My First Dungeon on Turtle WoW (Was Messy)

I felt that my first dungeon run on Turtle WoW was worthy of its own post, because it turned into quite an unexpected adventure (in both good and bad ways).

To set the scene, I noticed early on that Turtle's UI included the little dungeon finder eye that was added during Wrath of the Lich King as an icon on the edge of the mini map. I clicked on it to make sure that it was indeed what I thought it was, and while there was a second tab for manual group finding, the primary one was indeed an automated dungeon queue, though it required level 13 to access. I thought to myself that this was a bit odd and un-Vanilla-like, but then it's not an unusual thing for private servers to mix and match different expansion features, so I just shrugged it off.

When my little hunter hit level 13, the option to queue up for Ragefire Chasm opened up, so I signed up for that. (If you have experience playing on Turtle WoW, you may already be able to guess where this is going.) Somewhat to my surprise, I was in the queue for over an hour before anything happened. I mean, I know that wait times as a damage dealer are always longer, but the low level open world zones had been plenty busy and I couldn't quite fathom why seemingly none of these people would be queueing for dungeons.

I was inside a cave in Elwynn Forest when I finally got the pop-up telling me that a group had been formed. I excitedly pressed the "Let's do this!" button and quickly found myself in a group with four Horde characters. Now, I'd read some stuff about cross-faction play being a thing on Turtle, so that part wasn't really a surprise, however what was a surprise - and an unpleasant one at that - was the lack of a teleport to the dungeon.

So here I was, a level 13 Alliance player in Elwynn Forest, with the rest of my group waiting for me in Orgrimmar. Oh. OH.

I immediately apologised, telling them that I was new to the server and had expected this automated group finder to work like Wrath's, and that it probably wasn't worth waiting for me to get over there. I felt profoundly embarrassed, and part of me wanted to quit group right there, but I also hate leaving a group I only just joined, so I kind of hovered for a bit to await the party's judgement. Maybe Turtle WoW also had summoning stones? Someone (I think it was the tank but I'm not 100% sure now) said that it was fine and that they could probably wrangle a higher-level warlock into summoning me over there.

Still feeling a bit sheepish and uncertain about what to do with myself now, I decided that the best course of action for me was to at least make a good faith attempt at legging it to Orgrimmar in the meantime, even if I was unlikely to get very far. When I arrived in Darkshore, I noticed some strange things happening to the group, with people leaving and re-joining repeatedly, until the whole party was suddenly disbanded - or at least, I was suddenly group-less.

I just figured that I'd been kicked after all and felt a little sad, even if I thought it was understandable. As I was already on the road, I kept running south in an attempt to at least make it to Astranaar, since I was already in the area. However, not soon after, I got a re-invite to the group, and this time it included a level 60 troll warlock who sent me a summon. I appeared in Orgrimmar in front of the RFC entrance and thanked everyone once again.

Aside from me, the group consisted of a bear druid tank, an undead mage, a goblin warlock and an undead priest healer. The mage handed out some water and we quickly seemed to be off to a good start inside the dungeon.

At one point a green cloak with +2 agility dropped, and since I was still wearing a white, I rolled need on it. I wasn't surprised that I didn't win, but I was surprised that the other person who had rolled need on it was the warlock. Still, I wasn't going to complain - for all I knew, classes might be working differently on this server and I had only just had a demonstration of how little I actually knew about how things worked around these parts.

However, the mage took note, was not pleased and asked the warlock why they were needing on everything. It was only then that I noticed that the lock had indeed also needed on other items such as random gems. "I'm a JC" was their defense, which I thought was pretty weak (especially since I was one too) but again I didn't say anything. The mage continued to argue and rant about it though, and the lock started passing on everything for a little while, though they later resumed rolling.

The mage then also started complaining that the lock was just on follow and not actually doing any damage. I couldn't tell whether that was true, but it did seem like they were mostly just ambling about and not casting any spells. Still, nobody was responding to these accusations at all, even when the mage started outright demanding that the group leader should just kick the warlock already. It was as if they were just shouting into a void.

We made it past the first boss, but on one of the trash pulls that followed, my hawkstrider pet suddenly shot off into another group of mobs around the corner. I've played Classic hunter for so long now and have had so many pet accidents, but I still don't know what caused this particular one, as he was not on aggressive and the mobs were around a corner and not even visible to me. Either way, the moment I saw what was happening I said "omg, I'm so sorry, I don't know why he did that". We tried our best, but sadly it was too many mobs at once and we wiped.

The mage made one last complaint about how the warlock was supposedly only auto-attacking, before calling us all the "worst classic group ever" and quitting the party. Everyone else cared about that about as much as they had cared about the person's previous complaints, which is to say nobody even commented on it in any way. We just ran back, revived, and then finished the rest of the dungeon just fine with the four of us who remained.

