Level 25 in Season of Discovery

So this actually happened before my LFR adventure in retail; I just had the urge to write about that one while it was still fresh on my mind. But yes, I hit level 25 on my priest in Season of Discovery, woo! What an achievement.

Actually, I'm being kind of sarcastic here, but I do think people overestimate just how quickly the "average" player progresses. Blizzard released a video with some SoD statistics a week ago, and in that they said that only about 10% of the population had hit the level cap after the first week, and less than 2% of characters had cleared the BFD raid. I shared this with my guildies who were already talking about how they were "done" or bored and called them filthy one-percenters.

My own journey to the level cap involved more dungeons, as I predicted in my last post about SoD. I ran Wailing Caverns twice, mostly to finish off all my quests in there, though I got lucky and also won this excellent ring off Mutanus the Devourer in my second run. As a side note, I found it pleasant how easy it was to get all those collection quests done for a change. When Wailing Caverns is just one step along your levelling journey and you want to get everything done in one run, getting enough herbs, ooze and hide drops for everyone is always a pain, but with the dungeon essentially being "endgame" you can get endless runs in which most people will already have done their quests, with way less competition for drops.

Anyway, what was truly memorable about those WC runs to me was that they were complete opposites in some ways. In my first run I had a warrior tank who was massively overgeared for the place and who was just barrelling from one pack to the next one-stop. I was trying to eat dinner at the same time as healing (don't judge me, I like multi-tasking like that) and I could hardly get a bite in because the guy just never stopped. We were done in less than an hour, and that was with one of the damage dealers being AFK for the entire run, which was another funny thing to be honest. This mage was the last to arrive at the instance and then immediately put me on /follow. I think I saw him cast a fire blast once or twice, presumably so he wouldn't be logged out for inactivity, but that was all he did until the last boss, where he came back just in time to roll need on - and win - the caster ring. I learned from this that the infamous "ledge jump" is in fact so easy that an AFK character on follow will simply walk over the gap without falling, so if you ever do fall down that hole again, know that you're worse than someone auto-running.

In my second run on the other hand, our tank was completely clueless, didn't talk, randomly went AFK a few times, and otherwise just ran off in seemingly random directions. We ended up doing the right side of the dungeon before the left side (something I hadn't seen done before), and when we returned to the druid at the entrance we realised he wouldn't talk to us because by simply following our tank's errant pathing, we'd completely missed one of the bosses. It took me to take charge and lead the group back to him to actually finish the dungeon (something I was actually quite proud of as I'm not at all good at navigating the maze that is Wailing Caverns either).

Next I was off to Shadowfang Keep, which had fewer quests but which I knew offered several juicy cloth drops. I got incredibly lucky in that regard as well, as I won everything I could possibly want in only three runs: shoulders on the first run, belt on the second and the robe on the third. I can't say that it was all well-earned either as I body-pulled and caused deaths in "that room" (you know the one) in two of those three runs.

Due to my good loot luck I was only level 24 at that point, and there was another wave of competing healers sweeping LFG, so I decided to just earn the rest of my last level via questing. While doing so, I found one more priest rune in Silverpine, which brought me up to a total of four. I didn't catch the actual level 25 ding, but I levelled up after handing in to Kadrak at the Ashenvale border as seen below.

A funny side effect of the season's timing is that everyone's running around with winter hats because there are very few useful head slots available at this level so you might as well wear the fluffy hat for fun.

What now? Well, I was keen to get into BFD, but with the imminent holidays there weren't enough guildies available, plus I had some family obligations as well, so that adventure will have to wait for another day.

I had a brief look at the Ashenvale PvP event, which seems to be occurring quite frequently and appears to be quite rewarding, but I don't know if I care enough to make it a focus. I did notice that it seems to involve shared tagging, as when I ran up to an Alliance boss and asked to join the raid group there, I was told they were full, but I was still able to contribute from outside the group and received both loot and kill credit for the boss.

At some point I'll probably want to look up the runes I'm missing and go hunt them down. There's at least one very powerful healer rune that I'll probably want to get before setting foot into the raid.

My professions are another thing to work on. While I've been levelling them as I've been going along, I'm only maxed out for my level in herbalism and cooking, so alchemy, first aid and fishing all have some ways to go to be truly useful.

And of course there is questing - Blizzard made it so that like when you quest at level 60, "unused" experience point rewards get converted into money instead, which means that completing any at-level quest at the cap of 25 rewards at least one gold, which is pretty huge. Again, I don't think I'll make a habit of grinding these, but even just doing a few adds up quite quickly. I can't see many people having issues affording their mount at level forty if they get to spend any time at all playing at the level 25 cap and accumulating quest reward money.

