A rogue's adventure in the Ramparts

Yesterday I decided to explore the new instances in TBC. While I did like the instances of old the whole process of finding a group, going there and actually running the instance took forever.

Now it was as simple as opening the LFG tool, check the instances and wait. It took me about 5 minutes to end up in a group that filled up... just missing a tank. After 15 minutes of waiting and shouting in general/lfg I got a whisper from another group. "We need a DPS"... Without any remorse I switched group and entered the instance.

Our setup was warrior, priest, shaman, paladin and me as a rogue.

The Ramparts was fast and very linear. Actually I had lots of fun but when I think back on the layout it felt much as a long corridor lined with trash to the end. I had loads of fun shadostepping in for a quick sap. I was busy the whole time. Our tank took the role of leader and did an excellent job of marking targets and when needed giving sound tactics.

During two of the boss fights, I had the chance to play hero in taking over the tanking after our warrior died at the very end of the fight. I can tell you that preparation + evasion does allow for superhuman feats for almost a minute. At least it was enough for us to down the nasty dragon. The paladin in our group was retribution specced but more importantly did not show any sign of being capable of holding aggro or even using a shield.

Oh.. I almost forgot.. I did manage to do a few noobish mistakes. I am certainly I caused one wipe with a really bad pull. Halfway into the instance I got cocky and decided to pull what I thought was a solo mob to speed up our progress. I ended up pulling too much for us to chew. The leader was real good though, instead of giving me a public scoulding he whispered "What the hell was that"... After a few embarassing "I am sorry, won't happen again" we continued.

Also I learned that while shadowstepping + sap sounds really effective, it isn't when stealth sniffing dogs are involved. It is much safer to distract and then use sprint to run up to the target... shadow stepping has its disadvantage that 1) you sometimes don't end up where you thought and 2) there seem to be a slight delay before you can use an ability right after a shadow step...

Rewards... well I replaced my old Nightslayer boots and also managed to grab a nice blue sword.

The whole instance run took about an hour...

Zangaramarsh PVP
After the very fun adventure into the ramparts, I returned to Zangarmarsh for a little more questing. I did encounter a few horde that needed to be taken care of. One was a L63 warrior armed with dual swords. I've always had a problem with warriors so in order to learn I waited until he was healed and not in combat.. and attacked. The warrior fell so fast it wasn't even funny. I looked him up on the Armory and discovered that he had some extremely strange equipment... most of the stuff was green plate with additional intellect and mana regen... and his equipped trinkets was The Eye of Shadow and the Argent Dawn trinket... now what kind of player has this gear? My final guess is someone using a powerlevelling service...