Dungeon 2 Armor Quests
by Elizabeth Harper 
Apr 19th 2006 at 9:00AM
So, by now I imagine everyone
has heard about the Dungeon 2
armor sets - and the lengthy quest chain involved in acquiring them. The quests, while both expensive (plan
on spending around 350 gold at minimum - if you farm and craft (or have friends who can craft) all of the required
reagents. But if you're prepared to try your hand at this quest chain, grab your Dungeon 1 set bracers and head
over to the Ironforge throne room (for Alliance) or Thrall's Chambers (for Horde) to get started. And if you need
help from there, this
thread in the quest forums and this post on WoWWiki provide thorough
walk-throughs of the chain. Stuck on the required 45-minute Stratholme run? Check this video for some guidance.Anyone out there done these quests already? Anyone trying? What do you think of them? Myself, I'm just before the Stratholme portion, slowly gathering materials. While the quests are long, the gear is of high quality and I personally really like the look of the set art - yes, it's only a slight revision from the Dungeon 1 art, but I like it a lot. I could complain that all of the sets lean heavily towards hybridization - so, for example, my priest's dungeon 2 set is neither extremely good for healing nor extremely good for damage dealing, but the set is fairly well-rounded and useful in either situation, though you can find better individual pieces to specialize in either. This may or may not suit your play-style.
[Thanks to Dave for a couple of these links.]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
joey Apr 19th 2006 10:17AM
When I first heard about quests that upgrade your Dungeon 1 set it sounded great. But that was before I knew that the system that laid therein was patently idiotic.
Blizzard has taken the naive view that people set about getting every piece of their Dungeon 1 set before ever moving on to the next Tier of armor.
I, like many others frequent MC, ZG, Onyxia, Strath, Scholo, BRD, UBRS and LBRS. And because of this have some epic items as well as a pair of Nightslayer gloves which I will use as an example.
The 2nd part of upgrading your Dungeon 1 as you may know requires you to bring multiple pieces of armor at the same time to perform the upgrade, one of which for my class are the Shadowcraft gloves.
As I am wearing nightslayer gloves I have little intention of wearing said new (Darkmantle) gloves. Yet in Blizzard's infinite wisdom they feel I should either try to buy them (about 350g+) if you can even find them at all on the AH, or farm them (10% drop rate) off a boss people rarely go to. All this just so I can upgrade other pieces of armor with what amounts to a pretty insignificant upgrade, and then promptly sell the Darkmantle Gloves to a vendor, ha!
I really like the basic idea of being able to upgrade individual pieces via quests. It would have added things to do and content for players based off of the pieces that they have collected or WANT to collect.
All Blizzard has done however is halt me from ever bothering to do any of this quest content at all, since I have no intention of farming for a hard to get piece of armor just so I can throw it away or never wear it after I have completed the quest.
tibbsy Apr 19th 2006 10:41AM
I definitely agree to some degree what Joey says about the modularity of the Dungeon set 2 quest chain. But at the same time, I'm just happy that I can take Dungeon set items that were a bit low for my level and boost them up without having to sink 5+ hours into a raid instance just so that I can have a *chance* at nabbing some epic gear. This is a nice way for more casual players such as myself to upgrade what is reasonable pre-raid instance gear, and I'm quite happy for it :)
spencer Apr 19th 2006 10:59AM
Old news? Why is wowinsider so slow to get stuff like this posted?
Andy Apr 19th 2006 11:59AM
Most of my friends are up to the 45 minute Baron run right now (and we've been stuck there a while, sadly). We've been getting better at it, though - two nights ago we made it to the part near the end where the gates drop with 15 minutes to go, but we wiped there. We'll probably be able to finish it in another try or two.
Sadly, I'm not that far yet because the Lightforge Gauntlets just won't drop for me. Granted, it's nice that they trop on Timmy now instead of the Empreror in BRD, but I still haven't been able to get them yet. :(
Bloodfeast Island Man Apr 19th 2006 12:03PM
It's news to me. Myself, if I want a bit of info about WoW, I come here, as opposed to crawling the web for every nugget of info I can get. Also, if you'll read the article, it's more about "Hey, we know these quests and this gear are out there - anybody out there trying these? What's your opinion?" That being said... Spencer, piss off and troll elsewhere.
As for the items themselves, -note that I'm a casual player and have not yet made 60- I think I'd like them less for the stats than as a reward for a quest.. I don't mind a long journey to get a spiffy reward. I will freely admit that there are times that I see the higher tier stuff and think "Ahh if that's the best, then.. big whoop", but I just keep chugging along. As long as I don't stagnate, as long as there are quests to run, raids to join, I'll at least have something to do.
Pickypants Apr 19th 2006 12:33PM
Great topic, I covered it in my re-review of WoW on my site.
I ditto the annoyance of getting set pieces in a particular order, and not being able to go beyond. I also have been having a hell of a time with the 45-min Strathome. I am at work, but I will check out the video when I get home.
Thanks for the topic!
Shawn Otomo Apr 19th 2006 3:15PM
I'm on the 3rd part of the D2 set, meaning I'm going for the chest and the helm. I did the 45 min strat run, but it was with 4 members from one of the top Horde guilds on Alleria, and they just happened to ask me, so I got lucky.
What I don't understand is that this set is supposed to be for the casual gamer, but it seems like the only people who are able to get past the 45 minute run are people who are in a well-equipped guild, i.e. a raiding guild that does ZG and MC at the very least. I feel it's a nice idea, I just think that it kind of missed its mark in the population it was aiming at.
crsh Apr 19th 2006 3:15PM
I started the quests when 1.10 went live; got the new bracers (which are worse than a pair of non-epic ones I already had), I thought "ok, no biggie, they're just bracers, the rest should be fun". The second quest is all about bring mats to a NPC, it's direly costly: delicate arcanite spanner, if you don't know someone who will craft you one, runs about 45g on my server. 4 greater eternal essences, if you haven't got a few items to disenchant, is another 40g (again, on my server); 10 stonescale oils, I got them for what is considered cheap off our AH: 20g (again, you can fish those eels yourself and have an alchemist turn them into oil). *Plus* you got to hand in 40g to the NPC. That's 145g just to get the ectoplasm filter, you then need to collect 3 sets of 12 ectoplasms from different places, and if you can't do it with the 8 goblin rokcet fuels the NPC gives you, that's more gold down the drain because rocket fuel is now a "let's make lots of money off this" item; this is only to upgrade the belt and gloves. And it goes on and on.
I gave up after getting the ectoplasms for the belt and gloves, I don't mind the quests themselves as they can be fun (45-min baron run is fun to me, I know some disagree though), but it's just too damn costly for gear that's mediocre.
spencer Apr 19th 2006 3:18PM
"I come here, as opposed to crawling the web for every nugget of info I can get."
As well you should. However, if a site purports to be solely devoted to world of warcraft news, one can reasonably expect the news to be new.
Opinion articles are another matter, but if the writing of an opinion piece is the reason that news is being held back or posted late, it doesn't seem worth it.
HalcyonGT Apr 20th 2006 11:11AM
I too gave up at the gathering Ectoplasm quest. I felt jipped on the Bracers considering the amount of time and money spent gathering materials. While some have said that having a group of four people with 8 barrels of fuel a piece can gather the Ectoplasm...absolutely no one in my guild feels justified in doing the upgrades. In addition, I've never seen people simply asking for a group to do so.
Interestingly enough though, on the Llane realm in Ironforge there are quite a few spams asking for groups for the 45min Baron run. And each one asks for an Epic'd out group. Casual content that requires epics to fulfill. You be the judge.