Rune Hunting in Season of Discovery

I mentioned in my last post about SoD that I'd decided to put levelling on the back burner for a bit in favour of hunting down more of my class runes. Yes, I know you can just buy them all from a vendor now, but that just defeats the purpose for me - I don't so much care about having the runes at this point, I just want to see what kind of content/gameplay Blizz put into SoD related to acquiring them.

Back in phase one, I actually collected all but one of the available runes for my priest; the only one I was missing was the one for which you had to grind out various junk items for a goblin in Ratchet so he would turn into a vendor and sell you a rune (this was the same for all classes). I could never be bothered with that one, and when I returned to this goblin recently, I found that while the grindy quests are still there, he's just a vendor by default. I then opted to simply return to Orgrimmar and buy the rune from the trader there for one copper, because if I'm going to just buy these from a vendor, I might as well save myself some cash (the price at the goblin was still three gold).

Then it was time to whip out the Wowhead guide and go travelling around the level 30-40 zones for the phase two runes. The common theme for these seemed to be that they required you to travel a lot, and I tried to get several things done in each location at once for efficiency, but there was pretty much always something I'd forget and that I later had to go back for after all. At least I got my master fishing quest done during these repeated round trips around the world as well.

I also found out that the devs did away with the whole "meditation" thing, a.k.a. the buff sharing mechanic I absolutely adored in phase one (and without which you couldn't actually learn many runes even if you'd found them). Honestly, I was glad. While I thought that the whole concept was an incredibly cool idea a year ago, with most people at level cap and no longer hunting for runes, I think it would've been a massive pain in the rear to acquire those meditation buffs every time I wanted to learn a new rune. 

The tooltips are now a lie. And also a bit broken.

Anyway, about half of the phase two runes were relatively straightforward and uneventful to acquire with a guide. Farm some mobs over here until they drop a thing, click on this item over there that starts a short quest, that sort of thing. However, three runes stood out as more interesting/challenging:

First there was the Dispersion rune, which according to the instructions, first required a rogue to pickpocket a scroll for you, then a mage to decipher said scroll, and then the resulting item starts a quest for the priest to do a couple of bits and bobs in Stranglethorn. Fat chance I'm going to find anyone to help with that at this stage, I thought at first, but then I noticed that the guide said that both the pickpocketed scroll and the deciphered scroll were tradeable and could be sold on the AH. And what do you know... I checked the AH and there was exactly one of the pickpocketed scrolls there, for a rather silly price of six gold or so. However, I was grateful for the opportunity to still do the quest after all, so I bought it and sent it to my mage alt to decipher, which ultimately enabled me to still unlock this rune the originally intended way. I suspect I was rather lucky to achieve that at this point.

Next there was the Spirit of the Redeemer rune, which requires you to hunt down the seven dark riders of Karazhan across the world. This was one of those things I'd heard people talk about in early coverage of SoD phase two, and the general impression I got of said coverage was that this was another task that all classes needed to do for one of their runes, that it was very time-consuming, and that it required a full group. I figured that would be another thing that might be tough to do at this point in the game, but I was tentatively hopeful based on some comments I'd read and the fact that I was a few levels past 40 at this point that I'd be able to solo this one. So I made sure to grab some world buffs before revealing the first rider... and it worked! It was still a somewhat tough fight that required me to blow all my cooldowns and I was out of mana by the end, but it was doable, so I travelled to all seven of the required zones and hunted down the rider in each one. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that each rider hunted down counted as a quest that translated into about one bar of XP at my level, so I actually got a decent amount of that just for working to unlock this one rune.

The biggest challenge however turned out to be the Pain Suppression rune. This one required you to collect items from four different zones in opposite corners of the world (naturally) which you then had to use inside one of the rooms in the library wing of Scarlet Monastery. Now, obviously people are still doing SM runs, but I'd kind of reached a level where groups wouldn't really have been too happy to take me to the library wing (plus I wasn't sure how a pug would feel about me wanting to pause in the middle to faff around with no-longer-required rune stuff), but at the same time I wasn't yet high enough to easily be able to solo the place.

I spent a little time looking for a group but quickly grew impatient and decided to give soloing it a try anyway. As it turned out, a single mob inside the dungeon was easy enough for me to take down at this point, two were doable with mind control but kind of slow, and three were a mad scramble but survivable if I had cooldowns up. So I started to slowly work my way through the first corridor and then the courtyard, with things going wrong several times and forcing me to run back out, usually when I couldn't stop a runner in time.

