A guide to corpse-running in Outland and Northrend

When I sifted through search terms that led to my blog, I also found a couple that I considered interesting enough to dedicate a whole post to them: "corpse run" for steamvaults, entrance gundrak, finding oculus, gundrak where is entrence, instance door blood furnace. Of course, with the way the dungeon finder works these days, people can end up in instances without even knowing in which part of the world they are, not to speak of things like how to get from the closest graveyard back to the instance portal. Since I consider this an interesting subject I'll take a break from my usual opiniated blathering and write an actually helpful post for a change.

Outland

Hellfire Citadel: Hellfire Ramparts, The Blood Furnace, The Shattered Halls

All of these instances are located in the Hellfire Citadel in the centre of Hellfire Peninsula. If you die in there, your spirit will end up north-east of the fortress at the Thrallmar graveyard if you're Horde, or south-east of it at Honor Hold if you're Alliance. The Ramparts entrance is easy to find, just go back towards the citadel, over the bridge on your side and it's right there. If you're coming across the northern bridge, there's also a ramp leading up to your right and to the entrance of Shattered Halls.

The Blood Furnace entrance is physically close to the others but unfortunately requires you to take a completely different route to get there. Go to the southern "Alliance half" of the zone, and from the bridge that crosses over to the citadel, go west and follow the rampart. Eventually you'll see some stairs leading up to its top, go up there and then just follow the slightly winding path to the instance portal.

Incidentally, the raid instance Magtheridon's Lair is located in the Hellfire Citadel as well and also has an entrance that can be easy to miss if you've never been there. You have to go down to Hellfire Basin west of the citadel and then from there to the bottom of the southern wall.

Coilfang Reservoir: The Slave Pens, The Underbog, The Steamvault

If you've never been there before, dying in the Coilfang Reservoir can be bewildering. You'll resurrect at a graveyard on the shore of a lake in Zangarmarsh, and your corpse is supposedly right in the middle of said body of water. Run into that direction on the water, and when you see pipes going underwater, dive down. There's a pipe opening there, enter it from the south and swim north until you get out inside a cavern. As you come in, the tunnel to the very left leads to the Slave Pens, the one to the very right to the Underbog, and the second tunnel from the left leads to the Steamvault. The big waterfall in the middle hides the entrance to the Serpentshrine Cavern raid, incidentally.

Auchindoun: Mana-Tombs, Auchenai Crypts, Sethekk Halls, Shadow Labyrinth

This one is easy and very straightforward. Your spirit appears on a graveyard a bit south of the structure in Terokkar Forest, just run north into its centre and then towards the appropriate tunnel: the western entrance leads to the Auchenai Crypts, the northern one to Mana-Tombs, the eastern one to Sethekk Halls and the southern one to the Shadow Labyrinth.

Tempest Keep: The Mechanar, The Botanica, The Arcatraz

These instances in Netherstorm are special as they are located inside floating buildings and if you die and release, you'll resurrect at full health at a graveyard on the ground. Since you're alive, you can just use the dungeon finder's teleportation function to get back in! Handy, eh? For the curious, the southernmost floaty thing in front of you is the Mechanar, the northern one closer to ground level is the Botanica and the one a bit higher up than the others is the Arcatraz. The big one in the centre is the raid to the Eye.

Magister's Terrace

Welcome to the Isle of Quel'Danas! Just follow the road towards the "your dead body is here" icon on the minimap. Easy peasy.

Northrend

Utgarde Keep: Utgarde Keep, Utgarde Pinnacle

Dying in either of those instances will land you at a graveyard very closeby and you should have no trouble getting back in. Just rememeber, to get to the entrance of the keep you go down into the tunnels below, while the portal to the Pinnacle is on a platform on the west side of the building to which you have to go up.

The Nexus: The Nexus, The Oculus

Now, the run back to the Nexus is very straightforward, but the fact that there are three instance portals right on top of each other in there can lead to confusion for the inexperienced, seeing how the mini-map is only two-dimensional. You'll res right outside the building and if you go straight in and down you'll end up in the Nexus instance. To get back into the Oculus however, you have to walk along the inside walls until you get to a bride across to another portal, which is located right above the Nexus one. If you go up yet another level you'll find the entrance to Malygos's lair.

