Wrapping Up Wrath

After we burned through the entirety of Burning Crusade's level range in about two days, I should have known that Wrath wouldn't take very long either. I couldn't quite believe it though, because somehow I still remembered seventy to eighty as this massive slog, and I figured that Wrath of the Lich King wouldn't have quite as many dungeons to keep us busy either.

In truth, it only took us another two days or so to get through that stretch of content as well, and the only thing that felt slow was moving across Northrend. It's still huge, and neither of us were able to afford fast flying yet, which meant that transportation was a bit of a drag. Still, when we weren't trying to get from Howling Fjord to Boring Borean Tundra and back, we were making swift progress. Quest-wise we only did Howling Fjord and about two thirds of Sholazar Basin; the rest of our XP came from gathering experience and two-manning dungeons - and while there were fewer of them, there were still enough for us not to need to repeat anything.

Initially I was a bit disappointed that we still didn't seem to have any trouble two-manning things. Wrath instances were never particularly hard, but I recalled the normal ones being at least a little bit of a challenge initially, especially when you were coming into them with sub-par gear. But no, even with mid-level Outlands gear, the two of us cleared everything up to Drak'tharon Keep with no problems.

Old Kingdom was the biggest disappointment to me personally, though not because of the difficulty. First off, they redesigned the quests to guide you straight past the optional boss, à la Gnomeregan. Not just that though, they also removed the little bonus quest you used to be able to get in the cave with the mushrooms. Mustn't reward people for straying off the main path, oh no! It was a funny quest too: if I recall correctly, you gathered all these "interesting" looking samples from the elementals and then the Nerubian you handed them to gave you a bit of an odd look because they were essentially elemental poop and worthless. The worst thing was the final boss though, as they changed the insanity mobs into generic red blobs that didn't seem to have any abilities whatsoever! Was that mechanic really that confusing as it was? Killing lookalikes of your party members was what made that fight fun! Le sigh.

When we hit seventy-five halfway through Drak'tharon Keep, I put a Glyph of the Treant into my third minor glyph slot and spent the rest of the instance bouncing around like a loony. It was so nice to be an ugly little tree again! I still remember the "save the trees" parade I observed at the end of Wrath. And I have to admit that making it a minor glyph is actually a great solution, as you can keep the look if you want it, or drop out whenever you feel like it, without incurring any practical penalties either way.

Gundrak was the first dungeon where we ran into a genuine challenge, as we couldn't kill the first boss and his adds fast enough before they cocooned both of us and we got hopelessly overwhelmed. Eventually we succeeded by having me switch to my feral spec and going for a quick burn before he even had a chance to summon any adds.

In Halls of Stone we had a funny moment when I DCed and died during the Brann fight, and thanks to talents and self-healing, pet tank managed to stay alive long enough for me to not only come back online but also run all the way back into the room where he was fighting. During the NPC conversation afterwards I also had the embarrassing realisation that I've been spelling vrykul wrong for a whole five years - for some reason I always thought that the r and y were the other way round ("vyrkul").

The Oculus was the next instance that turned out to be a major challenge, as our gear was crappy and the drakes only had the absolute minimum amount of health. After a couple of failed attempts on Eregos we eventually managed to get him down by having pet tank circle-kite him on a red drake, spamming his main ability to do damage and get rid of the whelps, and occasionally using his dodge (especially whenever the boss enraged). Meanwhile I sat on top of the boss on a green drake and alternated between focusing on dpsing him and casting heals on the red drake as needed. With the kiting the damage on the drakes was manageable, though it was a very long and slow fight with no bronze drakes to do proper dps.

Trial of the Champion was also pretty tough, and not just because the jousting was quite a drag with only two people. Argent Confessor Paletress did absolutely nasty damage, especially to me, since she does a lot of non-aggro-based attacks and I was the only target that wasn't the tank. I'm not sure I would have been able to survive being feared around and smited as much had I been playing any other healing class, without the druid's heals over time ticking away whenever I was incapacitated.

The ICC five-mans were interesting as well. Again, the bosses in there had a lot more mechanics than previous ones, and I basically had to deal with everything at once since there was nobody else to do so. I always had to kill my soul fragment on my own on Bronjahm; I always had mirrored soul on the Devourer of Souls. On the last boss of Pit of Saron, I was almost constantly incapacitated or transferring damage and healing to the boss, which made for a very long and touch-and-go encounter. Halls of Reflection actually defeated us initially, as we didn't quite have the dps to make the fourth wall, but we came back once we had upgraded our gear a little and made it without problems after that.

We were level eighty-one by the time we moved on into Cata content.

