5-Man instances for the Time-Challenged (spoilers)

[Darian]

This reinforces my contention that Blizzard's love of mega-instances limits the end game for all players, especially the casual gamer.  This is a virtual tour guide for players going in.  It takes away from the joy of discovery and figuring out problems on your own.  If someone wanted to discover this for themselves, they would have to find a dedicated group that wanted to discover along with them.  They would then have to make many trips, doing much of the same thing over and over, to learn what is needed and what can finally be ignored.

I hear ya, Loch, and I really sympathize with you. The way the end-game instances are set up, you really have three options:

1) Go in blind and figure it all out on your own. Expect to have to go into the instance probably at least a half-dozen times, using up 4-5 hours a trip at the start, and only losing time-per-trip toward the end because you have figured out what you can skip.

2) Follow what I posted here, which I deliberately wrote up in such a way that it sort of tells you WHAT to do, but not so much how to do it.

3) Tag along with someone who already knows exactly what to do, which takes all pretense of "exploration" out of the picture. Unfortunately for me, that's exactly how Strat, Scholo, and LBRS played out for me. (BRD, we still went in and took our chances with; I have never run BRD without being the party leader.)

Except for when you were out PvPing, when is the last time you took your capped player out exploring?

Dire Maul, East and North. And arguably West, given the horrible run Skan, Arethor, Grizelle and I went on with someone who supposedly knew what they were doing, but instead ended up with us basically clearing the entire damned instance twice...

Dire Maul seems (I have limited experience with it) to be a good compromise... ...This makes it far easier to take small exploration chunks of an instance.

Amen. I have always held that if you're going to have lengthy instances, you should have the equivalent of "save points" within the instance. In some places they did an incredible job with this. Maraudon is perfectly set up, in my opinion. Do the purple side, do the orange side, bam, you have the key to do the end of the instance, and none of those segments really takes more than a couple of hours. Scarlet Monastery is similar; none of the individual arms of the Monastery really requires more than 90 minutes. Unfortunately, they either didn't do it with the end-game instances, or almost worse, did it, but made the segments too damned long. Sure, LBRS and UBRS are the same instance, and it was sure nice of them to break them into two pieces; finish LBRS and get the key, and then you can do the "rest" of the instance. But the sheer length of both instances sort of clues you in as to why everyone considers them to be two separate instances even though they aren't.

Again, Darian, good info.  Well done.  Thank you.  It will be very handy for people organizing groups to go in and get things done.  I would like to see posts like this pinned so people can continue to access them and not have them drop off the bottom of the front page.
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No, thank you. ;)

That's my hope; I really don't want to see people giving up the game in frustration because they want to get these things done but can't because there's just no time... not when there's a reasonable and non-explotative way to get it done.