Dos and Don'ts of LFG

I've done enough random dungeons over the last few days to pick up 'the Patient' as a title, enough badges to get 4 pieces of T9 and enchanting mats to get them raid ready. So here's my list of dos and don'ts based on recent experiences.

DO: keep yourself stocked up with reagents, water and ammo where appropriate, you don't want to be there at the beginning or halfway through a boss fight missing something vital

DON'T: assume you having a hissy fit and dropping group will make a difference, every time this has happened we've found a replacement and had a fantastic run.

DO: take a few seconds to say hello at the beginning and goodbye at the end, it doesn't take much but just helps remember you're playing with other people.

DON'T: be afraid of the Occulus. Yes it's very different to all the other instances with the vehicle mechanics but even in completely random pugs we're able to complete 'Make it Count'

DO: be prepared to wait for a group if you're dps. This might have just been my experience but it can't take a while for the group to form, which means there's plenty of time to get dailies and quests done.

DON'T: be disheartened if there's a wipe. Playing the blame game doesn't help anyone and there is still room within the game for there to be a random happenstance which gets everyone killed.

If you haven't played around with with the random dungeon finder then at least give it a go once, especially as it should be a fairly painless way to get a couple of frost emblems.

Hitting the Heroics

I have made a decision in guild to switch my main from Crash to Acidlake my paladin who has been so much fun to play as ret both in solo play and in groups.

However given the guild is preparing to hit IceCrown Citadel and I'm still rocking heirloom items and quest rewards some severe gear upgrades will be required. Fortunately the recent change in badge drops and that tier 9 is wholly available from badges means that there is a clear and straightforward route to getting raid ready, heroic instances.

Normally this would have required trying to grab any groups that were forming in guild and possible get one or two done. But given we're now in the land of patch 3.3 and the new looking for group tool.

I'd only had one experience with the old LFG tool when we picked up a healer for heroic Ramparts back in TBC days. It didn't end completely well due to the complexity of heroic instances back then and since then the only random dungeons had done had been pugs organised either through whispers or adverts in /2.

Hoping that I wasn't too undergeared I signed up for a random dungeon looking forward to the possibility of new emblems and a chance to try out running as part of a group with people who don't know me from Adam.

Getting Azjol-Nerub was a bit of a blessing and having completed all the heroics before means I know the tactics well enough to know what to hit and when. We completed all the boss kills without a hitch, including the speed kill achievement on Anub'arak. Achievements appeared, extra boxes appeared to say the dungeon was completed and my collection of badges had increased.

From then on I've been hooked. The simple way of getting to the instance, not quite knowing which one it will be and the extra badges every time it completes mean I can just queue up at a time I'm able to play should I not be able to fit things in around what the rest of the guild is doing.

I'm probably 2 runs away from getting the 'the Patient' title which I shall proudly display in future pugs and have picked up a couple of very nice pieces of T9 ret gear.

The new instances also provide a great way of getting gear as well as containing a fantastic part of the storyline but those journeys can wait for another post.

Shifting the questing paradigm

One of the interesting things about levelling up from the original game and through the expansions is seeing how Blizzard has changed how you go about picking up quests and going through the zones.

From about level 20 onwards you generally find yourself in one or more zones, going back and forth grabbing whatever quests were available and within the right level range. Often this could be quite annoying especially if you have to wait to level before continuing with a quest chain and the constant travelling could really eat into your play time.

Things got worse as you headed towards 60, chances are you'd only be doing 1 or 2 quests in a zone before having to fly/ride off to another zone.

Once you ride through the dark portal things change slightly, suddenly there are entire zones to complete at any one time before moving onto the next one. Each quest hub you approach is suddenly awash with yellow exclamation marks which you can run around and pick up before heading off to complete the objectives. Naturally there will be quests that can be completed at the same time, but you are going to have to figure that out yourself otherwise you may well spend lots of time riding back and forth to the same spot.

