Inspired by the horror stories at Pugging Pally, a little tale of levelling LFG woes.
Today Reversion and I pulled out another pair of old alts and moved them to the new server. After a quick respec to discipline, my 54 priest Verdandi was ready to try healing his little gnome warrior. We queued up and got BRD.
Bad sign one: it was already in progress. Got there and there were two warriors, one standing around and one dead somewhere in the instance. And he’d released, but he was asking for a res. Fortunately the other warrior knew where he was and lead us to the golem room. We rezzed, we buffed, we – wiped. Got too many groups.
We lost the other dps at that point. At some point a hunter came in, but I forget where. We ran back. Halfway there, Warrior 2, the one who had asked for a rez before says “can you rez me, I was running back and I fell in the lava”.
Now I’m really confused. As far as I could tell he had not been alive again since our wipe. Did he mean the lava outside? I asked. No, he replied, inside, near where the chains held up the platform. I determine from this that he means inside Blackrock Mountain, not inside the instance, and point out that since we’re not on the same server I can’t exactly rez him.
We get back to where we wiped and – his body is still there. I realize at this point that he was running back as a ghost, fell in the lava, and either couldn’t figure out how to get out or… unknown. I’m still not sure he understood the difference between “inside the instance” and “inside the mountain”.
The group broke up two wipes later mostly because that corpse run is so dang long. Blizzard, we’re lazy these days, can you please shorten corpse runs?
A few quests later, Verdandi is now 55 and we queue up and get Dire Maul. Also in progress. They’d killed the big tree and off we go to the big room with the dog. We’ve got a rogue, and hunter, and a druid. The rogue instantly starts commenting on me being only 55, which I ignore. We start clearing the room and die when the dps keeps aggroing more pats. By now I’m getting comfortable with healing in discipline. (Side note: this may not be the best way to level a priest but I hate Holy, and I want to heal instances on our way up. Disc just seems more fun)
We clear the pylons and the shield doesn’t come down, so we go looking for the other ones. The rogue is being really chatty and reveals that he is 10 and asks how old we are. I admit to my age and he asks if I’m married yet. Not sure he believed me when I said I was married to the tank 🙂
More wiping, mostly due to my lack of mana. I can heal one or two groups but not more, and it takes forever to get mana again with the stupid morning glory dew. Ugh.
We go upstairs, kill a pylon, come downstairs, the shield’s not down. Then finally we find the one in the center courtyard that we’ve walked past twice. And head upstairs to take out the final one, and get eaten by a hunter boss. Come back, pull too much trash, wipe. Come back – and finally down the hunter, though not before I, the druid, and Rev’s tank all die. We run back – and there’s respawns, so we call it.
Well, the Outlands instances are shorter and easier to get around in, I just need another 3 levels.
It is really interesting seeing the old, really huge, instances and judging them by the modern standards of 20-40 minute runs. I use to love how huge and epic some of those old places were. Not any more. I wonder if Bliz has hit on what they think is ther perfect size or of they are still going to experiment. With Cata coming I wonder if they will do more reworking of older ones to bring them inline with modern instances.
The wife and I found out that sometimes less is more.
We ran dungeons with parties of 5 with the first alts we levelled together (protection paladin, holy paladin) and did not particularly enjoy the experience because there was always 1 or 2 players who would do stupid stuff.
We got smarter for the second set of alts (protection warrior, restoration druid) and run dungeons with only 3 players. We prefer the third member to be a hunter with a tenacity pet or a demontology warlock, but we will run with anything. Although killing any specific mobs now takes more time, we wipe less than once per 3 dungeons and the experience is much more enjoyable as we are forced to play well to succeed. One caveat: I supply the party with potions (especially resistance for specific encounters) and elixirs to give us an extra boost.