The best and worst of Classic

At the weekend I did a couple of dungeon runs which showcased the best and worst of the game.

First I got together a pickup group for the Jailbreak stage of the Onyxia attunement. The resulting group were at various stages - two had completed Abandoned Hope and so were needing the Crumpled Up Note to drop, two others needed the information from General Angerforge and Golem Lord Argelmach, while I already had the information and was ready for the Jailbreak stage.

We cleared the route for the jailbreak and, as we had hoped, both of those who needed it got their Crumpled Up Note and went back to the Burning Steppes to progress their quests. We then killed Angerforge and Argelmach before completing the jailbreak itself.

The whole thing was done in a cooperative and friendly spirit. We had a silly wipe in the jail area while one member was back in the Burning Steppes and another AFK which would have been the end of many groups but this passed with barely a mention. The practicalities of putting a group together in Classic mean that members are treated as people and this really shone through here. The Looking For Group tool in the modern game has upsides, so it's important to remember as well that Classic negates some of its downsides.

Less enjoyable was my first run (in many years) of Lower Blackrock Spire. It was mostly a guild group otherwise I'm sure it would have been abandoned part way through. I'd switched to a healing spec as an experiment and I must admit that about two thirds of the problems were down to me - mostly not my healing as such but my lack of a "normal" resurrection. If a single character dies on a difficult pull then there's the decision of whether to use your combat ress, if more than one then they have to do a corpse run - which is especially a pain in the larger and less navigable instances like LBRS.

There were other problems as well, both mine and on the part of others, and and all-in-all the run was not enjoyable. I think I will swear off dungeon healing - the great things about Classic's class design include that the druid is master of no trades, but the shortcomings here were too much and impacted on the experience for everyone.