WoW Classic – A Run to Ragefire Chasm – The Movie!

Ula has been capturing video of our adventures in WoW Classic, including last weekend’s run to Ragefire Chasm.  So here is her video, A Run to Ragefire Chasm!

 

I love this video, both because it is a pretty concise overview of our Sunday in Azeroth and because it (rightly) overlaps with much of my post about that day.

For example, at about the 1:15 mark you can see us take off for our first run at Orgrimmar.  Chad leads the way, you can see him light off his evasion, then totally dodge around the first guard, just like I described, before dying on the bridge.  Scscla runs on past everybody and makes it to the west gates of the city.

In the next run you can see Obama and Chad taking the lead as the guards lay out Scscla and Jeepy.

Later, after death five, Scscla runs up to Chad’s corpse at the turn to the Cleft of Shadows, which is also its position in a screen shot from my post.

Sprawled in the road again

Then, at the five minute mark you can see Skronk’s corpse, floating in mid air, just inches from the instance portal.  I was already inside by that point, so only heard about the position of the corpse.

And then there was our glorious dance exit from the instance at the end of the run, again seen from another angle.

Anyway, watch the video, give it the thumbs up it deserves, and maybe we’ll get more videos of our adventures.

Running to Ragefire Chasm Again – This Time For Sure!

Part three of our Ragefire Chasm tale, in which we return to the scene of the crime. (Parts One and Two if you are so inclined.)

1pm rolled around… it is actually a bit of a boon that we’re all in the same time zone I suppose… and Bung and his son showed up and, surprisingly, seemed okay with the idea of making the run to Orgrimmar.  It looked like we might get a crack at Ragefire Chasm after all.

Of course, they had to start the run again.  I hadn’t left Booty Bay, so I sailed back over to Ratchet again and ran up the left bank of the Southfury river again to park myself at the west gate to Orgirmmar yet again.

This screen shot appears in all three posts!

I began to consider that it might have taken us less time and effort to run this instance if we had just rolled up a fresh group of Horde characters on Saturday morning, got them up into the level range, and just sauntered into the Cleft of Shadows in Orgrimmar.  But the sunk cost fallacy is strong with us.  We were committed.

Skronk got us all in a group and they began the run across the Wetlands while I went out into the back yard to grill myself a burger.  Lacking hamburger buns, I used a plain bagel, for which crime my daughter said I should leave and not come back. (A plain bagel makes a perfectly cromulent substitute for a bun in my book.)

They made their way to Methenil Harbor, then took the boat to Darkshore and began the run down the coast then across Ashenvale and into The Barrens, eventually arriving at my perch where we grouped up for another set of rushes and deaths.

Obama, Skronk, Chad, Jeepy, and Scscla

Everybody was down to their skivvies again as we tried to describe our past experience and possible tactics to the two new members of the team.  We also described the route and, having already made the map from the last post, I dropped that in Discord so they could see where we were headed.

The route to Ragefire Chasm again

There was some hope that with more of us there might be more distractions for the guards leading to greater leaps forward and perhaps fewer deaths.

Then I stepped up with Chad to once again lead the charge.  I remained optimistic that somehow my rogue skills would help me.  I eschewed stealth, that doing nothing save slow me down the last time, and plunged in, setting off evasion as the guards started to move.

I don’t know if that worked, but a good old fashioned side-step dodge seemed to go well.  The guard was mid swing and I just went around him and fired off my sprint to get well onto the bridge before being cut down.  The numbers did seem to help and Scscla passed through all of us, making it way down the line before dying.

At least I got into the city on the first run this time

Only Skronk had a bad rush, getting whacked by the guards as they ran back from slaying me, leaving his corpse not too far past mine.

Still, it seemed like an auspicious start for most of us.  And the second and third runs seemed to go very well as Obama and I made it to the end of the long ess valley to die at the first sharp corner.

After that it became a bit of a slog.  There are a lot of guards and other NPCs about, not to mention a few players keen to take a shot at us.

At least there were signs to point the way

There were a number of times when we had to take solace that even a two or three step rush moved us forward thanks to the radius in which you can revive.

Eventually we made it within sight of the instance.

It is just over there…. one or two runs left

I had a good run this time around, having made it in only eight deaths.  I think Skronk hit ten this time around due to some bad luck at the start.  I think with some very good luck you might be able to make it in six or seven, but you’re still going to be running from the graveyard quite a bit.

So there we were, in our first instance.

Through the portal at last

That probably means I should introduce the full group in the style of the posts from the old days.  We were:

• Scscla – level 16 warrior
• Chadwicke – level 15 rogue
• Obama – level 15 warlock
• Jeepy – level 14 mage
• Skronk – level 13 priest

And after all of the work and words getting everybody to this point, I wish I had some riveting tales from Ragefire Chasm.

Time to kill worms I guess

The problem is that it is something of a low-to-middling dungeon that doesn’t really have any standout features.