Return of the search terms

More strange search terms that led people to this blog:

cap the amount of death knights allowed in one pvp match - You know, I could totally get on board with that, especially for the 50-59 bracket. I shudder to think back to my shaman's Warsong Gulch experiences in that level range...

celestial steed floppy legs - I believe the word that I used to describe the sparkle pony's legs was "spindly", but yeah, I agree that something about its legs looks off.

drakes oculus cannot dismount - Well, there is this button with a big red arrow on the right side of the vehicle interface; pressing that should dismount you. That said, I have heard of cases where it bugged out for people and pressing the button seemed to do nothing. Puggers that I ran with seemed to be able to solve this problem by either reloading their user interface (/console reloadui) or by relogging.

eu stormscale jerks - Now, now, no need to be so harsh. As my almost scientific observations of pug composition showed, Stormscalers simply like to pug a lot in general, which is why you seem to meet more rude players from that server - simply because there are a lot more of them around. Don't judge them too harshly.

humminghippies.com - I had to go and have a look at that website after spotting this search term, but it only has a front page that seems to have been under construction for several months and nothing else. Just going by the overall look of it, I'm guessing that it's probably meant to be about proper hippies though. I'm only a hippie in the eyes of certain rage-quitting tanks.

lalapala - Okay, I made fun of a guy with that name once, but am I missing something here? Is he someone famous? Or is this actually a proper word in a language I don't know? I'm not sure why people would be googling for this repeatedly...

lfg tfa/cit - Assuming this wasn't meant to go into general chat instead of Google, I'm guessing that people searching the internet for this are trying to find out what that acronym actually stands for. It means "looking for group for Threat From Above/Battle Before The Citadel" (though on my server they tend to shorten the latter to bbc instead). These are daily group quests in Icecrown that become available once you've become a champion of your home city at the Argent Tournament.

old guild feels betrayed - Yes, yes, we do. Especially if you've been raiding with us for a year or longer and then just leave without as much as a word of goodbye. Hmph.

pukaja sport day - Pukaja is the name of my tauren hunter, and upon reading these words I couldn't help picturing her in a tennis outfit - something that makes for a very bizarre mental image, let me tell you. My curiosity was piqued enough that I investigated a little further and from the looks of it pukaja is actually a word or a name in a language that I don't speak. Anyone happen to know anything more about that? I think it's kind of ironic, since her first incarnation was called Pünktchen (German for "little dot"), but when I mentioned this to a friend he told me that it was against the naming rules for roleplaying servers, so I deleted and re-created her with what I considered a completely random name instead. Seems there is no escaping those pesky real words.

running around zul drak and sometimes all objects disappear and and i only saw the main frame of the terain i hope this is only a 1 time error - Holy convoluted search term, Batman! I really don't know what else to say to that.

tail sticking out near the drakkari colossus / elemental room in gundrak - Well spotted, though it looks more like a giant snake to me. One of my friends pointed this out to me during one of our earliest Gundrak runs and we got all excited about what it might be, but there's nothing in the game that gives us any further information about it. I've only heard vague speculation about how it might have been part of a scrapped plot for Zul'Drak involving a raid instance, but nothing official.

what is the weekly raid quest this week - I really hope that this one was meant to go into general chat instead, because Google isn't going to tell you the answer to that one, buddy.

Scary statistics

After following a link somewhere else and then browsing another blog's archives I stumbled upon this post at Bubblespec today, in which the writer talks about how she thinks that she ran way too many dungeons this expansion. To illustrate her point, she included a screenshot of an armoury statistics page that shows that two of her characters combined killed Cyanigosa an impressive sixty-nine times.

"Oh, that's neat," I thought, "I never thought of looking at all of my level eighties like that. I wonder how many instances I've run in WOTLK." So I looked at my statistics page. And, um. I almost wish I hadn't, because it was slightly scary.

Now, I know for a fact that a lot of the numbers on the statistics page are wonky at best. For example it claims that my paladin never killed the Black Knight on normal mode, even though she wore the Black Heart for a long time, or that my night elf priest has acquired less emblems of triumph than she already spent on gear. I still think that they have at least some basis in reality though; I guess at worst some of them need a little rounding up. Which is not really good thing when you have huge numbers to begin with, but there you go.

So, according to my armoury statistics page, I've entered 1456 WOTLK five-mans across my seven level eighties (yikes), but only completed 885 of them. Now, this is another number that I have a lot of trouble believing, because no way did I abandon 571 instance runs halfway through. Maybe it counts twice if you leave and re-enter an instance in progress while alive. I don't know. Still, close to nine hundred full dungeon runs is still a pretty damn impressive number. A lot of them were pugs too.

