Trash runs and server community

First, a quick note: our raid finally downed Nefarion on Friday, giving us our Defender titles, getting the guild the kill, and helping us feel like we’re ready for Firelands. The other guild raid downed him Sunday so congrats to them too!

In the last week I’ve been on enough trash runs that I’m only 600 rep away from being honored with the Defenders of the Ashen Verdict or whoever they were. I’ve helped kill hundreds of scorpions, magma lords, corehounds, whatever. I’ve seen the tank trinket drop twice, a cloth hands pattern drop twice, and… that’s about it, really; other people talk about coming away with epic loot but I just didn’t see much.

I did have a ton of fun though. It was really great to see pug groups form up and go. Sometimes our server can feel a little dead but pretty much any time I wanted I could get a run. I think this sort of thing is great for the server community. I learned a lot about what guilds could run a decent trash run and which couldn’t. Who could manage the turtles and who would end up horribly dead. There was one run I went on with some folks I vaguely know, Reversion has run with them more on his hunter. Nice, nice people but not very good raiders. They decided that the way to handle the turtles was to put one mage on each big turtle – the ones that spell reflect. I didn’t last very long in that group.

There were hunters doing 5k dps. There was a tank whining about not getting to roll on dps loot. There were four other resto druids, three of whom used nothing but Wild Growth and Regrowth. The other one, I was so shocked  I had to whisper him because he was doing druid heals right. We ended up chatting as we healed and I found out he’s looking for a raid and passed his name along to the other raid leader in guild in case he might have an opening.

That druid wasn’t the only person in a trash run looking for a real raid slot. It seemed like people who were unhappy with their raiding in 4.0 were using trash runs to show themselves off. Several of the raiding guilds were running trash farms this weekend.  I went along with a couple. Most of them were pretty solid folks.

I remember in Vanilla WoW there was a spot in the Blasted Lands where there were high level, hard to kill mobs that dropped good loot. Groups would form up and go there to farm. I kind of wish we had more of that. In a few weeks the trash runs will be gone and we’ll go back to running only with our own raid groups and once again I won’t know whose guild titles mean what. I love the convenience of dungeon finder and always thought the community weakening aspects are an ok trade, and I still do, but I like the feeling that there’s been this week that the server is just a little smaller and friendlier.