Aggressive and defensive healing

So I've been regularly running heroics on all four of my healers for a couple of weeks now, and it strikes me as interesting how different they feel to play at times. It's not so much about the healing spells they use, or even reactive vs. proactive healing (direct heals vs. HoTs and shields), but rather the difference between what I'd call aggressive and defensive healing.

Aggressive healing in this case means that the healer is generally as aware of the mobs as of his own party members, can easily join in to add some dps and may even actively decide to use offensive abilities to make healing easier.

Somewhat to my own surprise, I found the shaman to be the most aggressive healing class. Take bloodlust: While healers obviously also benefit from its haste boost, I find that, in all honesty, I don't give a crap whether it's up or not while I'm healing a five-man, not from a purely selfish, how-fast-are-my-heals point of view anyway. It's a dps ability really. And yet, even for a resto shaman it goes without saying that my group will expect me to use it at an appropiate moment. I actively had to train myself to not forget to use it at least on the last boss of each instance, and I still often struggle to gauge correctly at which point earlier in the run it's "safe" to use it so it will be available again by the time we get to the end. Also, at the end of the day it is useful to me as a healer even if don't care about buffing myself, because if the boss dies more quickly due to the boosted dps, I have less work to do.

Then there are the totems. I continue to be surprised by how many groups I end up with that don't have a single caster in them, rendering my well-meant flametongue totem completely useless. In such cases I often end up going with searing or magma totem, even if they only do piddly dps, simply because I can drop four totems with one click, and if one of them has no other use than to dps - even though I'm the healer - I guess then I'm doing some dps! Also, my fire elemental totem comes out at least once per dungeon regardless of other casters in the group, by the same logic as bloodlust: it's added dps at no cost to my healing, and the boss dies faster.

Then there are the interrupts. They are generally something that's supposed to be covered by the dps, but I've found that even in my better pugs, hardly anyone seems to interrupt anything, like, ever (unless they want to try for Less-Rabi). One boss where I've felt this particularly painfully and frequenty as of late is the Devourer of Souls in heroic Forge of Souls. He spams an ability called phantom blast which does huge damage even to a well-geared tank. It can be interrupted, and there's even an achievement for interrupting all of his casts, but does anyone ever actually do it? Nope.

And here I am with my shaman healer, and a ranged interrupt on a short cooldown. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's a lot more efficient to simply interrupt as many phantom blasts as possible on my own instead of constantly having to spam the tank back up to full health. It requires more general awareness and as I say, what I consider a more aggressive way of playing a healer, but it works.

The second most aggressive healer in my opinion is the paladin, largely because of their judgements. A good holy paladin will want to keep up the haste buff from judgements of the pure one hundred percent of the time, and for that he has to judge and thus attack a mob at least once per minute. I can't think of another healer who has to attack something as part of their healing rotation. Also, even while the haste buff is up, judging a mob with light can help a lot with healing in heavy AoE damage situations for example.

Also: hammer of justice. Stunning mobs is once again something that's generally considered the job of dps and tanks, but I find it a powerful defensive tool... which kind of goes against me saying that paladins are aggressive, but the point is that when another healer has to defend themselves, they can mostly just heal themselves and cry for help. A paladin can actually knock the mob out on their own (and then hope that someone will come to help within the next six seconds). It also works well to protect others, such as when you see a skirmisher go for a squishy clothie in heroic Azjol-Nerub. Again, this is something that requires you to look at what's going on with the mobs around you.

Priests are pretty defensive healers already. They can happily spend a whole instance just looking at their party frames and ignoring the mobs, because it's not like they can do a lot about incoming attacks. Fearing mobs away is an option but a risky one, not to mention that a lot of mobs in Northrend instances are undead and thus immune to fear anyway. Shackle works as crowd control against undead, but like similar effects it's hard to pull off effectively even if you want to, what with all the AoE flying around these days. About the most offensive thing a holy priest can do is spam holy nova in AoE situations, which does some damage as well as healing the party. It's also pretty easy to add a bit of dps as a holy priest with dots and smites, but by then you've already crossed the line from aggressively protecting your party to just dpsing.

Druids are the most defensive healers in my opinion (in PvE anyway), simply because of tree form, which prevents them from using any sort of aggressive move at all. Sure, you can choose to stay out of tree, so you can also cast hurricane, wrath and moonfire while nobody is taking damage, but you actually have to take a penalty to your healing to do so, so it's definitely not something that it's encouraged by the class design.