When we exited the instance, my hearthstone was still on cooldown, so I thought I'd take a look at this apparently cross-faction-friendly Orgrimmar, but I had barely taken two steps away from the instance portal when a guard ran up and one-shot me. So, uh... so much for that.

Nonetheless, I thought this was a very educational experience. I can see now why no Alliance players are queueing for RFC, and I'm not sure why the game would list it as a "recommended dungeon" when you're supposed to walk all the way to Org as an Ally. Considering my encounter with the guard, it seems unlikely that a full Alliance group would even be able to make it there without a lot of corpse-running.

The mage was a weird character because I could kind of understand their complaints (my pet mishap wiping the group was definitely worthy of some disdain I thought) but they were just... so angry about everything. It's RFC, man, and maybe that warlock is someone's kid or a complete newbie or whatever, no need to get quite so wound up about it.

Meanwhile, the druid tank was an absolute saint, organising the summon for me and also telling me "no worries" after I'd caused the wipe. The best and the worst of most Classic environments in a nutshell. 

Rediscovering Season of Discovery

I wanted to take some more notes on my experience picking up Season of Discovery again:

One of the first things the game reminded of was that I made a whole bunch of alts in phase one that were all between level 10 and 20. Now, playing alts won't help with my goal of getting a single character to a high enough level to be able to do Demon Fall Canyon, but it's also fun and alleviates bag space issues (since I can just send all the cloth to my tailor and so on and so forth), so I spent some time burning through restedness on all of them anyway.

The world was busier than I expected - I'd figured that pretty much everyone but me would abandon everything they were doing on other classic realms to join the rush on the anniversary servers, but Wild Growth still seems plenty busy. Also, people were dropping Rend and dragon heads in Orgrimmar at seemingly all hours of the day, which kind of surprised me.

While going out to quest, I made the odd discovery that gathering nodes and chests were respawning at absolutely stupid rates for some reason. I first noticed it when I found a chest on my druid in Mulgore. I looted it, went to kill a nearby gnoll, turned around, and it was back! I looted it again, killed another gnoll, and the same thing happened again.

Later I was questing in the Barrens on my shaman, who is a miner, and I would almost get stuck in a loop running back and forth between the same couple of ore nodes that just kept coming back almost immediately after being mined out. As this was on the night of the anniversary server launch, I couldn't help but wonder whether some hyper-spawn setting intended for the launch day crowds was bleeding through to other servers.

The launch itself certainly had an impact as I got booted out of the game with the message "world server is down" (truly a classic) multiple times. At the time I had just killed Kreenig Snarlsnout, and coming back online in the middle of a fully respawned quillboar camp was not very fun. However, before I could properly fight my way out, I got disconnected again. This happened about five times in a row, until I decided to give up on fighting and just made a run for it. As it happened, this was also the time the server finally stayed up and I was able to make a close getaway.

My shaman also got an invite to heal Ragefire Chasm, which she accepted. I was told that the tank was new, and it was very noticeable as I did a lot of face-tanking while healing, but hey, people gotta learn somewhere. Plus it was only RFC and nobody died (I'm not counting the druid who somehow managed to fall into the lava on the way out). The group asked me afterwards whether they could add me to their friends list and I said sure, though I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll meet again with me playing my alts only in short bursts.

In terms of grouping, I noticed that there's now a manual group finder in Season of Discovery that's similar to the one we had in original Burning Crusade. I was always quite fond of that one, even if seemingly not a lot of people used it, but personally I always got good results with it. That said, I haven't really had a chance to put the SoD version to the test yet.

Another thing that happened was that I realised that with the lauch of the anniversary realms, Blizzard had also launched the AQ war effort in SoD. For a brief moment I got all starry-eyed, remembering the wonderful memories I made of the AQ gate opening event on Hydraxian Waterlords, and even wondered briefly whether I'd have enough time to level up high enough to witness the ringing of the gong on Wild Growth too. Sadly I quickly found out that the war effort in SoD is "fake" in the sense that your contributions don't matter and it just auto-completes after a week. While I can kind of get wanting to speed things up on a seasonal server, I still think that fully automating the process sucks, and I will of course not be able to see the event. Though to be fair, it's not why I came back anyway; it just would have been a nice bonus.

More Hardcore Horde Adventures

I've continued to level my hardcore troll priest in small bursts of activity, and she's now up to level 20.