Granted, I am sure that is part by design.  It is the first dungeon in the game by levels and as something players are supposed to take on in their mid-teens when most classes do not yet have all of their skills yet, it has to be somewhat simple.

It’s main theme is many mobs standing around in groups with some patrolling mobs scattered about.  It teaches players how to pull (with some fun line of sight options possible), do crowd control, maintain situational awareness, and generally focusing on burning down targets one at a time.

And graphically, well, it isn’t bad.  It is better looking than any Lost Dungeons of Norrath instance I suppose.  Put there isn’t a lot of “there” there.

Still, for us, a mechanically simple dungeon was probably what we needed.  With Scscla a new tank and Obama new to the whole WoW dungeon thing (he was born about when we formed the instance group) and me learning how to play the very positional rogue class and Jeepy with a fresh mage. I guess only Skronk was in the same place as before, playing the dwarf priest to heal the group.  And I am sure even he needed a warm up.

The run went pretty well.  Things went wrong a few times, with aggro getting pulled off the tank or people running around trying to grab the right target.  But we only had a couple of deaths and one wipe.  The wipe happened when Obama’s void walker, which we were using to off-tank extra mobs on pulls, got a wild hare up its backside and ran off for no apparent reason into the middle of some mobs.  We were standing there after a fight and way off to my left I saw a void walker flash on by, heading into some mobs off to the side.  Given that some of the NPCs here were warlocks and had void walker pets, it could have been nothing.  But then Obama’s void walker was nowhere to be seen and we knew we had a problem.

The void walker died and soon all the mobs it had aggro’d came running straight at us.

Here they come

We stood and fought and brought down a few, but ended up dead.

But what is one more run from the graveyard on Razor Hill?  At least we knew the way.  In fact, we were all pretty familiar with the layout of Durotar and Orgrimmar by that point I think.  You don’t get that sort of on the ground knowledge with the Dungeon Finder.

Ready for another go

We finished off the final boss and took the traditional end of instance group picture.  Well, that is actually Jergosh the Invoker, who is the next to last boss, but we did last boss, Bazzalan, before him, because we missed a turn-off, so Jergosh was the last boss down.

There we are again

There were a few decent drops, but nothing spectacular.  We all gained a level along the way, but in the mid-teens it would have been hard not to gain a level killing that many mobs.

Viewed objectively, there wasn’t much reason for us to go to Ragefire Chasm.  There was no Alliance quest that sent us there.  The rewards were paltry.  And the time spent… well… we pretty much burned our entire weekend play time budget and then some setting up this venture.  We could have probably just focused on leveling up in Westfall on Saturday and some of Sunday and maybe been set for the Deadmines.

But we had never done it before, at least not at level.  When I looked back at our previous pre-Dungeon Finder run at the instance, it was during Wrath of the Lich King and four of us went in mostly to get the achievement.  We had some problems on that run… that was back when Blizz was having issues spawning dungeon instances.  But this time we did it the hard way, at level, with a real group, because we wanted to say we’d done it.

Which is the sort of opportunity WoW Classic gives you.

The instance done we decided to use this as an opportunity to lay down some groundwork for future efforts.  We ran back to the entrance and took off our gear again.

That was a bit of a problem for some, as our limited bag space had filled up, but we managed even if some people had to trash their goo collections.

Then we stepped out into the Cleft of Shadow again and ran around and danced and cavorted with the somewhat stunned Horde players who were hanging around the portal.

Just time for a catch phrase

Eventually they decided to kill us, but we were hanging out there for longer than we probably should have.

That put us back at the graveyard at Razor Hill, where we had the angel revive us, taking the ress sickness and the durability hit.  Then we made the run short run to Ratchet and picked up the flight point. (And got dressed and maybe sold some stuff to a vendor.)

From there it was down to the dock to take the boat to Booty Bay so that everybody could get the flight path there before calling it.

Waiting at the dock

That was a long effort, and by the time we were ready to take the boat I was ready to log off.  But we were now setup to get over to Kalimdor and The Barrens, something that will become useful with the Wailing Caverns on the list of upcoming instances.

But next up is the Deadmines.  The level target is 18 and I have to get Chad caught up on the quest line in Westfall as he was absent when we were helping Jeepy along there on Saturday night.

Our Ragefire Chasm Plan Falls Apart at the Meeting Stone

This story carries on from yesterday’s post.  If you need context, you should start there.

We left off with my rogue, Chad, sitting outside of the west gate of Orgrimmar, having scouted our route to the city with an eye towards our group running the Ragefire Chasm instance.

Bridge to Orgrimmar

We just had to get everybody together with me so we could begin working on getting to the instance.