Azjol-Nerub: Azjol-Nerub, Ahn'kahet: The Old Kingdom

Run west from the graveyard and jump down into the hole. The entrance to Azjol-Nerub is the one straight down south with the friendly Nerubians right next to it, and if you turn east from there you'll see the tunnel leading down to the Old Kingdom.

Draktharon Keep

Your ghost will appear at a graveyard in Grizzly Hills, just south of the Keep. Simply run up the stairs into the tunnel and you'll see the instance entrance to your left.

Gundrak

Now Gundrak is a slightly tricky one because it actually has two entrances, one of which is usually the wrong one for your purposes. Basically your ghost will appear at a graveyard in the north-eastern end of the zone and you'll see the "your corpse is here" icon and an instance entrance almost right next to you. But beware! This will lead you inside the instance, but at what most people would consider the wrong end, as you'll land on a ramp that leads down to Moorabi's room. Even if your party already killed Moorabi before you died, they might not have cleared all the trash mobs in front of the door as they are skippable when you're coming in from the other side and you could find yourself cut off. Getting back to the "correct" entrance involves running into a north-western direction from the graveyard until you see the summoning stone for the instance, which marks the door. This will take you back to the instance start.

If you had a wipe and end up with the party split across both ends of the instance after they ran back in, the smart thing to do is to have the ones on Moorabi's end leave and have them use the teleport function to get back in, which will reunite you at the start. Insisting that the ones in Slad'rans room should make their way to the back is cumbersome if there are trash mobs in the way as the teleport won't work that way, so their only option would be to teleport out and then make their way from wherever they were before the instance start to Zul'drak and Gundrak's back door, which could take a while.

The Violet Hold

Finding your way from the Dalaran graveyard back to the Violet Hold shouldn't pose a problem to anyone as it's very straightforward.

Ulduar: Halls of Stone, Halls of Lightning

If you've been levelling mostly by instancing, dying in one of these instances in the Storm Peaks might be the first time you find your ghost on the back of a ghostly gryphon. Fly west to get back to the Halls of Stone and north-east to return to the Halls of Lightning. Up and north will lead you to the entrance of the Ulduar raid.

Trial of the Champion

Another very easy and straightforward corpse-run. Just go west and enter the Coliseum through its northern entrance. Since it's such a short distance it's usually faster to run back on your own if you die during the jousting bit or early in a boss fight than to wait for a resurrection, even if you were the only one who died.

Icecrown Citadel: The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection

Now this is another fairly difficult one, and it's not unusual that you'll have to res fallen party members who simply got lost during the run back. I have a lot of sympathy for their plight since it took me a long time to learn the correct route myself. Especially if you're playing with low graphics settings, trying to find your way through Icecrown's fogs can be a considerable challenge.

Basically what you have to do is fly south towards Icecrown Citadel and then loop around the structure to the right from the main entrance. Make sure that your mini map is sufficiently zoomed out and keep an eye on it. You should quickly see something that looks like a vaguely Y-shaped piece of rampart. Fly towards it and up, as it has two identical levels. The entrance to the five-man instances is on the right "prong" of the Y-shape on the top level. Good luck!

Caverns of Time

Old Hillsbrad Foothills, The Black Morass, The Culling of Stratholme

The Caverns of Time aren't actually located in Outland or Northrend, but since the instances in there are for level sixty-six and up it's logical to include them here. Your ghost will land at an underground graveyard in Tanaris, just follow the arrow towards the main cavern area and from there to the correct entrance. The lush tunnel with a small keep that looks like the one in Hillsbrad leads to Old Hillsbrad, unsurprisingly. The swampy area with the crocolisks marks the entrance to the Black Morass, the cheerily decorated street shows the city of Stratholme before the culling and the winding green tunnel with trees leads to the Battle for Mount Hyjal raid.

I might post something similar for the old world instances if I get around to it.

One of those search term posts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dps signing up to tank isn't always bad

So today's daily heroic for my mage took me to Halls of Lightning. We buffed up and made the first pull. I got about two arcane blasts off before both mobs fell over and died simultaneously. Okay, clearly we had some very overpowered dps in this group. On the next pull I threw a glance at the damage meter and... holy moly, a warrior doing over eight thousand dps! Well, that explained it - except, hang on, I thought we had only one warrior in this party? The tank!

