Back to Instancing

After a couple of weeks including offline time and an average of zero groups forming at my playing times, things appear to have picked up again – ran Mecha two nights ago and finally, finally, got a group to Old Hillsbrad last night.

I had been waiting to run that particuliar instance since May or June or so, initially because I wanted the Continuum Blade for my tanking. Which is kinda hard to get if you cannot gain any rep for Keepers of Time. The CoT instancing pattern on our Ghost Town server seems to be everyone runs Durnholde exactly once and then sticks to BM, which doesn’t really help if you’re not online when the one single Durnholde group of the week is forming.

Ironically enough, in the meantime I’ve respecced to healbot (mainly for arena… which I haven’t set a foot into in three weeks) and snatched a Crystalforged Sword off the AH, so KoT rep is less needed in terms of gearing up. Still, fun instance and all.

Mecha was kinda painful. I came back after two weeks of absence and had spent my first evenings doing AV and fixing my UI in the wake of patch 2.2, and bearing the responsibility for keeping a group alive is a bit different that AV. We had a pallie tank, who was specced oddly and geared even more bizarely – my prot kit hasn’t been updated in two months now and still has greens in it but it’s probably better in terms of what it provides for sheer tanking than his which had some blacksmithing purples (except for armor, which still counts). I personally wouldn’t tank any of the TKs in my current tanking gear (although I tanked SLs in it fine before even getting the Crystalforged Sword) for lack of confidence. The guy tanked like a spellcasting warrior. Wasn’t really bad but every single pull was sapped and sheeped, the sheep too close to where he was tanking his leftover target. If you know mecha you also know there’s adds spawned quite often and 4+ mob pulls. Without consecrate, I had to bubble often, we wiped thrice and I personally bit it twice more. Repairs bill similar to when I was tanking, no loot dropped for me.

The really frustrating part is, I just know I would have been able to do a better job at tanking than the guy, and I know also that my healing could have been better that evening. So although we cleared the place, it wasn’t a really satisfying run.

Old Hillsbrad on the other hand was very pleasant. We had a feral drood, two hunters and a mage, all level 70, all knowing what they were doing. The only part which took too long was the sightseeing tour before getting the Durnholde quest. The instance run was very fast-paced and clean. No deaths, although we had one close shave with an overpull at the entrance of the keep in Durnholde, which the druid totally saved simply by shifting back and casting Tranquility after one of his targets went down, which gave me the needed three seconds to bring the lowest party members back to arse-kicking condition. Terrific work.

Finally, the less pleasant realization that my plan to heal while building up my prot set so I could get back to tanking settled in. If I’m with a warrior or a pallie tank, they’ll get first dibs on tanking plate. And in general, while your random PUG will happily let me loot any healing plate dropping, the only way to avoid loot drama is greeding on prot plate.

Oh well. I still need 2k health and 200 +healing more on my PvP healing set, something which can come either from instance loot or arena rewards. FoL + Cleansebotting isn’t exactly the most varied activity, but it gets me groups these days, and actually keeping people alive when crap hits the fan with the limited amount of panic buttons a healadin has is challenging in its own right. I can live with that.

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