Skronk and Ula both had characters on and were ready to go.  The Bung and his son logged on and we started to finalize the group.  Bung’s son, who I will call Nuget since that is his handle on Discord, had a level 13 warlock ready to go, which was perfect.  Bung on the other hand had been uncertain about which class he want to play.  In the face of that he apparently rolled up on of each option and played them to level 8 or 9.  He had decided on a mage, but he was only level 9 as of when he logged in on Saturday, so was well shy of the suggested level range of the dungeon.  Moreover, at level 9 he would be something of an aggro magnet trying to make the run to Orgrimmar.

We had to change up our plan.

We decided that three of us should run to Orgrimmar… I was already there… and get to the instance so as to use the meeting stone to summon Jeepy, Bung’s mage, to us once he had leveled up some.  Obama, Nuget’s warlock would help him with that while we got in place.

Now, before you rush to the comment section to tell me what was wrong with this plan let me get that out of the way.

The meeting stones in WoW Classic do not allow you to summon players.

That is probably the most direct comment on their functionality you can find on the internet right now.

Figuring that out, however, was not straightforward.  The meeting stones are there in their long standing locations outside of each instance.  They had been there since WoW 1.3 or so and had been used for a couple of things on the way to the WoW Classic version of 1.12.

However, the actual “three players can summon somebody to the stone” aspect of them was not put in until The Burning Crusade launched.  I have distinct memories of us using the stones to summon people in the group, but we formed the group in September of 2006, just a few months before TBC launched.  So we were able to summon as we worked our way though the instances in vanilla.  Given that was more than a dozen years ago, all of that has blurred together in the mix of time in my own brain.

Finding something that definitively stated whether or not you could summon was something else.  There is a lot of stuff out there about the meeting stones, but not so much specifically about WoW Classic.  People in General Chat said the meeting stones were there and I visually verified this.

Meeting Stone outside the Stockades

But we didn’t try summoning anybody to make sure that feature was in place.

So cool your jets on that and just smile knowingly as I tell our tale.

Skronk and Scscla (pronounced “shizz-la”) made the run and caught up with Chad.  We were levels 13, 16, and 15 respectively, stripped down with our gear in our bags, and ready to take our first run at Orgrimmar.

Ready to go

Here is how you get this done.  You run into the city until the guards kill you.  Your ghost runs back from the graveyard (which is way down at Razor Hill in Durotar in this case) until you get with in resurrect range of your corpse.

Paths back to your corpse

For the first part of the run you want to go back via the bridge you came in over.  After a you get into Orgrimmar proper it becomes easier to just run in through the front gate… though you do have to know a bit about Orgrimmar to find the spiral ramp up to the level where your corpse hopefully is.  Also, watch out for that canyon area along the Southfury River in Durotar on the run back.  Falling in is annoying, requiring you to run out the end of the canyon.  Also there are gaps that humans can clear in a jump that gnomes and dwarves cannot.  Some gnomes and dwarves at least.

Once back to your corpse there is a circular area in which you can resurrect which is generously sized… you can laugh at the locals standing right on your corpse… so you go to the point the furthest along your intended path, hit the button to revive yourself, and start running again until you die or get to your objective.  In our case that was the Ragefire Chasm instance portal in the Cleft of Shadows in Orgrimmar.  Through that we were safe.

The route to Ragefire Chasm

Being a rogue with all my rogue skills, I volunteered to be the first to run at the guards, hoping that some combo of stealth, evasion, and sprint would get me at least across the bridge.  While I attracted the attention of the guards Skronk and Scscla could get past and get some distance in.

That didn’t quite go the way I thought.  Stealth did nothing for a start, save for slow me down.  The guard quite obviously saw some human in his skivvies hunched over and tip toeing up to his position, so ran right at me swinging his axe.  But at least I provided the distraction.

First corpse of the assault

After we were dead Scscla and Skronk both said they had gotten flagged PvP, which is what happens automatically when you enter an enemy home city.  I did not get so flagged.  You can see my corpse behind the guard on the right, which fell just shy of the bridge.  I didn’t even make it into Orgrimmar on the first run.  Skronk at least made it onto the bridge, while Scscla managed to scamper over the crown and down the other side a ways.

And with each death we had to come back from the graveyard at Razor Hill in Durotar, which was a good five minute run.  But at least that let the cool down on my perhaps less than completely useful rogue skills run down.

But with each death, even if we only made it a few steps, the revive radius let us get somewhat more forward.

Over the bridge!

We just had to keep going until we made it into the Cleft of Shadows and the instance, so we revived, ran, died, returned to the scene, and did it all again.

Running back as ghosts just to die again

Sometimes we made a good run.  Sometimes we died just a few steps from our last corpse.  But every death carried us forward.  There was a nice moment at that button-hook turn where we found that you could go up the path, get out of revive range, turn the corner and come back, only to be back in range again.

It took Scscla 8 deaths before she made it into the instance.  Skronk took 9 deaths, while Chad had to die 10 times before he made it in.  That last death was a heartbreaker too, coming pretty much on the one yard line.  But on revive he was able to jump on in.

Into the instance at last

There we were, in the instance at last, ready for the next step of the plan.

