The Ancient Gaming Noob

Graveyard Mania March 3, 2010

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warcraft.
Tags: graveyard, Scarlet Monastery
add a comment

One of the problems starting out on a new server is you can never be sure which character you roll will end up being your main and who will get left behind.

At least that is one of the problems I have.  Some people just roll one character I hear.

So when we moved over the Lightninghoof for the great horde/RP/PvP experiment, I rolled up a few characters.  We didn’t know how things were going to shake out, so I wanted a few options.

In addition to a druid, I rolled up a warrior and a shaman.  I had played neither class beyond a few levels, so they fit into our “new class/new role” criteria.

I gravitated to the shaman at first and thought he might end up being my main.  Grungur the orc shaman.  I spec’d him enhancement, the melee DPS tree.  He was fun to play, the class feeling different than my old reliable paladin or hunter.

I even invested in a trade skill for him.  I figured if he was likely to be my main, inscription would be good.  That would let him make some money as well as keep the guild supplied in glyphs.

In the end though, the group needed a healer, and early on a shaman pretty much has one healing spell, so I decided to go the restoration druid route for instances.  Three heals are better than one, right?

And going with Hurmoo worked out well enough.  I had gone the enchanting route with him and picked up herbalism for his other profession which let him harvest for Grungur.  That kept Grungar skilling up inscription which in turn fed weapon and armor scrolls back to Hurmoo to enchant and hand out or sell.

Good for the guild and good for my own money supply.

However, to keep the inscription rolling, I had to keep leveling up Grungur.  You can’t just sit at low level and max out your trade skill.  Each tier has a level requirement you must meet, and while Grungur was already past 20 when he needed that, for the next tier he needed to be level 35.

I made a little bit of that up by doing holiday daily quests.  I also went out and did quests the old fashioned way.

But finally I decided, based on our experiences up to that point, that very little beat running instances.  So to get him up to level 35 I decided that the dungeon finder was the answer.

Not only is the experience great, but you get decent loot now and again and if you go random at lower levels you get a goodie bag and some cash when you finish the instance.

Of course, I am impatient, so the thought of hanging around waiting for a DPS slot to show up did not appeal to me.  I base that opinion partially on this screen shot.

It seems that, more often than not, that a DPS player misses the ready check.  And while they represent 3 out of 5 of the team, so the odds dictate that should be the case, in my mind they have gotten bored from the long wait and walked away from their computer.

Under this mental influence I respec’d Grungur to restoration.  After all, by that point I had TWO healing spells, healing wave and lesser healing wave.  What more could I need?

Well, HealBot would be nice, so I made sure that was enabled.

Thus armed it was into dungeon finder.

I suppose I should not be surprised at how readily groups come up since dungeon finder works across servers in the same groups as battlegrounds, but it always seems odd to get a group so quickly.

The first run was nearly a disaster.  Razorfen Kraul came up and our group was more towards the “gogogo” end of the spectrum.  Grungur was the lowest level in the group by a couple of levels and was running out of mana while running to keep up.

He didn’t do too bad.  Only once did somebody die due to lack of mana, though I was bandaging people at then end of a few fights.  Line of sight issues caused more deaths.  Welcome to RFK.

In the end we survived, leveled, and got our rewards.

And then began the dominion of the graveyard of Scarlet Monastery.

RFK got Grungur to level 27, and from that point on he’s gotten nothing but the graveyard for groups.

Granted, I do not think there is any quicker instance to run.  I went through it five times in a little over an hour one Sunday afternoon.  But you do start to tire a bit of seeing the same old landmarks.

So at this point I have undoubtedly been in the graveyard more than any other instanced dungeon in Azeroth.  With the combo of this as well as our times hunting the headless horseman plus actually doing this instance in the weekly group adds up to a lot of time spent banging on the scarlet crusade.

Still, as I said above, it is quick and you do get a nice little bonus at the end when you’ve finished.

You get a little extra experience on top of the bounty you already received, some extra coin, and the goodie bag.  Though for Grungur, it seems to be the same necklace 4 out of 5 times, with the only variation being a slightly different necklace and, once, some gloves.

Grungur hit 32 last night, again in graveyard. (I went back and did it again… 3 times… just to pick up some screen shots.)  So while I cannot really complain, having benefited so much, I do look forward to perhaps getting a different wing of Scarlet Monastery in these groups some day.