We've finally touched Outland, running a few random dungeons right after we hit 65 and choosing Scryer at Shatt, but we still have yet to start questing there. I think that may change soon. I'm thrilled that we were able to skip Hellfire Peninsula, though there are a couple of decent quests there which we may end up doing for the rewards. Honestly I'm quite content with just running Outland dungeons, mostly because they're nice and quick. Although...

I've noticed a distinct change on player mentality since starting the Outland dungeons, even though I've only run 4 or 5. People are done asking where my Helm of Wrath came from (it's a ton of fun to tell people it's from Heroic Deadmines) and are drooling over it. As it should be!

Speaking of which, my gear is finally being scrutinized, with a Druid telling me that his 40 Paladin has a shield with 3000 armor on it (yeah, okay buddy) and that mine is a piece of crap. Well of course it's no Shield of the Void, but I'm working on it. He then proceeds to blame a bad Crypts pull on my gear, after not bothering to do anything about the fact that I was possessed, and therefore unable to tank. The Hunter, who actually decided to stick around, finally beat me down until the possession faded. No wipe, but it was just me and the healer left standing. The Druid left, as well as a really worthless Death Knight, and their replacements helped us one-shot the rest of the instance no problem.

Guess there's not much "content" here for this post, but I figured I'd give at least a weekly update to all zero of the people who read this blog.

My Warrior finally hit 60 a couple days ago and right now I'm off enjoying classic level-cap content. There's actually a really nice Community Raiding organization on my server that runs pretty much every raid in-game, so I was able to tag along with a group of people who are way overqualified for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. I managed to grab myself some T1 and T2 armor, which is fantastic but weird - running around with the Helm of Wrath, Pauldrons of Might and a green level 42 belt makes me look rather foolish.

Speaking of which, these two runs were my first ever for either raid. Yes, I've been playing WoW (with one break from WotLK release to Nov 2009) since patch 1.3 and I never made it past Lucifron. Sure, it's not quite as epic as fighting my way through the instance until I could finally spend 15 minutes fighting Ragnaros, but dammit, it was still pretty awesome. I'd never even seen the interior of Blackwing Lair, so that was quite a treat.

I'm still running a full Protection spec, having picked up Shockwave when I hit 60, and I'm having a blast tanking instances. I do decent enough damage, but my weapon and shield are in desperate need of an upgrade. (Why oh why didn't you drop, Elementium Reinforced Bulwark?!) Still, I have no problems tanking classic instances, and even made it to the Beast in an UBRS run at 59 with only 5 people. Of course, much of that has to do with my awesome pocket healer.

And that brings me to the title of this post and the story behind it: There are a whole lot of really terrible players out there. I mean, I realize that some people have never run this content before and are genuinely trying. This is never a problem, and I'm always happy to explain encounters. I even have a macro set up with my two all-important rules for being a PUG tank:

If you want a smooth PUG run: 1. Give me a couple seconds to build aggro - I don't need more than 3-5 seconds, (in other words, do not AOE right when I pull) 2. If I do a line-of-sight (LOS) pull, don't attack them until they come to me.

I have yet to receive a complaint - though I'm sure it's caused a few eyes to roll - and in fact I receive more comments on how it's sad that something like that has to be pointed out to people. It is, isn't it?

But in recent runs even my two rules aren't enough. People will wander around, completely oblivious to the mobs in the room, aggroing multiple packs willy-nilly without any indication at all that they realize what they're doing. How many times must we point out that the green cloud that does 350 damage per second is not, in fact, a happy pixie-dust haze of wonderful? Stop standing there!

And I don't think I need to get into the douchebags who are never satisfied with your pull speed (and start taking it upon themselves to do so), or the idiot Warlocks who Life Tap down to 1% health and cry for a heal, or the Death Knights who DPS in Frost Presence, or the flavor of the month Ret Paladins who rolled just because they heard it was OP.

The point is: Blizzard increased the limit to players' ignore lists, and I don't think I'll have a problem hitting that ceiling anytime soon given the caliber of DPSers I've encountered so far with the Dungeon Finder. So there ends Yet Another Blogger Dungeon Finder Rant.

I've said it time and time again: until Mythic fixes the horribly broken AOE damage in WAR, I don't want to play it, even though I'm really tempted.

I think Blizz has gotten it right on the AOE damage, and I think Mythic should look at this as a potential fix for their broken system.

Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We’ve redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 1000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example.

I think implementing a change like this would do wonders to help with the AOE issue in WAR. I mean, 1.8 million damage in a scenario is just a little much, don't you think?

So, all zero of my readers: What do you think? Would this help or harm the situation in WAR?

My previous post touched on what seemed to me was a resurfacing of classic WoW boredom: the stale questing model. It turns out I was most likely incorrect.

I started all over on another server to play with some folks I know, and almost all of the original fun came back. My little newbie Warrior is now level 17 and I'm really enjoying myself. Doing familiar quests, running through nostalgia-inducing zones - this is the game I loved for so long.