I initially struggled with more interface problems, as I could tell that I still wasn't seeing all the death announcements, even after joining the server-wide HardcoreDeaths channel. Some googling revealed that there's an additional drop-down in the in-game settings nowadays where you need to select how many deaths you want to see, and it's set to show only those of guild members by default.

I was happy when I finally got that sorted out and could see everything, as the discourse from the peanut gallery about deaths is always interesting. There were some raised eyebrows about a wipe in Ragefire Chasm for example, and when a level 52 died to fall damage in Tirisfal Glades there were exclamations along the lines of: "Why not wait five seconds for the zeppelin to actually dock, man?!"

Aside from that, guild chat sadly remains a bit confusing because they expect you to install an addon called "Greenwall" to connect it with the guild chat of sister guilds, which I've refused to do so far because I don't like the thought of having an extra addon just for that. That said, it makes reading guild chat a very disjointed experience right now as it's very obvious that people are frequently responding to things that I'm not seeing. I might cave eventually.

I've been surprised by how regular world buffs are dropping on hardcore. I think I mentioned this before, but still... I know that people raid on hardcore, but I figured it was more of a fringe activity considering the risk vs. reward. The number of world buffs going out on the regular seems to defy that assumption though.

After accidentally picking up some buffs in Orgrimmar one night, I decided to venture forth into Skull Rock at level 12. I knew that was probably a risky move, but I was feeling brave and was hopeful that I wasn't going to be the only person there. Indeed, I ran into a male troll hunter as soon as I turned the first corner. At first we continued fighting separately, just leap-frogging each other with our mob pulls, but then I spotted the rare elite warlock around a corner and suggested we group up to kill him. We did and then continued killing more together - grouping up is such a force multiplier in era (particularly as a priest!), it never ceases to amaze me.

Just as we were about to go out, a mage entered the cave and asked to join. I invited him, but of course he was only just starting his quests. The hunter thanked everyone politely and took his leave, but I stuck with the mage to help him get his quest done too. Then a druid showed up as well! I enjoyed the grouping experience, but at that point I was getting a bit worried that I 'd gotten myself caught in an endless loop of helping out new joiners. As if he'd read my mind, the mage said that he'd stay with the druid to help them complete their quest, but that I was free to go. I thanked everyone and took my leave, happy that the most deadly place in Durotar had gone so well for me.

Up next, I started questing in the Barrens. One funny experience I had there was when I was killing centaurs around the Forgotten Pools and a death announcement popped up that "a Stonearm" had killed someone at my location. For all the hours I've spent in the Barrens over the years, I had never heard of "a Stonearm" before, and I was rather alarmed to hear that this unknown entity was apparently killing people in my vicinity. A quick Wowhead search revealed him to be a rare centaur, and about five minutes later he killed another player. I was looking over my shoulder with some serious paranoia now, wondering whether he was a patroller or something, but he was not. I eventually spotted him guarding a chest near some tents but decided not to engage after the earlier carnage. When I came past the tents again a few minutes later, someone else had successfully killed him though.

At level 15 I wanted to run Ragefire Chasm. My first attempt to find a group in the evening wasn't successful - I saw that another group was already looking for a tank, so I didn't fancy my chances and went off to do something else. This turned out to be a good decision though, because when I logged in the following Saturday morning, I didn't even have enough time to type "LFG RFC" into chat before someone had already whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go there.

It was a smooth enough run, but it also highlighted to me that healing in hardcore feels like a much bigger responsibility than usual. We had a level 18 shaman tank, which was fine enough, but there was also a level 15 warrior with a two-hander and a mage that liked to go up close to spam Arcane Explosion, and they both got aggro on more than one occasion, which resulted in sudden damage spikes on them, and that at a point when I didn't yet have Flash Heal or anything... I think I saw the mage chug a healing potion once and when the warrior got low, the other shaman in the group threw him a quick off-heal. Usually I'd be mildly offended by people "panicking" like that as soon as someone's health drops below 50%, but in hardcore I understand wanting to be safe rather than perma-dead.

We also made the most out of the experience (seeing how you can do each dungeon only once per day) and even went to kill the troggs in the little cul-de-sac to the left, something I hadn't done in donkey's years.

We'll see how things develop as I go up in levels. I do love how much everyone seems to appreciate being buffed with a priest's fortitude. I do it all the time on the road and people will often stop what they're doing just to whisper me thanks - I like knowing that those extra HP might really help someone out in the world. My next personal goal is probably going to be to get into a Wailing Caverns run, but there's no rush.