Strangers In The Night

I mentioned that I also have a mage alt now, and she was getting into the right level range for Wailing Caverns. I've also mentioned that I learned from experience that Wailing Caverns is full of annoying collect quests that can actually be a bit of a pain to do in a larger group, so that it's actually better to knock out as many as you can outside the instance itself.

On Friday night I returned to the outer caverns to farm more Deviate Hides and Wailing Essence, after successfully knocking off Serpentbloom and the 99-year-old port a few nights prior. I found that my mage could just about solo the elite mobs in the area but needed to eat and drink after every pull, and if anything went wrong even in the slightest - including but not limited to an additional mob joining in - I had to make a run for the exit.

As I was killing more of the reptiles near the entrance, a number of other players came past and there was the usual drive-by buffing and occasional assistance with mobs. (Based on the levels of some of the passers-by, we've already reached "I'll just boost you through with my main" territory, despite of the many at-level groups still running.)

I noted a level 22 undead priest wanding things to death nearby and inwardly shook my head a bit that he was even bothering - I know from experience that soloing elites as a priest is painfully slow, even once you're high enough level to make it possible. As it turns out, he was clearly having similar reservations about what he was doing, and after casting Renew on me after several of my kills in a row, he finally shuffled over and asked if I was farming quest drops too.

When I replied in the affirmative, he asked if I wanted to group up and I accepted almost immediately. While being grouped makes collection quests somewhat more annoying, the fact that I couldn't take on more than one mob at a time by myself was worse, and I figured that we'd both have a much better time as a team of two.

I wouldn't call a mage/priest duo particularly synergistic - we were both squishy and more than once we both ran out of mana and had to slowly wand things to death together. But it did make the whole process much safer for me as a mage, since I didn't have to worry about dying, and much faster for the priest, whose own dps was terrible.

He was almost apologetic about the fact that he was only there for this one quest, but I explained that it was more or less the same for me. I did want to do the dungeon itself too and had joined the LookingForGroup channel for this purpose, but while that was scrolling past at its usual insane speed, there were no calls for dps for Wailing Caverns, only the occasional damage dealer looking for a WC group themselves.

Round and round we went, often competing with other groups of various sizes, while my priestly companion moaned about how much he hated that quest, its stupid drop rate and Classic altogether, in what I assumed wasn't an entirely serious way. It certainly seemed appropriate for someone playing a Forsaken, whom I always picture as a bit morose and sarcastic.

He also made some more light-hearted in-character jokes though, such as asking me if I didn't need to pee soon after I sat down to drink for the umpteenth time in quick succession, followed by declaring that as an undead he didn't have such problems since he was lacking the necessary parts anyway. I told him that was too much info.

In case this makes it sound like we were super chatty, I do feel the need to point out that this was not in fact the case. We went for very long periods of time without saying anything, just killing mob after mob after mob, but it was an entirely comfortable silence.

One interesting thing were the Devouring Ectoplasms or sludges as they are more commonly called. They are needed for a quest too, for Wailing Essence, but you only need six of those and the drop rate seems to be close to 100 percent. Compared to the dinos, there are way too many sludges in the caves, and they tend to feel like nuisances that just get in your way (a lot, since they all seem to patrol as well).

To make things worse, they have an ability to clone themselves when their health gets low, which results in a Cloned Ectoplasm with the same health and stats (as far as I can tell) as the original, meaning that you have to fight another elite mob right away, and one that drops no loot at that.

The cast of the cloning ability is easy enough to interrupt, but in Classic many classes don't have interrupts, which included the priest and my mage (at this level). It was possible to nuke the sludge down just so to make sure it didn't have time to finish its cast anyway, but this was very hard and most of the time we were what felt like just a millisecond to slow. After failing again and again, and having to deal with Cloned Ectoplasms over and over, the next time we finally managed to avoid the extra spawn was like a victory in itself.

After we had been at this for what felt like more than an hour, requests for damage dealers for Wailing Caverns actually did start popping up in the LFG channel. While I had warned my priest partner early on that I might leave if that happened, I ignored them and kept quiet. We'd been going for so long, by that point I wanted to actually get the quest finished for both of us more than I wanted to join a dungeon group.

In the end we finished very close together, which was interesting in that I had started the evening with way more hides than he did, but RNG had ended up evening things out. We thanked each other for the company, and despite his earlier grousing he said that he'd enjoyed himself before we parted ways.

