Tunnels of Doom

Let’s not beat around the bush: I tanked an entire Cataclysm dungeon last week. I’ll let that sink in for a moment.

It came about due to a scheduling mix-up resulting from some confusion about what 00:00 (in military time) really represents relative to the day of the week. Suffice to say that I meant to sign up for a Friday night raid on Icecrown Citadel to get my Warrior the Kingslayer title, but that was actually meant to happen Saturday night (which was not going to be possible as we were out of town). So instead I joined a guild dungeon queue and somehow let myself get talked into running it as the tank. I think it bears breaking down my experience, for my own edification, because there was a lot to note and plenty of things I learned I need to work on.

The Good

• We queued into Grim Batol, which was probably the best possible scenario because I love that instance, I’ve run it quite a lot and it only has four bosses, unlike the other dungeon I enjoy and am familiar with (Halls of Origination) which has nearly twice as many boss fights. Plus Grim Batol has a mechanic where you do a strafing run over the two main mob corridors and can soften them up quite significantly so it made most of the progression fights a lot easier to handle since they could practically be burned down without much tanking.
• The Hunter in our group left his pet’s Growl activated (I presume because we were doing a guild run; I tend to agree with the “turn it off during PUGs” camp in the comments section on Wowhead because unfamiliar groups without Ventrilo need to have as few potential run derailment factors present as possible) and said that in spite of that I was still maintaining aggro pretty well so I was glad to hear that.
• We had a Mage, and he didn’t completely overwhelm me in every single pull.
• It wasn’t until after the first two bosses were down that we had our first wipe.
• Not every wipe was my fault.

The Bad

• It took me until about halfway through the run to realize exactly what the value of Vigilance is, and why it should always be up (probably on the Healer). Basically it refreshes Taunt every time the target party member takes damage (and gives you some Vengeance, but for a newbie tank the Taunt thing is the most critical) which allows you more of an opportunity to save that targeted party member.
• I really need to work on cleaner pulls. I hit just about every bad tanking form pull imaginable: Unintended pulls, pull without checking caster (and healer!) mana, pull before group is ready, pull without checking for patrol mobs, etc. I also discovered only recently that the Charge and Intercept abilities can be talent spec’d to work in Defensive stance which made my pulls better in that regard than those from my previous tanking attempt on my main Warrior (the aborted HoO run) but I watched some other tanks pulling later in the week as I was queuing with the Mage and they did some nice pulls that involved target-switching a taunt on one mob and then a ranged attack on another which draws the whole group. If there’s room between the mob starting position and the party, I saw a couple of those pulls where the tank also Intercepted the oncoming mobs in the middle which allowed the stun effect/damage effect to work while still leaving enough room for the crowd controlled units back at the original mob location to not get caught in anything’s blast and unhappily break CC but mostly it was good for rooms where you don’t necessarily want to charge yourself all the way in but instead need the mobs to come to you. In Grim Batol that’s less of an issue since it’s almost all long corridors but it was good to note.
• I’m still struggling with the rotation a bit. I think looking back on it a big part of my problem was my insistence on using Blood and Thunder which meant Intercepting to pull, hitting the primary target with Rend and then waiting for the global cooldown to drop Thunderclap. But since the party wasn’t exactly giving me to the count of three before they dove into their rotations, that was a long couple of ticks before TC could go off. In retrospect, the better choice would have been to pull, pop Thunderclapthen Rend/TC again to spread the DoT to all targets. The main rotation includingShield Slam, Revenge and a combination of Devastate and Sunder Armor needs a lot of work as well. My problem is that so many of Protection’s talents and abilities are inter-related in sometimes surprising ways I forget how to best use them all. For example, not only does Thunderclap affect Rend, but it also can stack a damage-boosting debuff that is usable by Shockwave. I think overall I did better than I had on my first effort, but I still have a ways to go.

The Ugly

• My interrupting was basically non-existent for the first three-fourths of the run, and even after that it was pretty miserable in its success rate.
• I relied way, way too much on the fact that my party members were outputting Heroic-level numbers and could pretty much melt most of the trash mobs without truly needing a tank. There were too many times when I saw a mob slip away and I just couldn’t get it together to Taunt it back. By the time I was out of the fire and looking for the stray mob, it was already dead.
• Mitigating damage is another area I need to work on. My defensive cooldowns went very unused, especially at first while I kind of hit whatever wasn’t on cooldown at random and ignored any ability that didn’t directly generate threat.
• I relied too much on Heroic Strike, which is bad because it’s a rage sink (intentionally) and over-using it means having too little rage for situational abilities.
• I didn’t pay enough attention to Challenging Shout throughout the run. It has a long cooldown but it’s basically an AoE Taunt and that can be extremely useful in big pull situations.
• My overall leadership skills: I kept looking for someone to tell me what I ought to do but that wasn’t their job. Our guild leader was healing the instance and he offered me occasional pointers but it’s so true that everyone automatically assumes the tank is the dungeon guide and they follow behind. This isn’t a role I’m used to in the game or in real life, but it’s something I need to force myself to become more comfortable with (in both cases).
• Cleave was never used.