I still like all four healing classes, but I have to say that in five-mans, the added utility of the shaman's and paladin's more aggressive moves to prevent damage to the party makes things a lot more interesting. I often hear complaints that healing is boring (which I don't agree with, but that's beside the point) and that Blizzard should make it more interactive, for example by people getting healed from healers doing damage. This concept already exists and it's called a shadow priest's vampiric embrace, it's repeatedly been nerfed to the ground for a reason and is now nothing more than a small gimmick for what's still very much a dps role, so trying to turn every healer into a shadow priest doesn't stike me as a good idea. I do wonder however, if giving healers more aggressive, non-damage abilities that force them to interact with their environment more could be a way to go.

I rather like Icecrown Citadel and its difficulty

I realised the other day that considering how much time I spend raiding in WoW, I actually blog very little about it. The thing with raiding is, there are basically two kinds of articles you can write about it: how-to guides, which I personally don't care about, or stories about truly amazing boss kills or wipes, which I like well enough but in all honesty they don't happen that often. If you've been raiding with the same guild for years, and things mostly go well week after week, that's simply not very exciting to write about. You go in, wipe some, eventually the boss dies and some people get loot. The end.

However, I do think it's worth mentioning how things are going for us in Icecrown Citadel - they are going well - and that I like it. The boss fights are reasonably fun, they are varied enough that the difficulty isn't always decided by the healers' ability to spam their biggest heals, and well... the difficulty in general just feels right.

I don't know how other people feel about facing a new raid boss, and I reckon that opinions on this might vary a lot depending on how much and how "hardcore" you play, but me personally - I want a new raid boss to wipe the raid on the first attempt, and hard. I remember facing off against Jaraxxus in Trial of the Crusader for the first time, one-shotting him and being deeply disappointed. When a monster is so big and bad that it requires ten or even twenty-five people to kill, then it should also present me with a challenge that is worthwhile of assembling such a big group in the first place. I've said this before in regards to five-mans: I don't mind spending some time preparing things for a game-related task, but then said task should also take some time, otherwise I just spent more time assembling a group than actually playing with said group, and that stinks.

On the other end of the spectrum, things being too hard isn't fun either. I hated Trial of the Grand Crusader, especially on twenty-five-man because we spent so much time wiping in there without making any progress, it felt silly. People will probably disagree about how much is too much, but I'm sure everyone has their personal pain threshold which, if surpassed, will make them decide that "this just isn't fun anymore". Heroic Northrend Beasts and the Faction Champions certainly helped me find mine.

Now Icecrown Citadel on the other hand has felt pretty damn perfect in terms of difficulty so far, to me anyway. I think we wiped three times on Marrowgar the first time we tried him, which was more satisfying than one-shotting him, but still easy enough that he works well as an entrance boss. You don't expect the guy guarding the door to be that hard.

Deathbringer Saurfang took us a night or two until we found the right strategy to deal with the add spawns, and he challenged the healers nicely with tough but smart healing requirements (as opposed to mad spam fests). Basically a worthy boss for the end of a wing, but still not too terribly tough, considering that said wing is the first one of the instance.

The Plagueworks were a massive step up in diffculty in my eyes, and while we've downed both Festergut and Rotface, it wasn't without struggling considerably and we're still far from being able to replicate the experience reliably. Putricide seems hard enough that I don't think we'll be able to down him on twenty-five-man anytime soon, but this is where the beauty of the multi-wing design comes in.

Last night for example our raid leader decided that instead of going back to the Plagueworks and trying to down Rotface again (Festergut was already dead), we'd have a look at the Crimson Hall. Trying to down the Blood Prince Council was absolutely manic and I quickly lost track of how many times we wiped. As a raid healer I didn't have much of a clue what was going on a lot of the time to be honest, but I still tried my best and judging by how our attempts were getting better and better (in-between some total failures) we seemed to be making progress.

At the end of the night, already having gone past our usual raid end time, with everyone tired and mostly just wanting to get things done and over with, we finally downed the Princes on the nineteenth try (according to the log), and my priest is now an Orb Whisperer. It felt wonderfully satisfying.

So yeah, I'm rather liking Icecrown Citadel so far, and I'm looking forward to working some more on the later bosses as well as to actually having options. Good work, Blizz.