Commemorative “We Made It!” screen shot

Jeepy was already level 11 at that point, so we figured we might as well try to summon him.  Our plan was to step out of the instance, take the few steps to the meeting stone, and try to do the summon thing as quickly as possible.  We hashed out the dynamics of how to do that aloud, refreshing and correcting our flawed memories of the days before the Dungeon Finder.

As we recalled, one person had to select the person to be summoned, then click on the summoning stone, after which the other two people had to click on the summoner in order to complete the process to bring the person to the stone.  We repeated that a few times, Skronk said he would be the summoner, we got Jeepy and Obama in the group, and we got ourselves right to the edge of the portal back into town.  Then Skronk said “Go” and we stepped through.

And nothing happened.  We were there, the meeting stone was in front of us, but we couldn’t summon.  We ran back in the instance.  We thought maybe Jeepy was too low level.  If you moused over the meeting stone it said the instance name and the level range, but the cursor did not change to the expected activate cog wheel.  We decided to try Obama instead, who was 14.

We stepped out again, but we couldn’t summon.  no cog wheel.

Meanwhile the locals, hanging around on the city side of the instance portal, started to take notice of the three Alliance characters in their underwear stepping in and out of the instance.  On a third try a couple of the names out there went red as they took shots at us, flagging themselves PvP.  We were already flagged ourselves, since you get flagged the moment you step into a hostile city.

More research ensued as we tried to figure things out.  In the end I finally found a definitive “no summoning” statement mixed in amongst the many opinions about meeting stones and out of date references concerning their behavior or functionality.  Summoning was not a thing.  So what to do?

Reluctant to give up our hard won gains, we stepped out of the instance and let the locals have a free kill.  That made us ghosts with corpses right on the instance line.  Then we logged out.

Ghost character

We were set so that we could run back to the instance if we wanted and jump back in.  Our corpses would stay there.  I wasn’t sure if they would stay forever, but I seemed to recall we were good for a few days.

Then we logged alts back in and went off to Westfall to go help Jeepy the mage get a few more levels.  If he was going to make the run we figured more levels would be good.

In a group of five you can take on many gnolls

And if we were going to give up, well, the next instance was the Deadmines, and we would need to be around level 18 or so in order to go after that… plus we would want to get to the right spot in the main Westfall quest line in order to be sent there… so more levels would, again, be good.  After doing that for a while we called it a night.  We had been playing WoW Classic pretty much all day and into the night at that point.

The next morning Scscla ran back to the instance and recalled home, either to help escort our two missing group members if they wanted to make the run or to just get on home if they were not.  Skronk and I decided to revive at the graveyard there at Razor Hill in Durotar, take the durability hit (hiding gear in your bags doesn’t help if you let the angel revive you), wait out the PvP flag, and make a run to Ratchet.

Chad stealthing away from the graveyard

However, I managed to stumble over a guard and get killed, so had to do the revive at the graveyard twice, for a double hit to my gear.  Eventually though the ress sickness passed and the PvP flag dropped and we were able to trot safely across Durotar to the Southfury River and follow it south to Ratchet, which ended up being closer than I imagined.

We grabbed the flight point there, figuring that might be useful in the future, then ran down to the dock to take the boat to Booty Bay.

Skronk was still wandering around in a state of undress

After sailing to Booty Bay we were able to run up and grab the flight point there.  Since that connects directly to Stormwind we now had a way to get directly to Ratchet without having to run the gauntlet of Stranglethorn Vale or the long way around from Darkshore through Ashenvale.

Now we just had to decide what we were going to do next.  Bung said he and his son would be on around 1pm the next day.  We decided to figure it out then, which is where the next post will pick up.

The Journey to Orgrimmar and Ragefire Chasm

It could be a three-parter, called ‘Ruler of the Bracelet’. The first part would be called ‘The Brotherhood of the Bracelet’, followed by ‘A Couple of Towers’, with the climactic ending called ‘Hey, the King’s Back!

-The end of the best joke from the /silly command

Like the vision in that joke, this too will be a three-parter, largely because I started writing about the beginning before we had reached the end, and the end ended up being further down the road… both in time, events, and words written… than I expected.  But it all started with a plan.

Yes, we had a plan.

It was a flawed plan, based on incorrect information, assumptions, and some blind optimism, but it was a plan none the less.

In its most simple form, the plan was to get together and run the Ragefire Chasm instance.

We were still fumbling to get ourselves organized, and Earl was still getting set up in Japan, but we were also getting a little tired of just hanging around, working on alts, and holding ourselves back to the first half of Westfall so as not to get to strung out in levels.

In that regard Ragefire Chasm has an advantage.  In the ranking of dungeons by level RFC, as I will call it from now on, comes in before the Deadmines, being rated for levels 13-18.  We figured we could get in and do that and not spoil the level spread.  So I put up a a target in the guild MOTD for people to be levels 13-14 in anticipation of running RFC this past weekend.

