Gracie Status Update

These are a little bit delayed since I had a few other things I wanted to post about. I have been running these vanilla dungeons pretty steadily so far. With the expansion upon us, I’ll have to set this project aside for a bit.

Gnomeregan: This group had a monk tank and a pally that pretended to be a tank. Even though the pally kept pulling everything went fine. Well, except for the fact that I forgot to turn in one step of the quest chain in there, so I didn’t get the quest to kill the last boss. This is possibly my most hated classic dungeon, but I felt like I hadn’t completed it without doing the quest so I went back a second time. I’m glad I did because the second group was super fun. People were chatty, emoting and dancing and having a good time. We even killed one of the extra bosses and people were happy to do it instead of complaining about wasting time. It was definitely the best group I’ve had so far, and I was actually sad when we were finished.

Scarlet Halls: Fast, quiet, no-nonsense group with a warrior tank. There were a few spots where the whole group was taking damage and I didn’t feel like I had enough tools to handle it well, but I did at least handle it. It is very strange to me how different the lengths of some of these vanilla dungeons are now. Blackfathom Deeps seems to go on for days, but the two Scarlet dungeons are over in just a few minutes.

Scarlet Monastery: Paladin tank this time. The group was very “gogogo” but given how short the dungeon is I didn’t really mind. The only time it caused trouble was when I stopped to turn in a quest and everyone ran on without me. Line of sight is still a thing, so one person died. If people pull without looking to see if they have a healer then I can’t be bothered to muster sympathy for them

Wailing Caverns: A relatively uneventful run. The dungeon is a bit long for as low level as it is, but at least it is less of a maze than the original version. I had a warrior tank who was just slightly squishy and liked to keep moving but it was never a problem. I’m starting to have fun looking at the meters and seeing that I’ve done more damage than the DPS.

Blackfathom Deeps: I forgot I had been queuing as both heals and dps. Somehow for this one it put me in as dps. I hadn’t set up my bars or talents yet. Whoops. I got that sorted, and it was a fun run with a decent group. The healer died at one point and I got to save the day. Other than that one slip up there weren’t any issues and we even cleared the extra boss. I wonder how many times I’ll actually get to go shadow…

Stormwind Stockade: Warrior tank who was a little timid on pulls but otherwise fine. They went to Hogger first and I was afraid they would leave without doing the fire elemental boss, but they did actually stay. The fire boss got pulled with a bunch of his trash but it was manageable. Between that quest and a couple more from when I was in queue I dinged 30.

So far in 6 dungeons I’ve only really had one bad experience, and even that wasn’t awful so much as weird. Did I get super lucky? Are WoW players getting soft? Or do I just need to get past the easy introductory dungeons before people start losing their sense of civility?

I wanted to try to keep from completely bouncing off of WoW after all my feelings about the War of the Thorns content. I decided that leveling something new from scratch would be fun and would keep me far away from the pre-expansion stuff for a while. Because I’m full of terrible ideas, I’m trying to level a priest via pugging dungeons.

This is DiscGrace, my new blood elf disc priest. It’s been a few years since I really played a priest, but in my heart my undead priest will always be my main. Now I’m trying to re-learn how to disc while subjecting myself to the best and worst of pugs in WoW. Either I’m going to get super good at priesting, or I’m going to ragequit MMOs for a while. At least I’ll get some good blogging out of it.

I leveled to 15 questing in the blood elf starting area. I like how quiet it is there, and how much has stayed the same since I first started playing the game. Once I could queue for dungeons I started running them and only questing a little to fill in the down time. I’m going to try to run them all in order if I can.

Deadmines: This was a reasonable group. I had a very nice bear tank. I was frustrated for a while because you don’t get atonement until around level 20, so I had to heal “properly” for this one. I hadn’t run many dungeons since the leveling changes last patch, so the time to kill the bosses was surprising to me. Other than that this was a smooth run.

Ragefire Chasm: Another reasonable group. I could get used to this. I had a monk tank this time. They were a little bit slow to pick up aggro but other than that there were no problems. People even said thank you when we were done!

Shadowfang Keep: My first wtf moment of this experiment. I’m amazed it took this long. Had a pally tank and a monk that kept rushing ahead and pulling. I finally had atonement at least and kept everybody alive fine even through some big pulls and various kinds of stupid. The wtf moment came about halfway through when the pally asked me “don’t you know how to atonement heal?”. That’s…what I was doing the whole time? Apparently they were mad that my largest heal on the meters was my shield, and nothing I could say seemed to placate them so I just gave up. Even the annoying monk that kept pulling stood up for me which was a shock. I ended up keeping my mouth shut for the rest of the run and just kept healing the same way I had been the whole time. Very odd.

So far I’ve made it to level 22 with only one relatively small incident. I’ll call that a win. I’m sure things will keep getting more interesting as I move into more complicated dungeons. Anybody want to take bets on how far I get before I get sick of pugs and give up?