And here I thought I had seen the worst of selfish tanks

As it turns out, you haven't until you try to just get a normal Halls of Reflection run done to complete the Wrath of the Lich King quest. I was healing on my shaman, always without having any issues, nobody came even close to dying... but damn, those tanks were selfish twits.

Tank #1: confused death knight

On the third wave of mobs or so he asks if the event has been nerfed. Well, it has, but it's also considerably easier since it's only normal mode. We tell him this and he goes, "Oh, this is normal? I wanted heroic!" He graciously stays until Falric drops his epics, then he leaves the group. Since the event continues regardless, we end up wiping without a tank and the group falls apart.

I had a little bit of sympathy for this tank because I've selected the wrong difficulty on the dungeon finder before, but frankly, there's no reason he couldn't have stayed another five minutes to at least get us to a point where we wouldn't automatically wipe as soon as he left.

Tank #2: paladin loot whore

On my next run I got a paladin tank. Again everything went smoothly, until Marwyn dropped the Splintered Door of the Citadel and the tank needed on it. I barely had time to congratulate him on the upgrade when he already left the group, clearly thinking along the lines of: "I got my loot, screw you guys!" Me and two other dpsers spent about twenty minutes waiting for a new tank until I gave up and went off to do something else.

Tank #3: paladin loot whore #2, now with extra malice

On my third attempt to complete the instance, I once again ended up with a paladin tank. I looked at his shield and it was a blue. Would this one end up being as much of a jerk as the previous pally? The Splintered Door dropped again and once again I typed out a "grats" in chat. He thanked me and moved on towards the next trash mob. My heart swelled with hope as he pulled... and then he left the party, while an angry skeleton beat up the dpsers. Fuck you too, buddy.

Tank #4: paladin loot whore of a different kind

Me and a dps death knight hung around this time and waited for a new tank. This time we actually got one after ten minutes or so, so we went on and finished the dungeon. Bone Golem Scapula dropped from the captain's chest and my eyes lit up as it's an awesome weapon upgrade for my resto shammy. I hit need... but so did the tank. He won the roll and instantly quit the group afterwards.

I have no words anymore.

Some days you should have just stayed in Dalaran

Two epic fail pugs in four days? I must be on a roll. Unlike the Gundrak fail on Monday I saw today's pug through until the bitter end, but not without a lot of exclamations of "oh my god" and "you won't believe what just happened" directed at my boyfriend (who was luckily busy doing something else).

I had queued for my daily random heroic with my paladin, and immediately got a bad feeling when I saw the Old Kingdom loading screen. Now, personally I don't mind Old Kingdom, even if it's a bit on the long side, but it's one of those instances that seems to bring out the prima donna in many tanks. Or, to put it more bluntly, whenever I get ported into Old Kingdom I can immediately start a countdown and the tank will have dropped from the group before it reaches zero, guaranteed. Occasionally I'll be surprised to find that we still have a tank after ten seconds, but then I realise that it's only because said tank is me.

Now, since I didn't fancy tanking that evening I had queued up as a healer, so the tank wasn't me, and as expected he left the party just as I had finished buffing up.

Tank chickening out as soon as the randomiser gives him an instance he doesn't like? Fail.

We queued up for a new tank, but after a few minutes I got fed up, switched to my tank spec and gear and re-queued us to find a new healer instead. As was to be expected that worked wonders instantly, and with me wearing my heavy plate and what looked like a friendly tree covering my back, we went on our way.

We made it to the first boss without problems, but as we fought said boss the healer started to complain. "Omg," he typed out repeatedly, "stop slacking!" After the fight he posted the damage metres, which showed me on top and all the dpsers doing between 1200 and 1600 dps - not great, but sufficient. He then declared that we'd have to find a new healer because he wouldn't run with people who couldn't outdamage the tank, then quit.

Healer throwing a fit and quitting because the dps isn't leet enough for him? Fail.

We got a shaman healer replacement and continued to Prince Taldaram. On one of the platforms we had our first death as the rogue managed to focus on the mob on which I had the least threat, pulled aggro and died. At least he didn't complain about it though, so we resed him and moved on.

As we approached Taldaram, I saw that the hunter was still standing on the platform where we had killed the last group of trash mobs. She had mentioned having lag before, so I decided to wait a bit to give her a chance to catch up. At which point the shaman healer decided to take things into his own hands and pulled.