That was the simple plan.  The actual requirement to accomplish this was somewhat more complex.

RFC is in Orgrimmar, a Horde city, home of the Orcs and Trolls.  RFC is located fairly deep in Orgrimmar, so getting there is a challenge… and all the more so if you want to get there at level 14 or so.  Still, we had done it before so naturally assumed we could do it again.  Piece of cake, details to be worked out later.  The target to do this was this past Saturday.

Skronk, Ula, and I were on early to start scouting things out.  One of the items that came to mind the night before was one we had overlooked up to that point.  How do we get to Orgrimmar?

A bit of discussion shook out three possible routes.

Routes to Orgrimmar

We were starting from Stormwind, and the first that came to mind was to take the boat from Booty Bay to Ratchet on Kalimdor.  From there is it just a short run up to Orgrimmar.  The problem is that getting to Booty Bay requires running/swimming the length of Stranglethorn Vale.  At levels 13-16, the level range of possible characters in our guild, that was going to be tough.  Not impossible, but the likelihood of dying a few times was high.

The second option was to take the boat from Menethil Harbor over to Theramore.  The run from Theramore to Orgimmar is about twice that of the run from Ratchet, but that still isn’t all that far.  That had two obstacles.   First, there is the need to do the reverse Wetlands run to get to Menethil Harbor.  That isn’t so bad at our levels and once you get there you get the flight point that connects to Ironforge, so you need never do it again.  The second problem was the run through Theramore, which is a higher level zone that Stranglethorn Vale, which to my mind made it more problematic that the first plan.

After hashing those out for a bit, the third route was hatched, to take the boat from Menethil Harbor to Auberdine in Darkshore and run the length of Darkshore, then through Ashenvale, into the Barrens, and finally to Orgrimmar.  That had the Wetlands run again, but as I said you only have to do that once.  But it also had the longest run through Kalimdor, much further than the other two options.  However, I figured it was also the safest.  Darkshore is about Westfall in level range, and Ashenvale is the next zone after that, so not a big jump in levels.  Plus, Ashenvale feeds Alliance players in at one end and Horde players in at the other, so the lowest level mobs are at the ends, with the high levels spread out across the middle, reducing exposure.

While nobody was happy about the longer run, it did seem the most viable path.  We set about scouting it.  Ula and Skronk made the run to Menethil Harbor and then took the boat to Auberdine, taking a side trip to search out a quest for a staff for Ula.

I chose my character for the venture.  Having had another week go by I had run up another alt.  This time I rolled up a human rogue on something of a whim, giving me one each of all the non-cloth caster classes for the Alliance.  I named him Chadwicke, looking for some variation on “Chad” I could roll with, since rogues have something of a reputation so I thought I might play on that with some of the “Virgin vs. Chad” meme stuff.

Honestly, the real reason I made a rogue was that we got a couple of the Defias mask drops in Westfall last week, which is about the first bit of head gear you can get in WoW.  There aren’t many options until about level 26 or so.  For whatever reason, I wanted to wear that mask, but it is rogue only and bind on pickup.  So I had to roll up a rogue to get one.  And once I had one I was in the level range of the group.

Chad Masked

I wasn’t too sure how far I was going to go with Chad.  Rogues have been problematic for me in the past.  But once I did his class quest at level 10 and trained him into dual wield he was destroying mobs one on one. (I was doing that during the Reavers entosis op at one point.)  That sold him for me, so I decided he should go on the run to RFC.

I stripped him down… you put all your gear in your bags to keep them from being damaged if you die, and this trip was going to see a lot of deaths I figured, so I was down to my skivvies the whole way… and sent him on his way through Loch Modan and through the Wetlands, a run made easier by his rogue abilities.

I’ll just stealth by that orc thank you

He was into the Wetlands and on his way, saying the tagline I had picked out for him, for which I made a macro.

Roll on brother Chad

That won’t get old I am sure.

He made it to Menethils Harbor without incident and was soon waiting on the dock for the boat to Auberdine.

Mask bros at the dock

I took the boat, passed by Ula and Skronk, who were headed over to Darnassus as part of a quest or something, and started the run to Orgrimmar.

Darkshore is, as the name implies, rather dark, but the sun began to shine through once Chad made it to Ashenvale.

Sunny days again for Chad

Ashenvale was a hoof, but there wasn’t much in the way of danger.  There were a few ?? mobs off in the distance, but nothing came to get me.  I picked up the flight point at Anastaar, then realized I had forgotten to get the one at Auberdine.  Something to go back for later.  I just stuck to the roads and followed the signs.

This must be the way

Once you get to the boarder between Ashenvale and The Barrens, the road veers right and leads straight into a Horde fortification with guards and such.  Dangerous stuff for a low level Alliance player.

Horde customs and immigration check point

Fortunately, there is an obvious path off to the left that leads to a hole in the ramparts.

