Imagine that, three nights in a row and we end up doing BRD, blackrock depths each night. My shaman Rockdarr and my gf's paladin Kriss7 ended up in BRD for the 15th time this past week. Since people start brd around level 52, and move on to BRD Uppoer City!!! at level 54, we have been through this dungeon more times than we'd like. especially when no one can figure out how to really get the "random dungeon completion" for doing the upper city.
through one of my first trips to brd, after a wipe, i picked up the stoneforge key quest that got me the, well, stoneforge key. this just gave me access to the rest of the city. it wasnt all that awesome really. basically i had to kill a boss, turn in the quest, and from between this dead guy's legs, out comes a key. yep, thats how it happened. i kid you not.
but brd holds several items of interest to me. one, full clears means 1 more level (actually now, about 80% of a level). two, i get to see some super silly accidental mass pulls. three, the opportunity to see the highest dps die several times. and four, craptastic items that actually look cool, especially weapons.
but other than those things, there's really not too much i want to take from these instances. like SM or Uldaman or Sunken Temple, i wanna get out of there as soon as possible.
BRD isnt like Maraudon. Mara is split up into three sections. but each section has a different look and feel. it could have possibly been three different instances, each with a different entrance and no connection between them. Instead, we're given a massive dungeon with two different entrances and a possible item to teleport us to the beginning of the third section. kinda involved, which is good, but still. i'd rather be told i cant enter Mara-falls because i havent done Mara-ugly yet.
BRD changed that. They added the requirement of a key and still do! Not only that, they drop us into BRD thinking we'll do the upper city. but we're sent to the beginning of the map and no one really knows we're in the dungeon group for "upper city" until after we kill the prison boss. everyone stands there confused and wonders where their ballsack of goodstuffs is. but its not there. we dont get the message that we're done. so we move on forward and try to kill as many bosses as possible. i have the key, so i open the locks and we go through every single boss we can kill. NONE gives us the acheivement for finishing the upper city portion of BRD. none. /sad
Am i complaining? sort of. i dont mind the large dungeon. with a good group, thats a lot of experience. i went from level 52-55 over the weekend. it was easy. i did get a few groups that stopped after a few bosses. there's really no incentive to stay after the prison boss. but others stayed, and thats how i got my key. i find that the level 55's would rather finish the whole instance than requeue because its basically the final push to get to outland. everyone's sick and tired of dungeons. everyone's sick and tired of trying to deal with groups and fail tanks (i dont know why, but they all seem to be druids).
Queue times have increased. from 10 minutes to 20-30 minutes. why? because no one wants to run the dungeon any more. i mean at level 55, there's just a few more levels til we hit the next continent. some are already out there trying to kill things. others are better off questing or finishing off some chain quest they've been meaning to do. others dont mind a little bit of pvp. but really, before i hit outlands, i'd like to complete blackrock spire (another stupidly long dungeon, and doesnt look like a spire at all), scholomance and stratholme. when people hit 55, they're able to make themselves a deathknight. but there's so many people i see playing on alts that this reason is a bit pushing it. so... why the queue times have gone up i have no idea. these are only my guesses.
in any case, i think the last azeroth dungeon we'll be doing in LFD will be blackrock spire and scholo. on my other alts, i've never been in a group for stratholme. scholo, yes. UBRS yes. upper black rock spire. ubrs.
most scholomance groups make it all the way to the end. most ubrs groups usually die out since no one knows where the hell to go for anything. we dont even know how to capture the worg for the pet.
In any case, i've seen BRD more times than i really care to see. although i am a healer and i look mostly at healthbars the whole time. i still find it very dull to see the same content over and over and over. i dont mind having choices, but make them well-defined. the way brd is laid out, no one really knows where to go. if we're doing upper city, drop us off in upper city. if we're doing prison, make sure everyone knows we're doing prison. tell us who we have to kill to finish the dungeon. i think we've killed every boss in brd without getting the upper city acheivement (although i got the acheivement for completing all of BRD. what??)
Xylie, Lv. 36 Belf Priest
My priest is named after two things. One of my friends on wow is named something similar. Xylie is also named after one of my daughter's mermaids. actually from the movie A Mermaid's tale. tail, tale. get it? old pun. i know.
I got into a random the other day. Yes i know, randoms are so much easier to do than questing. why? because i get to learn healing. as very many people know, leveling as a healer sucks. the old way of doing it was to level as dps then switch to healing/tanking at level 60, or 70, or now, 80. but those days are gone thanks to LFD. it has made finding groups, and leveling as holy, restoration, disc, "heals" much much easier. sure, people can get sick of dungeons. but that's the nature of anything you do over and over and over again (besides sleep, ofc). In any case, leveling as a healer is much eaiser (minus the stupid tanks and stupid dps out there) now.
Stupid tanks still exist, especially those who insist on pulling large quantities of mobs while the healer is drinking. also for the druid who insists on pulling more and more mobs, especially when the healer jumped into the dungeon mid-fight, fuck you. learn to respect that others zone into dungeons and most often, expect a minute to ready themselves. the grim guzzler isnt exactly the best place to chain pull anyway, especially with knockdowns and curses up the wazooo.
Speaking of curses. i landed in a RFK group the other day and was healing the tank pretty effortlessly. its funny that the tank mentioned that i was pretty good at healing. not only that, that i was spot on with my decursing and dispelling. why isnt that what healers do anyway? but he's mentioned that his whole day was littered with horrible healers. i gave myself an immaginary pat on the back. but decursing is as easy as a mousewheel scroll up/down (i made it that way). mouseover macros are awesome. remind me to add that function to Rend on my warrior. that would be a nice addition in between thunderclaps. thats all tanks do anyway. run in, thunderclap, revenge, rend, thunderclap. thats really all i need to do to hold aggro. but that's an aside and i should really talk about healing. lol
in any case, at level 36, my healing consists of Power Word: Shield, which is a stupid name for "Shield". or "Bubble". but i think of Divine Aegis as the "bubble" and PWS ans the "shield". so lets leave it at that. i've yet to get divine aegis anyway. what im really looking for is mana returns on used shields. meaning, whenever one of my shields gets used up completely, i get some mana back. this will be awesome although i really dont need mana regen right about now. i put a shield up on a tank, stand there for 30 seconds, then run to the next group, reshield. i might toss a heal. and that's about it. things get hairy when i get tanks that insist on tanking several groups at once. although it is a little more fun that way, my mana drops like a rock.
Here are my priorities when healing.
People Priority:
Me. Tank. Good DPS. lowest dps last.
Spell Priority:
Shield. Flash Heal. Greater Heal. Prayer of Healing. Renew.
Renew is last? yes. its an aweful spell for disc. it has its uses. like if i shielded someone, and let renew do the ticking. that would usually be used on a dps and not the tank. coming from a druid healer, who has HoTs of every flavor, you'd expect renew to be up at the top of my priorities. i would too! and that's what i used to do when playing my priest. but after a long time playing disc, i have switched over to a more direct heal and mitigation approach to healing. it just takes a little getting used to. but after seeing how lackluster renew is for a disc priest firsthand, it wasnt hard to shed the habit of blacketing HoTs.
tanks get more direct heals if i can help it. its mainly because the tank's health is going down faster than the rest, and a renew wont fill up a health bar. however, it will help to keep him from dying should i get a nasty chain pulling tank. i usually keep flash heal very handy, which is why my next talent points would be to lower the cost of my flash heal. lately though, my flash heal only heals for about 15% of the tank's health. hopefully, my spells will catch up. i do like to see about a 25% gain on each heal, much like how most other "flash" heal type spells work. oh well. it will improve in time.
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