Healer deciding that the tank is too slow and pulling in her stead? Fail.

Now, I remembered reading before that Taldaram had the ability to teleport anywhere in the instance, so I was not surprised when his second blood draining session took him to the hunter in the far back. "This is why I wanted to wait," I explained not without a certain amount of exasperation, as we helplessly watched the hunter die too far away from us to save her.

I waited for Taldaram to clumsily sprint back (seeing how his magical teleportation powers only seem to work one way), and suddenly both of the remaining dpsers were dead. I checked the combat log afterwards and they had to died to nothing but flame sphere damage and not getting any heals. I'm not sure how much the healer was to blame though, since his weird teleport might have bugged things out a bit.

Anyway, at this point the healer and I were the only ones left. I popped my pally wings to do a bit more damage, at which point the boss decided that he'd like to suck my blood next, and I found myself pinned to the floor, unable to bubble out of it. And the healer... just stood there and watched. He didn't even try to help me.

Healer being overzealous to pull but unable to actually do anything useful? Fail.

Fortunately Taldaram's health drain turned out to be one of the few abilities of this type that are not based on health percentage, and as it happened my tanking health pool was large enough to survive the full duration anyway. I then finished him off, but not without feeling slightly peeved.

I gave the rogue a res and he instantly quit the group. The hunter had DCed completely in the meantime, so we removed her as well while we were at it and got two new dpsers.

We ran down the tunnel to the next section of the instance, and immediately the healer urged me to pull again. I wanted to wait for our new dpsers, but afraid of more healer-pulling disasters I eventually gave in. I also asked people if they wanted to do a full clear or just the last boss, saying that I preferred the full clear but wouldn't mind skipping things either if that was what everyone else wanted. Most simply didn't give a response at all, but at least one spoke up in favour of doing all the bosses, so we went down to Amanitar and killed him.

When we came back up again the healer asked if we could do the last boss first because he'd have a raid soon. "And then you'll leave?" the dps death knight asked. "No," the shaman claimed innocently. Oh, well, if you're going to stay with us for the whole run anyway, then it shouldn't matter which boss we do first, right?

Lying in a thinly veiled attempt to get your frost emblems as quickly as possible so you can then dump the group? Fail.

We continued up to Jedoga and I ran in to AoE down the little initiates in front of her. However, as soon as they were dead, something strange happened. I had read about this bug in a comment somewhere, but since I hadn't heard about it anywhere else I figured that it probably wasn't that big a deal... until I got to witness it myself today. What happened? Instead of summoning her little Twilight Volunteers as usual, Jedoga summoned a whole group of Twilight Worshippers on one side of the platform - and no, it wasn't just that someone aggroed an extra group, we had cleared everything and I saw the mobs' nameplates. We drowned in a sea of flamestrikes and confused "wtf"s.

Wiping to really cruel and unexpected bugs? Fail.

The healer and one of the dps instantly dropped from the group, and once again we had to get replacements. However, this time we decided not to go near Jedoga again, just in case. At least our new healer found our story very amusing. We then proceeded to kill Herald Volajz without any further problems and I was glad to finally be done, but that run certainly didn't do anything to increase anyone's love of Old Kingdom I'm afraid.

Oh, and since we wiped, nobody got to complete All Things in Good Time, which I always have in my quest log just in case this instance pops up.

Missing out on a nice chunk of extra gold due to a bug that wasn't anyone's fault? Fail.

Some days you really wish you hadn't bothered at all.

How WoW changed my life

Tam made a very beautiful post today about how WoW has affected his life... go read it! It also reminded me of the fact that I've been meaning to write about the impact WoW has had on my life so far, and this is as good an encouragement as any. Plus, this is going to be my 100th post on this blog, so I might as well make it something special.

My life has of course been influenced by WoW in many subtle ways like the ones Tam lists, but in my case the game has also had some much more drastic effects. For example I was a reasonably successful student when I started to play WoW three years ago. A year later I dropped out of university.

Erm... that probably sounds a lot worse than it is.

