Tunnels of Doom

I keep forgetting that, technically, I’ve already attempted a raid during the aborted effort our guild made on Baradin Hold a back in February. Of course, that was with my Warrior who—like many of the others from that sad attempt—was not raid-ready from a gear standpoint. Last weekend’s run on Bastion of Twilight with the Mage had arguably a higher chance at success at least as far as I was concerned. I still haven’t solved the issue of the last couple of gear slots that need to be updated (that wand is going to be the bane of my existence) but then again I haven’t worked all that hard at it since the self-imposed dungeon embargo. Still, I can pull 10K DPS consistently and by most accounts that’s what you need to stand a chance at any of the current tier of raids.

And sure enough, when we got into the raid I did respectable damage, managed my crowd control and felt pretty comfortable that I belonged there. The problem was many of the others in the team were not at that level and thus we stood no chance against the bosses. So our sometimes maddening guild/raid leader declared that if we lacked a team DPS output of 10K we would make the raid a “trash run,” which is WoW code for “waste time playing the RNG.” I suppose in theory there are decent epics that drop off the trash but there’s a reason no one does 5-man heroic trash runs: Since you roll on any drops to begin with, you always have a one-in-however-many-party-members chance of scoring any given piece of loot. If some item drops at even a generous 50% rate, dungeon party members have a 20% chance to collecting that item on top of the 50%. So in most cases your best case (and unrealistic) scenario is a 10% chance that a given mob will net you a good item. There are some mathematical variables such as usability of the items to begin with, Need rolls and the actual probability for any trash drop (which is more like 5% or less, like on Maimgor as an example) but the point is, it’s not a viable strategy for gear accumulation when the collect rate for any drops is 20%, and it certainly isn’t mathematically sound when your base rate is 10% or 4% depending on the size of your raid.

With all this probability, it was predictable that nothing of value dropped and once one member declared they had to bail after the first run up to the initial boss, it started a critical mass that disbanded the group. Instead I joined a team doing a run on Zul’Aman which was fun but after another hour and a half or so I was falling asleep at the wheel and had to bow out myself.

Between this experience, the earlier Baradin Hold tryst and some of my complaints last week it’s becoming increasingly clear that this guild is not designed for raiding. I was checking through the Looking For Guild tool on my Death Knight and I noticed that my guild is the largest one that has open enrollment, with no barrier to entry at all. On one hand, that’s great for a casual, helpful leveling guild. On the other hand, it seems that being inclusive is not the best way to build a successful raid team, which is why you hear people recruiting in incredibly specific manners: “We need a Protection Warrior tank with 250K HP and an Affliction Warlock capable of 11K DPS; no Death Knights need apply.” I believe what you’re hearing when that’s said is “we lost a guy just like that and he really benefited our group” or “there’s a specific ability or dynamic these roles bring that we’re looking for to help us over a particular hump.” It’s sort of the social equivalent to theorycrafting, but as with that discipline, the more specific you can be the more value you bring. The other end of the spectrum is bringing anyone along who is online and meets the basic game requirements, having some time to kill and you end up where we are in the guild: Unable to bring down a single boss in a raid.

I mentioned before that I’m kind of conflicted about what to do. So far the guild’s strategy has been to announce the raids for times when lots of people are online and then take whoever shows up along. I feel that approach won’t work because there are good and great players in the guild and I think there are the makings of a solid progression raid team there. I don’t even know yet if I qualify (though my DPS seems high enough, I’m still a bit of a spaz on CC and I know my DPS suffers heavily when I have to deal with complex fight mechanics). Either way, raiding is something I want to do but I want to actually do it and so far there has been a lot of halfhearted efforts resulting in a vague “we need better gear” diagnosis which sends everyone back to the drawing board of “run more heroics.” Thing is, I can keep running heroics but there are a diminishing number of item upgrades out there for me which means mostly I’m doing the slow Valor Point grind which will take months and by then this tier of raid content will be old hat.

I actually did a little bit of digging to see what it might take to get into some raiding and it looks like the top raiding guild on my current server has some need for Resto Shamans and Blood DKs which means in theory once those toons are leveled up I could try applying with them to get onto a raid team. My other options would be to make a healer on a different realm (or work on an existing healer) since they seem to always be in demand and look for a raiding guild there. But a bit of the issue is that I have investment in the characters I’m using now. Specifically my Mage, whom I feel is representative of the play experience I most want to get out of the game. The scenario I imagine is one in which I can take that toon and step it lightly to one side such that my focus when logged in as that character is raid and raid preparation without the vigors of server transfers and loss of Herbalist/Alchemist access for my other alts. The level of realism this daydream contains is highly subjective.

Sha-ma-la-ma-shaman

Over the weekend I pushed my Shaman to level 50 which was necessary because I also got both Tailoring and Enchanting to 300 so there was nowhere to go without the next professional level, requiring a level 50 character. I’m finding that I actually enjoy PvP more so at this stage in the progressions than running instances, probably because the dungeons at this level are pretty epic in length and I’m surprised to find queues as a Healer—even in the late vanilla level range—to be a bit longer than I care for. Not that the PvP queues have been much better in my Battlegroup, especially the Random Battleground queue. For a bit I found queuing for specific BGs to help, but by the end of the weekend even that wasn’t really doing the trick.

One problem I’ve had in the PvP Battlegrounds is in getting my raid frames set up right. I don’t care for the default UI raid frames but the Pitbull efforts I came up with have a tendency to break down when I get dropped into, say, Alterac Valley where the raid sizes are drastically different than in Warsong Gulch. The simpler the frame is, the better, but I tend to think “Oh, I’ll definitely want this piece of information” as I’m configuring the frames only to find as useful as it may be, it’s overload. Plus Pitbull seems a little wonky at on-the-fly re-arranging of the frame columns which is where most of my hassle comes from since if the raid group gets too large I can no longer see the screen through all the unit frames. But I live and die as a healer by the frames I’m using since that’s how I target select friendly units so while it never really mattered to my DPS classes, getting this right for the Shaman is big.

I’ve also gotten now to the point where I have enough Totems that it matters which ones I’m using (before there were pretty clear cut choices, but with the addition of Mana Tide Totem I now have to at least choose between Mana Stream—for slow, steady mana, and Mana Tide—for burst regen). The grouping skills like Call of the Ancestors are great, but they do require some pre-planning. I have all three now (Call of the Spirits and Call of the Elements being the other two) and I try to think of them as “PvP Call,” “Standard Call” and “Emergency Call.” PvP call is basically my flag defense set where I give as much boosting to nearby faction-mates, debuff the opponents and try to keep myself alive knowing that the standard PvP strategy is “Kill the Healer First.” My standard set is basically a balanced set of long lasting mana assistance, heal helpers and group buffs while the emergency set is for getting back mana and health as quickly as possible in a pinch. It will be a while before I master this aspect of the class since I’m still getting used to the mechanics of keeping someone alive just using my basic spells, but I see where it is going to eventually make the difference between being a successful Resto Shaman and one who gets kicked from heroics for letting everyone die.