They built a wall and tried to make the Alliance pay for it

From there I just cut across The Barrens towards Durotar… dying once because I got a mob on me and forgot I was without my gear… running up to the back door of Orgrimmar, which is across a bridge over the Southfury River.

Bridge to Orgrimmar

Up until that point, everything had been going great.  We had been on for a couple of hours, Bung and his son were set to log in and join us to round out the group.  Ula was swapping out to her warrior alt Scscla to tank for us, Skronk was a dedicated holy priest set to heal, and Chad was there to help DPS.  We just had to get everybody out to where I was to begin the assault on Orgrimmar.

That is the topic for tomorrow’s post.

Three Instances – One Night

Hrmm, that title seems familiar.

We assembled on Saturday night to renew our instance assault, and the first on the list was Ragefire Chasm.

Ragefire Chasm was up first because you can only use dungeon finder to access it through level 21, and our group line up was:

• Xula – level 21 Gnome warrior
• Ethelred – level 21 Worgen druid
• Earlthedog – level 21 Worgen warrior
• Maloney – level 21 Worgen mage
• Nancyboy – level 21 Worgen priest

Last week’s runs through the Deadmines and Wailing Caverns was worth almost four levels to the group.  So if we wanted to do Ragefire, we needed to do it now or be faced with trying to run to the zone, which is located in the middle of Ogrimmar.  We’ve done it as Alliance players before, but it was a challenge just getting there.  And now with everybody hanging out in the old world capitals again, the challenge is no doubt even greater.

So we used the Dungeon Finder and dropped into the instance in the middle of the orc capital.

And, once there, we found… no quests.

Not much rage, not much fire, and no quests

I thought, with the advent of Cataclysm, that the dungeon quests were all going to be located within the dungeons. But Ragefire missed the cut for that it seems.  There were no quest giving NPCs hanging around the front door… at least not on our side of it.  So, presumably, the quests are all still in Orgrimmar and are horde only.

And the other thing we found was a lot of grey mobs facing us.  The level range of 15-21 seemed to be tilted firmly toward the low end.

Well, we were there, we thought we might as well get the achievement.  So we plowed ahead.  We hit and bowled over the first boss then kept going.  Weaving our way through the path of least mobbage, we ended up at the second boss, who also turned out to be the first mob in the instance worth experience to us.

We jumped on him and killed him quickly, at which point we got the achievement for the instance.

We stood there and debated for a moment as to whether this meant we were done or not. With no quests and very little prospect for experience or usable loot, did we really have to go after the final two bosses?  We decided Blizzard knew best and that we were done.  We pulled up the dungeon finder from within Ragefire Chasm, something we compared to sitting on the phone in one restaurant making reservations for second, and were soon whisked away to Shadowfang Keep.

Reservations for 5 please...

Elapsed time in Ragefire Chasm: 11 minutes.

At Shadowfang Keep (SFK) we met Ivar, a notable worgan and owner of a chain of seafood restaurants.

Ivar is the quest giver for SFK, the only exception being the class quests each of us got at level 20 that sent us to the instance.

Ivar is also known as Ivar the Doorman or Ivar-come-lately.

The thing is, Ivar and his droogs, who are very high level, appear over and over throughout the instance pointing the party at bosses and asking that we take them out, opening doors, and generally getting involved with almost everything.  Everything except the fighting. Ivar never seems to get his own hands dirty, only showing up at a fight once the main guy is dead.

So we got our first quest, to kill the first of several undead guys dressed like classical pilgrims.

Piling up on the stairs looking at the first boss

We were a bit worried, here in this new and improved SFK that we might run into something too tough for us at our level.

For the most part, however, we had little to fear.

There is a new set of bosses, but there were, for the most part, in the same old locations.

Hiding in the dining hall, eh?

There were less yard trash mobs to worry us than before.  Last time we were here we though the place had been nerfed.  This time it was a little more clear that it had.

Of course, Ivar kept showing up to egg us on, outside…

Ivar on the ramparts

and inside…

Ivar the doorman... or dog... or whatever

Until we were there at the last fight.  Ivar, in his usual style, offered to watch the door to ensure that nobody interfered, while we went in and did the heavy lift.

It was just Lord Godfrey standing up there on the platform where Archmage Arugal used to stand.

Now there was a boss.  That Arugal used to teleport all over the room.  That fight was a challenge back in the day.

This guy though.  He looked like a wimp.  Who is afraid of a pilgrim?  We walked up and tore into him.

And wiped.

It was a trap! He had TWO guns!

Yeah.  See, Godfrey has guns, and they give him this special attack, pistol barrage.  You get a warning and everything, but we ignored it.

In fact, we stood in such a way that he managed to hit us all with it whenever he used it.  He won, we lost.

That meant running back past Ivar… or multiple Ivars.  He didn’t despawn from a couple of his location.