I couldn't help but think once again that this sort of easygoing interaction with strangers is, to me, a big part of what Classic's appeal is all about. No great deeds were accomplished other than the completion of an arduous collection quest for two characters, and I'm not sure I'll ever see that particular priest again. But that doesn't really matter, because it was perfect as it was.

(Oh, and I did get into a Wailing Caverns dungeon group soon afterwards, as another call for dps went out while I was handing in my quests. Serendipity.)

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.

More Lowbie Dungeons on Horde Side

It felt oddly satisfying to do Wailing Caverns on my hunter at level - I mentioned that I never managed to do this back in actual Vanilla times (probably because back then I was levelling my hunter shortly before BC launch, so most people were focused on the upcoming expansion already), so this sort of "better late than never" experience was oddly cathartic.

As you'd expect of these old-school dungeons, each run was quite an experience.

During my first run, things seemed to be going almost too smoothly for a while, until we had a near wipe deep inside the instance - me and the mage were the only ones to survive, due to him re-sheeping one mob while I turned my cat's taunt on and spammed mend pet on it until the situation had stabilised. The warrior tank and the warlock decided that they were going to wait for the healer to run back and res them, but in classic Wailing Caverns fashion, our priest got lost on the way back. He did eventually find his way back to the rest of the group (I think he dug up a map from the internet or something), but not until a good fifteen minutes or so had passed.

Killing all the bosses was also a shocking drain on my ammunition - and I'm not some noob who goes into an instance with a half-empty ammo pouch. It got a little nerve-wracking towards the end (I didn't want to have to start meleeing things), and by the time we killed Mutanus, I had exactly five bullets left. Dodged that particular bullet (excuse the pun)!

That could have been it if I had actually managed to get all my quests done in that single run, however for two of them I was still short on drops, which prompted me to look for another group several days later. Pro tip: While watching the chat for LFG requests, a great way to pass the time in a productive manner at this level is to fish at one of the oases in the Barrens. Deviate Fish sell quite nicely.

Just as I was starting to get a bit impatient and began to think that it probably wasn't going to happen that day, I saw a lonely tank looking for group for Wailing Caverns, quickly snatched him up, and about five minutes later we were on our way.

I was kind of amused when this tank asked if we all knew how Vanilla dungeons worked - he was apparently quite old-school and the healer soon commended him on his excellent pulling. The tank explained that in Vanilla, the art of pulling was what tanking was all about, prompting me to add that the art of dealing damage was all about not pulling, which earned a few chuckles.

About halfway through, our warlock disconnected and didn't come back, which prompted the group to replace him with a mage. Said mage actually showed that the tank's question at the start had not been unreasonable, because he had trouble finding the instance entrance and expected all the quests to come from the NPC at the door. We finished without any further issues, I got a nice new bow and managed to complete both of my remaining quests. We also must have killed everything considerably more quickly than last time, because even though we did the entire instance once again, I came nowhere near close to running out of bullets this time.

Once again, this could have been it, except that someone suggested that we should continue to Shadowfang Keep as a group since we were doing so well. Everyone but the shaman healer agreed, and he was soon replaced by a priest.

I'd forgotten just how packed with trash mobs and claustrophobic SFK was in Vanilla. More than once I actually found myself unable to shoot things and forced into melee range since I couldn't get to the minimum distance required to use my ranged attacks (damn those spiral staircases).

Still, initially things seemed to be going well, until our healer DCed somewhat suddenly. He had been saying something about his baby waking up, so we figured that this was the reason for the sudden disappearance. We eventually replaced him with a level 18 priest, which is a tad low for the instance but seemed reasonable considering that he didn't have to hit things. However, we soon ran into trouble in the room with the many stairs and ramps after Odo the Blindwatcher, where our healer's immense aggro radius caused way too many mobs to descend on us all at once. We wiped and tried again more carefully, but still got too many of them, simply doing too much damage to us. I eventually lost count of the number of wipes we had in that room - five or six perhaps - but eventually we had whittled the problematic group down to a manageable size and were able to proceed.

Sadly we didn't have much luck once we actually made it to Arugal, who once again wiped us in short order. (I suppose it didn't help that he was level 26 and I was the highest level in the group at 24.) I think we had two attempts on him, and then found after running back that everything up to the courtyard had respawned, which prompted several people to throw in the towel. Bit of a shame, but it was still a productive run overall - I got lots of leather for my leatherworking and as mentioned, my little tauren dinged 24.

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).

More dungeon reports: Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep

Last night I specifically queued for Wailing Caverns and Shadowfang Keep, to make sure that I'd get a chance to run them before they fell out of my level range. I feel like I have to throttle my gameplay very carefully right now to not miss out on content I want to do, which is really rather bizarre.