Level 15 in Season of Discovery

Season of Discovery has been out for less than a week but apparently the no-lifers have already run the BFD raid to death and are bored. I haven't heard any complaints in my guild, but I've certainly seen my share of min-maxers there as well and I've got to admit it makes me a bit anxious. I'd forgotten how quickly the threat of "being left behind" looms when you're playing with people like that, and I'm glad they at least have nowhere else to go past level 25 for now. I hope Blizzard stick to their guns and give this phase time to breathe, without being tempted into raising the level cap too soon just to appease certain loud voices.

My little undead priest is level 15 so far and probably won't get to 25 for a while as SWTOR is deploying a major patch today. In my last post I talked about how I found my second rune, but I didn't mention what it was: it's called "Homunculi" and conjures three little mini-yous to fight by your side. The spell's cooldown and duration are the same, so you can have them up all the time unless they die. They don't hit particularly hard, but they do apply some very useful debuffs to your enemy and can serve as life-saving distractions in tough situations. Though they also do the opposite sometimes, by running off to attack a random mob by themselves that you didn't actually want to fight. I'm not sure about the logic behind that... either way, it's a fun little spell.

Around level 12 I left Tirisfal to pick up all the quests for Ragefire Chasm. One of them has a pre-quest in Skull Rock in Durotar. I wrote a bit about just how deadly that place is in the context of the orc voidwalker quest, but it's well-known as the deadliest place on Horde side in hardcore mode as well. Still, all the knowledge in the world couldn't have prepared me for what I encountered there in SoD: it was absolute carnage.

The moment I stepped inside I found the whole floor littered both with dead NPCs and player skeletons. There were both people and hyperspawns everywhere, which led to the bizarre situation of it being both hard to tag things and easy to get overwhelmed by respawns at the same time. An orc shaman threw me a group invite which I immediately accepted; later we were joined by two hunters. I was quite happy to let them do most of the killing and just do some healing. They seemed quite pleased with that and responded with friendly emotes more than once. However, both of the hunters left quietly the moment they'd completed their quests, so then it was just me and the shaman again. At one point I died - no shade on the shaman there, as I said it was weirdly easy to get overwhelmed out of nowhere - but then he just looted his quest item and also dropped group quietly, leaving me to run back to my body by myself. I've got to admit that felt kind of crappy.

I later joined another group and eventually got my own quest item, plus one of the mobs dropped a third rune for me. All in all, I must have spent about three quarters of an hour in that cave though, which is definitely too long.

On the plus side, getting into a group for RFC was fast and easy after that. When everyone arrived at the instance entrance I asked who was tanking since it wasn't obvious, and it turned out to be a shaman. Funnily enough, my first thought was "ah yes, I guess at low levels shamans can tank too" and only my second thought was "oh wait, in SoD shamans are meant to be legitimate tanks". It was only then that I noticed that they had a buff on them that indicated increased health and threat. Their tanking seemed to involve totems somehow - I'm not sure how it worked, but they did a good enough job with it. We only had one scary moment when we accidentally overpulled and the tank died... however, I managed to survive with something like five hitpoints, so we were able to res up and continue.

While in Org, I also saw Monty again, the priest who first gave me the Loa buff in Tirisfal Glades, asking for someone to /pray and give him the two buffs again. It felt like proper karma to be able to return his favour so quickly.

I've now moved on to Silverpine but will probably start working on the Barrens soon, if nothing else to get ready for Wailing Caverns. I haven't found another rune since the one in Skull Rock... but my plan is to just go with the flow until 25, and maybe then look up what I missed.

I've also been levelling all my professions on the side because that's the kind of thing I always enjoy. I've been surprised by how easy it's been to find herbs; I would've expected every zone to be absolutely picked clean with how busy it's been, but maybe Blizzard just made the respawns really fast in this iteration of the game or herbalism is a less popular profession than it used to be.

Return to Ragefire Chasm

I did two full runs of Ragefire Chasm this weekend. The first one was a boost, as a nice guildie offered to quickly run a bunch of new players and alts through the instance. As I've explained in the past, I tend to feel ambivalent about boosts, but in this case it was too good an opportunity to pass up, as my warlock was almost over-levelled for the dungeon anyway, and I was glad to just get the quests out of her log.

The next day however, I was fishing in the Barrens when I spotted some actual chatter in LookingForGroup about people wanting to do RFC on characters at the right level. Both a healer and a dps were involved in the conversation, so my thoughts immediately went to my little warrior, who was a few levels below the warlock - I could get out her sword and board and be the tank to complete the trinity! So I relogged, and not much later we were off.

The run itself was nice but unremarkable. We kept a good pace, nobody died and everyone was friendly. However, what made it stand out for me was that this was in fact my very first proper pug dungeon on Horde since since I started playing Classic era. I'd done a few on Alliance side before, but on Horde side with its much lower population, my dungeon runs had all been initiated and mostly comprised of fellow guildies, simply because the LFG channel was dead.