So, no pressure.

Shouldn’t We Be Called “Dead Knights”?

Since I was (apparently) on a round number kick I also pushed the Death Knight up to level 60 via some heavily Rested XP-assisted Hellfire Peninsula questing and a run through Hellfire Ramparts. As a tank. At level 59.

So let’s talk about that tanking experience. First of all, it solidified something I was starting to suspect which is that it isn’t just Prot Warrior tanking I don’t like: It’s just tanking. Something about the dynamic of having to be responsible for keeping track of what is going on in so many places at once really stresses me out and it feels an awful lot like the process of playing another kind of game I don’t enjoy as much as I kind of wish I did: Real-Time Strategy. I don’t like fighting to quickly target and react to the exact right thing in a split second when the hard-hitting melee mob peels off from me due to a big crit from the caster and I need to re-establish threat before it turns that party member into a greasy smear. I don’t like having to keep so much of my rotation in my mind that I’m reacting not only to what the AI-controlled enemies are doing as second nature but I’m doing the same in response to what my own party members are doing. I have pretty quick reflexes overall, but my analytical process is more deliberate than the margin for error as a tank permits. The result is I’m a very flail-y, undisciplined tank and I hate being that way.

In the run through HFR it didn’t help that I was the lowest leveled player, still wearing basic DK starting blues. To their credit the group was gracious and patient even though we wiped once on what is typically an easy dungeon. The healer griped quite a bit about how fast he was going out of mana because I was definitely struggling to keep aggro on the larger groups, especially when pats started getting pulled but fortunately the Mage, who was yanking threat like crazy as a result of being a super-rich alt decked in BoAs and BoE epics (bought for ridiculous sums that were probably still nothing to him), defended me and noted that in spite of being under-geared and under-leveled, I was doing as good a job as some heavily geared failtanks can do. It was a sort of backhanded compliment, but I found it somewhat encouraging. The biggest issue I think was that Death and Decay, a key group threat generation ability, isn’t available until level 60 so I was working without sufficient tools to begin with. In retrospect I should have specifically queued for green dungeons only since at 59 HFR shows as red (difficult for your level) in the Looking For Dungeon tool.

The way we eventually made it through was by having the other DK who was Frost specced I believe play an off-tank style so between the two of us we kept the threat off the healer and the ranged DPS and it worked out pretty well from then on. And in fact I found that, as with the Prot Warrior, I did great when I was single-target tanking. Obviously tanking is about managing threat on groups so it’s dumb to say that I like tanking as long as I only have to worry about holding aggro on one mob, but I reserve the right to this particular dumbness. If there were a role in the game that was all about locking down the aggro on one target only, I think I’d have a lot of fun with that. Anyway, all that aside we made it through and I got to level 60 which permitted me to continue my primary project of the week: Inscriptioning.

I wish I could tell you why I’ve loved this profession grind so much, but I seriously could not stop hunting down the necessary herbs, milling them up and making glyphs and cards all weekend. It’s odd because Jewelcrafting has a very similar progression mechanic to Inscription, but while Prospecting gets you the gems from stacks of ore, most of the crafted items also require annoying-to-come-by secondary mats like metal bars which aren’t sold by the profession supplier (unlike Tailoring’s thread or Inscription’s parchment). The result feels like you need to farm double mats since metal bars also come from ore: It would be as if you needed to create quills from herbs as well as milling them for pigments. Anyway, something about Inscriptioning captured me and I’ve been jamming on it, getting well up past the 300 mark in just a few days. Granted, I’ve blown through four or so farming runs with my Herbalist Mage and another 1,000 to 1,500 gold on top of that buying herbs off the Auction House but the way I figure it, once I no longer have to visit the AH for any core crafted items (other than Engineered ones) on this realm, I can start to make as much money as I can carry by working on those hard-to-craft high level items which sell for small fortunes apiece.

The only drawback now is that, like with the Shaman, I’m reaching the point where my actual character level is impeding my profession progress so at some point I’ll have to set this grind aside and do three things: Level the Shaman, level the Death Knight and do some serious ore mining with the Warrior. Guess what next week’s Edition is probably going to be about?

Actually, you’re wrong. This coming weekend is KublaCon so next week will probably be very little WoW and lots of tabletop games.

Novel!

This week was punctuated by intense frustration in my dungeon experiences. It seems that the release of Patch 4.1 the best players abandoned the heroic dungeon queues in favor of Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman leaving behind a handful of people who don’t have time for raid-length instances or people hoping for “easier” Valor grinds and a metric crapton of undergeared scrubs who can’t be bothered to crack a single website to learn the fights. The result is instances that were starting to become cakewalks suddenly dropping back into the incalculably frustrating realm. I spent so much time wiping on bosses that aren’t even that challenging like Dragha Shadowburner in Grim Batol and Vanessa VanCleef in Deadmines. Granted, Corla, Herald of Twilight in Blackrock Caverns is a tough fight and always has been, but there’s no reason I should have to burn through (no exaggeration) 14 other players ragequitting in frustration with each other in order to get her down. And of course I wasn’t going to give up because she drops one of the precious few wand upgrades that I’m still waiting for… which naturally didn’t even come up.

By the end of the week I had to take a self-imposed break on queuing heroics as the Mage in favor of working on other projects (mostly alts) or I was going to start being That Guy in the randoms who berates everyone else (conveniently overlooking his own faults) and generally gets kicked because people can’t stand him. And yeah, I wasn’t perfect through all these fights but when my meager gear is pulling 12K DPS and that’s four to eight thousand better than the second guy on the list and I catch myself being the only guy trying to fight the adds in the Erudax fight it’s hard not to get snippy. So yeah, I took a break.

The Alts

One thing I did last week was start PvPing with my Shaman. I know I sounded like I was finding healing boring last week but the truth is healing itself is terrific fun, kind of like a meta-game. But running dungeons with tons of players sporting BoA Heirloom gear or Twink alts who have a 50,000 gold bank alt feeding them the very best everything means healing isn’t exactly a taxing profession in the 30s and 40s. And hey, I’m no different with my full set of Heirlooms and generous guild bank. The result is dungeons as a healer entail casting Earth Shield on the tank and then spot healing for the occasional AoE attack or when some zealous Warlock pulls a few crits in a row and yanks aggro for a couple of seconds until a boss comes up. For instances like Dire Maul with loads of trash, it’s kind of a snoozer.

PvP is the flip side of that coin. All you have to do is find someone on your side and follow them for about thirty seconds and you’ll have some serious healing to do. And it’s all great, exciting fun. The plus side is you earn honor while you play and it’s much more exciting. The downside is the XP/hour rate is riskier since you don’t get much XP unless you win and XP only comes from achieving objectives so long matches also drop your leveling rate. Now, if you win, you get a slew of XP but unlike dungeons where the XP rate is somewhat predictable it’s not quite as sure of a thing.

