Reflections From The Pond

You know what feature would be good to have in the Dungeon Finder?

The ability to remove some heroic dungeons from your random list, to exclude them from the options so you don’t have to worry about going somewhere you don’t want to without the hassle and terrible rudeness of dropping from a formed group because you don’t like where you are going.

Maybe you plain don’t like the instance, maybe you are sick of running a particular one, or maybe you just feel that – whatever your gear score is – you don’t have the gear or skills or experience to handle them.

My baby priest Jools have been running a few heroics lately through the random dungeon finder and it has been going ok, despite my attempts of trying to water shield her and dropping totems and earh shielding tanks (fallout from having raided almost exclusively with my resto shammy the last few months).

And then one day I decided I wanted to go see the new ICC instances, so I selected normal Forge of Souls and went for it.

Was a bit worried first when I saw that the tank had 23 k health but I told myself I should drop my snobbish attitude and remember that it was a normal run, and that I hadn’t had much more health when I tanked my first Naxx with my furry bear.

Both my snobbish attidtude and my worries evaporated when we entered the instance and the tank swapped to his tank spec and tank gear though, and he doubled up his hp to land on 46 k health when buffed.

Rushed through it but it went ok, the Jaina quest completed so I followed the group through the portal to the normal Pit of Saron, which was a bit harder but we managed to rush through that one ok too.

Since I hadn’t read the quest text I didn’t realise until the end that killing the bosses in the Pit was not enough to complete the quest that would open up the portal to the next dungeon, so I thanked the party for the runs and left the group.

I dared venture in there later and it took me a few runs more through normal Pit of Saron to get the quest done, since apparently the one NPC you need to talk to is killed in mid-run! But I had a nice group which didn’t mind going through the Pit again so I could talk to him before the dragon lady blasted him away, and then we entered the normal Halls of Reflection. More difficult that PoS, but I was out of combat long enough between the waves to have time to ress and heal up anyone who died, and I didn’t lose anyone on the entire run from the Lich King.

Yay, now I was eligible for all the three new IIC dungeons!

The silver cloud soon turned out to have a dark lining though – I was now eligible to enter all the three new ICC instances…

Next time I chose a random heroic to get some badges I got ported into – heroic Pit of Saron…

Now, I did manage to keep people alive (mostly) through the normal one but it was no piece of cake playing with one hand while alt-tabbing out to watch other stuff and reading a book at the same time, it was pretty damned hard work for me to spread the heals and the fortunes and keep me and my party alive, so I was not looking forward to do it on heroic.

And it was pretty damned harder on heroic.

The first boss went down but so did three of the party including me – the retadin and the elemental shammy and the other two couldnt ress – so me and the shammy corpse ran while the retadin lay dead and demanded a ress when we got back.

The pulls were fast but flowing, the tank was considerate and although I had my work cut out for me I had fun too. The only grain in the cup of joy was the retadin actually, who barely had time to keel over before he demanded a ress.

The second boss was dealt with as well and although I kicked the bucket the shaman didn’t and could ress me to save me a corpse run.

We wiped three times on the multi mob packs on the way up to the ice tunnel, and every time the retadin stayed safe and snuggled on the ground while the rest of us ran back. I kept quiet about it because I was in no mood for arguing.

And then, with two packs down and the third reduced to three or four melee mobs, the retadin decides he needs to help me heal! Now, after having gotten the hard packs down and we are home free, now he decides he is going to help heal.

Those last mobs took some time to get down due to the lack of dps but at least none in the party had a health going under 95% at any time.

I was not so much annoyed at him as curious as to why he was doing it, but then the tank told him to get back into ret and start dps’ing again.

The rest of the run went without a hickup of any kind, and in summary it as an ok run. The people were not mean or uber, the tank looked out for me, the general attutude of the people was that “shit happens”, the retadin was a bit weird and I generally don’t like people who demands resses, but otherwise there were no major drawbacks.

And the last boss even dropped a pair of epic boots for Jools! She could finally replace her old worn blue footwear!

But I don’t want to do it again.

Not anytime soon at least, not being so rusty healing with a priest, and not in the kind of gear she has at the moment.

I am having fun in the random groups but I do need to work a lot for it, and  I don’t want to risk getting a rotten apple from the basket and end up in some horrible group like those most people seem to encounter in these dungeons where I feel I might be out of my league.

Doing the Jaina quests on normal unlocked the ICC heroic dungeons for my priest, and apparently the game thinks she is good enough geared to do them, but I simply don’t feel confident enough to do it.

Since I can’t undo the quest, I guess my only option to be sure I will not get an ICC as a random is to choose selected dungeons and check everyone but the ICC ones. I won’t get any frost emblems, but at least I’ll get the Triumph ones from the boss kills.

Hopefully she’ll be ready to do some serious rocking soon, but until then it would just have been easier if I could just check the ones I didn’t want to see on my random runs.

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