My little Homunculi were also a bit of a mixed bag. They were incredibly useful in terms of combat capabilities, but they are also uncontrollable and can be stupid unholy little terrors, and would sometimes randomly decide to charge off into another room to pull more when I really couldn't take any more mobs at that particular moment. I survived a lot of close calls, but one time it all got too much and I died. When I ran back in I had to discover to my chagrin that because I'd been so slow, trash at the entrance was already starting to respawn.

I almost gave up at that point, but I was so close to the room I actually needed that I persisted, carving an even narrower path through the respawned mobs to get back to where I was, and eventually I succeeded in getting to the corridor I needed and was able to place my items there to "summon" the rune.

With all the phase two runes polished off, I started to have a look at the phase three ones. There was one that was really easy, only requiring me to kill a regular one mob just outside Gadgetzan. Since it was in the area, I also tried the one that requires you to summon a voidwalker in a waste wanderer camp, but that went horribly wrong since it was an elite, immune to shadow damage (never great news for a priest) and had an absolutely horrific damage output. So I died and decided to leave that one for another day.

Time to get back to actual levelling.

Levelling Through Raiding in Season of Discovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Vanilla Dungeon Nostalgia

When I picked up playing on Kronos again after a break of several months, I dumped a whole bunch of group and dungeon quests from my quest log and vowed to myself that, in the future, I wouldn't allow them to bog me down. If I got them done, great, but I wasn't going to fret about it and if I outlevelled them before a good opportunity presented itself to complete them, I'd just throw them out without a second thought.

In terms of group quests, I've actually been pretty lucky since then - just as the ones in Stranglethorn Vale and Alterac Mountains were starting to build up and beginning to feel like a problem, I had a lucky day and got the whole lot of them done in two runs (one for each zone).

Also, I've been running dungeons again, mostly as a healer, even though I always feel a bit self-conscious wearing a dress as a paladin. I tend to not put my healing gear on until we're at the instance and I immediately take it off again as soon as we're done. Funnily enough, the one time I didn't do that and left it on for a bit while wandering around Ironforge clearing my bags, a dwarf paladin whispered me accusingly that paladins shouldn't wear dresses (it was clearly tongue-in-cheek but still telling)!

I'd kind of given up on the idea of actually tanking dungeons because it's just too annoying without a taunt, but ended up doing so for one SM Library/Armoury run anyway because everyone else in the group was several levels below me, which I figured would give me enough of a threat buffer. It did work out OK, though towards the end we had to replace one damage dealer and the new one was a shadow priest that was only one level below me or so... she had aggro pretty much until the end of the run.

Overall I've been enjoying these runs, for a variety of reasons. I'd forgotten just how much more distinctive the classes felt in Vanilla due to their different abilities, and it really makes every group excitingly different as well. Having a mage means that you can always sheep one mob in each pull, which vastly increases the tank's amount of control and makes the healer's job a lot easier, not to mention that their secondary job as a water vending machine is a godsend for any mana users in the party. (Remember when everyone had to sit down after every other pull to drink up?) Warlock summons are really useful in this age before summoning stones if one party member is slacking on their way to the instance and makes it so much easier to replace someone if you need to. On the other hand, they constantly lifetap themselves to within an inch of their lives and then just stand there, waiting for me to drink and heal them up again! Get your own food or drink, buddy, or at least some bandages! Hunter pets are actually really useful as occasional off-tanks since tanks have so little control, and over the course of the evening you can get really attached to the little critters. I always apologised if one died and often resurrected them afterwards. I actually felt sorry for Sheldon the turtle when his happiness level dropped to "unhappy" because he'd died so many times... also, as a paladin I'm having oodles of fun with seals and judgements. In Scarlet Monastery in particular, runners can be a real problem and I got a real kick out of slapping them with a judgement of justice when they got low on health so that they couldn't run away. There's just so much utility and so many synergies going around. The more time passes, the less favourable I look back on Ghostcrawler's "bring the player, not the class" mantra and the effect it has had on the game.