Overall, tanking is still very, very stressful to me, and I get into a sort of frantic mode during difficult fights. I’m hoping at some point a phenomenon similar to what they describe happens with players who move from amateur leagues into professional sports will set in: At first it’s so fast and hectic but as your experience grows eventually they say the game starts to slow down and you can anticipate things better, react to changes faster. So maybe that will happen with tanking. I certainly hope so.

I think the main thing I can do to improve my effectiveness as a tank would be to re-organize my hotbars a bit and make the binds more appropriate. I have Shield Slam and Revenge on un-modified 1 and 2, which I think is right, but the rest of the main bar I think needs to be rotation pieces like Thunderclap, Devastate and Shockwave (plus possibly Cleave) and then the Shift-mod bar ought to be threat generation abilities with Shift-1 being Taunt (right now it’s Shift-5 which is too far out of the way). I think Challenging Shout is something silly like Control-6, that may explain why I kept forgetting about it. Anyway, the point is, it needs some work although I feel the problem is that Protection Warrior is the first class/spec that has legitimate uses for so many diverse abilities that it doesn’t reliably fit into 24 slots (even excluding interrupts which I bind to Q and E with mods).

But, no matter how rough it may have been, the key takeaway is that I did it: From start to finish I tanked a whole instance. With my level 85 tank, not even with my training tank Worgen. To me, that was a huge accomplishment.

Mage Love

By the end of the week I was at level 83 with my Mage, had completed the Mount Hyjal questing and run through Abyssal Maw: Throne of the Tides and Blackrock Caverns, neither of which I had actually done as the Warrior. Throne of the Tides is an okay dungeon, although it has a boss that casts an Absorb Magic spell which pretty much makes my Mage useless for half the fight and the final boss is a weird non-boss kind of thing which you don’t even really defeat (expect additional Abyssal Maw dungeons in forthcoming content patches). It is kinda cool when you do the Alice’s “Eat Me” cake/Mario’s power-up thing and grow super-huge to fight the massive squid monster thing, I’m just not sure the fight itself is all that fun.

I also finally saved up the 4,000 gold necessary to pay for the Artisan Flying mount speed boost and maxed out my Herbalism skill although my main project for the week was to improve my gear from high-level Wrath into at least mid-grade Cataclysm stuff. I think the only holdout as of now is my Mercurial Alchemist Stone, a trinket that is technically the lowest item level in my set although at +50 Intellect and acting as a Philosopher’s Stone (permitting Transmutation), plus a potion-boosting effect, it’s certainly not a waste of a slot.

I’m not sure if I’ll make 85 by the end of the coming week. Three levels in one week, especially with no weekend playing, was mostly due to the fact that I ran through with a lot of rested XP and did a hard grind through Hyjal and the early part of Deepholm with plenty of Herbing. But if I recall correctly, the path from 84 to 85 takes a very long time and I’ve since abandoned all my heirloom items so my XP gains are not quite as dramatic as they (theoretically) could be. Another minor factor in slowing me down could be that I just now realized I missed a piece of the Alchemy progression in Burning Crusade which was the Mastery quests, which in my case would be Master of Transmutation. Unfortunately the prices for Primal elements haven’t really gone down as much as I kind of expected (~65 gold per Primal Fire for example). I have a couple of the Primals that I need but we’re talking something like 40 Motes of Fire, 35 Motes of Air and maybe 25 Motes of Water to finish it up.

I know I’ve had great success in not getting sidetracked by unnecessary projects but I’m actually using transmutation a lot as I level Alchemy in these last stages and it kind of sucks to think that I’m missing out on bonus output from my transmutes. At some point I will need to make the time to do this quest sequence though because I definitely want to have the Mastery available when I start doing Truegold transmutes.

Rollin’ With The Homies

In a rare non-WoW gaming moment, I had the chance to play Catan Dice over the weekend with the extremely Occasional Gamer, Doctor Mac. He won two of the three rounds we played which I sort of expected since I’m typically pretty bad at those kinds of dice-capture games. Plus in my experience beginner’s luck is pretty big in Catan Dice, something that is remarkably antithetic to the full board game, Settlers of Catan in which I don’t think I’ve ever seen the less experienced of any of the players win. In any case the game was just a diversion while Doctor Mac and I caught up since we hadn’t seen each other in person for probably several years. Say what you will about our information-saturation in modern society, but one thing I adore about living in this current era is that in spite of rarely seeing each other in the flesh, people like Doctor Mac and I can remain in touch, interact regularly and even play some games together now and then.

I made it to level 80 last week on my Mage, though that feat owes more to some early-Saturday insomnia (I was up before four in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep despite having to work at 7:30) which allowed me to get a solid four hours straight of just grinding as much XP as I could get. My experience with the Wrath leveling content, aside from the dungeons which I’ll talk about later, was pretty similar on both the Warrior and the Mage: The early levels—up through about 73—were handled pretty smoothly by the starting zones and the secondary zones are all interesting but the progression seems to really slow down as both Dragonblight (done with the Warrior) and Grizzly Hills (the Mage) involve a lot of travel from quest hub to activity destination and back and forth. And then at about 75.5 or 76 there’s this kind of dead zone where the only real level-specific questing is in Sholazar Basin, which I did as the Warrior but couldn’t seem to get interested in a second time around. I ended up doing comparatively low-level stuff in Zul’Drak until I finally got to 77 at which point I hightailed it to Storm Peaks, ran through the K3-to-Temple of Storms via the vyrkul chain and then sort of ran out of quests and decided to finish it up in Icecrown.

