Summer Reruns – The Instance Group in Vanilla WoW

The Chronicles of the Saturday Night Instance Group have been somewhat sparse this year.  Things change and real life intrudes.

So I went back and picked out the tales of the original group run, our joint conquest of the group content in World of Warcraft, which started in earnest back in October 2006.

The group in Shadofang Keep – 2006

Not that we were free from interruptions back then.  There is a pretty large gap in the timeline March and September 2007, during which one of us published a book, one of us moved across town, and another changed jobs and moved across country.  That gave us some time to go explore other games.  And we got back together to continue forward.

This group of characters… with one substitution part way in, Blintz the dwarf rogue was replaced by Vikund the paladin… did the group content and followed the various story lines all the way through to the end of Wrath of the Lich King.  We ended up skipping bits here and there.  And we never did get back and finish up those last three instances they added WotLK after we were done.

October 2006

• The Deadmines Round 1
• The Deadmines Round 2
• The Deadmines Round 3
• Wailing Caverns Round 1

November 2006

• Deadmines – Round 4
• Shadowfang Keep – Round 1
• Blackfathom Deeps – Round 1
• Stormwind Stockades – Round 1
• Shadowfang Keep – Round 2
• Razorfen Kraul – Round 1

December 2006

• Gnomeregan – Round 1
• Scarlet Monastery – Round 1
• Scarlet Monastery – Round 2

January 2007

• Scarlet Monastery – Rounds 3 through 7
• Scarlet Monastery – Round 8
• Scarlet Monastery – Rounds 9 and 10
• Razorfen Downs – Round 1
• Razorfen Downs – Round 2

February 2007

• Uldaman – Round 1

March 2007

• Uldaman – Round 2
• Uldaman – Round 3

September 2007

• Return of the Azerothian Combo (Zul’Farrak)

October 2007

• Finishing Zul’Farrak
• Maraudon Orange
• Maraudon Light

November 2007

• Maraudonian Azerothian Princess
• Sunken Temple – Round 1
• Sunken Temple – Round 2

December 2007

• Blackrock Depths – Round 1
• Blackrock Depths – Round 2
• Blackrock Depths – Round 3

January 2008

• Scholomance – Round 1
• Stratholme – Round 1
• Scholomance – Round 2 – Plus Dire Maul West
• Dire Maul West – Round 1
• Scholomance – Round 3 – Epic Win

February 2008

• Lower Blackrock Spire – Round 1
• Getting Upper Blackrock Spire Access

And That was that.  After getting UBRS access, we were through the dark portal and into The Burning Crusade content.  We had our epic mounts.  We saw most of the content.  And we were the right level.  It was time to advance.

The Group on Epic Mounts

Post WotLK we tried to recapture the feeling of the original instances by re-rolling our group as Horde on a PvP server in November 2009.  We made it into TBC content.  But various changes to the game… talent trees and abilities were tuned for the new content… and ourselves… we eventually figured out how to play… made it seem like the original content had been nerfed in some way.

And then again, with the launch of Cataclysm, we re-rolled and tried to start from scratch, four Worgen and a gnome.  But that fell apart more quickly than I thought it would.  The dark side of the Dungeon Finder reared its ugly head, as Blizzard redesigned the original content to suit its tool.  Until then, DF wasn’t that bad in my eyes.  I wasn’t so concerned about cross-realm groups or bad matches.  But when Blizzard decided that the instance content should be successfully completed by any group that met the minimum requirements in an hour or less, the instance plan died.

In about four years we went from needing to take multiple all-night runs at some instances to running multiple instances in a single night on a regular basis.  The game had clearly changed and the past was no longer reachable.

But we have our memories of good times, a series of blog posts to help remind us when memories fade, and even a video.