I did try a new healing AddOn, Healium, to see if it helped with some of the slowness I was perceiving or if perhaps it made me a better healer. Basically it replaces the party/raid unit frames with its own unit frames that include a set of assignable hotkeys next to each unit. The idea is you put your spells in the key boxes and click the spell next to the player to auto-target and cast at once. It prevents the target shuffle from being a problem (especially the issue I have where my target defaults back to none if I loot anything and my next spell ends up being cast on myself) and allows you to react more quickly to incoming damage on DPS (as opposed to the tank which is where my primary focus usually lies).

The good thing about Healium is that it does what it advertises which is make you a more efficient healer, less prone to common healing mistakes. The bad parts, though, outnumber that benefit.

• Primarily the issue is it pulls your focus and your mouse away from the main play field which means you’re less likely to notice and/or react if you end up standing in the fire. Not a huge concern in the instances I’m running these days, but I don’t want to have Healium teach me bad habits I’ll have to unlearn later when fights become more difficult.
• Unlike my beloved Pitbull unit frames, Healium’s frames aren’t terribly customizable which means certain graphical issues like not being able to clearly see the first 15-25% of the damage bar behind the role icon aren’t easily fixable without sacrificing other functionality.
• Doesn’t really make healing any more exciting, in fact kind of the opposite.

So I don’t think I’ll continue using it, although it did convince me to modify my raid unit frames for PvP which was a pretty fun little project. One wish list for Pitbull would be some sort of sample frame option that let you see what party frames would look like without having to actually join a party since most groups I get into aren’t really that crazy about waiting around while I make minor tweaks to my UI.

Also on the Shaman, who is now level 46, I reached 300 Tailoring and 275 Enchanting. I need to hit level 50 before I can bump my skill to Master level and go beyond 300 on Tailoring which is a bummer because I’ve been relying on Tailoring to feed me disenchantable items to level Enchanting. I don’t want to waste precious mats making Tailored items that won’t net me skill advances so I’ve been spending too much money on the auction house to get Enchanting mats while I try to push toward level 50.

Meanwhile I pulled the Death Knight out of the starting zone (my overall impression of it was favorable but I felt the transition from Lich King lackey to free-will Horde member was kind of forced in that I would have rather had a slow burn of regret and remorse shift the position similar to what was hinted at in the quest where you have to kill the prisoner of your race; as it was the disloyalty to the LK felt pretty self-serving). I started jamming on Jewelcrafting and I made an executive decision to transition Inscriptioning over to him as well, orphaning my Paladin. I just don’t have the patience right now to do another alt from the very beginning and the Paladin doesn’t hold my interest so she’s going to get abandoned for now, though I think I’ll keep the toon for a while in case I ever want to try playing a Pally again later I don’t have to start from scratch.

The DK mechanics are intriguing but strike me as a bit overwrought. I get that they wanted the Hero Class to feel advanced, like it was something you needed WoW experience to be able to really do well, and I think it succeeds on that level but I can’t help feeling like it get very game-y in the process. I mean, explain to me in non-game-mechanics terms what the purpose of Death Runes and Runic Power is and what their difference could possibly be. I do like that the abilities are very combo-heavy (“if this is true, the ability does that; which allows other ability to do some other thing“) though in practice it ends up feeling like a strict rotation because you don’t ever want to use (say) Blood Strike until you’ve at least hit with Icy Touch and Plague Strike. And so on.

The good news is he’s a complete animal at waxing mobs in questing zones: The fel Orcs around Thrallmar in Hellfire Peninsula typically gave me some troubles when I was around level 60 on both the Warrior and the Mage. As the DK I churned through them without ever once stopping to heal, and that’s using the standard gear supplied by the quests in the DK starting zone. Very nice. Anyway, I can’t say I adore the DK the way I love the Mage and am growing to love the Shaman, but he’s a perfectly fun class to play and I’m just happy to be able to level alternate professions without having to grind all the way up. I intend to do some questing with this toon (as opposed to my queue-only policy on the Shaman), but also once I hit 60 I’ll drop into some BC dungeons and try my hand at tanking again. Maybe it will be better with a different class, I dunno.

I’ve been playing a new-to-me iPhone game called Dungeon Raid a lot the last few days and I’m finding it to be extraordinarily great. It’s got a an ancestry in Roguelikes (Nethack, etc) in that it’s a randomly generated dungeon crawl with perma-death but its mechanics are similar to Puzzle Quest (or, more specifically, Bejeweled). I’m pretty new to the game but I wanted to keep a sort of log of the things I’ve learned about how to succeed at the game and I figured here was a good place because I haven’t been able to find much in the way of strategy guides online. The most useful I’ve seen is Jose Reyes‘, though as with all Rougelike games, there is some room for divergent opinions about what priority to put things and which strategy works best. That said, following the basic principles Reyes outlines will up your game demonstrably. The tips below are largely based off experience with Reyes’ approach and note that this will be a work in progress so nothing here is unequivocal, just notes from firsthand experience.

Early Game

Early on Reyes is right: It’s all about XP. Kill as many monsters as you can, focus on XP boosting abilities and build up your stable of spells. A technique that has worked well for me is to prioritize monster killing every other turn so that you clear your highest total non-monster match on opposing turns. This allows your (hopefully) big matches to play off each other: Big monster match followed by big potion/coin/shield match, repeat. The reason for this is to get the most bonus matches possible per turn, understanding that especially early on you can easily absorb even several turns of monster attacks even without worrying about potions or shields since the monsters start off doing very little damage. The exception to this rotation is when a special monster appears at which point you almost always want to focus on clearing that monster because they give big coin and XP boosts and can do enough damage to give you trouble.

Upgrades early game should be focused on XP and damage boosting as top priority. Monsters always progress in strength as turns advance so you need to stay on pace with them in the damage department or you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by monsters you can’t clear every other turn. More often than not you should be able to match three skulls without a sword and kill two of them. If that’s not the case, you’re not devoting enough upgrades to dealing damage. Obviously XP boosting is important to maximize these early, easy kills into lots of skill ups. Obviously Strength upgrades are then the best since they grant both of these things together, and raw XP boost being second best. Reyes downplays the utility of base damage upgrades but I tend to think of it as a decent choice if there is no other XP or damage boosting option available on a level upgrade. Item upgrades granted from collecting shields should indeed never be taken for base damage (there’s always something better to put onto an item since you only get one) but given the choice between two cooldown upgrades and a cooldown plus a base damage upgrade, I’ll take the latter. If you can maintain a damage pace sufficient to kill three skulls unaided by a sword, you’ll rarely struggle to deal with regular monsters.