I have to say that upon a second visit I think Blizzard really killed it in Icecrown. The questing there is simply phenomenal with so many different lore pieces clashing, the multi-faceted conflict that exists there with shaky alliances, enemy-of-my-enemies, mortal foes, conflicting motivations, outstanding NPC characterizations and plenty of variety to the quests, the mobs and the stories. I love a lot of what they did in Cataclysm and while the early levels of the new Undead progression are some of the strongest in the game I think if I had to pick a single favorite zone to quest in, I’d have to say Icecrown. My one complaint with it is that they seem to have packed too much questing into it for the level range it serves because while neither time did I devote the entire three levels from 77-80 to that zone, it seemed like by the time I leveled past it there was an awful lot of unfinished questing left over, and I had completed dozens of quests in there each time.

Oddly, when I hit 80 I had a strong desire to go into a holding pattern for a bit. My daily diet of one Lich King random dungeon had resulted in a lot of repeats so there were plenty of grey spots left on the list for Northrend Dungeonmaster. I wanted to get the dungeons via LFD since coordinating non-endgame dungeon runs with the guild is a hit-or-miss prospect most of the time, but from what I can tell the Wrath dungeons fall of LFD at level 81. This is especially a bummer for the Icecrown Citadel instances, which there are three that interconnect as sort of a quest chain, and while they don’t count for the achievement I did want to check them out anyway. At first my item level was too low because I had stopped really caring about gear toward the end and was just using whatever was easiest so I did a few quests in Hyjal and picked a couple bargains off the AH to stack up my level a bit and then I did the Specific Dungeons treatment.

The problem with that is you have to be patient while you’re waiting for an instance run on the one you’re looking for to open up so the queue times can be up to an hour or more, depending on how close you are to the achievement. Usually during this time I’d be questing but I didn’t want to do that in case I accidentally leveled up before I finished all the dungeons. Finding enough time to play so that I can reasonably wait out an hour queue and then have enough time to run the dungeon itself isn’t easy so once I got to this point I switched off to my training Warrior, the worgen, just when I only had a few minutes at a time to play.

While I didn’t quite make it to instancing level (that would be level 15) before the week was out, I did ding level 14 and got out of Gilneas’ starting zone, which I believe was an Alliance first for me. It’s very weird to play as an Alliance character after so long as being basically exclusively Horde. Every time the quest givers would say something disparaging about the Undead or Orcs I’d get all indignant, like “Hey! That’s my homies you’re talking about!” It’s a weird dynamic. I have, however, been pleasantly surprised that as yet there haven’t been any contiguous annoyances stemming from re-playing as a Warrior. Part of it may be that unlike the previous incarnation, Victory Rush allows the Warrior to now be less of a fight-stop-eat-fight proposition in leveling zones and that makes a huge difference in cutting out some of the annoyingly disjointed feeling flow to the early game.

I can’t say that so far I’m learning very much, but I have committed to Protection (it’s my only spec for the next 16 levels) to the extent that I’m not even questing in Battle stance so if I want to Charge, I’m going to need to write a macro to dance back into Battle, Charge, revert to Protection. Which reminds me, I need to do exactly that. At this stage the key difference is the lack of Charge and the heavy use of Shield Slam. I’ve been trying to work on some light tanking tactics as I kill mobs in the world zones but so far what those efforts have made me realize is that I need a better threat management AddOn.

On my Mage I’ve been using the ThreatPlates extension of TidyPlates, which uses the name plate as a graphical indicator of threat. In DPS mode, when you pull aggro on something it’s name plate gets all big and red and angry indicating, you know, stop melting that mob and run you idiot. That’s perfectly suitable when all you care about is a binary “Is this mob going to stomp on my skull right now or not?” But as a tank it’s not just a matter of “Do I have the threat here?” but also “How close am I to losing this aggro?” and “Which of my party members is most at risk right now?” Those are questions that, at least in my current configuration, ThreatPlates doesn’t seem to answer. I guess that means going back to Omen. The other related issue with ThreatPlates (which actually affects it in DPS mode, too) is that the plates are positioned over the unit’s head. For bosses that can sometimes be two, four or ten times taller than the player characters, seeing those name plates sometimes requires pulling the camera into an awkward angle. Mostly it’s no big deal with DPS, especially ranged, since you can often just zoom way out but with tanks you’re right on top of these models intentionally and having to worry about camera angles as well as all the other things tanks have to worry about at once, it’s just too much.

Mage Love

I’m a moron. There is plenty of evidence to support this (right here on this very site, too!) but the most recent example came from learning that up until just last week, I’ve been reading my Mage’s character sheet wrong. So wrong, in fact, that I’ve been very likely making poor, poor decisions about which gear to equip because I’ve been studying the wrong stat lines.