I inspected him and found that he was indeed in full fury spec, kitted out in ICC25 heroic gear, dual-wielding Shadowmourne and a heroic Cryptmaker. I expressed some amusement about this fact and he smiled. Nobody else minded. And you know what? It didn't matter because he tanked just fine. Nobody else was doing even half his dps so we stood no chance at stealing aggro from him, and that aside everything was dying so quickly that it didn't make a difference either way. On most AoE pulls everything was dead before I'd even finished my first channeling of Blizzard (six seconds). General Bjarngrim died after twenty-four seconds, Volkhan after eighteen, Loken after twenty, before he could even cast his first lightning nova. Ionar only survived for forty-one seconds because we couldn't do damage to him while he was dispersed.

We only had one wipe when our tank charged into the first boss while he was empowered and standing in the middle of a group of trash mobs. Our little warrior went splat before anyone could even blink, but everyone just laughed it off and the tank himself summed it up very accurately with "lol pwned". After that he pulled more carefully.

I think it's definitely a sign of the current heroic system being broken when people are practically encouraged to run them like this, but fact of the matter is that it was the sensible thing to do. Even in full dps gear our tank had over 35k health, and with the damage he was doing no pug tank would have been able to keep aggro off him anyway. So why not embrace the fact that you're producing massive threat and can survive a few hits and just sign up for the role you're going to play anyway, whether you want it or not? I thought it was clever. In fact, other massively overgeared dps plate wearers and cat druids who still want to run the daily heroic for some reason should probably take a leaf out of this guy's book if you ask me. Long live the dps tanks! Until Cataclysm anyway.

Only in Outland...

Yes, I know we've all been there, done that, worn the Deadly Borer Leggings... but still I don't think I'll ever cease to be amazed by the absolutely fugly outfit combinations that you can end up with while levelling through Outland.

I nearly jumped out of my chair with fright when I logged in to this image today, since I had forgot that this was the last character I played last night. That hat! Those shoulders! It's just... too much for words.

Pit of Saron sure is buggy

Just when you think you might be growing tired of running the same instances over and over again, one of them bugs out and thereby creates an exciting new experience.

Last night I was in normal Pit of Saron with my night elf priest. It had been a smooth run until we got to Scourgelord Tyrannus. Have you ever thought that it's stupid how he jumps down to melee people when he could just stay on the back of his giant dragon and blast everyone into oblivion from a completely safe position? Well, apparently Tyrannus suddenly had the same thought and immediately jumped back up after holding his speech and dismounting. Then he continued to circle us and ordered Rimefang to blast ice at us every so often, while we milled around on the ground feeling slightly lost. The following conversation went something like this:

"Bah, stupid bug!"
"Yeah, I heard about that. Apparently it's got something to do with attacking him too early."
"So, what do we do? Can we reset him without wiping up?"
"I don't know, I've never had it happen before."
"Maybe if we can hit him from down here."

So people started to run around and clamber onto nearby rocks to see if they could get in range. As it turns out, they couldn't get into range of Tyrannus himself (though apparently he could be hit with multi-target abilities that were targetting Rimefang) but yeah, Rimefang himself came close enough to have a dot put on him every so often if you timed it right. I commented that Rimefang had over three million health and that we should probably just wipe up, but people persisted and I would have felt bad letting them die so I kept healing them as well. (Though there wasn't a lot of damage to go around anyway. I guess that's why the Scourgelord usually comes down, because he knows that Rimefang's damage is pants.)

After about ten minutes the tank asked if we shouldn't wipe up after all, against which I protested by then, proud that we had already shaved off a million of his health. I continued to dot him and our two elemental shamans and our hunter did the same by casting one flame shock/serpent sting at a time whenever he got in range.

As we worked our way through the last million of his health I got excited and already started to picture us posing proudly in front of Rimefang's corpse. As if he was reading my thoughts and wanted to disagree, one of the shamans asked if we were all ready for the inevitable anticlimax. We laughed and said yes. Good that we were, because as it turned out Rimefang can be brought down to exactly one health but no further, which effectively renders him unkillable. Boo.


Somewhat disappointed, people hurled themselves at the skeletons fighting the NPCs to commit suicide, and I levitated off the platform to see how far I'd have to run to make him reset. When I reached Garfrost's area and was still in combat I shadowmelded, and fortunately that was enough to do the trick. DBM announced helpfully that combat against Scourgelord Tyrannus had ended after thirty-one minutes and eight seconds.