So this has been another lovely milestone for me, because while I obviously enjoy playing with my guildies, I don't want the world to feel like it just exists for my guild; I want to be part of something bigger, and encountering other players "out in the wild" is an important part of that.

Despite the recent virality of Classic era, population growth in our little neck of the woods has been slow, probably because playing Horde on a PvE server seems to be the least popular "combo" to pick for whatever reason (it's the same on the US servers). However, this past week it's really been picking up and giving me a lot of hope.

I saw it today while raiding Molten Core too. In the past, it hasn't been unusual for a lone leveller to pipe up with a dungeon request during a raid and get no response at all, until eventually a raider would reply that sorry, most of us were busy in a raid. But today I saw grouping requests get answered by other levellers even during the raid, and it just warmed my heart. It also makes me want to play my own alts some more to get in on some of that levelling and dungeoneering action. I'm always worried about jinxing things by being too optimistic, but it certainly looks like there are good times ahead right now.

Classic Dungeoneering

One of the interesting side effects of my current altoholism in Classic is that I've probably run Ragefire Chasm and Wailing Caverns more often in the last three weeks than I ever did them in modern WoW, which is quite ironic considering that modern WoW since at least Wrath of the Lich King has had a heavy focus on spamming dungeons, while Classic does not. However, levels 1-15 go by quickly, and if you enjoy running dungeons, why wouldn't you then jump right into Ragefire Chasm at the first opportunity?

Here are some of the things I've learned about RFC in the last three weeks:

- If you bring someone of level 12 or lower along, when running up the ramp to the lost satchel and Oggleflint, you run the risk of aggroing the entire other half of the trogg area (which most people never go into) from across the gap between the two paths. One of my groups learned this the hard way, but it was kind of amusing at the same time to suddenly be buried under a dozen troggs coming seemingly out of nowhere.

- The quest to collect two books for Varimathras has an awful drop rate, and you're pretty lucky if both books drop in a single run. It's quite possible to kill every single mob in the instance and only get one of the two books, forcing you to do a whole second run just for the second book.

- If you go up the ramp to Bazzalan first, you can then pull Jergosh the Invoker with a ranged attack from up top without engaging most of his trash. He'll run all the way round and up to you while only bringing two or three adds with him.

And some lessons I learned in Wailing Caverns:

- All the quests that require you to collect anything are best started early and can be partially or fully completed among/from the elites outside the dungeon itself, in a smaller group or even solo if your character is of a high enough level. This is a good idea because if you go into the instance with a full group of five that has all the quests, there won't be anything close to enough Serpentbloom, Deviate Hides or Wailing Essence to go around.

- Apparently tremor totem can break the annoying sleep cast by many of the enemies inside the caverns themselves. Unfortunately for me I only found out about this after my own shaman had made it through an entire run cursing about the stupid sleep spell and (as I thought) being unable to do anything about it.

- Even fifteen years later, with all the add-ons and internet resources one could possibly want, people still get confused about which way to go inside WC (including myself). I love it.

In general, all of my runs have been very pleasant. There were a couple of wipes, but people were always good-natured about them.

In general it feels great to be grouping with people again who all clearly want to be there and actively want to take in the whole dungeon as an experience. As soon as a party has fully formed, everyone will make their way towards the instance without prompting, and if someone is delayed they'll make sure to let the others know. Quests are often shared without anyone having to ask for it, and nobody minds killing a few extra trash packs to help with someone else's quest, or to get access to a chest for example. (One RFC group I had even gleefully went on to kill every single mob in the instance, "because XP".)

Who'd have thought that dungeon runs could be far more pleasant when they only involve people who actively want to be there and aren't afraid of talking to other players? As opposed to consisting of people who just want to get their weekly done or who pressed the queue button without necessarily even knowing where exactly it would take them.

Ah, but what about the horrible group forming experience of (in the words of J. Allen Brack himself) having to "spam cities and say 'need a tank, need a tank, need a tank'"? Well, that was never my reality, and it isn't now either.

Belghast made a post the other week about how to group successfully in Classic, and it reminded me a lot of a similar guide I once wrote on my old guild's forums back in the Burning Crusade. I, too, remember being somewhat exasperated at the time with certain groups of players who were forever complaining that it was sooo hard to get into a group while simultaneously being unwilling to make even the tiniest bit of effort to actually make it happen. Long before any developers had dreamed up the modern dungeon finder, there were always people who just expected groups to simply happen to them - and surprise, surprise... that never worked.

If you know what to do on the other hand, if you're not afraid of starting your own groups and starting them in a sensible way (which is to say involving a tank or a healer), and if you're happy to leave a solo quest for later when somone is LFM for something you need, it was always fairly easy to get stuff done and still is.

