Once upon a time there was a little night elf druid. He was a banker and the propriator of a three player guild. He was content, though he was thinking whether the life of an adventurer might have been more full of successes, challenges and epic failures than the daily grind of checking the mailbox, checking the auction house and listing new auctions for the next day.
One day he made the decision: onwards with the adventure.
Thanks to Dechion, I took my banker druid and launched him into the levelling game again. From level 25 it's all only upwards, so it was pretty easy a decision. To my annoyance, I had for some reason or another specced this toon as a moonkin from the beginning. Annoyance because at this low level the balance tree holds only supporting talents, nothing to really boost the damage to the level to be effective. Anyhow, I started flying to the area where the quests continued (far away in Ashenvale) and popped in to the LFD as dps.
To my surprise, I was summoned almost right away. To the Stormwind Barracks.
The group... well, was a rag-tag bunch of different type players. Two toons had visible heirlooms on them, and that showed in their play style: the warrior blasted through the mobs in succession and the mage kept pounding damage out without a stop. The shaman, however, seemed to be out of place, as he was out of mana even faster than I was, which - let me assure you - was very fast. And he left after the first call to heal from the warrior.
Then there was four. The paladin took up on healing while dealing, something paladins generally do pretty well. But that wasn't enough, so in mid run the mage asked if I could heal. Sure, but there was only one problem. In my great inspiration I had left the sanctuary of Darnassus without any potions and drinks, so when I ran out of mana, I stayed out of mana pretty much the rest of the time. The mage generously made me some water and off we went.
The warrior didn't have anything else in mind than to kill the main boss. At the same time he went down, the dungeon finder selection screen popped up and...
I found out that we had gone to Blackfathom Deeps.
Where the same happened: straight to the final boss, screw the rest of the content.
There were two things which started to annoy me immensely. The first was the way the warrior started calling the paladin on names for using the Hand of Righteousness (I think), as the paladin was taunting the mobs off of the warrior. Which the paladin didn't even realize doing. The communication contained such words as "retard", "gay", "idiot", "loser" and so on, in no particular order. But the main point was the fact that the one playing the paladin hadn't played for long. He made all sorts of 'newbie' comments on the way and was certainly doing his best.
The situation was almost as bad as in a heroic run with a newly dinged lv80, who is trying his best but just cannot deliver.
The other issue I had with these runs was the singleminded approach: go for the end boss to get the Satchet of Helpfull Goods and take another. Knowing the BFD, there are a couple of nice side bosses who grant nice drops and a nice side quest, too. All forgotten.
A newcomer must get a very one sided view of the old dungeons this way. Especially when you take into the account how much the dungeons have been nerfed for "accessibility" nowadays.(Ok, we were a bit on the high end being mainly lv22-25)
Then again, I didn't remember how fun it was running these lowbie ones! As a druid, even as I was mis-specced, I found myself doing ranged dps, melee dps, tanking and healing in one run. And no-one had nothing against it! At levels below 40 it really doesn't matter how you spec, you can deliver all this, more or less. I had also forgotten how good instance BFD really is: the challenge really grows up to the end, even though the end boss is a bit of a let down: the hall before that one is more a climax of the dungeon.
And it's beautiful, really.
So... does this mean I'm rather going to run a druid for a change? Maybe.
It just was so pure, good clean fun on it's own right.