Fighting Tyrannus the proper way afterwards felt almost ridiculously easy after we had just spent half an hour taking down Rimefang's three million health one dot at a time. Is that the pure antithesis to efficient badge farming? I guess I was fortunate that the other people in the party also valued the idea of trying something new over ruthless but boring efficiency.


That said, bugs aren't always fun. I tried to run the same instance on heroic right afterwards and it bugged out again, but in a slightly different way. Our somewhat inexperienced tank struggled with gathering up all the skeletons in the tunnel so we wiped just as we got to the top, though one person apparently still ran far enough to aggro the boss as well. Again he ended up riding around on Rimefang's back the whole time, but this time with the additional problem that we couldn't get up the tunnel anymore because the mobs that usually keep the NPCs busy had already spawned and were blocking our way. (There are a lot of them and they can gib anyone within a second.) Oh, and since dying did not work to reset the encounter this time, we just had to give up and call it a night. Though at least the bug had once again got us talking, and despite of the defeat we disbanded the party in high spirits. Players really do shine most when faced with true adversity.

I want epics to be epic again

Last night I came across a post in my own archives in which I casually mentioned how epics had become the new shiny fish scales, and that made me think. While we're making Cataclysm wish lists, I'd like to wish for epics to be epic again - even if it's unlikely that my pleas on that subject will be heard.

Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, this isn't about restricting all the good gear to hardcore raiders again or whatever. It's got nothing to do with the stats on the gear, it's purely a matter of nomenclature or coloration, as it were.

We're so used to referring to items by the colour of their names - greens, blues, purples - that it's easy to forget that those colours are actually supposed to be an indicator of rarity. Greens are uncommon, blues are rare and purples are epic. According to dictionary.com, epic means "heroic, majestic, impressively great, of unusually great size or extent" (when it's not referring to poetry). The keyword here is "unusual", and while it's debatable how much of a step up that is from uncommon and rare, I'm pretty sure that the one thing that something called epic is not supposed to be is common. Unfortunately however that's exactly what epic quality items have become, in this expansion more so than ever before. The bosses in normal instances have them as guaranteed drops; Dalaran is chock-full of vendors that sell nothing but epics, for the low price of running a couple of heroics for emblems; hell, even the emblems themselves are apparently epic. Go around Dalaran and inspect a bunch of random people. How many greens do they wear, how many blues and how many purples? I bet you that epic quality loot will actually be the most common type of gear among level eighties, and that's just silly. I don't care how cool it looks or how much stamina it's got on it, if everyone and their Mum's wearing it it's simply not epic.

What I'd like to see in Cataclysm then would be a monetary reform for gear so to speak, to give the label "epic" some value again.

- Emblems and tokens should never be epic, as they are guaranteed drops by their very definition. They should be rare at best, maybe even uncommon.

- Five-man instances shouldn't have epics as guaranteed boss drops, neither on normal nor on heroic difficulty. Having a few epics as really rare drops along the lines of the battered hilt would be okay though.

- Stuff that's available from vendors shouldn't be epic either, unless the requirements for getting it are severely limiting, like a high arena or battleground rating for PvP gear, or some heroic mode token for the highest level of tier gear. Everything else should be blue at best, including tier items if they are simply available for a bunch of emblems. If we want some items, like the tier sets, to stand out a bit more they could be coloured pale orange like the heirloom items or a different colour.

- Raids would drop a mix of blues and purples, depending on the boss's difficulty and place in the instance. The first boss would always only drop blue quality items, the last one only epics and everything else would be somewhere in-between.

Just to reiterate, this wouldn't actually change anything about the quality of the gear. A new tier of blues would generally be better than the previous tier of epics, as they were. Everything would just be marked more appropriately, so that something that can be bought from a vendor in endless amounts doesn't appear to be as "impressively great" as a drop from a tough raid boss anymore. After all, the colour system is supposed to be an indicator of rarity instead of pure quality: Raptor Hunter Tunic may be green but it's still better than Blackened Defias Armor. I'd really like to have that back at endgame level as well, instead of the muddied down version we have right now where everything above ilevel 200 is simply epic regardless of where it came from and how common it actually is.