Your second tier of upgrades are the necessary defensive upgrades. I like to maximize the stats first since they offer two benefits each and the secondary benefits max out eventually and getting to that max fast is important for the later game stages. That means I prefer Dexterity, Vitality and Luck over the other choices, though as Reyes points out, don’t overlook Durability entirely. Given a lack of great upgrade options (which will happen from time to time) I would take Durability first, HP second, and base damage third. I disagree with Reyes about Life Leech since I think it’s always useful to do two things at the same time, it’s especially important if you choose not to select Heal as one of your spells since you’ll waste lots of whole turns collecting potions without this and if you’re focusing on keeping your damage output high it starts to pay off pretty quickly. Regeneration is secondary to Life Leech to me, but also useful if you decide against Heal and can be good in tandem with Life Leech. Never select either of these upgrades over Vitality or direct HP boost, however. Even at 15-20% Leech on a high damage output you’re likely to be getting less benefit in terms of survivability than pushing your max HP.

Some stuff to avoid, especially in early game: As near as I can tell the generic Cooldown upgrade doesn’t actually improve the cooldown on your spells, rather it bumps the current cooldowns globally by one turn. This is only directly useful in the edge case of having a spell that will prolong your life one turn away from cooldown and you can’t survive the current turn. Otherwise, skip it (though this is dependent on my estimation being correct that it doesn’t actually permanently lower the cooldown of all spells; if that is the case suddenly this spell is a top priority because it can reduce cooldowns beyond the max spell levels). Blunting is of limited usefulness in early game and Reyes seems to think it doesn’t scale well in the later game stages which is a good enough reason for me to avoid it, although as you start getting into later game it becomes much more useful to smooth out incoming damage especially from stubborn enemies who get stuck in less accessible corners, so probably around the time you pick your fourth spell you should start putting some Blunting upgrades higher in your priority list. Spikes is a tough call because I find its benefit to be minimal if you’re focusing on clearing out monsters to gain XP—by the time Spikes does enough damage to clear a monster you probably could have done it yourself several turns earlier. As Reyes points out it can be useful in helping with difficult special monsters but as I’ll point out below, if you have the capacity to wait out a monster and let Spikes kill it, you’ve either gone with Spikes as a core strategy or you hit kind of a stasis mode; in my opinion there are better ways to deal with annoying specials.

Spell Selection

Read Reyes’ breakdown for convincing arguments in favor of Dazzle and Teleport. Dazzle I think is good, but since it doesn’t directly clear board areas it isn’t great as a first or second skill. Better are the skills that directly pull groups from the board. Reyes recommends Repair and I agree with him on that front but he also suggests Skill Elixir and I’m not sure I’m with him there. The problem is that these skills have to be applicable beyond the early game and while tons of XP is great early on, it gets less beneficial later when survival becomes more of an issue as the monsters increase in power. I actually prefer Heal, which does the same thing but gives you the actual HP instead of XP. The principal problem with Skill Elixir is that it re-purposes health potions which means you not only don’t get health from them but you then have to wait for them to collect back on the board in order to replenish your health. It’s risky to assume you’ll have enough time to do that without wishing you had some of those potions back. I’ve played games where I actually got both, but with two “clear-out” spells devoted to the same resource you end up getting less of each for every cast since the tendency is to try and stagger their cooldowns. So I recommend Repair as a first skill and Heal as another collection skill but I would avoid taking it until the third or fourth slot since it isn’t as critical early in the game.

Your second skill should instead be some sort of panic switch: Your go-to spell to get you out of a tight spot. There are several, most of them focused on mitigating special monsters: Banish, Exorcise and Teleport are the foolproof ones, but also Counterattack and Freeze can be reasonable panic switches though only if you just need a single turn of breathing room. Less reliable panic switch spells might be Explosive Armor and Explosive Potion could work if you like to live on the edge (or Fireball and Slash if you really like taking risks) and a few that aren’t recommended but can serve the purpose if you don’t mind the decent chance that your tight spot isn’t aided by your fallback spell like Boost Damage, Disarm and Shatter. If you don’t mind sitting on Dazzle without popping it every time it’s off cooldown, it can be a middling panic switch as well. My favorite panic switch is probably Teleport because it can aid in multiple-special situations plus it guarantees you won’t go out of the oven and into the frying pan if a new special replaces a dealt with one. Exorcise would be my second pick only because you still can get some XP from the evaded monster where Banish is just a problem solver and nothing more.

The big question facing you is probably going to be Dazzle vs. Enchant for your third slot. Enchant is pretty fantastic in that it’s just a free upgrade, every time it’s off cooldown (and there’s no reason not to use it every cooldown). Yet, it has a very long cooldown that is even long when fully upgraded. My recommendation after fiddling with both is to take Enchant if it comes up relatively early in the game and then don’t bother upgrading it unless there is absolutely nothing else worth choosing. The few extra turns between availability aren’t really worth the wasted upgrade. However, if you see Dazzle first, take it instead (the side benefit to that being that if you don’t see Teleport for a while, you can still hold back on being aggressive with Dazzle and use it as a pseudo-panic spell).

Some spell combos to avoid: Skill Elixir/Heal/Explosive Potion/Mana Potion; Dazzle/Treasure; Dazzle/Golden Touch. Also avoid the Boost spells (Boost Armor/Boost Damage/Boost Gold/Boost Health) as they are nice but not as useful as their free-clear counterparts (Repair/Disarm/Treasure/Heal, respectively) and any of the more random spells which you can’t control: Earthquake, Fireball, Magic Sword, Slash and Trap.

It’s certainly a viable strategy to skip the second free-clear spell (Heal or Repair) and go for either Treasure Chamber or some kind of killer combo. If you’re already taking Repair and Dazzle, it might be worth considering swapping out Heal for Scavenge: Dazzle-Scavenge-Repair could be a poor-man’s Enchant. If you do select Enchant, you may consider taking Mana Potion instead of Heal to run through those a bit faster.

The key thing is to make minor adjustments to your upgrade priorities depending on what you decide to do spell-wise: If you aren’t going to take Heal, make sure you put extra effort into upgrading Vitality and Luck early in the game when you aren’t at risk of death from a few regular monsters; if you decide to use a secondary panic spell like Freeze, beef up your defense and focus especially on damage so you can maximize the extra turn.

Upgrading Equipment

Equipment upgrades should follow the same basic strategy you’re using for level upgrades: XP, damage, HP, defense and then everything else. However, be cautious not to upgrade to a piece that isn’t compatible with your previous enchantments lest you lose a hard-earned bonus. Likewise, if a new item has an upgrade and a secondary benefit that provides a free boost in another area (say a shield that adds +1 to damage but also happens to add +5% Life Leech), always take the double-upgrade even if they’re both fairly low priority improvements. Occasionally I’ve seen an item that grants upgrades in three slots, though I don’t remember seeing one like that which didn’t also come with a downgrade on something as well. In that case I still take the upgrades, since netting two is still better than just taking one, but note that a two-up item with a downgrade elsewhere is a net gain of one upgrade and only worthwhile if you deem the downgrade to be inferior to both ups.

Your second choice beyond a double upgrade would be any item that casts a spell on upgrade: I’ve seen items come with Enchant and you can’t beat having an upgrade give you another upgrade (the side benefit of which is you get to see two sets).