Finally the frozen north beckons and you find yourself on the coast of Northrend with a whole new set of zones to quest through and quest hubs springing up. However this time instead of being awash with exclamation points there are only one or two and as you complete quests you either progress the chains or open up new quests to do. The other main advantage is that when doing quests they tend to be all grouped up in the same area.

Of the three models I definitely prefer what has been done in Northrend, the story lines are much easier to follow and I don't feel I'm wasting time travelling around trying to sort out the best order to do all the quests in. I really hope that Blizzard keep this questing model for future expansions, or indeed find some way to improve upon it.

Hitting Outlands (again!)

My paladin levelling has carried on apace, and in no time I found myself at level 58 and a choice. Stay in Azeroth for the next two levels or head through the dark portal to a land of increased XP and shinier quest rewards.

Unlike a certain shaman who carried on with the plaguelands, I decided to run the risk of orange quests and hit Hellfire Peninsula. It turned out that there wasn't really much of a problem, killing demons and having plate armor meant I ran through the quests in short order and found myself at level 60 and a letter in the mail inviting me to purchase a flying mount and the skill to ride it.

Being able to fly makes a massive difference, no longer do I have to run around avoiding hellboars and questing becomes a lot more point to point rather than following the terrain. Personally this is a good thing, I've ridden around Outlands twice and it was fun at the time, but with the current expansion my sights are set on Northrend so these things that help me get there quicker are obviously a good thing.

I'm still enjoying the retribution tree which puts out a decent amount of damage while being able to stay alive through emergency heals. In fact I'm getting so comfortable with the play style that several of the elite group quests are falling easily beneath my axe.

Just four more levels and I'll but hitting the fjord again, but will also have to fit in levelling professions and trying to get epic flying skill again. Ah, good times.

Joining the fold

I've started levelling another alt. There, I've said it but I don't think there's anything to be ashamed about.

The current state of the end game at 80 for me is either to run heroics repeatedly (all of which I've done) or grind the Argent Tournament for seals (which I've done).

The new raids are interesting, but are kind of a one night deal at the moment leaving any other night I decide to play slightly light on things I want to do. This isn't a rant about what Blizzard have done with the game, in fact I'm very happy with everything I'm able to do compared with the previous expansion. However there are times when I need to try out something else.

So I've resurrected my paladin alt who's currently decked out with a set of heirlooms and is tearing her way through the levels at a terrifying rate. Again it's melee dps but as I've mentioned before on this blog it's the style of play that suits me, and with the added bonus of heals and panic abilities it's very easy to tear through the mobs.

The mount changes meaning I can ride around since level 20 has also sped things up dramatically, no more running back and forth from Tarren Mill to Hillsbrad farm between quests and running past hostile mobs pretty quickly to get to where I need to go.

I have no real plans on what to do once I reach level 80. Though running through things as a ret pally could well be a laugh with the added advantages of plate armor and self-heals.

The end of a long strage trip

Let us go back one year. Wrath of the Lich King is currently in Beta and lots of information has been made available about the new achievement system that has links to all parts of the game. One achievement stands out for doing all the holiday achievements as it awards a shiny protodrake mount which is a 310% speed. As this would be a very cool thing to have I like a lot of others started preparing for what was required.

This post now provides a retrospective of all that I've been through in order to get hold of this great mount.

Brewfest 2008
At this time it's required to drink each brew supplied from the 'Brew of the Month' club so the token grind was there to join the club and make sure that all the drinks would count towards this. Later Blizzard would relax this achievement, a subject I don't want to get into now, but it irked slightly at the time.

Hallows End
'Trick or Treating' and traveling summed up this holiday for me. Killing the Headless Horseman was a trivial requirement after the changes put in in patch 3.0 but getting the Hallowed Helm and Sinister Squashling (something I already had) required either a lucky drop from the boss or a drop from the treat bag. Everything else was fairly straightforward, guild members meant buying wands from the Trade channel wasn't required. This one wasn't a problem, no stress.