Curious as I was, I wasn't satisfied with those numbers however, and wanted to know which instances I did the most often. Somewhat to my surprise, the clear winner turned out to be Drak'tharon Keep, with a whopping 197 Prophet Tharon'ja kills (151 of them on heroic). To be fair, it does seem to come up as a random dungeon fairly often for me, and I also remember intentionally running it every day for a while early in the expansion, because it was considered one of the easiest heroics; and coming fresh from the Burning Crusade, we didn't dare to jump into something as scary as, say, heroic Utgarde Pinnacle right away.

In second place but already very far behind is Azjol-Nerub with 106 Anub'arak kills (seventy-three on heroic). Again I was slightly surprised at first, but then realised that this matched my habit of running this instance on multiple characters a day if it came up as the daily heroic pre dungeon finder.

My third most-visited dungeon of this expansion turned out to be the Violet Hold with one hundred Cyanigosa kills (eighty on heroic). I don't remember ever making a point of running this one more frequently, but it does seem to come up as my random reasonabily often.

Fourth place goes to the Culling of Stratholme and Mal'Ganis, whose butt I helped kick eighty-five times (seventy-five on heroic). I remember running this instance a lot early in the expansion while we were trying to make it to the Infinite Curroptor in time. (Yes, kids, once upon a time that was actually a difficult feat to achieve.) I never really got tired of it either, and stubbornly stuck it out even when pug members dropped group right at the start because they couldn't stand all the talking (before you could skip the dialogue, obviously).

Fifth place goes to the Black Knight, which, again, I found somewhat surprising considering that Trial of the Champion was released fairly late in the expansion. I didn't assist that many people with Black Heart farming either. I did run the instance on normal mode a lot with those of my characters that hit eighty after its release though, as it's a great way of getting geared up quickly. My paladin spent a lot of time in heroic mode as well, farming for the Peacekeeper Blade for a fairly long time.

Now, I'm not going to continue listing the numbers for every single boss. Let it just be said that the average for most of them seems to be around seventy.

The ones that I visited the least often are also interesting, however. For example I only escaped the Lich King in Halls of Reflection thirty-nine times (thirty-one on heroic). I suppose this is in part because the instance is one of the newest ones, in part because it has a high gear requirement on the dungeon finder, and in part because the few times that I went there intentionally for a gear drop, I got it almost immediately.

The other Icecrown five-mans are well within the normal average, presumably because even though they were released late, I ran them a stupid amount of times for gear drops for my alts.

My second least-visited dungeon is, not entirely unsurprisingly, the Oculus with forty-two completions (thirty-seven on heroic). I may have overcome my dislike for it now, but the fact that I avoided it like the plague for the first half of the expansion left a visible mark on the numbers.

Slightly above it with fifty-four kills is Sjonnir the Ironshaper from Halls of Stone (forty on heroic). Just goes to show that even though it feels like I get that instance all the time on some days, I really don't.

That's a crazy number of dungeon runs either way. Unlike Enlynn from Bubblespec I don't really regret them though. I mean, there is of course a vague sense of having wasted a lot of time on WoW, but as far as activities within WoW go, instance-running is still one of my favourites so there aren't many things that I'd prefer to have done instead anyway.

One of those search term posts

A lot of bloggers I know occasionally post about funny search terms that brought visitors to their site, and I have to admit that even if they sometimes go slightly off-topic, I love those posts. Vidyala's interpretation of "you've got mail sfk" was an instant classic for example. So I went to Google Analytics and had a look at what brought people to my own blog. Unfortunately most of it was pretty boring in fact - who'd have thought that people would look for information about priests, healing and paladin tanking here? Crazy. There were a few search terms that I considered funny or interesting though, so without further ado:

arthas jokes - Why did Arthas cross the road? To cull the people on the other side of course. Sorry, I was never good at telling jokes. Let me know if you've got any good ones!

azshara how to get back up the cliffs - I guess that's a question that all of us have asked ourselves at one point or another. I don't know, maybe there are some secret paths somewhere, but if there are I never found them myself either. My personal recommendation is that if you fall off in the southern part of the zone, swim around to the Bay of Storms and get on the beach there. There are a couple of paths up through the naga-infested ruins. If you fall down somewhere up north, the slope at the eastern tip of that part of the landmass is quite gentle, so you can walk back up there, or you can swim into the bay as well.