Just The Start

These are notes from my experiences early on in my career as a Dungeon Raider. My strategies are likely to refine as I try various things and compare notes with other players. I said up top but it bears repeating that this is stuff that has worked to a certain degree for me so far, but I’m interested in improving. If you have any tips or strategies, I’d love to hear them, either in the comments section or at ironsoap@tunnelsofdoom.org. I’ll try to update this and add more discussion as I continue playing.

One thing I’m most interested in hearing is what people’s strategies are in regards to waiting on the spells you want: Is it better to hold out longer to get the right combo or should you work with what you get? I also kind of glossed over spell upgrades which reduce cooldowns: Some games I try to max out the spells to churn through them faster, other times I focus on more immediately beneficial upgrades to stats. Thus far I haven’t been able to determine which is more likely to result in a successful game.

I’m also curious as to which class people are playing. I’ve stuck with the Ranger for the most part to this point as I have him up to level 5, but the arrows are infrequent enough without Volley (which I can’t see being a viable spell choice) to only be occasionally useful. I do have the Mage unlocked who looks like an intriguing alternative with his free (that is, non-spell-based) mana potions.

There was a moment last week, around Friday, that I was kind of bummed out because I was sure that this—”this” being Children’s Week—was going to be the event that finally unraveled my hopes at getting the Violet Proto-Drake in a year. The reason for the discouragement was that I didn’t even log on to the game for several days following the posting of the last Edition due to an illness that plagued the females in my household leaving my wife unfit to care for our daughter and her, in turn, needing extra care and attention due to a raging fever and a very sad shift in her personality wherein she seemed to be frightened at the external forces acting upon her body. The good news for us is she doesn’t get sick much thus far. Needless to say, I essentially forgot about the game for two or three days and took care of my family.

When I did log back in I realized that I still needed School of Hard Knocks, the PvP achievement that has apparently derailed more than one person’s attempts at the year-in-the-making mount. Given my setback in number of attempts, it looked pretty bleak.

Somehow or other, though, I buckled down on Saturday morning, at times ruefully because the attempts numbered in the dozens and toward the end I really just wanted to log in as a different character and do something fun for a change. And at last I completed the requirement for Warsong Gulch and nabbed the achievement that completed the event requirements. I won’t say it was a hollow victory because I was very pumped when I finally was able to return that silly flag, but it did have the semi-unfortunate effect of making me a bit sick of PvP for a little while, especially Alterac Valley (which I wasn’t crazy about to begin with) and Warsong Gulch (which somewhat sadly I really liked for a time). The good news is that I had neglected the other toons all week in an effort to get the dumb achievement so I had plenty of reason to catch up with them after the event ended and give myself a break from all that PvPing.

What the whole encounter did prompt me to do was read ahead a bit on the rest of the World Event achievement lists to see what else was likely to interrupt my quest for the mount and it looks like, unless Blizzard changes something, the two most likely to trip me up are Sinister Calling and Fa-la-la-la-Ogri’la. The latter was one I missed last Christmas because of the reputation requirements for getting the Ogri’la dailies so in theory it should be doable as long as I spend some time between now and the end of this year rep grinding with that faction, plus the comments thread on Wowhead indicates that there may be a shortcut built in that doesn’t require the reputation grind as previously thought but I’m not positive about that. The Sinister Calling achievement looks like a RNG battle with a limited number of attempts possible. That’s a big bummer but at least it doesn’t look like anything that everyone else playing WoW is exempt from; it’s a source of frustration all around. The other ones I was worried about that are PvP-based actually look easy enough now that I’m more PvP-oriented with the Warrior; they seem to require simply getting X honorable kills while dressed in some event garb or another. There are a couple more of the “Do something to a select subset of the game population” such as Turkey Lurkey, which could be difficult as well though none of them seem to have the same number of requirements as Shake Your Bunny-Maker which had the odd distinction of needing a race/gender combo and a minimum level requirement. I suppose with something like Turkey Lurkey there’s nothing stopping an Alliance player from rolling an Orc Rogue and parking it outside Stormwind, for example.

I am worried about that Sinister Calling thing though.

Just One Drop/The Waffle

I’ve reached a fairly frustrating plateau with my Mage recently where I need to move on to the next level of content in order to facilitate my gear improvement but my current gear and situation is just sub-par enough to make that transition difficult. I’ve talked about how I couldn’t queue into the new dungeons last week because my item level was just below the requirement and getting in there actually matters because the loot in those dungeons is much better than the other heroics from patch 4.0.x. Well, at the tail end of last week I finally got a minor upgrade to a 333 item that boosted me the last point over the edge and I had the chance to try the new Zul’Gurub.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that just squeaking in over the requirement limit meant I was way undergeared for the content and I died a ridiculous amount on three bosses. In fact I ran out of time and never did see if they got the final boss down. On the plus side I got a Spiritcaller Cloak (which was an upgrade but is hideous to the point that I hit the “Hide Cloak” option in the preferences once I put it on) as a random mob drop but I can’t say I was really tearing it up in there. Part of the problem is that I’m just not pulling down 10,000 DPS on a consistent basis against heroic level mobs and other than continuing to grind Valor to try and speed my transition from heroic-level blues to epic gear pieces, I’m not sure how to cross that threshold reliably.

Part of me thinks that I’m spending too much time on heroic dungeons and not enough time working to get into a raiding situation. After all, the work involved in Valor purchasing individual epic pieces is something like four and a half weeks (for key slot items that cost 2,200 VP) which presumes hitting the normal heroic dungeon Valor cap each and every week, something I’m not likely to do. If we’re just talking about the core gear slots (that is, ignoring cloaks and rings and trinkets and such) that’s eight slots that need to be filled which would take three full years to do. On the other hand, most raid bosses seem to have between 15-20% chance to drop something I could use each time they’re downed suggesting that if I could get into a raid group that downed even two bosses a week I’d halve the time it took to gear out.

And herein is my struggle because I very much like my guild but they are not really pushing the raiding envelope with much gusto at all. Sure there’s idle chatter about getting raids going but by and large the focus in the guild is on achievements and leveling alts. I’m not saying I have intentions of becoming a hard core raider but I’m starting to get to the point where I see my priorities diverging from those of the guild. It’s really little things, like the fact that there isn’t much going on guild-wise outside the game: There are no active forums, the website is a ghost town and ventrilo is only ever populated by the same dozen or so players. Part of the blame does fall on myself, I realize. I originally leveled the Mage to be a better DPS in what was becoming, at the time, a fairly regular 5-8 man group, one which could easily have been fleshed out into a raid team. But as circumstances changed my play schedule became more erratic and I no longer log in reliably at the same basic time each evening. Some of that is chicken/egg: If I had a regular weekly raid appointment I could probably work out that schedule. Lacking that, I play when I have time here and there and I don’t think people in the guild think of me as a steady presence and even though I’ve expressed interest in raiding they don’t seem to think of me as a number to be counted on when they’re deciding if they have enough for raiding.

