Well, I just got back onto World of Warcraft this week. I began by leveling up a new undead character to level 13, and I got to see what it's like to be a warrior. Surprisingly, it was a very interesting endeavor, it turns out the Blizzard did right by the warriors in giving them a very interesting set of abilities. Unlike other games where being a warrior is just beating the living crap out of your enemies, WoW gives them a set of skills that make them perfect for taking damage and attracting enemy attention. But most of you already knew that.

Anyway, just today I decided to get back into playing my priest. I am still not sure about how I want to go about leveling him up, but I have a feeling that a large part of it will involve instances. These are dungeons that are predesigned for a small group to take, and they spawn for every group that enters one. If you are with a group in an instance, you never have to worry about running into another group, or having someone spring your boss before you can fight him. These instances are designed to be tackled by a group, so all the units are elite and therefore, very difficult. It would be suicide to go into one of these alone, even if you were a good 4 levels above the average mob.

So, my first instance run sucked. My group was terrible. The battles consisted of me saying "Alright, let the warrior pull" followed by watching the druid run headlong into the fray...freaking druids... There was no way I can heal that terrible of a pull, and we'd all die. We'd all apologize, and then the next two pulls would go great. The warrior would get the aggro, I'd keep her alive, everyone else would pick off the enemies. It's a beautiful thing. Then the druid would run headlong into the group, and we'd all die again. Eventually, the druid left, but by this time I was too fed up and signed off.

The next instance run was much better. This time we had a rag-tag group that looked terrible on paper, but worked great in action. It consisted of myself, a second priest, a mage, and a warlock. All magic users, two with relatively little offensive capabilities, all cloth wearers. For a moment I thought, "We're screwed without a tank..." then I came to a realization. I took charge and set up the system that we'd use to win. First, we'd have the mage pull, and pull from a distance. I would focus of healing the mage. The warlock would then join in on the beat down, the other priest would cover her. If either of us priests got any aggro, we'd cover EACHOTHER, not ourselves. This worked fantastically. We would immediately shield anyone who got aggro, which let them continue spellcasting unhindered, and then we would heal when necessary. When I had to leave, our group had only been wiped once. Far better than the routine problems I had with the other group. And to add to my awe, my second group was all lower leveled, and one player short in comparison to the other team. It turns out that great tactics are far better than stats that look good on paper.

Alrighty, that's it for my log today.