The whole experience is also just so different from most dungeons in more modern MMOs. Syp posted about what he considers a good dungeon run yesterday, and Telwyn wrote a post in reply to offer a counter-point on the subject of why "should take 30 minutes or less" might not be a good requirement for an instance. I can actually enjoy a 30 minute dungeon run as well if everything else about it works for me, but there is a certain quality to these old-school, multiple-hour runs that seems to be missing from many newer games. Both the time and effort required and the rewards you get are just so much greater. There's the whole issue of having to manually assemble the group and getting everyone to the instance (the trip to Scarlet Monastery as an Alliance player is epic on its own), but then once inside you earn decent XP and the drops are just amazing. I'd completely forgotten how rare even greens used to be in Vanilla and I sell almost every single one I find on the auction house. My own paladin still has level twenty gear in several slots simply because I haven't had any appropriate drops or received useful quest rewards. So going to a place where you're pretty much guaranteed to see multiple blues or at least high quality greens drop is just exciting. It's pretty much comparable to pugging a (non raid finder) raid in a newer game, just with fewer people. I guess as someone who enjoys raiding to this day, it's not surprising that those old-school dungeons appeal to me as well - though I fully admit that I wouldn't want to be running them every day either as it would get quite exhausting.

One thing I definitely do miss from those days is the greater sense of patience pervading every group endeavour. You could argue that people simply had no choice, since getting impatient and dropping group would just result in having to spend even more time finding a new one, but I think I'm not alone in actually enjoying that slower pace and feeling more comfortable with it. In one SM Library run, one of our dps apologised profusely that he had to leave to get dinner, but we encouraged him to not leave the party and continued clearing trash with just the four of us. It's not as if we'd gotten that far by the time he came back fifteen minutes later... Then there was the hunter who said "one sec, potty break for 4 year old", or the warlock who suddenly went AFK and then came back ten minutes later to say that her son had cut his foot open and she'd had to help him out, though he was all OK now... and everyone just nodded knowingly. In some way, this atmosphere is actually more casual and family friendly than the more modern, shorter but much more hurried runs, where there is a constant feeling of being on the clock and any interruption means wasting people's time. I really prefer a more relaxed approach where it's not all about efficiency but more about enjoying the experience of simply being in the game, where a bit of downtime is something that's perfectly acceptable every now and then.

Two Worgen Vs. The World

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

Gnomeregan ended up being a turning point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Up next: Uldaman and Dire Maul.

Instancing from level 25 to 35

Time for another installment of my series about levelling through the old dungeons in a post-Shattering world! I'm not sure how useful it is but I really enjoy writing it. Especially as I'm sure that Blizzard isn't done with making changes yet and I like documenting the process.

Scarlet Monastery

The Scarlet Monastery becomes available a bit earlier now than it used to, with the first wing opening up in the dungeon finder at level twenty-six. Otherwise it hasn't changed much, which is fine by me as it was one of the best old world instances to begin with. Why fix something that isn't broken? I was just a bit sad to see that Vorrel Sengutz doesn't offer a quest to his fellow Hordies anymore. I guess since the devs don't want you to have to pick up dungeon quests in the outside world anymore, they also don't want quests from inside a dungeon to send you outside.

All the wings have separate kill quests for all the bosses now, which results in a silly amount of blue quest rewards from those four instances alone. On Horde side they are given by a dark ranger who's standing at the entrance with a couple of Forsaken soldiers. Somehow this bugged me. When someone in a city asks me to please go to this scary place where nobody else dares to go and defeat the evil within, I feel brave and as if the quest giver thinks highly of me. When a bunch of soliders ready for battle tell me to go ahead and throw myself into the fray while they wait at the back - it will be alright, honest - I feel like I'm being used as cannon fodder or just plainly being made fun of. Hrmph.

There's also another quest giver in several wings, an undead rogue called Dominic who wears a gas mask and appears to keep his distance from the rest of the NPCs, even though he wants to see the Scarlet Crusade go down as well. He intrigued me. Is he a rogue apothecary or something?

Razorfen Kraul

Razorfen Kraul has been bumped up by about five levels, presumably because things were already kind of crowded in the low twenties. Layout and bosses have remained the same however, except that I could have sworn that Agathelos the Raging didn't always have a name. I think he was just called Raging Something-or-other?

Even the goblin escort quest is still there, but people still weren't particularly interested in doing it after getting their "instance complete" pop-up, not in my runs at least. No really, Blizzard, telling people that they are done is an automatic death sentence for any content that you might still have in store afterwards.

What I found interesting is that the quests for the instance paint a somewhat different and more coherent picture of the dungeon than before. You used to go in there to kill the quillboar because... they were evil. No elaboration was necessary, nor any explanation of why they were the way they were. The largest bit of story that you used to get was that the last boss dropped an item that started a quest revealing a connection between the quillboar and the undead. The new quests however tell you to fight the quillboar because they are trying to take over the Barrens with a giant armoured boar. No, really. Likewise, the justification for Going, Going, Guano! is now that this strange bat poop "seems to send the quillboar into a murderous frenzy" and must be studied. Okaaay... an A for effort I guess. Too bad that they couldn't shoehorn the snufflenose gophers into this whole thing as well somehow.