Wailing Caverns was a bit of a disappointment because it didn't appear to have changed at all. Now, WC is one of the old instances that I'm slightly less familiar with, so I can't completely exclude the possibility that they removed a side passage or two, but it looked exactly the same to me. The changes that the developers were talking about at Blizzcon, where they mentioned making the instance less confusing and putting all the bosses into separate rooms definitely haven't been made. I can only guess that they ran out of time before the Shattering and that this is something that they'll patch in later - or at least I hope they do, because otherwise WC is going to feel horribly outdated compared to other instances.

The only positive change that I noticed, other than the quest givers sitting inside the instance now, was that the Disciple of Naralex actually runs once you start the escort event now - instead of walking at a snail's pace, as quest NPCs that claim to be in a hurry are so often wont to do. Thanks for that.

Still, for what it's worth I enjoyed that run, because I had a group that was both nice and competent. The trip to Shadowfang Keep that followed afterwards was exactly the opposite.

SFK itself has been changed drastically, just like the Deadmines, but I couldn't really warm to those changes yet. In the Deadmines, even before I had played through Westfall to learn about the story behind it, it was at least somewhat apparent that we were breaking up a rather shifty operation in those caverns. I mean, mining monkeys? That can't be legal.

SFK on the other hand just confused the hell out of me. Gone are Arugal and his werewolves, and instead there are... evil Forsaken? The quest giver at the entrance greeted me like an old friend and went on about avenging some insult against Sylvanas, but I had no clue what the hell he was talking about. The fact that three of the bosses looked like they were identical triplets or something didn't help either.

This basically strikes me as story gone wrong: instead of the background enhancing your experience by giving you additional motivation to clear out the evil guys' hideout, the story is your only motivation to take action... otherwise it's just random. I mean, this stuff was clearly designed to be a sort of follow-up to whatever happens in Silverpine - about which I've only heard good things - but without that background it's just weird. I guess I'll have to roll an undead hunter soon and maybe I'll change my mind once I understand what it's all about.

Like in the Deadmines, the new bosses are considerably more complex than what you'd usually meet in this level range, and pretty much all of them have some kind of big flashy move that you're supposed to avoid. Oh, and the first boss seems to have no other purpose than to scare the crap out of your healer. You're dead! No, you're not! You're dead! No, you're not! Arrrgh.

Most of my unhappiness with my SFK pug came from the fact that my entire party absolutely loved standing in the bad stuff, even though several of them wore heirlooms and really should have known better. I didn't have the mana to save them all the time and there were multiple deaths. On the last boss we even wiped twice, though our warlock managed to finish him off on our second attempt as the last man standing.

The tank also aggravated me because he kept pulling whole rooms at once, which led to loads of unnecessary damage on him as people were killing things off one by one, so I was constantly oom and left with no time to regain mana as he kept charging off into yet more mobs over and over. This sealed my decision to not queue as a healer anymore until I can get dual spec at thirty. At least then I won't have to constantly feel guilty and question the validity of my off-spec healing whenever someone dies to playing stupidly; I'll know that it's their fault.

Discussing the raid and dungeon changes announced at Blizzcon

Blizzcon may not have brought us any amazing revelations this year, but the developers did provide us with some solid pieces of insight into what they are planning to do with the old world dungeons come Cataclysm.

Confirmation of more conveniently located graveyards and the addition of dungeon maps was not a surprise but still welcome. I remember desperately pressing the M key so many times during my very first Deadmines run, not understanding why there was no map for this zone, and have pretty much continued to make that same mistake over and over again to this day, even though I should really know better by now.

That said, I'm not sure I'm entirely sold on those so-called "enhanced" dungeon maps they've been advertising. In fact, my very first thought was definitely an "OMG, how much more do they want to dumb things down" knee-jerk reaction. I mean, 3D images of the bosses on the maps? Do they think we'll be unable to recognise them otherwise? Are they trying to appeal to kids that can't read the NPC names yet? Seriously...

I still find this feature rather strange, but I have to admit that the others definitely have some appeal. For example the addition of a list of boss abilities in-game: How many times have you had to explain a boss fight (or heard someone else do it) and it went something like "and then he does this thing, I forget what it's called, let me look it up..."? Might as well save people the tabbing out.

The same thing is true for the detailed loot lists. While I'm apparently in the minority as someone who never ran with any loot information addons because on the whole I rather liked the surprise, I'd lie if I said that I've never looked up a boss's loot on Wowhead for some reason or another.