I can think of two options: I can try to wedge my way into the guild a bit more and volunteer some of the precious little time I have for various guild-improvement activities such as fixing up the website, working on getting the forums more active, volunteering to organize a raid team, basically trying to make my current guild match more closely what I want out of it. The other choice is to shop the Mage around and see if there are other guilds that I could switch into that are already doing the kinds of things I like to do.

There are pros and cons to each. A big con of working on my current guild is that it would be a non-game time sink. Typically if I have time to be doing World of Warcraft-y things, I like to be playing the game. The only reason this blog gets updated is because I have to do something on Tuesday mornings while the maintenance window is ongoing. Other than that I’m playing or doing other things, so fiddling with a website and trying to be active on forums (something I’ve never been great at) sounds kind of blah. Not to mention that I’m new enough to the game and the guild that I don’t want to be seen as someone trying to horn in on anyone’s authority: I know the guild leaders work pretty hard to try and do the best they can with the guild and even if I sometimes think I could do better, I’d never presume to know what it takes to do what they do. The downside of shopping around is that I’d lose the DPS toon I specifically rolled and maxed out to be my damage-dealer in this guild, plus there’s the very real possibility that such an endeavor would result in a paid realm transfer: A $25 fee that would not only mean ponying up more dough for a frivolous virtual service than I could ever feel comfortable with, but my current server of choice would lose it’s resident 85 Herbalist/Alchemist and I’ve been spending an awful lot of time trying to get the profession bases covered in my stable of alts to cut out a couple of 525 professions just like that.

So I don’t know what, if anything, I ought to do. One alternate thought I had was to try out a couple of other guilds on some of my non-affiliated alts (like the Death Knight) and see if I can do a try-before-I-buy kind of deal, possibly focusing on other guilds within the same server. Once I’m out of the DK starting zone I do plan to try out the Looking For Guild tool and see how well it works, so there’s something that could come from that.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Healing

I made it up about five more levels on my Shaman over the weekend mostly by running various wings of Scarlet Monastery which is a good suite of instances to run. I personally find them to be pretty enjoyable and they have a lot of drops that are good for Tailoring like Silk Cloth. It actually got me thinking about what makes an enjoyable instance versus a drudge and I came up with the following. Note that these apply to the low-level Vanilla instances for the most part, because newer dungeons (basically Wrath onward) kind of operate on a different set of game paradigms.

1. Good dungeons have an epic feel in a reasonably sized experience. A good example of this is Deadmines (Reg) and Scholomance, both of which have cool internal lore and seem a lot more sprawling and complex than they really are. Bad examples are Wailing Caverns and Gnomergeran which both just feel overly long.
2. Good dungeons don’t punish players who have never run the instance before. Mauradon, with its confusing multi-level access to the various bosses is poor at this, while Scarlet Monastery is much better since it splits itself into separate wings with a progressive difficulty and a semi-linear progression that makes the distinct parts manageable while the sum is so much more without any of it being brutal for first-timers.
3. Good dungeons have a nice boss-to-trash ratio. The magic number isn’t really quantifiable but I think more than a dozen trash mobs between bosses starts to get really dull, especially if there isn’t much variance to the mobs (ahem, Razorfen Kraul).
4. Good dungeons always make working through them a joy rather than a pain. Sometimes this means having teleporters to get you deeper into the instance if you wipe and have to corpse run back in, sometimes it just means not getting overly cute with the progression mechanics so they get confusing (Dire Maul is bad at this, Scholomance is better). Typically any dungeon with internal quests is on the right track (Blackfathom Deeps, in spite of its reputation, for example), those without are not so much (Gnomergeran, I am disappoint). Honestly just that small carrot of the dungeon quest makes going through it matter and mean something as opposed to just being content designed to be 5-manned.

I think most of the old world dungeons, especially after the little changes in Cataclysm, are pretty good. And it doesn’t seem like Blizzard are resting on their laurels either, apparently they’re removing the maze from Wailing Caverns. It may seem controversial, but it really isn’t. Non-linear dungeons are good at making their progression fun rather than dull (see #4, also Blackrock Caverns) but awkward layouts aren’t non-linear, they’re just confusing and frustrating. Blizzard isn’t 100% on this (the revamped Sunken Temple for example was excitingly non-linear before and is now fundamentally Stormwind Stockades: Swamp Edition) but if they want to cut out the backtracking and group frustration inherent in places like Wailing Caverns and a couple of the Coilfang Reservoir wings, they won’t have an argument from me.

This really matters to me on my Shaman because I’m running instances as my means of leveling up and if I get dropped into a dungeon that should take 30 minutes and I’m in there for two hours, that kills my XP rate and so far, even with the full suite of heirloom gear and guild XP bonuses, leveling rate is the thing that is holding me back the most. My professions have consistently outpaced my actual level and I end up waiting to ding a few times so I can train the next profession level so not fiddling around with a group for three or four times as long as should be necessary when I’m just trying to heal people, collect my experience and go is a major win for me.

Speaking of healing, part of the impetus behind this dungeon-crawler experiment was that since the Shaman is intended to be strictly a healer (my off-spec is being saved for a different Restoration build, not an Enhancement or Elemental DPS alternative), I needed as much practice leading up into high-level healing as I could possibly get and I wasn’t going to get that working on solo questing. But it turns out that for most people leveling alts, they don’t really need a lot of healing most of the time. I drop Earth Shield on the tank, stand around and maybe triage a careless DPS with Healing Wave every once in a while. I tend to throw out a few heals at the tank, too, just to give myself something to do between boss fights because mostly the trash is manageable as long as everyone is doing their jobs.

There has been one or two cases where I actually had to work and use a bunch of my tools to keep folks alive and when that happens it’s very exciting. But while I’m still surprised to find myself enjoying healing I feel like so far I haven’t really been tested much at it which means it gets a bit dull at times and when it’s early or late I catch myself dozing more so than I ever usually do playing the game. I guess I could say that means it’s more of a soothing play experience but that’s not really accurate either because when Serious Healing does need to be done it’s as stressful and exciting as anything in WoW, it’s just that the lulls between the action are longer especially at this level range. Hopefully things start getting hairier as I push through the level progression but it seems more like it’s just a matter of getting the fundamentals down so when I hit Cataclysm range I’m good enough at healing to be able to keep up.

I’ve finally discovered the purpose for my Warrior. It turns out he’s a blast to play in PvP. I kind of knew already that some light PvP wasn’t wholly outside my comfort realm because I’ve done Tol Barad several times with the Warrior but it was always kind of a side project; something to do whenever I wasn’t looking for excuses not to do dungeons as a tank. But the thing about PvP is that it allows me to use my Fury spec which I’m comfortable with in a non-PvE manner so I don’t feel like when I’m doing it that I’m so obviously failing as a tank.

