Scarlet Monestary redux

Ironforge is officially my favourite city in the game. It just has so many nice touches. It's almost tempting me to start levelling a dwarf, but I'm resisting so far.

I've been intending to take my hunter to Sunken Temple to see what I think of the dps-and-cc role, and to see how instances feel grouped with humans and dwarfs instead of undead and blood elves. However it occurred to me to keep him at 49 for potential battleground use, rather than get him to level 50 or 51 and then get distracted. So instead I started looking for a group for SM Library with my NE druid. You can feel pretty confident when you can say "LFG, can tank or heal", and so it proved, we had a group together pretty quickly. I just need to bear in mind that you can't really do this at max level, at least not for the tricker instances.

As I should have expected, the outcome wasn't so much an idea of what grouping is like on the Alliance side as a reminder what it's like to PUG in an early instance, when people know their roles even less than a nightmare end game pugger. Fortunately we had an experienced tank (yours truely) even if on an unfamiliar class, otherwise between being unable to deal with runners or to focus fire on skull we'd have hand a pretty bad time. Or maybe I'm claiming undue credit, and we were just overpowered or lucky.

In hindsight I was lucky - I learned to tank from my mistakes in Pyrewood Village and with advice from a friend with higher level characters. I also got to run the Monestary several times with a semi-regular group that quickly came to trust one another, to the point that I was regularly invited to tank from then on. I'd learned a lot by then, and had forgotten my level 17 self who didn't want to use defensive stance because it lowers your damage output...