azshara instances - Alas, there aren't any. Not as of now anyway, who knows what Cataclysm might bring. There are a couple of instance portals right now, but they don't work. The ones in the southern half of the zone were supposedly meant to lead to a battleground that never actually went live, and there's a mysterious portal to the Timbermaw Hold up north as well. When I was an ickle noob I was told that it would be a raid one day, but considering you become friendly with the furbolgs it could have been meant to become a city too I guess.

don't understand the ending of the arthas fight - If you've ever run Halls of Reflection and actually listened to the long intro with Jaina or Sylvanas, one of the things that Uther's ghost says is that there'll always have to be a Lich King. So that's why, uh... that stuff happens at the end of the fight. And that weird flamey dude? That's Bolvar Fordragon, who used to be an important Alliance NPC and then got poisoned and roasted at the Wrathgate (if you remember the video), though it seems he got better. If you actually know all this but still think that it makes no sense in context... let me just tell you that you're not alone.

i love the oculus - I don't really, but I don't mind it either these days, and I think a lot of people have softened up in their attitude towards the instance after it was nerfed so many times. Either way you're not alone, I even had a guildie or two who were in love with the instance from day one - though we all considered them weirdos at the time.

where will everyone afk in cataclysm - Good question. I don't know if they'll make a new Dalaran in the sense of a new city with lots of portals to everywhere. Generally I guess people will hang out in whichever major city ends up being closest to the new raids and dailies.

who killed the lich king - I did! So did a lot of other people though, and you can kill him too if you work hard enough. The Lich King is for everyone.

why did pally cross the road - To get to the Uther side? Nah, still suck at jokes.

An Oculus pug made of awesome

You might have noticed that there has been a bit of a drought of failpug stories on this blog as of late. This is because the friend who originally introduced me to WoW has recently returned to the game after a break, and we've been spending a lot of time running heroics together instead of queuing alone. I know many people have said this before and it should hardly be surprising anyway, but signing up for the dungeon finder with at least one friend (even better if one of you is a tank) is an excellent way of avoiding complete fail. Obviously it can't protect you from ninjas and annoying "gogogo"ers completely, but just knowing that at least one person in the run is going to back you up if conflict arises is already very reassuring, and it makes it much easier to enforce at least a minimum amount of respect and consideration for each other in the group. As such most of our runs have been, if not great, then at least okay.

Today however we got into a group for the Oculus which I found noteworthy for just how nice it was. My friend and I immediately started joking in party chat about how it was the Oculus again - it's one of the dungeons that we've been getting a lot lately. I was tanking on my paladin and he was healing on his druid. While I started rounding up the first group of whelps, he greeted everyone in the party and asked if anyone had a "drake preference".

I have to say that this is a great way to break the ice in an Oculus pug, as it gives everyone an opportunity to politely speak up if they are going for some kind of drake-related achievement (like Experienced Drake Rider), without sounding pushy or demanding (unlike say "dibs on the red drake" or whatever). Alternatively, you could get another kind of interesting response, like we did (slightly paraphrased):

Elemental shaman: "Umm..."
My friend: "Well? Don't be shy!"
Shammy: "This is actually my first time in the Oculus, so I have no idea what you're talking about. :("
Friend: "Oh, then it's a bronze drake for you! ^^"
Shammy: "That's the most difficult one, right? :o"
Friend: "Nah, it's the easiest one!"
Me: "It's also the one that only does dps and if you mess it up we won't wipe. ;)"
Shammy: "Great, I'll have two of those then! :D"

We continued at a solid pace but also made sure to give the shammy short explanations of everything that was going on: how to get a drake, what they were there for, what we had to do on the next level of the instance, what special abilities the bosses had and so on. While flying around I also made sure that our new shammy friend didn't fall behind or got lost, but fortunately he didn't seem to have any difficulties navigating in three dimensions. The other two dps stayed relatively quiet, but they didn't try to hurry us up either, apologised if they messed up in some way, and added an extra piece of information here and there if my friend and I forgot something.

I couldn't help but smile when the shammy gasped at the way Mage-Lord Urom kept eluding us, or how he cheered when a trinket dropped that was a nice upgrade for him. There is something very refreshing and delightful about seeing someone else being awed by something that you've already seen dozens of times yourself, and it gives you a whole new appreciation for the thing. Makes you wish more newbies were willing to admit that they don't know something yet and allow themselves to be guided - and that more experienced players were willing to pause and teach.

For the last fight we made sure to explain all the bronze drake abilities and what to use when. Things didn't go perfectly as I let martyr drop off for a few seconds once, and one of the enrages didn't get time-stopped, but thanks to the numerous nerfs to the encounter we still made it through with little difficulty. Again, our shammy gasped with excitement when we told him to collect some extra badges from Eregos' treasure chest, and everyone agreed that it had been a really nice run.