Did WoW play a role in my dropping out? Probably. I used it as an escape as I came to utterly loathe my study for a lot of different reasons, which I'm not even going to bother to list here. Let's just say that it wasn't just a case of being annoyed with having to write pointless essays (though that did factor into it). I don't know how things would have gone differently if I hadn't started to play WoW - for all I know I might have just looked for other ways of distracting myself until the mental breakdown came. I certainly didn't just start to neglect my study because I thought WoW was a more worthwhile pastime.

Either way, regardless of how much you want to blame WoW for being involved in me quitting university, you'd then have to give it an equal amount of credit for helping me get my life back in order again afterwards. Because it was at a WoW guild meetup one and a half years ago where I met the man that is now my boyfriend... and with whom I fell so deeply in love that it filled me with an urge to pull myself together again and become a better person, get a job and generally get my life back on track (which I did).

Said man also happened to live in another country, England to be precise, and about a month ago I moved to live with him. I'm very happy right now, but even so I still often find myself thinking how funny it is that I'd be living a completely different life now, probably back in my home country, if only I hadn't bought a certain computer game over three years ago. And I can only shake my head at people who use the age-old argument of "it's just a game" to try and deprive WoW of any importance - as if something being a game means that it can't have a profound impact on someone's life.

Book review: Rise of the Horde

I'm not a huge consumer of Warcraft merchandise, but a few years ago I stumbled upon a copy of The Warcraft Archive in a bookstore and decided to buy it on a whim. It contained four short novels, ranging in quality from pretty good (The Last Guardian) over reasonably entertaining (Lord of the Clans) to occasionally cringe-worthy (Of Blood and Honor) and humorously bad (Day of the Dragon). Since most of what I heard about other WoW novels seemed to firmly place them in the latter two categories, I shied away from buying any more... until I spotted Rise of the Horde in another bookstore the other day and decided that since I had liked Lord of the Clans well enough and this was by the same author and also about orcs, the chances of me enjoying it were pretty good.

I'm happy to say that my assessment was spot on. Rise of the Horde is no literary masterpiece, but if you're sufficiently interested in the plot and characters it will keep you entertained, maybe even hooked. I was actually a bit disappointed that it ended when it did, not because it didn't make sense, but because I know that other interesting stuff happened after the last events in the book and I would have liked to just read on.

I'm not sure how interesting the book would be to anyone who already knows the story of the Rise of the Horde in detail, but I didn't, so it was. As someone who didn't play any of the previous Warcraft games I really appreciated the opportunity to read about some of the related events in novel form. Of course there's always WoWWiki if you have lore questions, but to me reading WoWWiki is like reading a history textbook - okay for quick fact checking, but I'll be unlikely to retain anything but some scattered bits and pieces for longer than five minutes. (Or maybe it's just me who's like that with history textbooks...) I do much better when I can look at events as a story, with context and human (or orcish as it may be) relations laid out in a logical manner. Finally I won't have to be confused anymore when someone mentions Ner'zhul or Gul'dan!

Also, it may be a bit silly but I really enjoy reading about the same fantasy world that I play in every day. Good old Velen, I know he's just as ugly in the Exodar as the book says he is! Ata'mal crystal? Oh yeah, I remember taking that off some demon dude in Netherstorm. And so on and so forth... though there's sometimes also the negative side effect of the images of the game world conflicting with what I'm reading. Like me thinking that there's no Draenei city other than Shattrah in Terokkar, I've explored it all so I know! Or frowning at the description of K'ure being buried under a lake when he's just floating around in the back of Oshu'gun in the game.

Still, overall I can recommend the book as good, light entertainment for anyone who wants to know more about that particular bit of the lore and enjoys reading about the same virtual world they play in every day.

Epic Gundrak fail

For all the dungeoneering I've been doing in the past months it's been quite a while since I had an epic fail pug. Sometimes I'd get a tank who was unnecessarily rude, or a dps who was quiet but utterly clueless, but nothing to write home blog about. Until today, that is!

The scene: heroic Gundrak, apparently my priest's daily random dungeon.

I zone in, float down the ramp, and before I've even finished buffing, the elemental shaman has pulled. I manage to save him, then the mage gets aggro, the death knight tank tries to taunt something but apparently not the right something... but in the end the mobs die and we're alive. Not the smoothest start for a daily random, but nobody died and I wasn't even particularly stressed out. We continue to clear the rest of the snakes including Slad'ran the same way, with the tank, the shaman and the mage playing some kind of aggro pong.