We made it back to Godfrey and then, a little bit wiser, we pulled him down to the main floor where Xula, in her first tanking assignment that required positioning of the mob, kept him aimed at a wall while the rest of us stood behind him and kicked him in the ass.  And when the pistol attack came up, Xula stepped out of the way like a matador facing a particularly ugly bull.

We killed him dead which, as usual, got us the achievement.

And so we were victorious.

Victory over Godfrey

We learned a bit in Shadowfang Keep, though what we learned was mostly about gnomes and hay.  They love it, it seems.  They hide in it.

Beware in the hay

SFK done, we were still only 90 minutes into the evening. We decided to let the Dungeon Finder send us someplace random.

It chose Stormwind Stockade.  Here we would be challenged.  This instance has a recommended level range of 21-30, and we were only level 22 as a group.

Just to demonstrate how bad we were in for it, we wiped on the first pull.

Dead on the door step

Okay, Xula was a bit keyed up, excited after all that hay, and pulled pretty much the whole hallway down on us while we were still standing around going, “So, stockades, haven’t been here in a while.”

And to prove it, we went on and took the place out without another death.

We had to take care, all of the mobs were at least a couple of levels above us, but we stuck to tried and true pulling and killing and ground through the place in no time.

Hogger! Again!

Of course, Hogger is the star of the show.  But we cleaned his clock without much drama.

Killing him gives you the achievement.  See, he is the star.

But unlike Ragefire Chasm, we actually had a reason to carry on, another quest to finish off with the final boss.  Which didn’t take us that long at all.  30 minutes or so after we started, we were standing victorious.

Nancyboy fell asleep

And that about wrapped it up for the night.

We all ended up at level 23 and, in contrast to the start of the night where we were in a hurry to get to a couple of dungeons because we had so many choices, now there is only one more dungeon available to us through the dungeon finder.

Blackfathom Deeps is all that is on the list that we haven’t done yet.  With the same level range as Stormwind Stockade, we had probably better hit it as soon as possible to make it any sort of challenge, judging from what we have seen so far,

After that, we might have to go outside and play.

Meanwhile, watch out when walking through hay.  There could be gnomes hiding in it.

Ragefire Chasm Redux

We finally reached the point where there were no more holiday events to go after and no more fresh instances to run for the group.  It looked like we might spend a Saturday evening playing our new characters, the ones we rolled up on Lightninghoof, one of the RP-PvP servers.

But what should we do?

With five of us, running around the Barrens seems like a bit of a waste.  We had all progressed into the teens with characters though, so Ragefire Chasm seemed like a good plan.  It is a nice, low level instance.  Yes, we did it before, though not exactly as it was intended.

So an objective was set.  Now which characters should we play?  Each of us had at least two or three characters in the right level range.

We shuffled through the deck of possibilities and ended up with the following roster:

14 Troll Rogue – Azucar (Bungholio)
15 Tauren Druid – Hurmoo (Vikund)
16 Tauren Druid – Azawak (Skronk)
17 Orc Shaman – Earlthebat (Earlthecat)
19 Blood Elf Paladin – Enaldie (Ula)

This gave all of us somewhat different roles than we had in the old group.

Azawak became the tank, leaving the healing role behind.  Azucar and Enaldie left behind ranged DPS for… melee DPS.  Earlthebat got to stand back and take the ranged DPS route.  And Hurmoo was no longer in close doing melee DPS, but got to stand back and heal.

Fortunately, to support the learning curve for our new roles, we were, on average, a bit over level for the instance.

The first order of business was to get all the quests for the instance lined up.  A few were easy and could be shared, but there was one quest line that starts at Thrall that we had to all run through.  And run is the operative word, since it meant running back and forth around Orgrimmar for a bit.

Finally though we had all the quests and were ready to go.  We had all the quests.  We had a laundry list of things to kill.  We were at the instance door.

Somehow I, as Hurmoo, was nominated to be the group leader.  Usually that is a mistake on the order of going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line, but things did not go too badly.  I need to go off and find some macros for putting up raid icons, but otherwise the floaty crownie thing on my portrait was not the mark of death.

Considering how new we were to our roles, the run went smoothly.  None of us died despite some teething problems.

Azucar got some on-the-job training about stealth and sap, which was required because he was our only crowd control option.  Being the lowest level in the group meant that his stealth was not as effective as it might otherwise have, but that just reinforced the lessons.

We do have to get used to having somebody stealthed and leading the way in the group.  At least one group member kept following our stealthed rogue as he was trying to sap, triggering the expected proximity pull.  Again, we made it through despite the that.

Having a druid bear tank worked well enough.  At this level he also put out the most damage, thanks largely to the retribution aura Enaldie had up.

Ragefire Chasm itself is somewhat odd in its design philosophy.  There is a whole side path of mobs that leads to nowhere and the main boss, Taragaman the Hungerer, is the second of four bosses you kill, so the achievement comes up when you’ve still got work left to do.

He was not an epic fight for us.  We cleared some of the surrounding groups and then went after him.  Soon we stood over his corpse.