The whole thing came about this week as I wrapped up Noblegarden by camping the Tol Barad Alliance base of operations for literally hours on Saturday morning. I should clarify up front that my daughter was off visiting her grandparents alone this weekend while my wife was out doing various personal errands and activities, enjoying her toddler-free reprieve. Meanwhile I was stuck at home at my desk because I pulled oncall duty at work so I had nothing to do but keep an eye on my work stuff and the rest of the time it was just Warcraft ahoy. Anyway, my only goal was to get that stupid achievement because I had the one day to finish it or it would have to be done next year. So I camped. And I camped. And I camped some more.

It gets really boring just sitting there clicking Alliance players to see if they happen to be a female Gnome, so I started queuing for Tol Barad when it came up. I figured it wasn’t going to hurt anything if I was away for a bit while the battle was taking place since most players on the Alliance side would be in the battle as well at that point, too. But Tol Barad only goes once every couple of hours so in the meantime it was getting dull. On a whim I decided to try queuing for random PvP Battlegrounds. Worst case scenario I figured was that I’d hate it and never do it again.

Instead I started having a lot of fun. It also helped that I realized how quickly Honor Points accumulate compared to Justice Points or Valor Points. Granted, Conquest Points are even harder to come by than Valor but it doesn’t matter since I’m undergeared for serious PvP anyway and most of the Honor gear is significantly better than my PvE stuff on that character. It soon became a huge project for me to get decked out as a contender in Honor PvP gear so I queued for Battlegrounds over and over and over again. At last I saw a female Gnome in the base camp and without really thinking I charged the camp, thinking, “AT LAST! THE GNOME!”

I didn’t make it.

The guards took me down before I could cast the bunny ears and I ended up at the graveyard on a 24-second resurrection timer. I couldn’t wait so I took off on a ghost run, saying aloud over and over: “Please still be there please still be there please still be there please…” until I was standing over my corpse with the resurrection dialog box and, lo! In the corner, I could see my Gnome. I rezzed and fully expected to be accosted again by the guards, this time at half health, so I hastily cast the stupid bunny spell and watched in what I presumed would be short-lived triumph as the achievement boxes popped up. And then…

…I didn’t die.

It was weird because I was out of the guards’ aggro radius and also not flagged for PvP so, technically, no one could do anything to me, but I was kind of stuck behind enemy lines. I briefly considered using my Hearthstone to go back to Dalaran (I switched my home city on the Warrior after patch 4.1 because they added the portal to Orgrimmar back and while it’s frequently a two-load-screen proposition to get to Org, it’s worth it because getting to Dalaran has been such a pain since Cataclysm) but I actually wanted to stay in Tol Barad and work on some daily quests so I tried to casually saunter out of the camp as if I had an invitation to be there the whole time. The guards saw through it all instantly and turned me into Cream of Orc Soup but it was totally worth it.

I presume that the back-to-back World Events with Noblegarden ending Saturday and Children’s Week beginning Sunday had to do with CW being the first week of May while NG coincides with the calendar-wandering Easter holiday, otherwise it’s kind of intense to have two of these things in a row. But I wanted to get a head start on Children’s Week since I cut it so close the previous event so Sunday—still oncall, still no daughter—I started working on those achievements. It’s a good thing I suppose that I got on the new PvP kick when I did because the difficult CW achieve is one in which you need to perform several PvP feats while your orphan companion is with you. So I spent more time queuing for Battlegrounds, earning Honor and trying to Assault a stupid flag in Arathi Basin. I finally got that one but it wasn’t easy. Even more challenging so far has been the Alterac Valley requirement. I actually got into a match where the Allies and Horde were trading off achievements but I didn’t realize they were doing it until it was very late in the match and I ran out of time. Hopefully I’ll have a few more chances but I still need to do Warsong Gulch as well. I keep thinking every one of these tough achievements is going to be the one that undoes my bid for the Proto-Drake. Knowing my luck it will instead be an easy one that I just overlook on accident or something.

By the end of the week my Warrior was rocking a nearly full set of Bloodthirsty Gladiator PvP armor and have close to 2,000 resilience now. I did a bit of reading and I think I need to reset my spec and adjust some hotbars and rotations so I can make the most of the tools at my disposal but I’m getting better at it and at least it’s breathed some fresh life into a character I had kind of gotten sick of.

Just Give It A Try

I have to make an aside here to talk about the phenomenon that happens to me in this game in particular but other online games as well which amounts to being shy about trying new things only to find they are not just tolerable but utterly enjoyable once I finally get over the mental roadblock of not wanting to have some twelve year-old flame me for twenty minutes because I n00b’d it up doing something unfamiliar. This has applied to doing random dungeons, random heroics, joining guilds, offering paid services like Mage portals or professional work and now PvP. Each time, broadening the scope of the game I play has made the game better, not worse which is what I always fear.

The lesson here is apparent: Just try it. If you’re newish to a sprawling game like this, especially one with a social element to it—even if that element is chatter on XBL—it’s worth just giving it a shot. It’s odd that the same anonimity mechanism which allows jerks to really embrace their inner douche doesn’t seem to permit those who would find their play experience fouled by those imbeciles to ignore their hateful pratter. In my case after a weekend of heavy PvP’ing I only encountered one instance of directly targeted angst which came because I was basically holding down the Goldmine in Arathi Basin by myself for close to ten minutes, valiantly fending off three or four small waves of assaulting Allies. At last another player (a Hunter I believe) from my faction showed up to help after the flag had been hit by a stealthing Rogue while I dealt with his Warlock and Paladin buddies. Between the two of us we wiped out the remaining Allies and I re-capped the flag which I felt was perfectly within my rights because I had owned this stupid cap point for so long and this Johnny-come-lately Hunter was free to try to cap it as well if he wanted but I felt no reservation in playing the Battleground as intended.

The issue was that he was achievement hunting for School of Hard Knocks (whereas I had already gotten the requirement for AB) and he took umbrage to the fact that I didn’t even have an orphan out which meant I wasn’t interested in the achievement. The possibility that I actually did need the achievement and had simply overlooked the orphan requirement didn’t seem to interest him and he called me several names. My sympathy was limited though. Like I said, if it wasn’t for me the opportunity to re-cap that flag would never have existed and he was free to try to cap the flag same as I. I know for a fact no one gifted me the achievement requirement when I got it, and more to the point he never indicated in any way that he was more interested in getting the achieve requirement than winning the Battleground ahead of time. I don’t feel like it’s my responsibility to make sure I have permission from everyone in the vicinity before I attempt to execute the game objectives just like I don’t feel like I need to ask permission to roll Need on an item that drops. I know that I try my hardest to play the game with integrity and a certain degree of polite deference to my fellow players. If their perceptions of my actions are skewed in some way, that’s not really my problem.

But these are the kinds of scenarios that, prior to their actual realization, fill me with dread and trepidation over trying something different. I wish I could somehow keep in my head the idea that so far I’ve regretted trying new things far less often than I have regretted not trying something. And interestingly that applies well beyond the bounds of the game.