More importantly though, you also get to talk to the spirit of Agamaggan, who is now an NPC towards the end of the instance, and it turns out that the quillboar have actually been corrupted by Charlga Razorflank. There is even talk of helping them "return to their noble roots" by killing her. I'm not so sure about that, but I have to admit that it's a nicer story than just "kill these evil guys".

One caveat: Agamaggan's spirit stands only a few metres away from the final boss, and if you end up with a group of imbeciles like I did in one run, they might rush in and pull the boss before anyone has had a chance to hand in the quest and pick up the follow-up to kill Charlga. Be ready.

Maraudon

Like it was the case for Wailing Caverns, the big changes that were announced for Maraudon at Blizzcon have not yet been implemented. In other words, it still consists of three parts that don't really feel quite right as instances of their own, though Blizzard at least tried to apply some band-aids to the most glaring problems.

The Wicked Grotto for example, formerly Purple Crystals, used to have only one boss, which was just silly. Blizzard decided to change that by randomly moving Tinkerer Gizlock, aka that goblin towards the end of Maraudon that half the playerbase didn't know about and the other half never bothered to go to, smack into the middle of the purple dungeon area. This feels extremely random, but then a goblin in the middle of Maraudon has always been a bit odd. I think for the time being it's a good move, as it adds some value to the Wicked Grotto and actually exposes more people to the guy. If the players don't come to the boss, the boss has to come to them!

Celebras the Cursed is now officially part of Earth Song Falls, formerly known as Pristine Waters, at least according to the dungeon map, but his placement is still problematic. Players entering this part of the instance will now spawn on top of the waterfall instead of at the bottom, meaning that they only have to turn around to get to Celebras... but unfortunately old habits die hard. In the group I was in people just ran straight ahead and jumped down the waterfall, and when the tank made an attempt to loop back towards Celebras, he was told off for going the wrong way because that boss was nothing special anyway. If you are in a position to take the lead and want to kill him - and why wouldn't you, when he's right behind you - you'll probably have to shout at the rest of your party quickly to make sure that they don't hurl themselves off the cliff prematurely.

The quests in Maraudon are now given directly by the spirit of Zaetar, which is slightly strange to say the least. It's particularly bad if you start in Foulspore Cavern, aka Orange Crystals, where he doesn't even identify himself in the quest text initially. So you just get this quest to kill some guys... out of nowhere. I would think that even in Azeroth killing people because invisible voices told you to do so would be considered slightly crazy.

That said, once you figure out who's talking I thought that the story flowed better this way and is easier to understand for someone who's new to the lore, as opposed to the old way where you'd make your way through this huge mysterious cavern and then get an infodump at the end about how this princess you just killed seduced a guy called Zaetar and blah dee blah.

Uldaman

Uldaman could take a leaf out of Maraudon's book there - in regards to infodumping I mean, as it still has that annoying quest at the end where your only objective is to click through ten pages of text about the titans, which I haven't actually paid any attention to in years. There's a little animation that alternates between a picture of a dwarf and a trogg now, possibly to intrigue you, but that's really not enough.

The quest givers on Horde side are a bunch of blood elves from a group that calls itself The Reliquary and looks like it's supposed to be a Horde equivalent of the Explorer's League. I thought that was interesting.

The rest of the instance remains unsplit and pretty much the same as before, except that it's a lot less confusing when you actually have a map at hand. I still managed to nearly get lost though...

I have to admit I got pretty excited about having to do Archaedas "the proper way" again, as I'll always remember him as the first dungeon boss for which our newbie group needed an explanation and proper strategy back in the day. It was nice to see him actually get a chance to execute his add-spawning moves again, even if they still didn't pose nearly as much of a threat as they did to us newbies back in the day. He also seems to have ditched the overpowered clone of himself at the end that used to serve as a sort of enrage timer.

As far as tuning goes, I'm generally unsure of what to think of these instances. Things have definitely got somewhat easier compared to the earliest levels, but that might be due to me having dual spec now. Still, there seems to be considerable variation between the difficulty of my runs and it's not always due to heirloom gear. For example I had an SM run where I literally felt completely superfluous, and the tank was just a warrior in levelling gear. At the same time there were also still runs where I needed mana breaks every now and then, even as resto. It just doesn't really add up.