Taragaman Defeated

That left us the clean up of the two passages behind Taragaman’s area, which we worked our way through slowly as we tried to fit into the new dynamic of our group.

In the end we stood looking out over the dungeon having made it to the far end.

Mission Accomplished!

And then we had to walk all the way back to where we came in because there is no back door to Ragefire Chasm.

The ironic twist of the night was the loot.  Formerly we were a group that wore only plate or cloth and we seemed to get a huge amount of leather or mail armor drops.

Now we were a group that wore only leather and mail.  So what dropped all night?  Cloth.

So cloth much dropped that I later trained Hurmoo as an enchanter so that we could at least disenchant items we cannot use if we get a repeat performance.

Ragefire Chasm is nice, and served as a good place for us to start working on our grouping skills.  In fact, we were wondering why there wasn’t an Alliance instance at the same level before you got to the Deadmines.

Of course, Ragefire Chasm is something of a single use dungeon, so investing in an Alliance version might not be worthwhile, though who knows what Cataclysm will bring.

Once we were through the dungeon and had turned in all the quests, our group had all leveled at least once and three of us leveled twice.  So our group looked like this at the end:

16 Rogue – Azucar
17 Druid – Hurmoo
18 Druid – Azawak
18 Shaman – Earlthebat
20 Paladin – Enaldie

At those levels, there is little point to heading back into Ragefire Chasm.

But now where to go next?  Do we face the PvP aspect of the server and try to get to the Deadmines?  Or should we try the long and winding road that is Wailing Caverns?

Things to do in Orgrimmar When You’re Naked

I was not the only one in our little guild feeling the post-Noblegarden achievement buzz, or so it seemed.  I logged on Sunday after our Azjol-Nerub run to find Skronk and Ula in the midst of an assault on Orgrimmar in search of an achievement.

They weren’t after Thrall or anything crazy.

When Blizzard introduced the achievements a lot of things that you might have done before they were part of the game did not get recorded.  That includes, for us, almost all of the instances we did.  So they were looking at the list that we were going to have to redo and saw one we had not done.  They wanted Ragefire Chasm.

Of course, the reason we had not done it is that the instance is located deep within Orgrimmar, one of the horde capital cities.  But, being a quiet Sunday afternoon, it seemed as likely a time as any to give it a go.

Getting to Ragefire Chasm involved stripping down to avoid damage to our equipment and running through Orgrimmar until we died.  Actually, we left our tabards on so as not to terrorize the local population too much.  Noblegarden bunny ears were also worn to give the whole thing a festive appearance. (Those bunny ears are the best head gear ever, even beating out my animal fur trimmed pimp hat in my opinion.)

Once dead, we would run back to our corpses, revive at an opportune moment, and run a bit further into the city, thus moving the ball forward with each death.

Our Route into Orgrimmar

Ula and Skronk had some bad luck inititally and only made it to about the auction house while Vikund, wearing tabard, bunny ears, and mounted on his swift Zhevra, made it all the way to The Drag before falling to the city guards.

Running back to Orgrimmar

It turned out that the corpses of Skronk and I ended up pretty close together, so we coordinated our next move forward.  He revived, bubbled himself, mounted, and raced ahead pulling the guards with him.  Then Vikund revived, mounted up and followed in Skronk’s wake.  We had a clear shot to the instance and were going to make it when Blizzard stuck it to us yet again.

So close.

Ula moved herself up in the chaos and we all ran back through the city and debated how long to wait until we revived.  Death would be quick as two guards were camping our corpses.  Skronk tried running into the instance as a ghost only to find that reset him back out in Durotar again, giving him the joy of running back to his corpse without actually having the fun of dying.

We got lucky though, and were able to get an instance to launch for us after only a couple of tries.

In the name of being sporting, we remained unarmored for our run through the instance, wielding only silly things, such as my fishing pole.  Okay, it is a pretty devestating fishing pole, but it does not allow me to do any of my special paladin weapon attacks.  Not that I needed it.  We area attacked our way through the instance, mowing down very low level elites until we came upon a bigger than average guy whose death gave us the achievement we desired.

Tradition dictated that we take our picture after killing the main boss, so here we are, attired for adventure in Ragefire Chasm.

Naked Aggression Rewarded

Now, if I had been thinking, I would have run over to some open water in Orgrimmar and quickly fished to get the achievement for catching a fish in both Stormwind and Orgrimmar.  But that will have to wait for another time.

We then went off and knocked out the Scarlet Monastery achivement.  We had done that instance ages ago, but it was in the pre-achievement days so did not get counted.  That run also let us pick up quite a few of the books you need to read for yet another achievement.  They were mostly in the Library wing, of course.

With Mother’s Day though, we did not do a Northrend instance last week and Earl has a couple of weddings to attend this month, so we will be on a short instance hiatus in WoW.  We’ll probably keep it light and work on some other silly achievements in the mean time.