I hope more Oculus newbies get to have positive experiences like that! Don't be shy to ask for assistance, you have little to lose - even the nicest players can't help you if they don't know that you need it, and if people aren't willing to help, they'll likely turn nasty later on anyway, so you're not saving yourself from anything by being quiet.

My take on the Oculus changes

So the Oculus has received some updates yet again, this time in the form of some extra loot drops from the last boss. A lot of people have already commented on this, but I wanted to think about it a little longer before making a post on the subject.

The first conclusion that I came to is that the fact that the blue drake now also drops in Oculus kind of sucks for people who already had one from Malygos and were priding themselves in having a truly rare mount. My boyfriend is one of them. I do feel a bit sorry for him, though we'll see how common the drop actually is. We might not yet see a wave of blue drakes flood the skies of Northrend after all.

Secondly... the whole thing just strikes me as pretty stupid; I'm sorry but I have to say it. I'm not an Oculus hater myself (not anymore anyway), but from what I can gather those who still do avoid it like the plague don't do so because it doesn't drop enough loot.

Basically, as far as I can tell, people expect to get fun out of any part of the game in two ways. The first is from basic gameplay, like running around, exploring and whacking stuff. The second is in the form of rewards that improve their character.

If a piece of content is lacking in the first department, say because it's very difficult and people end up spending much more time dead than alive (which isn't very fun), then you can make it more appealing by making it easier, so people can spend more time actually playing (i.e. running around and whacking stuff). That's what they did for Halls of Reflection in the last batch of changes for example and it makes sense. I can say that I personally enjoyed the challenge of that instance as it was, but I also had enough wipes on the ghost encounter to understand why a lot of people considered it very un-fun. In this case making it slightly easier should help to make the dungeon more appealing again.

If a piece of content is lacking in terms of rewards, like a raid whose gear drops have become obsolete, you can make it appealing again by adding new and better rewards. (Hello there, achievements for Molten Core and the like!) That's also what they've been doing with heroics throughout this expansion, by upgrading the emblems to a higher tier with every major content patch.

What Blizzard has done with the last amount of Oculus changes however, is trying to fix a category one problem with a category two solution. People might cite different reasons for hating the Oculus, but I'm sure that the really deep-seated dislike, the kind that makes people drop from the group as soon as they zone in, has never been inspired by a lack of rewards. It's having to play a stoopid dragon when you want to play a priest/paladin/whatever, it's navigating an instance in three dimensions, it's wasting endless amounts of time mounting up and dismounting again (which does take a good ten seconds each time, what with the silly vehicle interface) and so on. People won't suddenly increase their tolerance for that kind of crap just because you offer them two extra badges and a gem.

In my battlegroup I actually haven't had any massive problems with Oculus groups falling apart as soon as people zoned in; I always only read about that elsewhere. Yet when the luck of the draw threw my shaman in there today, on the first day of the new additional rewards, two dps instantly quit the group. I think that says it all really.

I don't blame Blizzard for wanting to lure people into doing content they spent a long time designing and putting together. They haven't failed completely for sure, just to use myself as an example: My first two runs of the Oculus were horrible and painful experiences and I never wanted to go back there again after I got my Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. A few months later I ended up braving the instance with an alt anyway, and found that the drakes scaling with better gear really helped a lot on the last fight, making me more open towards the experience again. (Eregos being too unforgiving when people didn't use their drakes' abilities correctly all the time was a playability problem that received an "increased playability" solution, as it should be.)

However, there's also a point where you have to admit that something just doesn't work, and then it's time to either leave it be or to scrap it altogether. A lot of people hate the drake riding mechanic, no amount of increasing the loot tables or nerfing overall mob health is going to change that. They could either accept that a large portion of their playerbase simply doesn't like the concept, or they could revamp the instance entirely, say by connecting all the platforms on the same level and adding a lift or teleporter to move between them. Leaving the drakes for the last fight only might be just about acceptable to a lot of people (just like they tolerate the jousting as part of the first encounter in Trial of the Champion).

Sound too drastic? As I said they could also just accept that not every part of the game is for everyone. So what? The World of Warcraft didn't end when people stopped collecting Silithyst either. And anyway, at the rate at which things are going, it might be easier to revitalise silithyst collection than to make the Oculus popular...

Using the new dungeon finder, day 1

I kind of feel like I'm copying Spinks here since she made a post very much like this only a few hours ago, but to be honest I intended to write something like this long before I saw her entry - and I hope that many more people will do the same, because I'm very keen on hearing what experiences other people are having with the new dungeon finder.