It turns out there are three distinct stat boxes that cover similar info: Basically the effectiveness of your in-combat performance. Many of the stats in each of these categories are the same, just applied to different sorts of actions: Hit, Haste, Critical, Penetration are all common. But the distinction is that one box covers melee attacks (swinging an equipped weapon), one covers ranged attacks (throwing or shooting with an item in the ranged slot) and spells. As a Mage, I literally never hit anything with my weapon. In fact, my weapon is just a stats booster and serves no mechanical function whatsoever (well, I like to think that I stop and lean up against the staff when I’m tired from lighting all those bad guys on fire). On rare occasions I’ll shoot things with my wand as a ranged attack, but that happens only when I’m silenced and for the most part the wand becomes another stat boosting item as well. So clearly the only box I should be caring about is the Spell stats.

Except I’m a moron, as I mentioned, and I’ve been evaluating the Melee box this whole time. The. Whole. Time. Levels one through eighty I’ve thought the effectiveness of my spells was being conveyed by a series of stats that actually have zero meaning to my character. I think in practice this has probably been most profoundly impacting when it comes to the critical strike rating: Crit for spells is calculated in part by your Intellect primary stat where as Melee uses a combination of Agility and (mostly) the specific crit bonuses you get for some items. I think the end result is that I simply tended to prefer crit-stacked gear over Int gear because it was the only thing that made my Melee crit adjust. For a spec that lives and dies by critical strikes, that meant it sometimes seemed like a big Intellect upgrade that maybe sacrificed some direct critical strike bonuses looked like a poorer quality item than it perhaps really was. This is especially true when you consider that Intellect modifies a lot more than just crit rating as well, it also increases the total mana available, and adds to spell power both of which are very important to Mages. As a result, usually you would always prefer Int to Crit on a piece of gear if all else was equal but I may not have been making that decision correctly until just recently when I realized the error.

At least I figured it out before I started trying to run heroics or anything.

On the upside, I’ve noticed that I’ve begun to regularly be tops on the DPS charts in 5-man dungeons pretty consistently. Oh, occasionally there will be some Hunter or Warlock who comes along and puts out stupid numbers, probably because they’re a fifth or sixth alt and have all the money in the world to buy level Epics. But for the most part I’ve been #1 or at worst #2 for several weeks now and in some cases I’ve been #1 with a freaking bullet, outpacing the damage output of even the runner up (often the tank with their freaky Vengenace-based damage output) by roughly 2:1. I’m sure it says something negative about my personality but I absolutely love it when tanks single me out and say, “Try to hold back a bit because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to keep up with you.”

Dungeoneering

As I was queuing up for the last of the Northrend Dungeonmaster instances I ended up running a couple of high-level Wrath dungeons that I’m likely only to do a handful of times (if I ever return to them) such as The Oculus, Halls of Lightning and Utgarde Pinnacle. I will say that the whole Brann Bronzebeard appearance in Halls of Origination makes a lot more sense once you’ve done the Ulduar quests (and, while I didn’t finish the entire quest chain, the sequence that introduces him in Grizzly Hills helps clarify things a bit as well). I’ve actually done Utgarde Pinnacle a few times with my Warrior for various guild reasons (plus world events) so it wasn’t new to me except for the whole at-level thing. That was one of the instances where I was—ahem—on fire with the DPS output. Of course, doing that means sometimes pulling aggro but whether it was because I had enough Cataclysm greens to make me better geared than most epic-level Mages would have been in end-game Wrath or because I was just hitting my crits like a fiend, it didn’t even matter that I was getting threat because I was burning same-level elites down before they could even reach me after peeling off the tank. Like I said, it probably speaks negative volumes about me, but I loved that I felt like in that moment I could have two-manned the whole thing with just a healer to back me up (that’s actually not true, I’m sure the bosses would have stomped me alone, but it didn’t stop me from feeling that smug at the time).

One other instance I got to try once was Trial of the Champion, a sort of arena-like 5-man instance with epic level loot. It’s kind of a fun deal with several different phases although I thought they didn’t do a very good job in-game of explaining how the first phase where you have to grab a special vehicle-like mount and a specific weapon worked ahead of time. Fortunately I had some patient and helpful random party members but once it got going I thought it was pretty great. I’d actually have been inclined to run that one more than once on purpose if the loot wasn’t trash compared to the stuff you can get easily from regular Cataclysm questing.

In this episode of Wowphiles podcast they discuss a sequence in which a person playing a DPS Warrior selects Need on a tanking chest piece that drops during a PUG and is subsequently kicked for not yielding it to the tank. Now, I don’t exactly agree with the hosts of the show because even a couple of episodes later they have yet to prove that the offending player was simply being gold-greedy. From my perspective I don’t like the idea that if I’m DPSing random instances on my Warrior to farm rep, JP/Valor and tanking gear because I want to eventually transition into Protection spec, I should have to be ready, willing and able to provide a conclusive argument that I do have intentions of using (as opposed to selling) a valuable drop that’s only suitable for an off-spec.

Now, a later episode presented a listener workaround that I like which was that anytime you select “Need” on an item it converts any item won in that fashion into a Bind on Pickup which would prevent the scenario from even arising. I have no problem with this solution but until Blizzard makes it happen, I’m faced with the unpleasant reality that my intended method for gearing up a Cataclysm tank—which certainly may have been flawed at base to begin with—is liable to result in etiquette breaches.

