Wednesday 31 March 2010

Patient Priest: Maraudon and on

I'm now level 43 and continuing to push my way through Maraudon. After five runs in a row in Maraudon:Orange I signed up for Purple as I didn't want to level past it (and was seriously bored of Orange).

Purple is definitely easier than Orange. It's a twisty cavern full of satyrs, demons and a few elementals. The don't do much damage and you can dispel a lot of the debuffs. We survived a massive pull in the beginning when someone cast some aoe and a horde of imps and other demons came running at us from the lower level. It's a fairly short instance. In fact I didn't realise we'd finished the first time and I though our tank was just quitting. You only need to kill one boss to get your lucky dip bag, which means that there's one boss in the middle of Maraudon who isn't covered by any of the LFG sections.

I signed up for a random and got another Maraudon:Orange run. I've realised by this time that I've had enough of this instance. I think I'm starting to lose patience too because I found the group really annoying and I'm sick of having to ask for buffs. I unfortunately had a couple of really unpleasant guys in this group. There was a warrior tank and a rogue who were RL buddies. The tank went afk for a few minutes and when the hunter asked the rogue what was happening he just gave some cocky answer that shut the hunter up. Tanks can do as they please you know. For the rest of the dungeon the warrior and rogue made fun of the hunter, criticising his dps, calling him bender and telling him he was doing stuff wrong. I eventually told them to shut up and stop being assholes and that seemed to help a bit. When we'd downed the last boss the hunter called them idiots and left. The rogue wanted to continue deeper into the harder sections of the instance but I said no thanks and teleported out of there. They were the worst people I've grouped with so far.

Continues...


I was reading a blog post on Wow.com Drama mamas this week about grouping with people who get nasty like this. It makes a good point that sometimes you have to tell these people they're going to far and quit the group - even screenshot and report them if they say something really offensive. You shouldn't let people like this ruin your game experience - get out of there, do some relaxing fishing for 15 minutes while your deserter debuff wears off, then join a new group with hopefully nicer people. I think my experience shows that most wow players are pefectly pleasant. The blog on Wow.com is here: Drama mama's

I signed for another Maraudon:Purple run because I thought I hadn't finished it all the first time, but it really is a lot shorter than I was expecting, and it was over just as fast as last time. I then did some more randoms and got sent to Zul'farak a couple of times (more about that another time) and finally I found myself in Maraudon:Inner (or pristine waters). This starts with the group falling down a waterfall and into a pool of swimming hydras. It really is a beautiful instance, with wide caverns full of rivers and waterfalls and exotic ferns. In some places there's skylights overehead and the sunlight streams in.

I had a good group, though the tank started off using the wrong weapon and I didn't want to ask him to switch in case he didn't have a tank set and he got nasty with me. I guess that previous unpleasant Orange group was still bothering me. However he soon got out a one-hand and shield and everything went smoothly. The mobs here hit noticably harder than previous instances. I was a little worried that I was a bit low level (I was 44) but the tank was level 48 and was obviously well-geared enough for the mobs. When he ran in and started attacking two giant rock monsters at once I was nervous but it was no big deal. I just stayed well back and we had no problems. The last boss is fun to do, with the knockback and huge aoe-fart she does. Unfortunately our hunter decided to melee the boss and then proceeded to try and take the spell-power dagger (but I won the roll, thankfully). He also took the cloth shoulders that dropped off the giant crocodile boss. I pointed this out and at first he insisted he could use it, but then offered to hand it over when someone else backed me up.

I got another random group for Inner straight after this, and the tank instantly starts complaining that she's done this one 20 times in row and is bored. I think if I'm still doing this instance at level 48 then I'll be bored too. She had very little patience and was not too subtle about telling the hunter off for pulling aggro. When the druid charged in and attacked the wrong mob, the tank helpfully used her macro to inform the group that " <= Evil tank, you tank what you pull" and left the druid with the mob attacking him. The druid was truly annoying though, giving us progress updates every other minute..... "4 bars til ding".... "half a bar til ding!!". The tank informed him she didn't care and I tactfully kept quiet. The feral druid and hunter both rolled on the spell dagger off the last boss, but I already have it and didn't say anything this time. I don't know whether people are just ignorant of the loot system, or just pretending to be (or pretending not to care). I don't often feel there's much point in trying to discuss it with them.

Overall I like Maraudon - when Blizzard switches Orange and Purple around it should be a nice run of dungeons to do, as it should have the right level of challenge. It would be nice to have some more quests in there though, as currently you need to spend a lot of time outside the dungeon in order to start the quests off, and I think most people don't know where the entrace to Maraudon is, they just use the teleport.

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