I was a Warlock the first time I encountered the Deadmines, one of the first of World of Warcraft’s instanced group-based Dungeon romps. Life had been good to me so far; my class worked well, I’d seen a lot of new and interesting places, carried out a lot of not-uninteresting quests and had some fairly neat rewards. I’d mined a bit, engineered a bit, fished a lot and generally had any number of low-grade but satisfying adventures, culminating in a prolonged campaign against a veritable army of suspiciously organised bandits in the Westfall farmlands. The Sherrif chap told me he had just one more task for me.
I suppose seeing a blue-named item reward ought to have set the warning bells ringing, but I took the job anyway, and suddenly my happy-go-lucky solo extravaganza hit a snag. For while the quest difficulty implies work not much harder than that I’d done already, pretty much everything inside was what they call ‘Epic’, and after getting flattened by one a level or two below me, I immediately recognised the phenomenon; a text-book ‘Group-Mob’. The creature is superficially no different to one of it’s ‘normal’ variants, but has such massively inflated hit points that without a significant level advantage, you will lose, purely because it will simply outlast you, even with a good DPS for your level.
Add to that clump agroing which makes pulling one single Epic mob alone, very difficult, devious scripted spawn events and some truly overpowered end dungeon bosses, and you have an experience which is effectively unsoloable, or at least unsoloable at a level where the xp and rewards are at all useful still.
I certainly saw the point, and in WoW’s defence, surprisingly little of the game actually needs other people and yes, a good MMO should have places where groups can do well, otherwise what is the point? It just irritated me that my quest book was trying to send me in there, is all. So I set up shop at the Meeting Stone (An idea that probably works better on paper than in implementation), and then gave up and just spammed ‘LFG’ for a bit and got into a few pickup groups, with varying success, but none came close to getting the quests done. It’s understandable, as that must be the first place where Alliance players have to group at all, and even long time MMO veterans are still getting used to the dynamics.
It was largely these trips that made me question my own character choice and ultimately made me start again as a Priest – wanting to get the most out of the Instances. With a decent group who know what they’re doing, the Instances are actually a lot of fun; interesting themes, clever scripting and lack of general riff-raff traipsing through make the whole trip a memorable event, much more in the nature of a fantasy action movie, than the usual methodical rat-whacking mediocrity outside.
But that hadn’t happened yet – I was still a warlock, and quite frustrated about the lost potential of the mines. Then I joined the last pickup group – a hunter, a mage and me, a warlock. I pondered dubiously for a bit then suggested we look for a tank and a healer, as frankly, the entire party as it stood was about as useful as a meringue hammer. “its ok…bf coming…hes a rouge,” piped up the mage. Mmm-hmm, I thought, there ya go…just what we were missing, a backstabbing DPS papertank that dies if he gets agro. I sighed and got the Voidwalker out – my halfarsed solo-viability tank-pet. He didn’t look to pleased either. Then the ‘Rouge’ turned up, and I understood – he was level 49, about 30 levels above the intended level for the place. The Babysitter had arrived.
What followed can best be described as Tourism, as the uber backstabbity-death mastah rampaged through the mine, murderizing everything that moved, with the three of us following meekly through the bodies. I wondered what the point of it was, although the girlfriend was sure to loot everything that fell. As we progressed, I got the distinct impression that ‘gf’ was merely there to farm linen for her dressmaking hobby. I did managed to pay for a new skill with my own split the cash proceeds, but felt dirty for ages afterward, and had at least the dignity to pass on all loot rolls. For a time I tried actually helping kill stuff, but soon found that to be utterly pointless. My DOT spells would do one tick of 4-5 damage, then I’d just see this dagger erupt from its chest, point first like something from Alien, and then cleave the poor bandit in half in one go.
I did take a small measure of pride in one spectacularly ill-advised debuff cast which caused such a horrific domino effect of chained agro that even The Babysitter got wiped out, but on the whole, I felt cheated. I got the quests ticked off, but the end-dungeon boss group managed to kill everyone except The Babysitter, which basically told me I wasn’t nearly capable of completing the thing properly.
I thanked them and left, reflecting on a ruined experience and a suddenly missing goal in life, and not very long afterward, swapped my demonology tome for a holy book. The next time through, as a Priest in a properly levelled group was far better, despite us only making it half the way through. The time after that, we won, and quite frankly it was one of the most memorable MMO experiences I’ve had in recent years. Without the watchful eye of a Babysitter too…I guess that means we’re finally all grown up!