Burning through the Burning Crusade

After taking a bit of a break over Christmas, our Worgen duo is back on the levelling track. Having done a round of all the Blackrock instances meant that we entered Outland about halfway through level sixty. We then left for Northrend just after hitting seventy-one, and after only about two days or so of playing (though we did admittedly binge-play quite a bit during those days).

Questing in Hellfire Peninsula was indeed quite a break from the rhythm we had got used to in the revamped old world, with its very linear "get two or three quests at a time" formula. While there were still some mini quest chains with two or three follow-ups that needed to be done in order - generally speaking, the world was our oyster. I was strangely delighted to see a dozen quests or more in my log at once, and the whole map of the area lit up by quest markers. It was a little overwhelming, but also liberating. We had the freedom to do whatever we wanted, in whatever order we wanted to! Of course this also had the side effect that we had the freedom to make "mistakes" by doing things in an inefficient manner, such as by going into certain sub-zones before we actually had all the available quests for that particular area. I didn't find it overly annoying though; mostly I was just slapping myself on the head and telling myself that I should have known better, seeing how I had done all of this before (even if it was quite some time ago now).

As an aside, we were surprised to find that cross-realm zones had turned Hellfire Peninsula into a hotbed of PvP activity, due to that quest to capture the fortifications. Nothing like level ?? death knights one-shotting innocently flagged questers before you've even had a chance to realise what happened. Some of them also flew into Honor Hold to gank the quest givers there and then do a little teabagging dance on them while all the people actually trying to level stood around /facepalming. It was funny to me in so far as I have a screenshot from circa 2007 of Hordies raiding Honor Hold and killing our quest givers, so the whole thing certainly brought back memories. However, at least the invaders had to put up a fight back then. It's less fun when they literally have fifty times as much health as anyone or anything in the area and are just ganking out of boredom.

We were sixty-three by the time we finished all the quests in Hellfire and decided to set out to duo some instances next. Every time I set foot into an Outland dungeon it strikes me just how formative those BC years have clearly been for me, because I instantly remember all the difficulties we used to have in each instance, the tricky pulls, which mobs had disruptive abilities and needed to be crowd-controlled. Yet every time I'm also disappointed by how easy those very same dungeons are nowadays, even when you're two-manning them. Somehow the lesson of "that's just how it is these days" never seems to stick.

One thing I did kind of like was what they've done with the quest givers. I knew in theory that they moved all the instance quest givers inside the actual dungeons some time in Cata, but I hadn't actually done any instances beyond the level sixty ones since then, so all the changes from Hellfire onwards were new to me. Basically they seem to have added some quests to dungeons that didn't have many to make sure that there would be a roughly even amount in each instance, and they changed the story and quest givers to make the whole experience more coherent if dungeons are the only thing you're doing. In some way that's sad I guess, considering that many of the Outlands dungeon quests were very intertwined with the story of the outside world, but to really get the whole context you needed to do both loads of quests as well as all the dungeons, which - let's be realistic - is just not happening these days, not with how quickly the levels fly by and the convenience of the dungeon finder. Considering that harsh reality, it made sense to edit some storylines out of the quests and just focus them on the quest givers that are actually there in the instance. And there is at least some internal consistency now. For example you save Naturalist Bite in the Slave Pens (well, in theory you do, assuming you don't let him die in the naga attack like we did...) and he then shows up as a quest giver in the Underbog and the Steamvault, so even if you've done nothing but dungeons there is some sense of recognition and progression.

After a couple of instance runs we continued our questing in Zangarmarsh. This is where I have to admit that my TBC nostalgia took a bit of a nosedive. In Hellfire I had felt liberated from the linearity of Cataclysm-style questing... but Zangarmarsh reminded me that, for all the progress the Outlands quests demonstrated from Vanilla questing, they still weren't without their flaws. Too much running back and forth all over the map, too many quests to kill ten rats or gather five boar livers with little variety to spice things up. When we finally finished the zone, I was pretty tired of Outlands questing and ready to just go the rest of the way via duoing dungeons. Which we did, as they gave more than enough XP, and since Outland has so many instances we never had to repeat anything either.

Somewhat disappointed by how easy things were, we continually worked our way up from doing dungeons a little below our level, to ones the same level, to ones up to three levels above us. By that point things did actually get moderately challenging, but mostly because any mobs that my pet tank didn't maintain solid aggro on would grind me into the dirt before I could even blink. Still, duoing Black Morass at sixty-eight for example was pretty fun as we rushed from one portal to the next, remembering just how challenging it used to be back in the day to control all the little adds.