Low-level play is seriously out of whack right now

Nils made a couple of posts on this subject already which got me curious, especially this one. After playing some of my own low-level alts in the past couple of days, I can only confirm that he's not exaggerating. The power inflation at low levels is absolutely insane at the moment.

Example one: I took my level thirty-one protection warrior out to explore and do some mining. In Desolace I aggroed three mobs that were red to me while trying to get to a node. I don't remember the exact level difference, but I believe they were five or six levels higher than me each, maybe even seven. I fought them for about thirty seconds, by which point I decided that this wasn't going to lead anywhere as I was losing health faster than I could reduce theirs, what with the high level-imposed miss chance. So I retreated, ate until my health bar was full again, and then killed the same three mobs comfortably one by one.

Now that just strikes me as wrong, and not just because I couldn't have done that "back in my day". The colour scale is supposed to be an indication of difficulty: grey mobs are trivial to beat, green ones are easy, yellow means medium effort is required, orange means they will be a reasonable challenge, red should be near impossible. At the moment it feels more like everything up to yellow is trivial, and even red mobs only require a couple of button pushes. It's just silly.

Being a warrior, I also found that my rage generation had gone through the roof. Even when I was fighting mobs that died in two or three hits, I was gaining rage faster than I could spend it and as long as I kept fighting my bar was pretty much perpetually stuck at one hundred. So much for rage "normalisation"...

Example two: I noticed that my rogue was getting close to level forty and decided to hop into a battleground before he'd level up into the next bracket, both for fun and to have a shot at the G.N.E.R.D. Rage achievement. I ended up in a WSG match in progress where fifteen of the twenty players were rogues... and they were all one-shotting each other. It was pretty ridiculous really, and I got my achievement very quickly - when people die in one hit, even if it's you sometimes, that leads to a lot of honourable kills. However, gameplay-wise that match was a complete and utter failure. Nobody could run the flag as they would get one-shot the moment someone managed to hit them. There were actually healers on both sides, but they were unable to make a difference in any way, as people went from full health to dead in one global cooldown. I had no urge to go back for another match.

Example three: On the same rogue, I decided to queue for a random instance instead and got into a Scarlet Monastery - Cathedral run. Our tank was a protection warrior on the lower end of the dungeon's level bracket, but he just barrelled through the place like a force of nature anyway. He couldn't always hold aggro, but that seemed to make little difference. The AoE damage from his Thunderclap spam meant that he was top of the damage meter too, as nobody else had any AoE.

Inside the cathedral itself we cleared out the front half of the building in a manic free-for-all as people just aggroed more and more mobs without any negative consequences. Then the warrior ran up the stairs and charged Mograine. "Oh no," I said in chat as the entire second half of the building aggroed on us at once. I hit vanish, fully expecting us to wipe, but the warrior used his Thunderclap spam to get them all on him, and even though he was tanking a dozen mobs three levels higher than him at once, he lived through it quite comfortably. I rejoined the fight when it became clear that he wasn't going to die and we finished the instance.

Once again it was kind of funny in a "this is amazing compared to what I'm used to" kind of way, but at the same time very sad, because from the looks of it this is what all low-level dungeon runs will be like for at least the next two months. Once Cataclysm gets released... who knows? The developers actually don't seem massively concerned, though I also found this quote from Kalgan, where he says that "nobody should be one-shotting at any battleground level" and that those issues will be addressed.

Only a little more than a month ago I said that running Gnomeregan is not like running heroic Nexus in ICC gear, but it seems that even that isn't true anymore now. I'm trying to be positive, but the whole situation does leave me with an uneasy feeling in my gut. After all there's little point in having all these cool abilities if we can just kill anything and anyone with just one hit from our biggest nuke. And saying that the low levels don't matter just doesn't make sense when improving the levelling experience was supposed to be one of Cataclysm's major selling points.

Instance Review: Scarlet Monastery

Today I'd like to look at a classic instance and why it is awesome. So far Blizzard hasn't announced any intentions of making a heroic version of this old five-man, but if they intend to do more after the Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep, the Scarlet Monastery strikes me as a prime contender due to how iconic and popular it has become over the years.

So, let's look at all the things that are great about it:

1. Accessability

For Horde players, getting to the Scarlet Monastery is extremely convenient, as it only requires a two-minute walk ride from the Undercity, even at level.