What makes things even smoother in Classic is that the servers are so insanely big and busy that you can find a group for pretty much anything at almost any time of day right now. Oddly enough, I've had the most trouble finding groups as a healer... similar to my experience on Darrowshire, there was a period where there seemed to be a proper glut of healers in my level bracket and you were actually more likely to find people looking for dps. I'm hoping that this will get better with time though.

Anyway, my own pro tip beyond agreeing with most of Belghast's advice is to join the LookingForGroup channel, which is always abuzz with activity. In fact, on my server I only join it when I'm actively looking for a group and then leave it again immediately afterwards as it otherwise drowns out all other chat that I'm following. As it's a global channel, people can shout about all kinds of grouping requests in there while happily continuing with their questing wherever. Not that I've really had to do that, considering that you can often find a group within mere minutes anyway.

Back in the Saddle

Kronos has been back up again for a couple of days, but it's still a bit wobbly on its legs sometimes. I logged onto my paladin to see how things were going and a stranger ran up to me and traded me The Light and How to Swing It. However, before I could even do as much as say "thanks, stranger", I was disconnected and unable to log back in again. So, if you happen to read this, random stranger in Ironforge: I didn't mean to be rude, and thank you again!

Fortunately the server was stable enough for me to spend some time playing this Saturday, as I wanted to make use of the rested XP my new tauren hunter had accumulated during the downtime.

Before the servers succumbed to the DDoS attack, I had actually gone out and tamed a hyena as my second pet as planned, but I struggled with both of my pets being unhappy and absolutely ravenous 24/7. I had taken up fishing to keep my cat happy but didn't have enough suitable food for the hyena at hand, causing me to stable it for a couple of levels while I saved up random meat drops. Fortunately Petopia confirmed for me that this was just a side effect of the initial low loyalty level and that both pets would become less ravenous over time as their loyalty increased, which turned out to be true.

I also made a bit of a fool of myself when I meant to go to Orgrimmar to contribute some wool bandages to the war effort and kept looking for the zeppelin docking point in Thunder Bluff. After I gave up and googled it, I found out that this particular connection wasn't actually added until Wrath of the Lich King. Oops!

Two quests from Thunder Bluff reminded me of the existence of Ragefire Chasm. Maybe it's because of my early Alliance experiences, but I always kind of forget that this particular instance even exists, as I always think of the Deadmines as the lowest-level dungeon.

I decided that I wanted to run it. Fortunately there were plenty of LFG requests flying around, however I was soon reminded that things are a bit different when you play a pure damage dealer. On my paladin I could be relatively picky and wait for a group to be looking for a tank or healer at a convenient time, but when you play dps, things are a bit different. I would whisper someone who was "LFM", get no response, and a few moments later they were now only looking for a tank or healer. You just have to be quick and/or lucky... or you can take it upon yourself to be the person who actually puts the group together, which is a bit more work but also more reliable. So the next time I saw someone "LFG RFC", I snatched them up right away, and luckily it turned out to be a warrior willing to tank. It took maybe five minutes to put a full group together, and we ended up with "four undead and a cow" as one of my group mates put it.

There wasn't that much to say about the run itself. We had one near-wipe (the surviving rogue and I ran back out since we were still close to the door) but otherwise things went smoothly. Another time one of the two rogues fell off a cliff and died. I had to chuckle when a group member congratulated my pet (!) on levelling up, and that by name (!!). Quite a contrast to the silent LFG culture where you're lucky if people address you at all, never mind using anyone's name.

Back in the Barrens I also completed one of the more infamous group quests on Horde side: Counterattack! For those who never got to experience it, it's a group quest you get after hunting down centaur leaders in three different oases around the Crossroads (which is an annoying prerequisite to begin with). It involves an event where hordes of centaurs attack, until eventually an elite warlord spawns who hits like an absolute truck, able to two or three-shot players of the right level in average gear.

I was worried that it would be a pain to find a group for this, but as it happened one was forming up just as I was approaching the bunker with the quest giver to hand in the head of the third centaur leader. That said, even with a full five-man group people died to the warlord repeatedly, and most of the time I ended up desperately kiting him around the bunker. I've said before that I'm not very good at kiting, but it's interesting what the threat of impending death will do for your learning curve!

As an extra annoyance it turned out that the banner that he drops can only be picked up by one person at a time, forcing us to redo the whole event five times. One guy was even rude enough to quit the instant he got his own quest item, but fortunately everyone else at least agreed that this was very improper and definitely shun-worthy behaviour.

