ironforge and immediately got annoyed when I couldn't instantly figure out where in Ironforge the quest givers were. Where are my easymode quest markers to show me where to go? /cough. The quest starts in Tinker Town, which makes sense of course.

The gnomes start off with a recruiting quest like the one for the trolls, except that, being gnomes, they use technology to "convince" people to help out - and typical for gnome technology, it doesn't always do what it's supposed to do. One of my potential recruits got turned into a rabbit for example. It made me laugh. This trend continued when the next quest sent me to participate in "brutal and rigorous" gnome training, which consisted of things like emoting /cheer at the drill sergeant in unison.

Gnomes being gnomes, all the rest of their quests were about doing something or other with their machinery: testing ejection seats, controls and weapons of their tanks. Nothing special but not boring either. There was also a "bombing" quest to measure the radiation coming out of Gnomeregan's vents. Gnomer has vents? Since when?

Finally you're supposed to test some drafts of a speech for Mekkatorque, which is again pretty amusing, as some of them are quite silly. Then you deliver the final speech to the High Tinker near Gnomer and get ready for the Alliance version of the second Battle for the Undercity.

Now, I kind of liked that this one felt more fast-paced as there was less NPC chatter going on, and the messages you did get from Thermaplugg were pretty amusing. However, it did have one big disadvantage as it bugged out just as we were about to go underground; the High Tinker just stood at the entrance for ten minutes or so until he finally reset and anyone with good sense suddenly had to make a run for their life, being faced with respawned elite mobs and no invincibility buff. If one raging player who apparently experienced this before was to be believed, it's caused by people running down into the tunnel too early. I don't know if that's true, but there you go.

On the second attempt I managed to complete the event, but the ending was a bit disappointing in a way. Unlike the trolls, the gnomes don't actually get to kill their big bad, and Mekkatorque's pride in having taken back the surface feels hollow, considering that said area only contained a couple of buildings with leper gnomes in them. I can understand Blizzard wanting to keep Thermaplugg around so Gnomeregan can remain an instance, but couldn't they have allowed the gnomes to retake most of the city and at least push him back into deeper tunnels or something? As it is I feel kind of sorry for the gnomes; they definitely got the short end of the stick here (no pun intended), only being able to retake a really small area while their archenemy continues to hold most of the city and in fact managed to take the radiation levels in it to new heights.

All in all I think I liked the Horde version better, but that's probably largely due to my racial bias and the annoying bug in the Alliance version. I also think that the trolls tell a more engaging story, but I do have to give the gnomes credit for making me laugh. What did you think of these quests?

Running Gnomeregan is not like running heroic Nexus in ICC gear, guys

The title of this post might make you go "duh", but well... some players apparently aren't actually aware of this fact.

Apologies for writing about Gnomeregan again so soon - it wasn't entirely intentional to be honest. I was quite happy to consider the subject over and done with, but then I logged onto my rogue alt today for a bit of a change of pace, levelled his lockpicking, did some quests, queued for a random dungeon and... oh look, Gnomeregan again!

I landed smack in the middle of the instance, in combat, but everything seemed to be under control. We had a paladin healer, a hunter and a warlock for dps and a druid tank who really seemed to enjoy chain-pulling large groups, which was the first thing that gave me the idea for the title of this post. I mean, it didn't seem to be a huge problem per se, but in all honesty the benefit of this sort of pulling was limited as well, because two of our three damage dealers simply didn't actually have any AoE attacks yet, so with the exception of the warlock who was spamming rain of fire and thus doing marginally more dps, we had to pick off the mobs one by one anyway. Thus the main result of the druid's pulling style seemed to be that he just took a lot more damage and the healer had to do a lot more healing. That's not really going to make the run any more faster or fun.

Still, it worked alright until we got to the tunnel leading up to the last boss, you know the one, with the dark iron dwarves that drop mines. Tanking several of those mine-droppers at once, our bear took even more damage than before and soon the paladin was running out of mana. "Mana break, please!" she announced in chat and sat down to drink, even as the rest of the party plowed on without her. I sat down next to her as a show of solidarity, which earned me a /smile emote.

Unsurprisingly the tank went splat in the meantime, and mayhem ensued as we tried to stave off a wipe. We managed to avoid a corpse run by a hair's breadth, largely because the warlock had the sense to put a soulstone on the healer in time. Afterwards our pally resurrected half the party and put blessings on everyone, which unsurprisingly meant that she was oom once again. Again she asked for a mana break, again the tank ignored her. This time he managed to survive a pull or two because he actually turned around and ran back when he got low on health, but eventually he charged too far ahead again as the pally had another drink, and this time we wiped.

