I love the Dungeon Finder

I really do love the dungeon finder. I like getting groups quickly and find some of the group drama mildly amusing.

I hated dungeons while levelling in Vanilla WoW and therefore missed out on a lot of dungeon runs at lower levels with my main. If my memory serves me correctly I think I had only really seen Deadmines, Stockades and Zul Farrak – which is shocking in hindsight. A lot of the time dungeons seem to bring the worst out in players. It may be greed, competitiveness or rudeness. Visiting some of these dungeons for the first time had me a little excited to finally see the content as it was meant by a group of adventurers at the correct level. I was curious to see if the greed, competitiveness and rudeness still existed… After all, the levelling process is a lot easier these days and most people have at least one level 80 character.

Queuing as a tank means I find a dungeon fairly fast, even though I’m still in my mid level 20s. Within 4-5 pulls you can tell what type of group you have.

I would say that there is always at least one of the following type of people in every group:-

The Uber DPSer - Constantly looking at DPS and spamming the meter when he is at the top. Mostly geared in full heirloom and will give grief to the the lower poorly geared DPS who are ‘beneath him’. To him everyone in the group is a noob.

The Aggro Magnet - Once again usually in full heirloom gear. The tanking class that has queued up as DPS but at every opportunity will taunt the mobs you are tanking. Will also ninja pull mobs when least expected. As I tank learning the trade I find this a real pain.

The Needer - The guy that needs everything from Tiger’s Eyes to a blue BOP drop from the final boss that he can’t use. He will stop once he is challenged. I run dungeons for the experience and find loot as a side reward. Usually rewards from completing the dungeon via the dungeon finder are better than the dungeon loot.

The Tactical Group Kicker - I’ve only come across this type of person twice – both in The Deadmines. This person knows and wants what the next boss drops but doesn’t like the fact he may have competition for the item. A few trash pulls before the boss he will try and vote kick the competition. The vote kick failed both times.

I have only met the above groups within lower level dungeons where most get their first chance of blue items. It will be interesting to see if it continues into the level 30s-40s dungeons… Or could it get worse?!

It’s been a while!

It has indeed been a while since my last blog post. Starting a blog at the same time as studying for exams, coursework wasn’t a great idea! My RL commitments are almost clear and I’m intending to return and blogging about all things Azeroth.

Where am I at? Before my hiatus I had managed to level my baby Druid to lvl 23. At level 15 I jumped straight into the dungeon finder which is great! Reliving some of the old dungeons gives that old world feel again and you can’t help but feel a little nostalgic. It also interesting seeing people in the group set ups wether they be uber leet or complete newbies starting out… Sometimes the later is better to group with! As a lowbie tank you don’t have as many cool downs for aggro retention as a level 80 and it’s something the leet peeps don’t seem to understand.

Shim

I have talents!

Ding… Level 10! Where do I put my first talent point?! This decision meant more than choosing what style of play I wanted with my fledgling Druid as I had been saving emblems for some nice heirloom gear.

My first point went into the Feral tree – Furor to be precise. I liked the idea of healing my way through Ragefire Chasm and Deadmines but my motivation was learning how to tank. It’s something I’ve never done properly in 5 years of playing this game! It represents a new challenge and hopefully a nice learning curve!

Geared up with shiny new Stained Shadowcraft Tunic, Stained Shadowcraft Spaulders and a Repurposed Lava Dreger I set off to complete the Druid Bear Form quest. The quest is very long-winded for a low-level class quest and involved a good bit of travel. While making the Auberdine-Darnassus-Moonglade-Darnassus-Auberdine-Darnassus trek I did wonder how a new player would find their way to all these unchartered places.

Initially Bear Form has left me slightly underwhelmed due to the poor attack bonus. As the tooltip states –

“Increasing melee attack power by 30, armor contribution from cloth and leather items by 180%, and Stamina by 25%”.

I believe that the early stages of feral DPS will lag behind that of the Balance tree but hopefully using the dungeon finder and tanking instances this will not be a problem. Hopefully my tanking debut will be in the not so distant future.

Fresh Start

I started playing Warcraft around the time European release as my friend had raved and pleaded with me to give it a go. It was my first experience of an MMO… I didn’t even know what an MMO was at that time but five years later I’m still playing. I levelled making all the well known noobie mistakes but eventually made it to 60 and somehow found myself in a raiding guild. I very quickly fell in love with raiding and look back fondly of my evenings spent in Molten Core & Blackwing Lair.

So why start this blog?

The main reason behind this blog is to keep WoW fresh and to offer a new challenge of blogging for the first time. I have also started a Druid and hope to document the class levelling and learning experience. I have not as yet decided which tree my Druid shall travel but will make these decisions as I level.

Any advice on levelling a Druid or blogging will be very much appreciated.