The whole train of thought got me to sit down and evaluate my respective gear sets for both Warrior specs and I realized that because of my procrastination on learning to tank I’ve gotten  to where my Fury equipment set outpaces my Protection set by quite a bit. I got annoyed by the whole thing and decided to make a decision then and there which was that I wouldn’t use Fury spec unless specifically requested by some guild members looking for an 85 DPS. At the base of it, I need to start thinking of myself as a Protection tank, not a Fury Warrior who has tanking aspirations.

As a down side, I’m still stuck without any real tanking experience and therefore mostly unable to run dungeons with that toon, so I took the semi-drastic step of rolling a new Warrior. I went ahead with the Alliance tank, a Worgen, mostly because I did want to see the Gilneas starting zone play out but also because I figured as long as I was going to do LFD more or less exclusively I wouldn’t really have to worry too much about the typical ancillary concerns for leveling a toon, especially because I really don’t care what level this Warrior is or achieves, I’m only playing him so long as I have some learning to do when it comes to the Prot spec and Warrior tanking. Once I have the fundamentals down I’m likely to work with guild members on 85 dungeons so I can get comfortable with the broader toolset. The ultimate goal is getting back to where I can run random normals.

I made it to about level 8 on the Worgen so I still have a bit before I even select a talent tree and qualify for LFD. As predicted there is a fairly strong sense of chagrin as I play the new character. The feeling of “been-there-done-that” is pleasantly absent probably because of the new race and starting zone but also because it’s been a long, long time since I was a low-level Warrior and they’ve changed the talents around enough that the progression is also fresh. Instead I can’t shake the feeling that there are no immediate in-game rewards for playing as this toon: Everything I’m doing is to get Paul better at this as opposed to getting the characters better and that’s a unique, non-quantifiable progression. It’s necessary, I think that much is clear now, but it doesn’t make it less annoying.

Mind The Grind/Dungeoneering

I spent most of the week on the Mage, leveling up just into 76 on Sunday evening. I lingered in Grizzly Hills as I did so, both because I really liked the limited questing I did there as I passed through with my Warrior (the quest chains there are really, really good) but also not in small part because I simply cannot listen to Totems of the Grizzlemaw enough, especially the enrapturing Nyckelharpa solo about two minutes into it and then of course the startlingly beautiful climax of the song once the string accompaniment kicks in… gorgeous.

Some of my leveling happened through LFD queuing in which I was just able to squeak out the Outland Dungeonmaster achievement before I leveled past 75 and could no longer queue for the final instance, which in this case was The Arcatraz. As for the final couple dungeons, I thought that Shadow Labs was pretty mediocre, like all the Auchidoun instances in my opinion. Although I felt like 75 was a bit pushing it as something that can be queued: I ran it with a bunch of high-60s players and it was a little rough for the level 67 tank to keep up with my DPS, even though I was holding back quite a lot. Without really trying and keeping my output pretty well throttled to avoid pulling too much aggro I easily doubled the #2 DPS in terms of overall damage output and there were a couple of cases where I practically tanked portions of the instance just by CC and kiting adds. We did wipe a couple of times because I think the lower level players started to rely on me being able to faceroll the whole thing… I can handle some 72 elites if they don’t hit too hard and there aren’t any trash adds to contend with but if the tank and healer both go down, there’s a limit to what I can do. I can’t say for sure if the tank was over-pulling and expecting me to make up for it by burning the mobs before either he or the healer got overwhelmed, but it felt like it at times.

The Arcatraz I thought was actually pretty strong, at least as good as The Botanica, and I liked the final boss fight with the weirdo lunatic releasing all the most dangerous imprisoned beasties. I laughed out loud when the gnome popped out and the guy was like, “What? That’s not a dangerous creature!” I was overpowered for that dungeon, too, but it felt less like a mistake that I was able to get in than Shadow Labs did.

I also did quite a bit of Wrath dungeon running, including several takes on Drak’Tharon Keep—one in which I was able to see the end of Cleansing Drak’Tharon, something I missed going through as the Warrior because I wasn’t doing instances. I love this questline. As some folks on Wowhead pointed out, it’s not the only time in the game that you end up working for someone less than honorable but usually in the other quest chains it’s pretty clear when you’re getting duped. Drakuru, on the other hand, is more like what I’d expect a truly powerful villain to be: He’s more charming than evil and he plays things close enough to the vest that you don’t really start asking questions until it’s far, far too late. In fact after finally clearing out of Grizzly Hills I intended to go to Sholazar Basin but I detoured into Zul’Drak because I wanted to see how the second part of the Drakuru chain plays out.

I also did a couple of runs of The Violet Hold, which is by far my favorite Wrath dungeon so far. It’s very similar to The Black Morass Caverns of Time instance I talked about last week in that it doesn’t have a maze element or even a geographic progression: The entire instance takes place in what I suppose could be called a literal dungeon albeit a “good” dungeon that contains the magical beasts imprisoned by the Kirin Tor in Dalaran. The blue dragonflight are attempting to infiltrate so they spawn 18 portals on a series of timers and two bosses randomly spawn at set intervals. I say randomly because there are actually six potential boss encounters but you only get two per run and then the final encounter is always Cyanigosa.