While we do so the shaman expresses a desire to "zerg Less-Rabi", proudly informing us that he can even interrupt once. Wow, you go, shaman! I remember getting that achievement on my own shaman's very first Gundrak run, while she was healing and doing most of the interrupting to boot. I don't actually say that though, because it's one thing to have self-righteous thoughts on occasion and another thing to say them out loud (or type them out, as it might be). I find myself wondering whether the mention of the word "zerg" implies that he'll expect me to go dps, and how he'll react if I have to tell him that I'm dual-specced for healing and... more healing. While the shaman and the mage agree that they want to try, the tank wants to know what they are talking about, and I decide that my spec is probably going to be the least of our worries.

As soon as Slad'ran's body hits the floor everyone gets ready to enter the next room, except for the tank, who has jumped into the water and is swimming across the middle section of the instance, with half a dozen Drakkari Frenzies chewing on his legs. He tells us to follow him. For a moment the rest of the party just stands there, probably going through the same internal argument as me:

"1. I'm pretty certain that whatever he's going for isn't possible. After over a year of running this instance over and over and over again, I'm quite sure that I'd have heard about such an easy way to skip all the trash to the Drakkari Colossus. This can't end well.

2. He seems pretty confident and after all, he's the tank. You go where the tank goes, damn it!"

After a few seconds of hesitation everyone jumped down. While I'm getting disoriented for a moment and trying to survive the onslaught of unfriendly fish, the rest of the party gets ahead of me and up to the next boss. The tank asks if everyone's ready. One of the dpsers says yes; I say no, what with still treading water under the bridge. They pull anyway. What's the point of asking if you're just going to ignore the response anyway?

I hurry to catch up and save the day, only to be greeted by the unpleasant fact that trying to pull the boss from the "wrong" side in an attempt to skip all the trash results in getting the boss and all the trash in his room at once. I don't know, maybe a better party might have been able to come through, but as it was, trying to play aggro pong with four colossi and who knows how many elementals at once doesn't really work well. So we wiped.

I don't recall the tank's exact words afterwards, but I think it was something along the lines of "that didn't work so well lol". The dpsers were less than pleased.

Finding myself at the graveyard, I started to run back towards the little "your dead body is here" symbol on the minimap, entered, floated down the ramp again... and right into a pack of mobs. Damn you, Gundrak and your two instance entrances, and specifically the fact that the "wrong" one is actually closer to the graveyard! Somewhat embarrassed and not wanting to die again, I managed to leg it up the ramp and out of the instance in time to save myself. Momentarily I ended up a bit confused to find myself back in Dalaran instead of in the midst of the snows of Zul'Drak, but then I remembered how the dungeon finder works in such cases, teleported back in using the little minimap icon and found myself at the right entrance this time.

Except, the rest of my party was not there. They had all run for the "wrong" entrance and two of them were already dead again. I was briefly overcome by guilt and worry that my hasty escape had trained the mobs that saw me onto them instead, but as it turned out that was not the case. Instead the death knight had hit path of frost as soon as he had jumped down, and the dps who decided to jump straight after him at half health went splat. They were very outraged about this and threatened to kick the tank "if he messed up again", but I have to admit I was amused more than anything. Usually failpugs tend to make me feel bad as well, with that nagging voice at the back of my mind wondering whether I'm not contributing to the fail myself, but for once I felt blissfully zen, innocent, and above all the anger.

So there I was, standing alone where we had killed Slad'ran. "Priest?" someone asks eventually. I tell them that I'm at the entrance, and that they should and could easily join me by porting out of the instance and back in. "No, we're here now. And there's a boss here." So... what exactly did they expect me to do then? Unlike them, I didn't have the option to magically port to the other side. I usually hate it when people drop group without warning, but at that moment I was just drawing a blank. All I knew was that this party was certainly not worth the hassle, so I just left.

As usual, the right words came to me about a minute too late, when I found myself back in Dalaran after the fact. I thought about how the group should get a replacement healer pretty much instantly anyway, and wondered how they would do...

... when I suddenly realised that their new healer would also get ported in at the "right" instance entrance, and if they still insisted on staying where they were, they'd have to convince said new healer to either a) kill himself and then corpse-run to the other entrance, or b) leave the instance and manually fly all the way to Gundrak to enter the dungeon on the other side. Just to save the rest of them two teleports.

And then I grinned.