Ze Patch, Mon

So 4.1 dropped which means new Heroics, interface changes and an alteration on how daily dungeon bonuses are handled. I’d love to tell you about the new Rise of the Zandalari dungeons, but I can’t because I’m one freaking ilevel point away from being able to queue into them on my Mage. I know that one of my trinkets and my cursed wand are what’s holding me back, but I can’t seem to get those slots filled. By far my favorite thing they did in this patch was change the daily dungeon rewards so it’s a weekly cap that can be rolled at your leisure. For someone who doesn’t play every single day and, even if it were possible, doesn’t always have the time to sit through a queue and then run a whole Heroic, this is huge. I tend to play in big chunks on weekend nights and smaller batches early weekday mornings before work. Where before I’d often try to squeeze in a Heroic in the morning so I could get my Valor, now I don’t have to and I can focus on other activities in those smaller blocks of time and get the weekly Valor in a more relaxed manner as time permits.

I ran a bunch of said Heroics on Sunday to try to get my ilevel up, but you need 346 (average) to queue in the new dungeons and I ended at 345 following a splurge of Valor point spending on a ring. My motivation was this: You can actually earn extra Valor per week if you queue into the new dungeons versus just grinding the 4.0 Heroics which caps out at a lower threshold so I figured if I sprung for a less significant item upgrade and it boosted my average over the queue requirement, I could at least try to make up the extra Valor with the new instances. Also, those instances drop epic level loot so it could end up being a benefit on that front, too. Anyway, the gambit failed and of course the one time I queued into Grim Batol (where Forgemaster Throngus drops an improvement for my sorry green wand) it was a kick/drop replacement and they were already on the third boss so I didn’t even get a chance at it.

Most of the other interface changes have been fairly uninteresting for me: I don’t really benefit from the extra rewards for under-represented roles since my level capped instance runner is a DPS and I’m already in a good guild on my three primary toons so the Looking For Guild feature will only help me on my lower priority alts. The interface changes did impact me though since I had some issues with a few of my AddOns following the patch. I don’t remember if I really dealt with a major content patch when I was playing after Wrath came out but if I did I don’t recall it being much of an issue. This time I had a lot of really glitchy behaviors popping up and slow updates from the AddOn maintainers didn’t help. I can’t complain too much since they are all provided free of charge but considering my rare opportunity to play for hours on end, it was a bit frustrating to have so many problems during that window.

Alt Nation

I ran my Shaman healer up to level 30 doing chain instances, which was kind of cool. Level 30 seems almost like a bigger deal for this toon than level 20 was since you get Astral Recall, which acts as a second Hearthstone, Reincarnation which lets you rez yourself, and some new Totem abilities including Call of the Elements (my favorite) which drops selected Totems from all four groups at once. I guess level 20 was big for me as a Resto Shaman, but since Ghost Wolf hit a couple levels earlier—and the fact that I don’t go anywhere since I’m still leveling exclusively through dungeons—getting a mount was sort of anticlimactic.

Unfortunately I had to do a lot of Gnomergeran to get to level 30. One big downside to doing instance-leveling is that occasionally you get to a spot where there are only a couple of available dungeons to queue into. If one of them is kind of a stinker (I get the hate for Gnomergeran now), it really feels like the grind you’re trying to avoid by skipping out on questing comes creeping back in. The reason GNO is so agitating is that it’s long, especially if you don’t take the shortcut, and that first skippable boss is really tedious in that it involves an NPC fiddling around on timers while you battle spawning trash mobs of the most boring sort and then the boss finally shows up and he has the worst loot table. Granted, I’m realizing that caster Leather is really, really difficult to come by so I don’t really expect lots of sweet drops all that often but when every single player from a nice class cross-section rolls Disenchant on the boss blues—twice—there’s a loot issue for that boss.

What makes it worse is that there is no teleportation option into deeper dungeon levels and the trash respawns alarmingly quick. Which means if you, like me, happen to have the dumb and you fall off the platform after the second-to-last boss—as the only resurrection-capable healer—you get to attempt to run back to the party through scores of respawned elite mobs. It’s brilliant, really. The result of that particular run (I initially typed that as “ruin,” which is pretty fitting) was abandonment of the instance by all party members. They briefly considered attempting the boss without heals but nixed the idea since I think the party makeup was Warrior tank, Mage, Warlock and Hunter none of which have any kind of healing off-spec or anything that could be used in lieu of an actual healer. Considering we were at the last boss, it was pretty disappointing. The other option would have been to have the party run back through, trying not to die on respawned trash themselves, and escort me back to the spot we left off. I didn’t blame anyone for not wanting to do that.

I’m fairly shocked at how much fun I’m having playing a healer. I wonder in some cases if I like being a Shaman or if I just like healing in general. If the former then great! I’m already doing that. If the latter I wonder sometimes if I might not be better served by using a class that was more directly suited to the role (Priest, for instance). Most of what I read about Shamans indicate that they are capable healers but not exactly the most sought after class for that role. I suppose the analogy would be like Fury Warriors: They can DPS just fine, but if you really want to DPS you ought to look into a more pure DPS class. This is the consideration that led me to create a Mage and the result of that was overwhelmingly positive. But then again I wonder if playing a Priest might feel too much like playing a Mage: The gear is very similar, the play style looks very close; the only real differences seem to be the increased interest in the Spirit stat and the targets of your spells are different. For now I’m happy with my Shaman, I just hope I don’t hit a point where overcoming the class limitations for the chosen role becomes a matter of possessing a high degree of skill (this feels a bit like the case with Warrior DPS) where a less skillful player could mask their sub-optimal ability level with a strong class choice.

Meanwhile, I put a bit of time into my Death Knight for no other reason than that I’m frustrated with the Paladin and I’m hoping that the DK will catch my limited attention enough to feel good about making him my new Inscriptionist/Jewelcrafter. Leveling my Shaman through the instances has been fun, but I don’t seem to have the motivation to get the Paladin up to level 15 so I can start doing that with her. I wish I knew what it was about Paladins that makes me so prone to making this sound: “Glear-ACHKpth!” Then again maybe it’s that she’s also a Blood Elf? I dunno. There’s something very uninteresting to me about that toon and I keep logging in with her hoping it will pass and I’ll finally see the light that seems to blind everyone else into believing that Belfs and Pallys are “so freakin’ beast, man!” But then I realize that I don’t want to talk like that and I’m not sure why it matters to me whether or not I’m able to see things from the majority viewpoint so, hence, I hit the starting zone with the DK.

This actually marks my third attempt to finish the DK starting area which admittedly is awesome but for whatever reason I get to a point where I just stop and character abandonment ensues. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that 55 feels like a weird place to start because the thrill of the rapid level advancement that aids in lowbie grinding isn’t there or maybe it’s because no matter what kind of DK I roll the starting zone is always the same. I do want to get at least to level 60 with this guy so I can start trying to tank as a Blood DK (going back to my Just Try It mantra, I want to find some toon that I can find enjoyment in that role with) in Burning Crusade dungeons but I also keep forgetting that a lot of my time is going to be poured into the Warrior until the end of the next week because of the silly World Event. As much as I actually enjoy all these holiday things, they kind of put a damper on my schedules.