All in all it was a fun play session and allowed my hunter to hit level 20, a couple of hours earlier in terms of /played than my paladin. Plans for next time: to mop up the rest of the northern Barrens quests and get into Wailing Caverns!

Adventures in Dungeoneering

If you asked me which aspect of WoW I missed the least in the past two years, I definitely would've chosen the dungeon finder. As such, I wasn't at all keen on reacquainting myself with its "gogogo" culture and had originally planned to avoid it altogether. My pet warrior had different ideas however, as he really wanted to tank some dungeons, so who was I to say no?

Initially I thought that I was going to play off-spec healer for him while staying feral for our questing, however I soon found that the talent changes in Mists of Pandaria seem to have made that kind of thing pretty impossible. By the time we became eligible to queue for our first couple of dungeons, I still only had a single healing spell as feral - a heal over time at that - and my mana pool was limited to a piddly 200 or so, no matter how much int gear I put on. So I settled for queuing as dps.

Interestingly, our queues were still near instant almost all the time - with one notable exception when we just couldn't find any other damage dealers and spent about ten minutes waiting to fill the other two dps slots, which was probably more time than we then spent in the actual dungeon (Stormwind Stockade in this case). If anything, there seem to be too many healers in the low-level queue: in more than one run we ended up with a healer filling one of the dps slots. The holy pally in Wailing Caverns at least seemed to give ranged dps a pretty good go, but the disc priest/resto druid combo in Shadowfang Keep were both convinced that since they had both queued as healer, they didn't need to do anything but stand in the back and look pretty. (The druid literally had my pet tank on /follow for most of the run.) Since our third dps wasn't particularly on the ball either, this led to a rather odd experience where it felt like my tank and me were pretty much duoing the instance, while everyone else just tagged along to collect loot.

I suppose I mustn't complain too much though - at least we haven't run into any rude people... yet. For the most part, the players in our runs have been what you could call enigmatically silent, leaving their thoughts and motivations up to individual interpretation. Being a cynic, you could certainly interpret the fact that two dps dropped out of our Wailing Caverns run within the first five minutes as a sign that they were extremely impatient and even a minute of walking the wrong way (which we were doing at the time) was already too much of a waste of time for them to tolerate. For all I know though, they might have been some perfectly relaxed people who only just happened to remember at that time that they forgot to feed their cats.

Overall it seems to me that the "rush rush" culture is as alive as ever though. It's not that much of an issue in our case, as my tank is the sort of person who actually likes charging madly from one objective to the next, and I know that I can always tell him to stop if I need to. Gameplay-wise it's pretty dull from my point of view though, just running along, mashing my AoE buttons and collecting shinies along the way. I couldn't help feeling wistful in Blackfathom Deeps in particular, remembering how deadly so many of the trash pulls and boss encounters used to be, while it's now just a race to see who can round up the next room first.

One thing that mystifies me a little has been the loot. I suppose it's positive that we didn't encounter any ninjas, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that this was due to some sort of change to the loot system rather than people suddenly being more considerate. Most of the time I couldn't even see anyone but myself rolling (which among other things resulted in me winning four pieces of the "of the Fang" set in a single Wailing Caverns run), and I just can't believe that everyone was always passing on everything.

Not quite as I remember it...

Taken on its own merits, the most interesting instance so far has probably been Ragefire Chasm, because I had completely forgotten that Blizzard was going to redo that one for MoP. Imagine my surprise when upon entering I found mobs that looked like they escaped from the Firelands instead of a bunch of troggs! Now I'm curious to see what they've done to the Scarlet Monastery (which I know was redone).

Reporting from Ragefire Chasm and the Deadmines

Even without heirlooms or restedness, levelling still feels too fast to me. I want to see the new quests, but I also can't stay away from instances entirely and that's already enough to throw my questing completely out of whack. By the time I finished the Northern Barrens, most of the quests and mobs there were already grey to me, and all because I had done a couple of RFC and DM runs... I guess it's good for people who like to level using only one part of the game or who really like to pick and choose their content, but for me... not so much.

I chose to make my new troll druid feral but didn't feel like tanking, so I queued as dps... and as healer, since I healed low-level instances as an off-spec very successfully in the past. I do have to say though, I'm now not sure anymore whether that's such a good idea, at least not with random groups. It's far from impossible, but I still found it a lot harder than I expected, even though I had collected a full set of int gear for healing.

Mana was the biggest issue - healers all get meditation at level ten now if they choose to go resto or holy, and I reckon that not having that as an off-spec healer was what made the biggest difference. Spell scaling was another problem: in the past I used to compensate for off-spec healing by only queueing for instances for which I was on the higher end of the level range, using the fact that the extra levels had increased my mana pool to my advantage. However, nowadays the cost of my spells increases with each level as well, meaning that being a few levels higher doesn't help at all - my mana pool will still only be good for x number of spells. If anything I found it more difficult to heal once I hit twenty or so, since it was around that time that I seemed to lose the massive regeneration bonus that all the low levels get these days.