I know some people grumble that when they’re trying to farm the instance for a specific drop they have to contend with two layers of RNG (will the boss with the loot table I need spawn at all, and then will he drop the item I want) but whatever. I like the fact that it isn’t the same every single time and as far as I’m concerned, farming mid-level range instances (it’s a 75-77 dungeon) for items is kind of silly anyway since soon enough you’ll land in Icecrown Citadel and you can get the best Wrath gear available in there.

I’m hoping that by the time I hit 77 (ideally by mid-week), things will start to pick up in terms of leveling speed because I can go into Storm Peaks which is a completely new zone to me so hopefully the questing progression will be as smooth as Icecrown was when I rolled through it on my Warrior. It’s felt like the last couple of weeks have been sort of defining the term “grind” but it was sort of startling to realize that I’m now within reach of Cataclysm content on my “alt.” I mean, theoretically I could hit up Vashj’ir or Mount Hyjal in less than two levels. Consider that I rolled this Mage the week of January 3rd, which means that it has taken me no more than nine weeks to do what it took well over five months to do the first time around—and to really make the comparison accurate, if you check the play times of both runs toward Cataclysm content I’d put money down that hours spent on the Warrior to this same point on the level scale outpace the Mage by 3:1.

Mage Love

A few distinct pleasures I found while playing this past week, unique to playing as a Mage:

• My Mystic Frostwoven Robe (pictured in this week’s post image), which is by far my favorite piece of gear I’ve obtained for this toon. I also went to the trouble of hiring a Tailor to craft me Mystic Frostwoven Wristwraps as well, just so I could get the set bonus and justify keeping the robe for a bit longer after I picked up a drop that was technically superior when the bonus was lost. The wrist piece cost me almost 100g for the mats (far above what it’s actually worth on the AH, although there were none to be had) but was totally worth it to appease my vanity. It just looks so cool; exactly the kind of thing I imagine my character would wear.
• Having the Portal: Dalaran spell at last, I’ve finally found the distinct joy in providing transport services to other players. I know it’s a supply/demand thing: The time saved in getting quickly to a place that would otherwise drain close to 30 minutes in travel time is worth a relative pittance, but the tips people are willing to give for what amounts to 2-3 minutes of my time and maybe 32 silver in reagents blows my mind. I got 15g one time and 10g another just for teleporting to Orgrimmar and opening a portal to Stonard. That’s 25g for the price of two Runes of Teleportation, two Runes of Portals and the casting time for six spells. Exalted discount on each reagent makes them 8s and 16s each, the cast time for all the spells is 10 seconds. 48 silver, one minute of casting and maybe two minutes total in flight time from deep in The Drag to The Valley of Strength to stand next to the other players. Three minutes for 24.5 gold? Even if you round the travel time up to five minutes and add the time to stop at the reagent vendor for replacement Runes, I think that mage transport is perhaps the most efficient ways to earn gold in the entire game. Plus, teleportation is arguably the best non-combat class perk I can think of in terms of time and money savings. Have I mentioned that I haven’t used a flight path since I got the spells? It’s so ridiculous I almost expect it to get nerfed any second.
• I found a new mini-combo to boost DoT DPS which I wish I’d been using previously: The Living Bomb DoT can be spread to mobs near your target with Impact/Fire Blast. That might seem obvious but I’d been relying on Living Bomb for my Combustion combo and presuming that Impact was for spreading Combustion. But Combustion is a hard spell to make happen a lot of times and I didn’t bother to check where else the Impact Dot-spreading effect might come in handy. So now I drop Living Bomb on one mob in a tank’s pull, drop Blast Wave or Flamestrike on the group which more often than not procs Impact/Fire Blast and I just hit the Living Bomb with that and presto, all the mobs in the group now have a free Living Bomb debuff applied. It’s really helpful whenever tanks pull trash packs that feature more than one elite, and it seems like most Wrath dungeons eschew the common “one elite, several normals per pack” that was common in BC instances, preferring to group two or three (or four) elites together.
• Had a weird experience when going through The Nexus early in the week where some lippy Paladin started demanding “Mage Food” which I presumed meant he wanted me to drop a Ritual of Refreshment, something I couldn’t do at the time. He berated me for a while until I finally game him a stack of Mana Lollipops to shut him up. Of course, he proceeded to whine that it wasn’t the food he was after (as if I controlled it somehow, since the food scales with your level) and then trash-talked the tank for the next 15 minutes (he was healing) until we all got sick of him and kicked him for being a douchebag. The whole thing got me thinking about how Mages are strange creatures in WoW: They provide a unique support role in that they have hardly any buffing spells but they provide things like Refreshment tables and teleportation services and Slow Fall which are all non-combat supports. It’s like “Hey guys, I’m here to help. Well, until the fireworks start. At that point, y’all just better step out of my way and let me do my thang.”
  The “thang” in this case being “blowing up monsters.”

I’ve gotten into a sort of rhythm as I hit the Wrath of the Lich King content with my Mage. I’ve started to get a touch impatient with the slowdown that happens in level advancement as you push through the expansion content, my estimation is that I feel comfortable with the idea that two hours or less of solid questing ought to reward me with a minimum of one ding, but as of the late 60s that’s just not the case. I started playing yesterday having just reached level 72 the last time I played (so my XP for that level was around 1%) and put in a solid two and a half hours at the end of which I was all of 75% of the way to level 73. The by product of this impatience is that I mostly have patience for leveling the Mage when I have a decent store of rested XP bonus but since I play a little bit on most nights the rested XP lasts maybe 30 minutes or so, sometimes less if I’m doing a dungeon or two.