We finished our tour of Outlands with a round of Isle of Quel'Danas dailies, after having done all of two zones worth of quests and all the normal mode dungeons once, all within the span of two days or so. It pains me to think of how busy this whole expansion used to keep us, and how it's reduced to barely a blink during levelling time now... but at the same time things like the tedium I felt in Zangarmarsh show that there is no going back to some things even for those of us with cases of severe nostalgia.

Oh, and I really wish they'd make the Shattrath cooking and fishing dailies available at level sixty. That "must be level seventy" restriction is very out of touch with the way the game works now, only giving people access to something that is effectively levelling content just as they are leaving for the next expansion.

Sunday night pug musings

Last night I took my death knight out to pug a few instances, to balance the large amount of solo-play that I've been doing lately. Since I gave her a tank spec I've found grouping with her much more enjoyable - I just think that melee dps is kind of annoying and boring. In fact, I've generally started to warm up to her a little.

I've complained in the past that I didn't like death knights because they felt too much like pre-made characters to me and getting all those abilities right from the start just confused me. However, after (very, very, slowly, over the course of nearly two years) gaining sixteen levels since her creation, my death knight is finally starting to feel a bit more like she's truly "mine", and I also couldn't help learning at least a little bit about the class's abilities after two years of playing with other death knights - I suppose you could call that mental osmosis. So things aren't quite as bad now.

But to get to the pugs. They were actually all pretty pleasant, and I don't think we had a single death, but that's not to say that nothing interesting happened. I started the night by queuing for a couple of specific Outland instances, since the dungeon finder won't let me do random normal modes anymore at my current level.

I expected a bit of a queue even as a tank, since healers tend to be the bigger problem in that level bracket, but I actually got a group very quickly. My first run took me to the Arcatraz. I don't know what it is about that instance, but I swear every time I run it these days it elicits cries of joy from at least one member of the group. People love the bickering demons, laugh at Millhouse Manastorm and gasp at Harbinger Skyriss. In this case our priest was particularly fond of them all. It's really weird in a way, because I remember that instance not being one of the most popular ones back in BC, especially on heroic mode, since it had a lot of absolutely murderous trash pulls, and Zereketh the Unbound was without a doubt one of the worst heroic bosses of that expansion (even if he could be skipped). It's funny how our perceptions of what's fun can change.

I also noticed that our healer had to drink a lot, which is perfectly fine and I was happy to wait of course, but I realised for the first time that this is another one of the things that I miss about crowd control - it gives the non-casters something to do while the mana users drink. I mean, I stood there in front of the next trash pull, trying to be patient but admittedly being a bit bored, and found myself thinking that I never had that problem back in BC because back then, while the healer was drinking, the tank and dps were marking up the next pull and discussing strategy. I do think this is why nerfing mana regen and requiring more crowd control have to go hand in hand in Cataclysm - because just forcing the healer to drink after every pull while everyone else taps their feet and waits to be able to do more AoE wouldn't really cut it I dare say.

Anyway, my next run took me to the Old Hillsbrad Foothills. I had run that one before, but went again because I had forgot to complete the Nice Hat quest. Two other people in the group had it too and everyone was perfectly happy to take a quick detour to get it done. I miss that kind of co-operation in many runs these days.

I was also really hoping that I could get people to continue to the Black Morass right afterwards but had no such luck. I've said in the past that Escape from Durnholde is hard to get a group for these days because it requires you to do a boring attunement quest that nobody tells you about, in a zone that's way out of the way when you're in the right level range, but after careful consideration I've come to the conclusion that Durnholde isn't so bad. Black Morass is much worse, for the simple reason that it requires you to do all the things you have to do to unlock Old Hillsbrad, and you have to complete the Escape from Durnholde quest, and you then have to be at least level sixty-eight to enter BM, by which point most people are already off to Northrend.

My last Outland instance for the night turned out to be the Mechanar. Again we had a pretty smooth run, though one thing pissed me off: When the other death knight in the group, level sixty-seven and dps, looted the crystal from Gatewatcher Iron-Hand, I told him to hold on to it because we'd need it later. Then, after we killed Capacitus, that same death knight suddenly announced that he would leave because he felt that he was too low-level for the instance and couldn't hit anything, and anyway, we should get a replacement quickly. I thought this was a slightly strange, but not entirely unreasonable complaint, but quickly typed out "wait" in chat because I wanted that crystal first. Too late, he had taken off already, taking our key to the loot chest with him. Grrr! Damn you, cross-server pugs and the way you allow people to just vanish into the nether!

After these three runs I decided to finish the night by giving Utgarde Keep a go. Even though I was level seventy-one by then, and keep in mind that I'm the kind of death knight who actually bothers to collect defense gear before starting to tank, my health went up and down like a yo-yo throughout the entire run. In the previous instances I had sometimes chastised myself mentally for not using my survival cooldowns enough, but in that UK run I was spamming them like there was no tomorrow. Being so squishy was just scary. It's really ironic how the normal Northrend instances are so much tougher at level now than the average heroic run of the same place. I have to give massive kudos to our priest healer, who never let anyone die even when the going got tough and who pulled through even though our dps was rather low.