Winters Veil
PvP reared it's ugly head again with the requirement of getting 50 honorable kills while disguised as a gnome. Losing the disguise upon death meant there was queuing for a lot of battlegrounds but patience was the order of the day for this one. Everything else was very straightforward so again no stress.

Lunar Festival
Once again I was sent around Azeroth visiting elders and had my first taste of sneaking into Alliance cities. It was at this point that I realized just how much the Alliance could be jerks by fiercely guarding their Elder. Other than that a guild run through the Northrend dungeons and a pug for the outdoor raid meant this was wrapped up very easily with no real issues.

Love is in the Air
This was the achievement that nearly broke me. Everything was progressing smoothly, I had love fools to pity, arrows to shoot and rose petals to scatter. However I also needed bags of candies to pull the candies from and this would not drop for me. In the end I had to resort, on the penultimate day of the holiday to logging in once an hour on the hour to try and get it to drop. After many hours it did and the relief was tangible. Lots of stress and the beginning of some doubt as to whether it was worth it.

Noblegarden
A late arrival to the meta achievement and probably the biggest grind of all the achievements. Everything you required could be bought for chocolates but you also required enough to eat so there was a lot of running around opening eggs. Some music to listen to and a bit of patience and this one got added to the list.

Children's Week
If Love is in the Air made me question the whole thing then this festival ran it a close second. School of Hard Knocks had already been well analyzed and understood just what would be involved. The Alliance remade some ground by helping with the flag recapture in WSG and some creative use of Vanish allowed for a flag capture in AV. As it turned out a lot of patience and a complete disregard for trying to win any of the battlegrounds made the achievement very doable.

Midsummer Fire Festival
More traveling, and more sneaking into Alliance cities. A quest reset by Blizzard meant I had to sneak in more than I expected but did provide extra blossoms for buying things I actually wanted rather than what I was required for achievements. Again just some effort on my part got this one done.

Brewfest 2009
Here we are again grinding tokens for an outfit. For some reason I had to kill Coren Direbrew again but the level 80 version with the gear we're now sporting meant this wasn't really an issue. I am now officially sick of ram racing but I got enough tokens to buy the clothing, got drunk, fell a long way and danced my way to success.

So here we are with a very shiny mount and a heck of a lot of achievements.

I don't regret having gone through with it, other players have gone for the hard mode achievements in raids while others have fought hard in arena matches for similar rewards. This suited the way I play the game and so made sense for me to work towards it.

Would I do it again? This is an interesting question as I have another max level alt and others I could be working on. Having done it once on my main I'm not feeling the necessity to go through it all again. However knowing what I know now means it might be a lot easier the second time, so I wouldn't like to commit myself either way at this stage.

Not going on the raid....

It's not a phrase anyone wants to hear, you've made yourself available for a raid, you've got everything prepared and now the evil raid leader (me in this case) indicates that you won't be going.

A little background, we'd added Trial of the Crusader back on the raid calendar and there were 22 signups. 5 tanks, 6 healers and 11 DPS. Given that we only run 10 man raids it was clear we could run two raids but it did mean that 2 of the signups would not get to go. Our guild has guidelines on how people get selected, generally on based on how many previous raids that person has been on and should someone be excluded they have preference for the next raid they sign up to.

You'd hope with such clear and understood reasoning in place this would be ok with people and they could wait until the raid instance reset and the guild organized another run. For the majority of people this is ok, but there always seems to be a minority who feel the need to vent on the forums that they've been somehow hard done by and why the decision to bench them for that raid was incorrect.

Now it's perfectly possible that a mistake will be made, everyone here is human and fallable, but even if this happens don't go ranting and raving about it. If anything, all this is going to is antagonize those who run the raids and a petty raid leader may put you on the bottom of the list of signees. Fortunately for those involved I'm not like that (though have been tempted) I just write about them here.

As with all things I resort back to my maxim of 'It's just a game' so if you're going to get so bent out of shape about missing one night's instance please realize that this is your issue rather than mine.