After deciding to finally level a character to 80 in World of Warcraft (I’ve had an account that I’ve played off and on for a few years) I’ve been experiencing the pain of running Wrath of the Lich King instances using the dungeon finder.
As great as the instances themselves are, the whole experience is ruined by the fact that players who have progressed beyond this content are compelled to farm them for emblems. In the vast majority of cases the groups you get using the dungeon finder will be over geared characters just running the daily random for their emblems.
Experienced players just want their emblems
Their goal is to clear the instance as quickly as possible so don’t expect much help if you are unsure what to do. This is particularly hard if you’re the tank. People will shout at you if you don’t pull fast enough and if you tell the group you’re new chances are some of them will quit. These are usually the same people who complain about the lack of tanks.
Over gearing makes tactics obsolete
If you look on the internet you’ll find guides to each dungeon with tactics for each boss yet when you actually get to play the instance in most cases these tactics are thrown out in favour of the tank rushing in while dps spams AoE or whatever they can do most damage with.
It’s a shame because for me half the fun of doing a dungeon is working together with your group to overcome the challenge. Most WotLK instances present little real challenge to most of today’s groups.
Lrn2Play
The result of rushing through instances using brute force like this is that you don’t learn to play your class properly. Healers and dps worried about aggro management? No problem, your over geared tank will keep the mobs off you. Forget to move out of range of a boss attack? No problem, your over geared healer will keep you up. The opposite is true too of course, though to a lesser extent; over geared dps can melt face so fast that poor tanking and healing can be covered up.
I expect that more than a few people have been effectively boosted through this content and are much poorer players as a result.
Conclusions
If you’re a new player and you want to experience the WotLK dungeons fully, as well as improve your overall playing ability, I recommend you find yourself a guild of like-minded people to play through the content at a slower pace. The dungeon finder has it’s place of course, but that seems mainly to help people farm emblems or quickly gear up their alts.
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