That was the other interesting thing about that run - why was our dps so low? Right after we entered, I noticed that our "dps" paladin was sporting a sword and board combo. I inspected him and sure enough, he was protection spec and not changing. I asked him why he was dpsing if he was geared and specced to be a tank and he said that he just hadn't felt like tanking when he signed up. Now okay, I get that a tank might not always feel like tanking, but maybe he should make sure to also gather some dps gear then? The really daft thing was that it turned out that he was actually dual-specced prot/holy. Why in the world would you queue as the one role out of three for which you have neither gear or spec?!

I do have to admit that this annoyed me and I kind of wanted to get rid of him, but at the same time I felt that I should at least give him a chance. And to be fair, he did behave himself - he didn't use righteous fury or tried to pull aggro off me, he just attemped to do damage. Unfortunately he was still very much dead weight, as he only did about two hundred dps, which was about a third of what I was doing while tanking very amateurishly. On Prince Keleseth we must have gone through about ten frost tombs, that's how slowly he died. I couldn't hold it against the healer that he bickered at the paladin to pick it up, but the latter assured us very earnestly that he was trying. We did complete the instance despite of the paladin's rubbish performance, but I felt bad about the healer basically having to make up for the other guy's fail pretty much the entire time. Going into group content with strangers while intentionally gimping yourself is just wrong.

Why is nobody running BC heroics anymore?

I've been working on the quest for epic flight form for my Alliance druid recently. I know I could just train it, but doing it the "proper" way just feels more rewarding to me, not to mention that it's simply an extremely cool and entertaining quest line. I now have Vanquish the Raven God in my quest log, and figured that with the dungeon finder it should be easy enough to get a group for it these days. Oh how wrong I was.

I don't know how much time I've spent sitting in the queue and waiting for a group for heroic Sethekk Halls in total by now, but it must add up to several hours. At no point did I ever see more than two other icons light up as the group was being assembled, even though I had signed up as able to fulfill all three roles to be as accomodating as possible. Often I'm utterly alone. It's discouraging.


I can understand that BC heroics are nowhere near as popular as the normal Northrend dungeons - there's no emblem reward and most drops are outclassed by Northrend greens. But still, I would have thought that there would still be some interest, be it for the achievements or simply a change of pace. I'm sure many altholics are tired of running normal Nexus for the umpteenth time, and I would have thought that simple curiosity would be enough to lure the occasional newbie into a BC heroic as well. After all I had little trouble getting into the old level seventy instances on normal mode, and that's with Blizzard removing the "random Outland dungeon" option from the dungeon finder at level sixty-nine or so, so you can only get into instances like Magister's Terrace if you sign up for them specifically. At least "random Outland heroic" remains an option for several levels. Why is that not enough?

My best guess at the moment is that the old attunements are simply too much of a stumbling block. I like attunements in general, but keeping them in place for instances that are nothing but levelling dungeons these days strikes me as a mistake on Blizzard's part. I know they are not at all difficult, and people might even reach the honoured requirement with various factions without as much as trying, but actually buying the keys requires knowledge that many curious newbies probably don't have, and effort that the jaded veterans might not want to bother with, as in: they might consider queuing up for an old heroic on a whim, but once they realise that they are locked out because they didn't think of buying all the keys while they were levelling through Outland, what are the chances that they'll actually stop their questing in Howling Fjord to march all the way back to Zangarmarsh or wherever just to buy those keys? Not very high, that's what.

The old Caverns of Time instances have the same problem, even on normal mode, seeing how you can't enter them without completing this quest first, which is a massive shame considering how much fun Escape from Durnholde and Opening of the Dark Portal are to play through. But again, a new player simply receives no pointers that this attunement is needed at all, and a veteran might simply not want to bother with flying down to Tanaris and then trudging in a circle for ten minutes just to unlock another instance that he'll soon outlevel anyway.

I did get lucky with Old Hillsbrad myself as I got a group almost instantly, but it was telling that one of the dps immediately exclaimed: "Finally, we've been in the queue for this one for three hours!" And the only reason that I got the Black Morass completed as well that day was that the group from Durnholde wanted to continue straight towards the followup really badly, probably knowing full well that they might not get another chance at finding a high enough number of attuned people anytime soon.

Really, it is just bizarre that it requires more effort to get into an Outland heroic than to get into a Northrend one, even though the former is levelling content that provides very little reward. I'm all for making people work to reach the top of the game, but if you want people to group while levelling as well, you really mustn't throw hurdles like that in their way (or even leave them as forgotten leftovers from a different time).