My, it's been a while...

Guess I haven't had a lot to rant about lately.   Well, I haven't had as much time to rant, to be honest, as I had to go out and become a productive member of society and find a full time job...   After I stopped posting here (and the Moonkin Repository forums, and the WoW Druid forums, and everywhere else I frequented in my abundant free time while jobless), my guild managed to down 25 man LK and several heroic 25 man encounters... and then....

Starcraft 2 happened.  And the Cataclysm Beta.  And burnout.  And suddenly people stopped showing up for ICC, or for much of anything.  I got a beta invite courtesy of a guildie who has a friend with connections, and leveled my main on the beta server to 82, and then my friends in beta got more interested in Starcraft 2 and were never on when I was, and I got bored of playing by myself.

Now that 4.0 has dropped, we've managed to scare up enough interest to raid one or two nights a week again, with the help of a few non-raider friends and a PUG or two willing to fill a spot for a chance at offspec or unwanted drops.  And I'm still not back in full forum-lurking mode yet, although I most likely will be by the time I'm 85 and trying to gear up to raid new content.

Meanwhile I've been logging onto WoW a good bit less, and reading more.  After my most recent re-read of George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, I started lurking more at the Westeros.org forums, and finally created an account to post there.  The only thread I've dared to post in so far is one in the Entertainment subforum dedicated to WoW - for the ASOIAF related threads, I still feel too much like a noob to contribute anything.

This morning I decided to contribute to a conversation about the best and worst of 5 man dungeons over the history of WoW, and I thought I'd share it here as well:




Vanilla

Favorites:

Deadmines - every new character I rolled, Deadmines was my test of whether I knew what the heck I was doing. I'm a bit of an alt-a-holic, so I've done it a lot, but every time I look forward to it... and I'm actually looking forward to the level 85 heroic version.

Maraudon - I farmed this place like mad on my main back in the AQ40 days trying to amass a set of Nature Resist gear. Still not tired of it - there was a lot of variety in the mobs and bosses, and interesting scenery. I hated Desolace itself, but the dungeon made up for the crappy zone.

Least favorites:

Stockades - except for my crazy compulsive need to complete the quests for this place, I wouldn't have done it more than once. OK, I take that back, it's a great place to farm wool cloth for my tailoring alts. Nothing good drops there, and every single pull is an adventure in stopping the mobs from fleeing at low health directly into another room full of mobs.

Wailing Caverns - loved the gear drops, but I hated how difficult it was to find your way around the place, and how likely you were to miss something if you weren't in there with someone who knew the map like the back of their hand. I'm also not a fan of any place that has a Q-bert jump that you are required to make to be able to follow your group (see also BFD) as under pressure I nearly always miss the jump and fall into the gap/water/slime/etc.

Honorable mentions:

BRD - as I mentioned earlier in the thread, it always felt sincerely epic. There were so many bosses and rare spawns, and so much good gear to be had... with a good group, it was a pleasure to run (and with a bad one, a nightmare).

UBRS/LBRS - being able to get through UBRS with pretty much any 5 man group always felt like an accomplishment. LBRS I hated, except for doing stealth solo runs as a druid to farm my Wildheart Boots.

BC

Favorites:

Steamvaults - My main being a druid with feral aspirations at the time , I farmed the hell out of this place trying to get to exalted with CE and pick up the Earthwarden. I had a lot of good groups, and a lot of bad groups. This is another one of the dungeons that I liked specifically because it was an accomplishment to get through it smoothly, and I always felt like I could contribute well to making that happen - especially when I was the one leading the 5-man.

Blood Furnace - I always preferred this one to Ramparts, even though it took longer. More interesting pulls and boss fights.

Least favorites:

Shattered Halls - I'd have liked this fine if my main wasn't a resto druid by the time I started running it on heroic mode under pressure to complete the attunement chain for SSC/TK. I'd just joined my guild at the time, and the GM and officers took a few raid nights and divided us up into 5-mans to get everyone through the attunement chains... every group they assigned me to failed miserably. Either the warrior tank couldn't keep all the mobs off of me (oh hey, GIVE ME A PALLY TANK PLEASE) or on the Warbringer boss fight, I'd get targeted by the boss during an aggro switch and creamed almost instantly. Attunement was removed two weeks after I joined the guild, so I never did complete that quest, and avoided it like the plague as a healer from then on.

Auchenai Crypts - If you can get past the first pull, it's not bad. 80% of the groups I have been in were not able to get past the first pull without a wipe.

WOTLK

Favorites:

Drak'Tharon Keep - I liked the story surrounding Grizzly Hills and Zul'Drak... The dungeon is interesting and relatively easy... and infinitely preferable to Gun'drak with the snake wrap boss, the achievements that require a pretty specific group makeup, and the altars you have to remember to click or someone will have to run back later on (and probably run into mobs that you tried to skip) to be able to finish the place.

Utgarde Pinnacle - Again, I liked the story in Howling Fjord, and the dungeon was interesting. It provided a bit of a challenge to the undergeared, and even with a decently geared group there were challenges. The achievements were fun, the fights were varied, and playing smart would make the place a heck of a lot easier to complete. On my shaman alt, dropping tremor totems when fighting groups with a berserker... on the shaman and priest, cleansing the diseases from the aboms when the group healer was a resto druid... On my feral druid alt, being smart about how quickly and how much to pull, and where to position... I like dungeons that make me feel like playing smart makes a difference (but isn't 100% necessary to finish it without a wipefest), at least until everyone's decked out in welfare epics and can brute force and AOE everything to death without knowing what the heck they're doing.

Honorable mentions:

Oculus - I hated the place before they nerfed it, solely because every random dungeon group I got into, as soon as they saw the Oculus loading screen, the tank would drop group and we'd be left standing there for 20 minutes waiting for another tank, or the rest of the group would immediately fall apart. Since the nerf and the incentive cache at the end, groups stay together better, and you can actually enjoy the place. I always liked fighting on the drakes, and the variety of the other fights.

Utgarde Keep - Short, sweet, and easy as pie.

Nexus - I loved the lore.... the dungeon always felt like it was just a touch too long for my taste, compared to the other WOTLK instances. Too much trash, perhaps.

Halls of Reflection - It's a pain for undergeared groups, so I hate to PUG it... but as soon as it came out, I loved being able to see the storyline played out. It was exciting as heck the first few times through.

Least favorites:

Old Kingdom - Gah. Talk about miserable failures in PUGs...

Pit of Saron - The abbreviation POS is extremely apt. A bad tank or a bad healer will make this the most miserable dungeon experience ever. Tank and healer will each immediately begin blaming the other for any wipe or near-wipe. Every heroic PUG with a priest healer I've been in, the healer has left immediately after the second boss, because they were only there for the cloth belt. The pulls on the hill leading up to the gauntlet are the biggest pain in the butt ever for druid healers who used to be the only ones without the ability to remove diseases... Of course most PUGs with the ability to interrupt the caster mobs didn't think to do it to make anyone else's job easier. A tank who is not watching to make sure the healer is in range and not being beaten on will cause multiple wipes in the gauntlet... People not paying attention to their debuffs on the last boss will also cause multiple wipes... And the drops from the last boss are highly sought after, which means after you struggle through wipe after wipe, learning to despise the idiocy of the PUGs you're in there with, someone is sure to justify ninja need rolling offspec on something that you've been running the place for weeks on end to get for your main spec. Hate. Hate. Hate.