Still, from an immersion point of view I find having access to all this information slightly strange once again. WoW is a fantasy setting with steampunk elements, not something set in the age of information. Not knowing what exactly lies ahead in the dungeon you're about to enter but doing it anyway is one of the things that makes adventurers stand out as truly brave. If we know our target's exact coordinates and its abilities, aren't we more like hired assassins? Or secret agents? /hums the Mission Impossible theme... actually, that's kind of cool. Maybe we can just look at it as a sort of evolution - as the gnomes and goblins develop more technology we tend to have more information available.

Now, the other major topic was that of how exactly they intend to streamline the old world dungeons to bring them more in line with Outland and Northrend ones. First off, I was really glad to see this quote: "We don't want dungeons to be left behind in the redo, we want them to be up-to-par with everything else", as this was something that I had been kind of worried about.

They said that they want to make currently confusing dungeons less so, with Wailing Caverns being cited as a prime example. I can honestly say that I'm definitely in favour of this, as there's no love lost between me and WC's winding tunnels, even though I've become reasonably good at navigating them by now. I just hope that they don't swing too far the other way and turn something that's supposed to be a natural cavern into a straight and boring tunnel. I do believe that there's a solid middle ground to be found here, where you can make a place appear to be reasonably complex while still avoiding structures that might actually cause players to get lost. I think they did a pretty good job at this in WOTLK already - while most dungeons were still very linear, they didn't suffer from "endless hallway" syndrome nearly as badly as most of Outland.

Then there is the issue of shortening dungeons, in particular by splitting them into wings. Now, in general I approve of this, but I have to say that I found the fact that Utgarde Keep/Pinnacle was quoted as a good example of this rather amusing, because I thought if anything Utgarde is an example of how not to do it. I mean, there you are, questing in Howling Fjord and getting into this whole Vyrkul storyline, you try to kill King Ymiron but Arthas whisks him away to Utgarde Pinnacle, you clear out the lower levels of the keep... and then you go and have to gain ten more levels in other zones, running other dungeons, before you can come back and get on with the story. Sorry, but I don't think that works very well. Different wings of what's supposed to be considered the same dungeon should be close together in level so people can run them right after each other and get the whole story in one go if they choose to do so. That said, places like Scarlet Monastery and Dire Maul already pulled this off very well in the past, so I have faith in Blizzard being able to get this right.

Now, a few more instances that are going to get this treatment were discussed in a bit more detail. Uldaman for example will be split into two parts, with Ironaya ending the first half and what's currently called the back door being the entrance to the second half. Now, this sounds pretty sensible to me. I do have to say though, I really hope that they buff dungeon mobs significantly, otherwise this whole split thing might turn out to be a bit pointless. I mean, I too remember Uldaman as this endless winding maze from my WoW youth, but when I recently ran it at level again, for the first time in ages, we breezed through the whole thing while killing all the bosses in about twenty minutes. If it were to stay like that, splitting a twenty-minute dungeon into two ten-minute ones would just be silly.

Then we have Maraudon, another candidate for a logical split. To be honest I always thought that the whole "two entrances" structure that forced you to backtrack considerably if you wanted to do a full clear was kind of annoying. Two halves sound about right. Currently the dungeon finder splits it into three parts, and from what I hear this separation is rather awkward. Personally I only entered the instance through the dungeon finder for the first time tonight, and just found that the purple section felt extremely short. The rest of the party seemed to agree as we simply continued past Lord Vyletongue (the purple section's only boss) and continued all the way to the princess, just not bothering to go back for the orange section. Again this actually didn't take us all that long, even though we were doing very poor dps (one guy was on /follow the entire time and me and the other remaining damage dealer were about five levels lower than the mobs we were fighting). Again I hope that they will buff the mobs so the instance will still feel like a worthwhile undertaking even when cut in half.

Hearing that they want to cut out Sunken Temple's bottom floor made me a little sad to be honest, but I'll admit that the "elemental section" as we called it was always my least favourite anyway. Still, I'm one of those strange people who always loved Sunken Temple, even back when I kept getting lost in it. I just loved the whole Indiana Jones adventure feel of the place.

The comments on BRD raised more questions than they answered in my opinion. Apparently the developers think that this one is too hard to split into sensible sections, so they added teleporters instead. I don't mind those as an addition (after all, why shouldn't the Dark Iron dwarves go with the times too), but doesn't that leave the instance at the same length at which it is now? Or will nothing prevent groups from zoning in and teleporting straight to the Emperor? If not, what do these teleporters really solve, other than shortening possible corpse runs?

We shall see.