Since I don’t really want to slowly eke out incremental gains, my new routine for most sessions has been to log into the Mage, run a Wrath random dungeon to earn the (paltry but still useful) Justice Point bonus and then if there is any rested XP left I’ll quest until it’s gone and then hit the auction house, repair shop, bank and log out. This almost never takes more than an hour, leaving me on many evenings with at least another half an hour or so to play at which point I’ll log in as the Warrior and immediately hit the regular random queue, hoping to get through it before my time runs out (DPS queues are long) and then I start doing dailies. I’m still grinding Dragonmaw rep so I’ll often head over to Twilight Highlands, make a mining run around the zone and then settle into the Dragonmaw dailies which I can now knock out in maybe 20 minutes. If I’m not in the mood for Dragonmaw I’ll head to Tol Barad not because I’m super into PvP but because I want the mount they sell for TB commendation points and you don’t even have to join the TB battle to earn them or the rep required. It takes me a bit longer to do the dailies there (mostly because you can’t use flying mounts in Tol Barad), but I can do four or five of them in 20-30 minutes. Usually by then I’m at least at the front of the queue if not already in a dungeon which I farm for the Justice Points and rep and then wrap up the dailies I was working on, do the fishing daily in Orgrimmar (at least; I still do the cooking daily sometimes but it depends on which one has come up), check the auction house, repair shop and bank and usually by then it’s getting close to bedtime.

Now that may sound fairly dull, maybe even rote. But considering how much time I’ve spent in-game floundering around trying to figure out what I should be doing, what I want to be doing and what is most beneficial to me to do, it’s actually nice to have a very clear-cut set of goals that I know very comfortably how to achieve and just be able to log in and work toward them. Plus, I know it won’t last long: I’m JP grinding on the Warrior so I can afford the last bit of XP-boosting heirloom gear for cloth wearers to hopefully get the Mage to max that much faster (I’m actually running out of time since I’m pretty certain the heirlooms no longer grant their bonuses after level 80; if I don’t earn the 2,175 JP before my Mage reaches the point where it’s not useful anymore I’ll get a leather/mail piece to help out my Shaman healer) but once the Mage is at end-game level I’m not going to want to run regular randoms as DPS on the Warrior any more and I’ll have no choice but to buckle down and learn (somehow or other) how to tank so I can switch my spec to Protection once and for all. Then that will also mean switching to Heroics because Valor Point gear is what I actually need to upgrade the Warrior’s pieces. Plus, I need the chaos orbs because I’m really hoping that between the Mage with Alchemy and the Warrior with Blacksmithing I’ll be able to make a nice chunk of change crafting Truegold armor since theoretically I won’t need to incur the cost of the Truegold directly.

It does bother me quite a bit that I’m still not completely convinced at the best way to get better at tanking. I’m delaying the inevitable quite consciously with this current routine: Probably a better use of my time right now would be to forget about the heirlooms and JP and Cata reps and focus on getting to the point where I can competently tank as a Warrior. It isn’t that I don’t need the rep and JP, but there is a more pressing need for tanks in instances via the LFD tool (hence the long queues for DPS), the guild needs tanks and I need to stop thinking of my Warrior as a DPSer since soon enough any instance I’d enter as a Fury Warrior I’ll be rolling into as a Fire Mage. Those are simply the circumstances, I just have to find a way to accept them.

Dungeoneering

I have to get something off my chest before I get into the various dungeons I ran over the past week. I cannot understand why, in Utgarde Keep, when entering the Dragonflayer Pens, at least half of all the tanks I’ve run the instance with (and it’s been at least six runs) charge in and pull more than one pair of Enslaved Proto-Drake and Proto-Drake Handler. I can’t stand it because it doesn’t seem to matter how good the tank is or how good the healer is but 100% of the time when that happens there has been a wipe. The most intensely aggravating part is that it always seems to happen at the exact same place: Right at the end of the Pens. There’s a EPD and Handler kind of off in the last pen on the left (though more in the middle than inside the pen as the previous two had been) and there’s another pair fairly close by in the middle of the room but a bit away from the door. The problem seems to be that the pull radius for the middle pair is either just shy of the radius of the last pair before the door or it may even overlap a little bit. So occasionally it may be accidental, but it really ought to be one of those things everyone knows to be careful of (like the crumbling span in the second wing of Grim Batol).

The mind-boggling part is that the whole issue is entirely avoidable because you can walk to the back of the second pen and go around the backside of the divider and come up behind the third pair, completely on the opposite side from the middle-of-the-room guys. The fact that this isn’t just The Way You Run UK makes me nuts.

