06-05-2005, 11:11 PM
So, it was a horrific Sunday for some of Carpe Aurum's finest. Novaa and Psybie were on the five-man Scholo run from hell (four hours, nothing accomplished), and Onan and Altrius were on an even worse five-man LBRS run (four and a half hours just to get to the spiders). That, in addition to some posts from recently capped 60s here in the Lounge bemoaning the difficulty and time demands of the end-game 5-man instances, got me thinking about the way instances get run for quest completion as opposed to loot runs.
All too often, people head into an instance trying to complete as many quests as they can, with the idea that clearing the dungeon is the goal, and getting quests done is a side-effect of doing so. While this works pretty well in all the pre-60 instances except Uldaman and BRD, when it comes to the 60-level dungeons... it just flat doesn't work, because you run into time constraints on respawn. The reason people have 10-hour Scholo runs is because it can easily take 10 hours to run Scholo trying to do all the quests at once -- but they don't realize that you can go into Scholo three times to complete all the quests there with each run only taking a couple of hours, and mostly avoiding respawn!
Additionally... a lot of people just don't have the time to devote to uber-long instance runs. Targeting quests rather than trying to bust the whole instance is a great way to get things accomplished for those folks (as well as making it much easier to get people to give you a hand if their time is limited).
With that in mind, I'm going to try and take a cut at a sensible breakdown of each instance from BRD onward (NB: from the Alliance perspective only; Horde folks are encouraged to take a crack at this as well), splitting each one into trips which are reasonable and can be accomplished in a couple of hours, assuming competent groups. The idea is to avoid non-quest-related side trips, and take advantage of the ability to bypass irrelevant content when possible. I welcome any and all kvetching, criticism, and alternate ideas.
All too often, people head into an instance trying to complete as many quests as they can, with the idea that clearing the dungeon is the goal, and getting quests done is a side-effect of doing so. While this works pretty well in all the pre-60 instances except Uldaman and BRD, when it comes to the 60-level dungeons... it just flat doesn't work, because you run into time constraints on respawn. The reason people have 10-hour Scholo runs is because it can easily take 10 hours to run Scholo trying to do all the quests at once -- but they don't realize that you can go into Scholo three times to complete all the quests there with each run only taking a couple of hours, and mostly avoiding respawn!
Additionally... a lot of people just don't have the time to devote to uber-long instance runs. Targeting quests rather than trying to bust the whole instance is a great way to get things accomplished for those folks (as well as making it much easier to get people to give you a hand if their time is limited).
With that in mind, I'm going to try and take a cut at a sensible breakdown of each instance from BRD onward (NB: from the Alliance perspective only; Horde folks are encouraged to take a crack at this as well), splitting each one into trips which are reasonable and can be accomplished in a couple of hours, assuming competent groups. The idea is to avoid non-quest-related side trips, and take advantage of the ability to bypass irrelevant content when possible. I welcome any and all kvetching, criticism, and alternate ideas.
Darian Redwin - just some dude now