The druid and the hunter dropped group, and the three of us that remained made our way back to the instance while sharing feelings of something between amusement and exasperation about the tank's behaviour in chat. Here's another way in which Gnomeregan is not like running heroic Nexus in ICC gear: even in heirlooms you are simply not totally invincible; you do need your healer, and since said healer has little to no mana regenerating abilities yet, they might also have to drink every now and then. Just live with it.

It only took a minute or two after we had re-entered the instance until a new tank, a paladin, and a replacement dps, another rogue, appeared. In what was probably a bit of an oversight on our part, we didn't think to tell them that we had already cleared a considerable part of the instance, but then it didn't really feel like it would have made much of a difference as we were surrounded by respawns anyway. Oh hey, another thing that you won't usually encounter in level eighty heroics! I wonder if people who are used to today's heroic and raiding culture find them off-putting. After all, seeing respawns at level eighty is a sure sign of big fail. But really, in some of the low-level instances, the mobs near the entrance can be on a respawn timer that's insanely short; it doesn't have to mean anything. The vast majority of the instance will still be cleared once you just take the time to swipe those lame "gatekeepers" out of the way.

To get back to the run in question, our new tank seemed to assume that it was a fresh run and just started pulling things, also in relatively large groups... sigh. I felt so lame with my single-target attacks. He then made a beeline for the "tunnel event" with the troggs, and it turned out that the group had originally skipped that one anyway. The warlock silently left all of a sudden, presumably because he thought that we were going to do the whole instance all over again or something, and immediately got replaced by a shaman. Just before Grubbis spawned, the tank suddenly stopped moving and appeared to disconnect. We managed to kill the boss anyway, but when the tank didn't come back after that we removed him from the group, and the other rogue left as well, leaving just the paladin, the new shaman and me.

We three-manned our way into the Alliance base, but when I stopped to clean a couple of grime-encrusted objects, the shaman quietly disappeared too. The paladin and I weren't so easily discouraged however and decided to stick together since we were both from Earthen Ring (and it's quite rare that two players from our server meet via the dungeon finder). We re-queued, /danced and killed a couple of carefully pulled troggs with just the two of us. It was a nice opportunity for me to practice things like sapping and kicking.

Eventually our party filled up again, with a hunter, yet another rogue and a warrior tank. The warrior was quite a chatty sort, telling us that he was from Sweden and raging in ALL CAPS about how he had just come out of another Gnomer run and that the last boss hadn't dropped his shield - all in a friendly way though, if that makes sense. Then he charged into a dead end and admitted that he had no clue where he was going.

We managed to steer him into the right direction eventually, and he expressed bewilderment when we started to get into corridors that had nearly no mobs in them. This is when we explained briefly that we had already been close to the end boss at some point but that things had got a bit manic since then. The paladin promised that she wouldn't let this tank die because he was so nice and that she'd try harder. Then the warrior charged out of range and died. We lived through it though, and mostly just thought that it was funny. Our final party was really quite friendly, and several people went on to do another instance together right afterwards (I was too tired myself). Thermaplugg failed to drop his shield once again though. Poor tank.

I didn't exactly time the run, but from what I remember in regards to reapplying my poisons, it must have taken somewhere between one and one and a half hours. What a nightmare for level eighty heroic standards! For Gnomer it really wasn't all that terrible though - sure, it could have gone much faster, but considering that we had a wipe close to the end and had to replace half a dozen people it didn't strike me as hugely out of the ordinary. Many old world instances will simply take a bit longer than twenty minutes, and yes, wipes can sometimes happen as well. These runs are simply not for the impatient - though personally I don't really consider that a bad thing. Embrace the challenge!

Giving Gnomeregan some credit

Gnomeregan is one of those instances that everyone loves to hate. And I've been one of those people, chiming in whenever the subject came up with how annoyingly long and confusing it is and so on and so forth.

But then... something funny happened yesterday. Continuing my mission to do everything there is to do in the old world before it goes away, I stumbled upon this quest in Orgrimmar to kill the final boss of Gnomeregan. I wasn't thrilled at all, but decided to do it anyway. Might as well be thorough. As it turned out, there were even more quests inside the actual instance that I hadn't done before, so that was very convenient.

The really surprising thing however was that my mind was flooded with a huge amount of happy memories the very moment my priest entered the instance. What is this? Had I been suffering from reverse nostalgia all this time (where you only remember the bad things but not the good times)? Me? What an odd sensation.