First off, you can shake your head at people who take the day off work when cool new content is released on WoW just to be able to play more, but today I really wished that I could have been one of them. As it was, I was on afternoon shift at my workplace, which meant that I had just enough time to patch the game and see the servers come up before I had to leave for work, and that I didn't get a chance to actually log in until very late in the evening.

I knew that I'd want to turn my attention towards one of the new instance-related features first, so it was either pugging a random dungeon using the new dungeon finder or trying to get into one of the new Icecrown five-mans with some guildies. Seeing how I had found some unpleasant guild drama on the forums immediately upon logging in, I ended up preferring some distance from my guildies for the night and tried my luck with the pugs.

Random heroic #1: Azjol-Nerub on my priest

I started off by adding myself to the random heroic queue on my main, a healing priest. I got a "Your group is ready!" popup literally instantly, then got a loading screen for what I recognised as Azjol-Nerub, then found myself in a party but back in Dalaran. The name tags quickly made it apparent that it was indeed a cross-server pug and that we could chat just fine, but we were confused by the instance teleport apparently not working. Our tank then dropped group so we got thrown back into the queue, but found a new one within only a couple of minutes.

Someone in the group suggested that the tool was likely just buggy and that we should try making our way to the instance portal the old-fashioned way, as we should be able to meet up inside. I was the first to arrive at the Pit of Narjun but the instance portal acted like a solid wall to me. To make things worse I had accidentally got myself flagged myself for PvP by getting too close to Wintergrasp on the way, and before I could even grasp what was happening, a night elf druid had ganked my bewildered self as I was vainly trying to gain entrance to the instance.

While corpse-running back I realised that I had actually been greeted by an unpleasantly familiar error message: "Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later." Argh, I thought we were past this! However, my party decided to valiantly try banging their heads against the instance portal for a few more minutes and eventually managed to snag a free instance ID. An interesting thing to note was that I could see their little dots right beside me on the mini-map, even though they were on a different server; I thought that was kind of cool.

I clearly wasn't the only one having ganking problems, as one hunter stumbled in and managed to die from an enemy dot a second later and right in front of me, which we both thought was kind of hilarious. At this point we had four people in the instance, but the fifth group member, a retribution paladin, was still sitting in Dalaran and apparently AFK, since he wasn't responding to chat and hadn't in fact said anything at all since the party got assembled. So we immediately got to try out the vote-kick feature as well, which worked nicely and we got a new dps from the queue instantly.

Happy to finally be ready to go, we proceeded to have a very fast and smooth run. Someone in the group must have been a disenchanter as the disenchant option came up and we got to try it. About half the group still selected greed though, more out of habit than anything else I suspect. I was also surprised to see the disenchant option pop up for bind-on-equip greens as well, I guess I can save my boyfriend's enchanter alt some work in the future then.

A guildie had warned me earlier that I should need on the frozen orb at the end because the other puggers were sure to do the same. Not wanting to be so cynical I hit greed, as did three of the others... but the fifth hit need and that was enough. Considering the low value of frozen orbs these days and the fact that it had been a nice run otherwise I decided not to say anything about it though.

Random heroic #2: The Nexus on my hunter

I decided to try my luck on my hunter next. Unsurprisingly damage ended up being a lot less in demand than healing, and despite of the tool's predicted wait time of two minutes, I spent a good ten minutes in the queue before a full group for heroic Ahn'kahet popped up. Still not too bad when you're a huntard I guess.

We ended up having the same problem with getting an instance ID, but I happily told my party that it shouldn't be a big deal if we just went to Dragonblight and poked the instance portal a bit, however I got no response. I still flew to the Pit of Narjun on my own and managed to get inside Old Kingdom after only a few attempts. Proudly I told my party that I had managed to snag an ID and if they'd only come over now... at which point several people went "meh" because clearly actually flying to an instance is too much fucking work, and quit the group. The remaining ones disconnected simultaneously, making it impossible for me to add new people to the group in the meantime (cause the tool wouldn't let me), and then disbanded the party as soon as they came back on without saying a word. I felt very sheepish as I stood there all alone on the ramp right behind the instance entrance.

When I complained about these events to my guildies, a couple of them helpfully pointed out to me that there had been no need to walk to the instance myself, as you can just click on the little eye icon next to the minimap and select "teleport to the instance". D'oh, if I had only been able to tell that to the other guys earlier... then again, I can pass on grouping with people that uncooperative and lazy anyway.

Nonetheless I was undeterred and hopped back into the queue. After another five minutes or so another group had been assembled for me, this time for the Nexus. Again we couldn't get an instance ID right away, but spamming the "teleport to the instance" command got us there after a few minutes.

