What a weekend. Nothing I planned really happened, but a lot of other things did.
I planned on putting my main, warrior tank, on exp freeze and play through Mt.Hyjal and Vashj'ir, play some Gnomore to get him to LFD level range and do some crafting on my priest.
Did next to none of them.
Instead, for some curious reason, I played mostly with my banker (yikes!) as he was already in the level range for Blackrock extravaganza. The old raid instances have been 'lowered' to random 5 mans and Copramo spent most of the time in there, healing the heck out of ragtag groups, most of which didn't even know where they were. Heck, I didn't know most of the time, and as I mostly got picked up by a group which had lost their healer, I didn't even get the big picture of the place!
What was the most curious about this experience is something worth discussing about. Sure, all the high up "been-there-since-early-beta" people who have grinded (ground?) Blackrock as a raid instance way before Burning Crusade came out know the place like the bottoms of their (often forgotten) pockets. But there are an amazing number of players who have never, ever set their foot in the instances. And I mean ever. Myself included.
Especially Blackrock Depths is a dumbfounding whole as a 5 man instance: the LFD loading screen doesn't tell which part you should be doing. At one run it was just one boss (right, from the start!), on another we had to plunge through majority of the map to get to the boss needed (another one!) and so on. I'm SO confused on which boss is the one the group should go and smack, and I'm definitely not the only one!
Blackrock Spire is almost as bad, except that there you have more linear approach. But... the LFD doesn't tell which one of the two you should go and complete! And you get quests for both from the questgiver conveniently inside the entrance - just in range of the first mobs, which is a bit of a design flaw in it's own.
It's nice they did this and 'force' the new players to go through the hellish depths of Blackrock Mountain while levelling, as the story will later on bring them back to Blackrock Caverns and all. But it would be nice to know which part or which bosses you are supposed to kill before you start: there was this one tank who said that he'd been in Blackrock for over two hours and he just wanted to finish the instance. He had had the whole group changed twice over and they hadn't found the boss they were supposed to kill for the dungeon to finish. Needles to say, we found it and one shotted it.
It was very nice, though, to find myself in the queue for the Burning Crusade instances at level 58 and after that one run (they were never this easy back when BC launched!!!) he was lv59. One to go and the sky is ours!
Of course, I had to dedicate some time to Gnomore, too. It takes about one hour for a level with this bugger, so the progress is very slow. It's especially rewarding, when you see a new character level from 5 to 15 in the same time it takes you from 11 to 13 yourself... and that newcomer has way better gear at that point.
C out
.
