So, with me being the ever-alt-starter, I've started YET ANOTHER toon.
This time, it's a Tauren Druid. I'm not going to list it on the right hand side of the blog as a "real playing toon" but trust me, she's there.
Her primary role is to stay unguilded and participate in Pick Up Groups for dungeons as a healer. Her secondary role is to scope out casual adult players who might like to join our uber-casual guild, but I haven't decided exactly how to scope folks out for that quite yet, because I don't plan for this secondary role to bear fruit immediately.
So, last week I spent a few days advancing her up to level 13. I used my Leatherworker to craft her some starting armor and used my Enchanter to spiff the stuff up, and while I advanced up to 13 I kept an eye on the Auction House for reasonably-priced equipment for both my soloing DPS and my partying healer roles. Again, I made sure to enchant the equipment the best I could, with +Stamina and +Agility to my DPS set and +Spirit and +Intelligence to my healing set.
I had reached level 13 in time for the weekend, so on Saturday afternoon I hopped over to my new druid and made my way to the door of Ragefire Chasm, the first instance Horde-side which is located in the middle of the main Orc/Troll city, Orgrimmar.
The Art of LFG
One thing I want to avoid as much as possible with this PUG toon is complete and utter newbies going into dungeons for the first time. One of the primary ways to avoid them is to not only use the LFG tool (which is not obvious to any first-time users) but also, to use the "LookingForGroup" channel.
Before the LFG tool was put into place, there was a Blizzard official channel called "LFG". When the tool was put into place, that official channel was removed. Since the LFG tool has some fundamental problems with it, many realms have taken to creating an "Underground" LFG channel, which you can join this way:
/join lookingforgroup
So, I joined that channel, and while I put myself into the LFG tool (and unchecked "auto join") as wanting to go to Ragefire Chasm as a healer, I also sent a message to the LookingForGroup channel:
"13 druid healer LFG RFC"
A few minutes later, I saw a level 14 warlock on the Orgrimmar General channel LFG for RFC, so I whispered to him that I'd be willing to go, and he invited me to his group, which consisted of himself and a level 18 warrior. I let him know about the LookingForGroup channel and using that, he found a couple more people who wanted to come, including a level 11 Shaman who was on a higher-level alt and needed to hop over.
And In We Go...
The party ended up with two Shaman (one lvl 11, one lvl 14), lvl 18 warrior, lvl 14 warlock and myself, the lvl 13 Druid. Four of us were at the instance door when we invited the level 11 Shaman into the party but found we couldn't summon him from the summoning stone because he was too low level.
It just occurred to me that none of us thought to get the Warlock to summon him... we all just hopped into the instance and told the Shammy to run for it, and join us when he gets there. We weren't very far in when the Shammy joined us, and it wasn't too long before he levelled up to 12 in the instance, as well.
The run itself was awesome! The warrior came equipped with a sword-and-board (one handed weapon and a shield) and was good at grabbing aggro from all mobs in the fray, the damage-dealers didn't pull aggro very often and require healing themselves, and that level 11/12 Shammy served as excellent healing backup during tough fights where additional mobs had been accidentally aggro'd.
I went in with four quests to complete and got them all done in no time. Nobody died, nobody ninja'd, nobody whined (even the Shammy who had to run in to join us).
I added all four of my team members to my friends list on this toon and will try to include them in a future dungeon run. I know some of them will stop playing these toons and some will zoom way out of my Druid toon's range, but if they're quality players I can always keep in touch on higher level toons.
Cuz when it comes to advancing in this game, you can do it alone but it's slow and painful. You really gotta have friends.