Everyone was there and ready and we set off towards the dwarf mini boss. The resto shaman kept running ahead and pulling in place of the tank (What is it with the Nexus and annoying healers doing that?), complaining that we were going way too slowly. One of the dps responded with "quit your whinging", at which point the shaman decided that he didn't want to deal with "such attitude" and quit the group right in the middle of the boss fight. Fortunately we lived, and upon rejoining the LFG tool we got a priest healer as replacement immediately.

We plodded on happily, but only a few pulls later our mage messed up and brought some adds, causing us to wipe. In the Nexus, yeah. Still, it didn't have to be a big deal, but the mage "mystery-DCed" right afterwards, and the tank said that he had seen him log off on purpose outside the instance entrance (they must have been on the same server). So before I could even type out my suggestion to give the guy a minute or two to come back, the rest of the group had kicked him and got a replacement dps.

The rest of the run continued smoothly, though we didn't have a disenchanter and thus clicking on the "disenchant" option for drops did exactly nothing.

On a side note, I absolutely loved the revamped misdirection, even if the animation for it appearing over my head instead of that of my target confused me at first. Being able to transfer the threat of an entire volley salvo is simply amazing.

After Keristrasza's death we once again had just that one guy who rolled need on the frozen orb, and this time I couldn't resist at least asking about it. As it turned out he was quite apologetic and said that he'd only done it because he thought that's what everyone else would do too. Apparently people are only becoming cross-server ninjas if they are too scared of others ninjaing stuff from them. There was a happy ending though as we just ended up re-rolling for the orb and the priest won it.

Random heroic #3: The Oculus on my paladin

Once I was back in Dalaran, I decided that I had enough time for one more random heroic left, this time on my paladin. I queued up as both tank and healer and once again got a group instantly, though I was surprised that I had been assigned the healer spot. With the constant talk about tank shortages I was pretty sure that I would have to tank.

Once again a new instance couldn't be launched right away, but it didn't take us more than two or three tries to teleport inside. Also, for all the talking there's been about cross-realm LFG making it impossible to meet players repeatedly and to befriend them properly, I was amused to see the AFK pally from AN in my group again. He wasn't AFK this time but still didn't really talk - I think he said one sentence during the entire run, and that was in some nordic language that I didn't understand.

In fact at least three of my four temporary allies were Scandinavian, and happily chattering away in party chat in their native language throughout the whole run. To be honest I thought that was a bit rude - Earthen Ring has a large nordic population as well, but in mixed company it's generally considered polite to speak a lingua franca.

Performance-wise I really couldn't complain much about this group, except that it was maybe in a bit too much of a hurry. I barely had time to loot anything before the tank had once again rushed out of range and into the next group of mobs. The upside of this was that I got both the Experienced Drake Rider and the Make It Count achievements without even intending to. Oh, and nobody rolled need on the frozen orb this time.

The only other thing left to say about this run is that the Oculus really has been nerfed hard. From what I could make out, one of the Scandinavians actually asked if we had accidentally entered on normal mode, because it was just that easy. This was just as we were approaching Mage-Lord Urom, who died before he could even teleport once. Still, up to that point it might have been that we just had really good dps, but the last bit with the drakes had really changed quite noticeably.

The drakes have been scaling with gear for some time now, but as far as I recall that used to mean about a quarter more health for them if you were in top-end epics. Now on the other hand, not a single drake had less than one hundred thousand hit points, and I think the strongest one had nearly twice the "default" value of seventy-five thousand. There also seemed to be considerably fewer whelps around, and everything was just... weaker. I was riding a bronze drake, the one colour that I'm still not entirely comfortable with, and just hitting buttons randomly, yet we never got even close to dying. Also, I was making sure to save my time-stop for Eregos' enrage but it took ages until it actually happened and then we only had that one enrage during the whole fight. I couldn't help thinking of something my friend Scorch predicted when we were discussing what the incoming Oculus nerfs might be: "They removed all the dragons. All of them! You enter the dungeon and there's a mage there with a very big chest. The mage says: I will you give you my big chest, but about twenty minutes after I die, so you have to sit on your hands till then." That seems less and less unrealistic now...

So what's my verdict on the new dungeon finder so far?

Overall I'm happy to say that the quality of the players from the other servers in the battlegroup didn't strike me as any worse than that of Earthen Ring's. The over-sensitive shaman from the Nexus was a bit silly, but then I've had worse than that on ER too. The need-rolling on the frozen orbs and carefree chatter in a language that half the party can't understand struck me as signs of some servers simply having a different pug culture, and we'll see how things will develop in that regard now that we all have to find a common middle ground for the whole battlegroup.