Some of it might also be a class-specific problem however. For example I had a run in which I was a kitty and our healer was a shaman in pretty crappy gear, but his mana bar hardly ever seemed to move at all. After observing him for a little while I noticed that he was making a point of using his super mana-efficient heal, healing wave, most of the time. Paladins and priests get their version at low levels as well, but druids still don't get nourish until level seventy-eight. Ouch! This left me with only rejuvenation, regrowth and healing touch in my toolbox. (Compare the 26-35% of base mana cost to nourish's 10%!) Rejuvenation worked reasonably well, but I needed a direct heal to cover damage spikes as well, and neither regrowth nor healing touch worked really well for that. The former is fast and heals for a good amount but too expensive to use all the time, and healing touch is so fricking big that it's hard to use it effectively as you'll overheal a lot of the time, and that while it's still quite expensive. (In my runs it healed for a little less than 400, with the tanks having between 400 and 600 hitpoints. I could hardly wait with casting until they were near-dead every time!)

Still, I don't want to make it sound as if healing was completely horrible or anything, but the instances as a whole are definitely not as facerollable as before. It's hard to make a judgement on how much more difficult they've become, because it still depends a lot on your group. If you've got a tank in full heirlooms you'll probably be fine. However, I've also had non-heirloomed tanks that were at the lowest level for the dungeon and went splat so quickly that I could barely even get a healing touch off in the time in which they went from full to nil. I actually started pre-casting and cancelling my heals in some cases, the humanity! Talk about something that gave me vanilla flashbacks. Actually, that's probably the best way to describe the state of these revamped low-level instances: they have a certain vanilla WoW feel about them. They'll still go a bit faster, but overly crazy pulls are definitely not recommended. Crowd control is not strictly necessary but can be helpful.

I already mentioned in my last post that Ragefire Chasm hasn't changed much. Mobs have been thinned out and moved around a bit (for example Oggleflint is right up ahead now instead of up in that cave up on the side), they have more health and hit harder now, but otherwise it's more or less the same. I expect that this is the way Blizzard handled most of the old five-mans.

Both the achievement system and the dungeon finder also still claim that the instance has been completed once you kill Targaman the Hungerer, which is just as silly as it was before, seeing how he's only the second boss. However, due to the new dungeon maps which show more skulls further ahead and the fact that there's now a quest at the start to kill Jergosh the Invoker and Bazzalan as well, you should have better luck with convincing your party to do a full clear than you might have had in the past.

The quests at the start are noteworthy as well I suppose. Blizzard did mention that all dungeon quests would be available inside the instance from now on, and they weren't kidding: a full contingent of quest NPCs awaits you, offering about three to four quests for the instance at once. As if the dungeon finder wasn't efficient enough already... still, I'm not complaining. Having everyone on the same quests has its advantages (see above) and it saves you all the running around you used to have to do to pick up all the dungeon quests. Just remember to go back to the instance entrance at the end to hand in instead of leaving the group and teleporting out right away.

My only complaint with this system so far is the rather awkward way in which it works with one quest in the Deadmines. One quest giver there has a whole chain to kill all the bosses in the dungeon, except that you don't know that right away. So you get the quest to kill the first boss, clear the instance - then at the end all the quest NPCs conveniently show up so you don't have to run back, and when you hand in, this quest giver tells you to go and kill another boss. But, but... I just killed everyone in here, you're standing right on top of their corpses, lady! I ended up having to do three runs in a row or so just to complete this one quest chain, which felt a tad silly. Why can't she show up after I killed the boss she wanted me to kill and give me the follow-up then?

The Deadmines as a whole have been changed a lot, presumably so that the level eighty-five heroic version would be on par with other heroics. This means that the boss fights are fairly involved for such a low-level instance, though still not too difficult. Almost all the bosses have some sort of ability that requires you to move away, but you shouldn't die immediately if you don't - you'll just make your healer cry. Still, compared to the usual tank-and-spank in other dungeons of that level that's a huge difference.

Also, all the bosses (with one exception) are different from the classic Deadmines. If you're Horde, you'll probably just go "What's going on? Who are these people?" and then kill them anyway. If you're Alliance you can level an alt through Westfall (which I did afterwards) and learn all about the story behind the changes there, with little nods to pretty much all of the new characters. If you're at all into lore, it might be worth levelling an Alliance alt just for that, even if you're usually Horde.