Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been spending a lot of time getting intimate with the new Dungeon finder tool recently, though not yet enough to get me a new pet. And, on the whole, unlike a lot of people it seems, my experiences have been overall positive. Every run I’ve been placed with has, had enough DPS to clear the place, so I don’t really see what the fuss is about if one or two members are less well geared than I am.

The big thing I miss is the whole travelling across the world to get to a destination. Even if it’s just being summoned, it feels a lot more epic than being unceremoniously whisked away from wherever you were, and whisked back when you finish.

Of the negative experiences,  there have been two. The first one was entirely not the group’s fault. It turns out that if your world server crashes in a certain way, you’ll disconnect from a shared instance server too. Given at the time I’d just pulled a boss and when I managed to get back online ten minutes later, I could see that there had been a wipe, it wasn’t surprising I’d been kicked by the group.

The second one was caused by Oculus, Destroyer of Pugs. On zoning in, two people immediately left the group. Of those remaining, one hadn’t done it before, and admitted as much. I asked him to listen to my instructions so that we’d get through the last boss fine. The replacement players were happy to do occulus, and had done it before multiple times.

So, after downing the first boss in relatively short order we moved onto the drakes. This was where things began to fall apart. It turns out that the last member of our party also had never been here before, had kept quiet, and was now demonstrating the most Epic of Fails I’ve seen in a long time. He had no vehicle bar. He claimed he’d never used a vehicle before, and couldn’t get off the dragon once he was on it.All the while others were pulling the random flying dragons from all directions. I’ve no idea how they were managing it.

The excuse? “I don’t PvP”. Obviosuly you don’t raid or level, either, matey, given the huge numbers of vehicle quests out there.

Anyway, in the 10 minutes it took us to clear the trash, he’d “discovered” how to unmount. Suspicious. The second boss was a nightmare – I ended up soloing it after everyone else failed to get out of the AoE. Third boss was OK, but not great, idiots with the time bomb debuff running toward the group rather than away from it.

And the fourth… after people ignored my requests to actually get a green drake (I was on red, everyone else on yellow) and ran into the boss without actually checking who was near for a second time, I said a single word. “Bye”. And I ninjaquit the instance.

I’m not proud, but Occulus has a reputation for being difficult and now I see why. It’s not that it’s hard (it isn’t). It’s just that two people unwilling to listen even for a second if they’ve never been there before make things impossible.

I tank to enjoy myself. Hell, most situations I can salvage, like pulling many packs at once in a conventional dungeon (my record so far is five, and I did that knowing full well that everyone was well geared and would cope). But having to sit back and watch as someone who’s never been there costs me 14G every time I die because they know better? No thanks.

Perhaps I’m being overly negative. There have been far, far more good experiences than bad. It’s unfortunate that the bad ones overshadow the good.

Originally published at The View From Down Here. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been a few days since 3.3 launched. Things have changed big time in the World of Warcraft.

Sure, there’s the new raid encounter (and a very fine one it is too), but that’s not all. Three new dungeons, which link together to tell a story. I only had a chance to play through them from Saturday onwards, and the story they tell is one that I find somewhat satisfying. I have also been spending multitude time with the new LFG tools, but that’s another post entirely.

Arthas / The Lich King (depending on who you listen to) has cropped up a lot over the entire expansion – in fact, I think he appears in encounters at least once in each zone, and then again as an uninvited guest in the Trial of the Crusader.  The trouble with all of these encounters, though, is that he loses. The sole exception is the Drakuru encounter in Drak’tharon Keep, and that turns out to just be a waypoint in a longer story.  The net effect is that he seems rather too much like a pantomime villain, whose parting catchphrase may as well have been “I would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids, er, adventurers”

And so for me Halls of Reflection was something of a triumph. We actually lose, and have to run away. The blow still doesn’t seem so hard, though, as everyone gets out alive. If I’d had my way, we’d have seen a repeat of the Wrathgate scenario, and lost another major faction leader. The Lich King is badass, and yet he allows us a fair chance at escaping? Give me a break.

In terms of Icecrown Citadel, I’ve seen the first three encounters. Well designed, but we seem to be spending most of out raid time bouncing against the “Additional Instances cannot be launched” problem. Yeesh. I don’t enjoy spending my raid time being punished for being a guild that raids later in the evening (9PM server time). And the trash seems somewhat undertuned thus far – pulling both main packs of Lady Deathwhisper’s room at once and AoEing them down? I long for the carefully calculated pulls in Black Temple and Sunwell.