The main advantage of the new tool is simply that it's incredibly fast. Being ported to and back from the instance instantly saves a lot of time (when it works), and things like getting a near-instant replacement for someone who threw a huff or disconnected are simply amazing.

The "additional instances cannot be launched" thing really annoyed me at first, but I have to cut Blizzard some slack. Considering just how many people were likely trying out the new tool they didn't do too badly, and as I said we were always able to snag an ID after a few minutes at the latest.

The few minor downsides I can think of is that not having an actual daily quest to hand in feels a lot less satisfying, plus it makes it impossible to kill two birds with one stone and do both the normal and the heroic daily at once, like you used to be able to on some days. Also, with the daily dungeon being unpredictably random, planning your runs will become harder to an extent. I used to be able to do stuff like run the daily heroic four times in two hours when I knew that it was Azjol-Nerub and thus really quick. When I queue for a random dungeon on the other hand, I might get Trial of the Champion and be done in fifteen minutes, but I might also get Old Kingdom and have to calculate for about an hour of run-time. Still, those seem like small trade-offs for the extreme increase in convenience.

Some thoughts on heroic Oculus

I ran heroic Oculus twice today, once in the role of healer on my paladin, and once on my hunter. Both groups were pugs. Do I deserve a medal or what?

Though I have to say, in all honesty... it wasn't actually that bad.

Oculus is an interesting instance in so far as I don't think I've ever seen another dungeon in WoW that was as universally hated by everyone. Sure, people didn't like running heroic Shattered Halls back in BC either, but if you needed it for your Nightbane urn quest or whatever, you'd usually manage to find a couple of helpful guildies to assist you. Not so with Oculus - no matter how nicely you ask if anyone would be interested in joining you for a run, guild chat will instantly go eerily quiet as soon as you mention the o-word; that's how much people hate that place.

I was in the same camp for the longest time. I remember running the instance twice or so on my priest and really, really disliking it, like I had never disliked an instance before. It was all the more pronounced since all the other WOTLK dungeons I had run up to that point had been amazingly beautiful and fun, with massive improvements compared to what we had in BC. And then this? Are you kidding me?

(Just for completeness sake it has to be mentioned that there is also a small minority who absolutely loves the Oculus. Yes, I'm looking at you, Ferâthü. However, I've never met anyone who simply felt neutral about the instance. I think that says a lot about the place too.)

Recently I decided that I wanted to work on getting the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title for my two level 80 alts, so I'm currently focusing on running five-mans with them more often. Today Oculus was both the normal and the heroic daily and since I knew I wouldn't stand a chance to get a guild group going I decided to pug it.

I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, we had a few wipes in both groups, but on the whole things went smoothly. My hunter's party even managed to one-shot Eregos, which is something that I'd never seen before. To be fair, my server is quite old and the average player's skill more than decent, but I was still pleasantly surprised. Was this really the same place that I despised so much on my first attempts that I vowed to never go there again?

Some players have theorised that the reason that Oculus is so universally hated is that people just don't like vehicle fights and want to control their own character all the time. I have my doubts about that theory, especially with the way people fight over who gets to control the spiders on Mimiron trash...

I think that, at least for me personally, the main reason I disliked Oculus were the many, many wipes I had on Eregos early on without understanding what was really going on due to the vehicles. After almost three years of playing WoW I generally have a pretty good idea of all classes' core abilities and their roles and when something goes wrong in a five-man it's usually not that hard to tell what went wrong: tank didn't taunt, dps didn't interrupt a spell, healer was out of range etc. Conversely, I still don't know what exactly a ruby drake does, other than "tank, sort of", and I'm pretty sure that very few people (even if they are good players otherwise) know all the different abilities of all three drakes and when exactly they should be used. Not that the whole thing is extremely complicated or anything, but if you've never done it before it can still take some getting used to. So you wipe. And wipe again. And nobody really knows what's going wrong because they aren't exactly sure what should be happening either. And you wipe some more. Oh god, the memories... It's like learning the whole game all over again just for one dungeon.

But in both of my pugs today, everybody knew the instance. They knew what the dragon's abilities were all about and discussed the strategies accordingly. ("Make sure to always use time stop when he enrages.") And wham, bam, things died while we didn't. Mostly. And if something didn't work, we at least knew why.

So, next time someone asks for more people to join their Oculus run, I'll at least consider it. Though I still could do without all that clunky mounting up and dismounting again. Maybe in the next expansion.