We had our first round of instance play on Saturday. We decided to give the Deadmines a try as we all had the quest “The Defias Brotherhood” in our logs. We did have to run around, knock off the Defias Messenger, follow the traitor, and get the last step, but that went pretty quickly considering how many people were running around the zone on a Saturday night.
A busy night on the server also explains why we did not face a single fight getting to the instance. The Deadmines were busy.
When we zoned in, our group consisted of:
Level 15 Warrior
Level 16 Priest
Level 17 Rogue (me)
Level 18 Mage
I understand that this is a fairly low level group for Deadmines, and we were not outfitted with particularly formidable equipment. (Not a blue item amongst us.) Still, we were there and ready to go, so we thought we would give it a try just to see how we did.
Myself aside, the party was knowledgeable when it came to the zone, which certainly saved us any excessive grief. We got into the zone and lost our warrior to a death a few fights in when we had one more elite patrol than we expected. That is what you bring a priest along for though, so he was quickly ressed up and off we went.
We cleared out everything up to the first boss, the goblin Sneed in his shredder.
Our first run at the shredder went poorly and we got wiped out in short order. We reassembled and took another shot at it and the shredder went down much more smoothly. However, once the shredder is down, Sneed jumps out and attacks. At that point people were low on mana and had used heal potions recently, so Sneed wiped us out after a moderate fight. But, in WoW, death is relatively painless. We regrouped and took down Sneed in the return bout without much drama.
We proceeded along to the forge where we were able to effectively take out pairs of elites. We did get wiped on the ramp once when we ended up with three elites, including two engineers who each summoned up one of their little robots. Still, we sucked that up and came back.
The forge was also the scene of our best battle. We got done with a single elite battle when a three member patrol group walked in on us. We started that fight and were doing okay when we got a proximity pull on one of the gnomes. So we have four elites on us, but everybody just did their job and we brought them all down. It was a beautiful moment.
We moved on, killed our way through to the cannon, lit the fuse, stood back, and blew the door open. Van Cleef’s ship was in sight now.
And then the mage had computer problems and had to log off and reboot. As we waited, another three elite patrol wandered up and caught us with out pants down and we were spanked again.
The mage logged back in and was outside the instance. We ran our ghosts back in got ourselves situated in the instance all together again and found that not only had a good portion of the place respawned, but the warrior and the rogue had our paper dolls up indicated dangerously worn equipment. My rogue had both weapons in the warning zone.
Still, we decided to press on as we had not yet been decisively defeated.
We fought our way through the miners and patrols until we were back at the dock. We started pulling the mobs on the dock, but after the second fight there, my main weapon went red. I was a one dagger rogue. Fortunately somebody had picked up a grey dagger that I could use in stead of having to equip my skinning knife.
Then our warrior’s pants went red after the next fight, which made a big difference in the amount of healing he needed. Some spare pants were found and on we went. We made it all the way up to the ship’s gangway. At the top stood Mr. Smite the first mate, his rogues hidden from site. This would be our biggest fight so far!
I was also, quite possibly, our shortest fight. Mr. Smite and his two rogues were beyond our capabilities. Our warrior went down quickly and, as Mr. Smite turned on me, my last words were, “We got his hit points down 5%!” And then I died.
When I got back to the instance, my other dagger was red and a lot of my equipment was yellow on my paper doll. It was time to call it a night.
Still, it was a lot of fun. We all ended up gaining a level during our time. We all worked together pretty well. And, frankly, we got further than we had any right to given our levels and equipment.
Things I Learned
The rogue things has its ups and downs. I managed to do a lot of damage without pulling too much aggro. I was surprised to see how effective feint was when I did pull aggro. It never failed to turn the mob back on our warrior. On the other hand I had to do a lot of running around to get into position to use my best attacks. Since hunter has been my favored class up to this point, I am more used to standing still and shooting, so this was a bit of a keyboard workout.
Do not panic. Stand, fight, do what you are supposed to do, the situation might not be as bad as it seems. Our big fight in the forge bore this out.
Bring along an extra dagger or two.
Doing an instance with people who know what they are doing makes a huge difference.
When you have a mage along, you end up hearing the word “sheep” a lot more than you would ever expect to in any context.
Next Time
We plan to give this another try this coming weekend. We will all be a level or two higher and we might have a warlock along as well.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 