Thinking about it some more, I realised that there were indeed plenty of things for me to love about Gnomeregan back in the day:

First off, I was Alliance before I was Horde, and for the Alliance there are very few instances that are more convenient to get to than Gnomer (only the Stockades in fact, though the Deadmines are probably close). Leave through the gates of Ironforge, turn right, and you're already almost there. Now, this may not mean much in today's world of dungeon finder teleports, but back then it was really helpful and made Gnomeregan very easy to get a group for. You didn't have to hang out in Ironforge for long to find a couple of people who were willing to come along.

It wasn't just the proximity to Ironforge though, there were also the quests. Gnomeregan has so many quests for Alliance players, it's silly. (The Horde shares a couple of them, but the Alliance gets so much more.) Back before old world levelling was nerfed to hell and back a trip to Gnomeregan was very much worth your while in terms of experience. And some of the rewards were nothing to be sneered at either, my night elf priest wore her Civinad Robes for quite a while (even if I thought they were extremely ugly), and every low level leather wearer drooled over the Triprunner Dungarees.

Many of the drops inside the instance are pretty damn good for their level as well. The Hydrocane may look silly to the eyes of an experienced player, but to a newbie who was struggling with all the underwater quests in Stranglethorn Vale back when your characters could barely hold their breath for a minute or so, that thing was the shit. I also remember wearing the Acidic Walkers for a very long time, despite of their garish looks.

Finally, Gnomeregan is simply a great place to be if you want to feel like a real adventurer. There are ambushes coming out of tunnels, a little Alliance base fighting to stem the tide of irradiated troggs, mysterious drops, winding tunnels and deep pits... it's pretty damn immersive really if you don't let the feeling that you don't know where you're going frustrate you too much.

Speaking of which, during my visit with my level eighty priest I pulled up the map of the instance on Wowhead and quickly found that it wasn't actually that terribly confusing if you had a map. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most of the unpopular old instances would seem much less daunting if they simply provided some in-game navigational aid. I think not having any instance maps in the original game was simply a huge oversight on Blizzard's part; to this day I sometimes get frustrated when I habitually hit the M key while in an dungeon and a screen pops up to show me that I'm somewhere on Kalimdor. Yeah, that's helpful...

Oh, and one more bit of love for Gnomeregan: it's very silly and whimsical, but back at level sixty my druid friend and me would go back into the instance, she would stealth up the tunnel leading up to the last boss, unstealth in the middle of a big group of mobs and then run for her life, creating a massive robot/dark iron train that followed her around. Then she'd lag out from the sheer size of it, they'd come over and beat me up, and we'd laugh. The ways in which you can make your own fun when you're bored...

Anyway, after having rediscovered my love for Gnomer on my main, I wanted to know whether it would hold up to the test when being run in the here and now, at level, so I logged onto my troll warrior and specifically queued up for it as a tank. I got a group instantly and off we went.

Initially it seemed to be one of those slightly eerie pugs where nobody talks, but people were obediently following my lead. As we were in the middle of the event leading up to Grubbis, a dps and the healer dropped group all of a sudden, I can only guess because they got bored of waiting for the waves of troggs to spawn? I don't know. We got replacements immediately and continued on our merry way.

I was almost starting to feel slightly disappointed by just how smoothly things were going and how easily we were killing things, when we somehow ended up aggroing multiple alarm bots or something and suddenly got buried under an absolutely massive amount of elite mobs; we're talking several dozen or so. Others might have found the resulting wipe frustrating, but I just thought that it was hilarious as it once again took me back to the "good old times" when we wiped like that all the time... Everyone patiently ran back and found their way back to the instance without any problems. I guess I got lucky in so far as everyone seemed to be reasonably experienced; about the most noobish thing that anyone did was one of our two hunters meleeing a lot (but not even most of the time).

Then as we made our way back and jumped straight down into the pit with all the oozes for the second time, the slightly noobish hunter didn't dismiss his pet and about a minute later it brought a veritable Horde of troggs down on us. Fortunately we just about managed to kill them, so I could laugh it off as yet another nostalgia-inducing noob moment.

The rest of the run went smoothly again, and I felt a bit more comfortable after the previous two incidents had tickled at least a couple of good-natured words out of the other party members. We didn't take the "detour" to kill the Crowd Pummeler since people seemed to be fairly eager to get to the end and we had already clocked some "extra time" to clear out the Alliance base and the dormitories to do the goblin escort quest. All in all it was a very enjoyable run, and I only found myself wondering how I ever came to dislike this instance. It's really not all that bad!