For the Alliance it's very much the opposite and to be honest I'm not sure why the instance is so popular with them despite of it, but I guess it offers enough incentive to go there to make it worth it. As it is, an Alliance player who wants to kick some Scarlet behind has to fly to Southshore and then cross three zones on their own, one of which is enemy territory. Nowadays you can at least ride, maybe even already at 100% speed increase, but back when I played Alliance you usually had to walk all the way, which considerably increased the risk of getting ganked by a passing Brill guard. And yet people still did it en masse even back then. Go figure.

2. Atmosphere

The Scarlet Monestary is very much not a dungeon in the classic sense, but it's definitely atmospheric. Even though the place isn't much to look at, it does look and feel like a monastery, with its sun-filled courtyards and quiet alcoves stuffed with bookshelves.

3. Story & Quests

The Scarlet Crusade doesn't have a story with a beginning and an end, but they are simply an entity that will be present as a common enemy throughout your whole levelling career. If you start as Forsaken, you'll encounter Scarlets as early as level three. They are all over the plaguelands and in Northrend you'll end up facing the Scarlet Onslaught, which is just a fancy name for "Scarlet dudes who went to Northrend". As such taking out some important characters belonging to this faction feels quite satisfying. Kelpsacovic would call them "well-crafted" I guess.

In terms of quests, there are quite a few connected to the Scarlet Monestary. Both factions have a quest to actually take out all the bosses except the ones from the graveyard, and most of the others are about finding books in the library. Makes perfect sense and adds a nice chunk of XP!

4. Length

The Scarlet Monestary was the first instance to be split into different wings, four in this case: the graveyard, the library, the armoury and the cathedral. This was quite a stroke of genius as it meant that you can basically choose the length of your instance run. If you've got a lot of time on your hands you can clear all four wings in one go, but it's just as acceptable to stop after only one wing. Since they are all separate it's not like someone suddenly bailing halfway through BRD, leaving the party with the awkward question if anyone even remembers the way back to the summoning stone to get a replacement.

What this means is that the length of this instance is simply... ideal. It can be short, relatively long and anything in-between just as you require. If that isn't a great design then I don't know what is.

5. Layout

You'd be hard-pressed to get lost in any wing of the Scarlet Monestary as it's quite linear - either you go further in or you run back out. Fortunately that doesn't mean that it's just a boring tunnel, it still feels like a real place: The library has little alcoves with bookshelves and extra mobs inside for example, and the cathedral has a massive cloister with fountains, through which you can choose your own path at your leasure without having to kill off all the trash in it.

6. Trash

Speaking of trash... the Scarlets are actually reasonably challenging at level, mainly because almost without exception they will run away when they get low on health, making it very easy to get adds when you really don't need them. A lot of them are also able to heal, which makes getting adds even more annoying as you'll have to deal with multiple opponents healing each other up all the time. Some of them also have other annoying abilities like stuns and kicks.

On the plus side, if you've ever been annoyed by paladins' seeming invincibility in PvP, you can have a field day in here by killing them in droves. It's obviously not the same, but still satisfying.

7. Bosses

The Scarlet Monestary has some very iconic and memorable bosses, the most important ones being Herod with his "blades of light" and Whitemane and Mograine. "Arise, my champion!" See? I'm really bad at remembering quotes but even I know these without having to look them up.

As far as difficulty goes, none of them are very hard, but you have to consider that this is a relatively low-level instance where people are still learning. Newbies to WoW at least get an early chance to familiarise themselves with some basic strategies like "moving away from spinny blades of death" (Herod) or the relevance of kill order (Whitemane and Mograine).

8. Loot

Loot from any levelling instance is obviously always going to be temporary, but some of the drops from the Scarlet Monestary are likely to last you for a long time. Whitemane's Chapeau is such an awesome caster hat that you might keep wearing it until Outland for example. Any drops from Arcanist Doan are going to make the clothies drool. Plate wearers that can't wear plate yet will be delighted by any piece of the Scarlet set. Ravager and Mograine's Might are lovely weapons for anyone who likes to smash face with a big two-hander (though the proc on Ravager gets a bit annoying after a while). And Loksey's Training Stick is one of the first instance drops you'll find that is specifically tailored towards hunters and feral druids. There is more of course, but these are some of the nicest and most common drops.

It's worth mentioning that an extra, max-level boss can be summoned on the graveyard during Hallow's End, the Headless Horseman. He's not hard to kill and drops lots of fun stuff, making the instance worth a visit for all ages levels.