Other instances I ran this past week:

• Azjol-Nerub: Bah. Kind of hate this dungeon. It was sort of interesting to do a guild run on the heroic version of it as 85s because the faceroll of it all eliminated a lot of the aspects that are just stupid about it at-level. In particular Hadronox is an annoying, overwrought fight and I don’t just say that because we wiped on him twice. I say that because any boss who has the strategy “Stand around and wait for him to kill his own adds” is a poorly designed boss.
• Utgarde Keep: Of course. As I mentioned above, there’s a part of this instance that makes me crazy but overall I like UK quite a bit. The final boss, Ingvar the Plunderer, is sort of cheap because he’s really like two bosses (he gets resurrected after you defeat him once) and neither of them are all that interesting but I like the look and feel of the rest of the instance. Naturally though, being the first and lowest-level dungeon in WotLK it comes up in the queue a lot. I’ll be happy to level past it just because I’m ready for some new blood.
• Nexus: Even more fun at-level than solo’d, and I quite liked it when I ran through with my Warrior. It helped that the group I got matched with was really pleasant and we all had a nice, quickly established chemistry as we knocked it out and I was kind of remorseful that I didn’t note any of their names or servers before I dropped party. I doubt I’d bother to create additional toons on their servers for the off-chance to play with them again, but it was one of those rare cases of PUG magic that seem so much more rare than the annoying, hair-pulling ones. Probability-defying is how I’d describe the discrepancy.
• Caverns of Time: The Black Morass: Kind of a cool, unique sort of dungeon that doesn’t really have a typical instance feel since there’s no linear progression and instead the mobs spawn on a timer with boss spawns at set intervals while you try to protect and NPC (Medivh). I really wouldn’t mind if Blizzard toyed with the structure and progression of the instances a bit more in this fashion. That actually may have been sort of what they had in mind with the new Sunken Temple but while this one worked pretty well, the same cannot be said for ST.
• Magister’s Terace: Finally polished this one off. I thought it was a solid instance all the way around, although I happen to like the style they chose for the Blood Elves’ architecture so it was aesthetically pleasing to me to begin with. As much as it annoys me how many Blood Elves are running around, I’m intrigued by their lore such that I wished as I was playing through this one that I understood a little more about what the heck was going on. In fact, I will say that the biggest flaw to me of using the LFD tool to experience all these dungeons is that you don’t get as much of the lore run-up to them as you would if you leveled around their physical location. Not that I think Blizzard always does a great job of explaining what the dungeons are or why you’re in there killing everything in sight, but it’s certainly better than the context-deprived nature of dropping into a dungeon out of nowhere lacking rhyme or reason.
• The Botanica and The Mechanar: Tempest Keep didn’t really impress me design-wise although I did kind of dig on the encounters throughout The Botanica. I liked the whole plants-run-amok vibe and it gave me extra chances to be awesome in the eyes of my group by casting Remove Curse on everyone. The Mechanar was okay I guess, but I felt like the semi-science fiction vibe has already been done with Gnomergeran (admittedly more steampunk than the Mechanar’s glowy purple meets THX-1138 thing but still) plus, while it didn’t matter at the time I know, it kinda sucks that The Nexus (and yes, even the Oculus) pull off the whole technology-but-really-magic thing far better in my opinion.

I still have two more Burning Crusade dungeons to finish, but I’ve been avoiding it because queuing for such a short list of specific dungeons makes for a very long wait. However, I have the opportunity to get the Outland Dungeonmaster achievement having done all the instances more or less at-level (I mean, technically Shadow Labyrinth and Shattered Halls go up to level 75 although I’m not sure how terribly challenging they’d be well into your 74th level wearing Wrath gear) so before I level past those I think it will be worth the wait to do those via LFD.

Introspection

One thing I’m noticing is that the routine described above speaks to a truth I didn’t really consider about having two mains or even just two toons at/toward max level. It’s that once you start dividing your attention in WoW, you lose a bit of a part of the game that I actually didn’t realize I’d miss very much: Loafing. When you have a single main and no serious push to bring up an alt, you can sometimes find yourself doing things for protracted periods of time that don’t necessarily have much or any impact on your current game goals. Sometimes this happens while you’re waiting for something “useful” to come about: You’re queued for a battleground or you’re waiting for your raid group to all stop farming the auction house so you run around farming low-level mats to sell on the auction house because they’re plentiful or you faceroll a ton of trash mobs that grant rep for some edge faction from BC or whatever just to slowly work your way up toward getting Exalted with as many factions as possible.

Other times you do things that seem to waste time not because it’s filling the gaps while you wait for anything in particular but just because the activity in itself is fun or interesting. You might solo low-level dungeons to earn achievements, you may fly around trying to take down any mob with a huge model (say, a Storm Giant), which is a personal favorite pastime of mine, or just fish while you watch TV or something. Whatever it is, it’s not part of the active pursuit of progression on the game but it can be pretty fun. When you have multiple characters though, there tends to always be something pressing to do: I’ve thought several times over the last week that it would be interesting to go around leveling Archaeology on my Warrior but then I realize that if I’m going to be grinding something I ought to be grinding levels on the Mage instead since the longer I procrastinate on hitting 85 the longer I have to keep my Fury spec at the ready in case some guildies want someone to round out a guild run.

Obviously it’s just a game and I should be doing whatever it is in that game that seems like the most fun, but I know at this point that I’m so close to finishing up this little alt project I just want to get it done. In the end I’ll be much happier, I know, having an 85 DPS and it’s possible then I’ll feel less compelled to be “working” on something with every available moment. Possible, but more likely is that I’ll find some new all-important project that will simply demand my time.