My stance on GearScore

There's been some discussion about GearScore in the blogosphere lately (again), and I feel that I finally have something to add on the subject. I never felt like I was in a position to comment when it came up previously because I simply never had to deal with it. Yes, on my server that blasted addon is blissfully underused. People know it of course and I'm guessing that quite a few players have it installed as well, but GearScore number values are generally not used as an entry requirement for pugs. People might ask for achievements sometimes, sure, but as far as gear goes most pug advertisements that I see in general chat still just ask for a gear check in front of the north bank or something similar, which has the added advantage of being a test to see whether the potential pug applicant is actually interested enough to put more effort in than just sending a whisper.

Now on the server where I recently levelled my two old Alliance characters to eighty, things are entirely different. I remember feeling bewildered when I first saw all these pug adverts asking for arbitrary numbers, but I still wasn't curious enough to actually install the addon just to find out what the numbers actually meant. Then an article on wow.com led me to wtfismygearscore.com, a nice way of getting at least a rough idea of how GearScore works without actually having to support the addon yourself. So I found out that my freshly dinged eighties were barely above 3000, while my fully ICC25-geared priest had surpassed 6000, and my TotC10-geared hunter sat at 5000. Using that as a guideline, I found that almost all the numbers that people asked for were fairly unreasonable, like 5000+ for a TotC10 run, which pretty much implied that you were only welcome if you didn't want any drops from there anymore. I just shrugged it off however, since I didn't intend to raid with my alts on that server anyway.

But then... I somehow still ended up doing VoA with my priest, killed Flame Leviathan and Malygos for the weekly, and even cleared the first wing of ICC with no real trouble. And that even though her GearScore only just hit 4600 with two new items from ICC. The thing was, as I was wandering around Dalaran going about my business, I occasionally spotted pug adverts in trade that didn't ask for achievements and GearScore numbers. And even though I don't like the addon myself, I couldn't help but wonder about them initially, because if everyone on the server uses it for pugs, what's up with the people who don't? Are they such noobs that they don't know what achievements and GearScore are all about? Or utterly desperate because they can't find anyone else? Well, the latter is sometimes true for runs in progress, but otherwise I noticed that the ones starting pug raids without any silly linking requirements are usually simply people who don't like GearScore either and are so confident in their own abilities that they aren't that worried about other people's performance. And oddly enough that attracts people with a similar mindset and you end up with fairly competent raids anyway. (Though you usually also get at least one guy who has absolutely no clue, makes blatant mistakes and then dies halfway through the fight.)

Larísa compared raiding and GearScore to relationships in her last post, saying that demanding a high number from a pugger was akin to only wanting to check out the really hot people on the dancefloor while you're out clubbing or whatever. I think that's a pretty apt comparison. Like that kind of dating, GearScore is very superficial. As someone who's never been superficially attractive in real life and struggled with that for a couple of years as well, this is something that I dislike. In all fairness though, it's not the end of the world either. If you don't want to be judged like that, you don't have to - not to date in real life and not to pug raids in WoW. Simply seek out people with a similar mindset. In real life I found internet forums about subjects that interested me and met great people there. In the same vein, if GearScore mania in the game bothers you, you can transfer off to a server where it's not as rampant (because it's certainly not the same everywhere) or generally keep your eye out for runs that don't bother with it. Trust me, they are there even on the most GS-crazy servers; you just have to be attentive to the wording of the adverts.

On a sidenote, doing the first wing of ICC as Alliance for a change was vaguely amusing. When we made our way to the gunship I couldn't help feeling slightly confused by how we were going the "wrong" way, and why were we killing the friendly Horde NPCs? Oh wait... During the gunship battle my boyfriend looked over my shoulder and made funny noises whenever Saurfang yelled at his axe throwers to "hurl faster". Then when we got to Saurfang the younger I got ready for a brief break during the endless speech, but as it turns out on Alliance side Muradin Bronzebeard basically just goes "charge" and Saurfang goes "lol dwarves" and then combat starts. They have a longer NPC roleplay at the end to make up for it, but at least that one's easy to skip if you've already seen it twelve thousand times. I'm not a big fan of Blizzard playing up the conflict between the Horde and Alliance, but having even slightly different content for both sides definitely adds something interesting to the mix.