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by Eliah Hecht 
Dec 14th 2009 at 9:00AM
Like many of you, I've been spending the last few days happily hitting up the new dungeon finder over and over again. The rewards are pretty amazing for the time involved, and the whole system is usually pretty painless. I've picked up a few tips and tricks along the way, on top of what was covered in Saturday's post by Mike Schramm, and here's what I have to share.
- If your dungeon pops and then gives you the dreaded "additional instances cannot be launched," you can try again by simply selecting "teleport to dungeon" from the DF menu on your minimap (the eye icon).
- If you have a full group (of guildies, say) and want to do a particular instance, you can use the DF to queue up for just that instance, and thereby gain the ability to teleport straight there. Sure beats flying.
- Damage meters are not yet working reliably cross-realm. This is because the channel that addons use to communicate with each other is not cross-realm, and meters only scan in a small local range aside from the channel. Mike mentioned this, but it's worth repeating.
- The following configurations will probably get a group instantly (or close enough): solo healer, solo tank, any group that includes both a tank and a healer. Any other configuration is likely to have a ten-minute wait or more. That's been my experience, anyway. Oh, and if you want any chance of DPSing, don't queue as "heal or DPS" or "tank or DPS," or you'll almost certainly end up healing/tanking.
- Roll greed on Frozen Orbs (or pass if you don't want them).
- Roll need for offspec and sort it out afterwards if someone needed it for main spec. Rolling greed for offspec is too likely to result in the item getting disenchanted.
- If you run into a really terrible player, you can put them on your ignore list, which will prevent you from getting matched up with them in the future.
- As I learned firsthand yesterday, random dungeons do not respect instance locks; it's fully possible to do a dungeon more than once in a given day if you're doing randoms. I'm told the system is more likely to give you a dungeon you haven't done today, though.
Have you learned anything interesting from what I think is one of the greatest features ever to come to WoW?
Reader Comments (Page 8 of 8)
Zanathos Dec 14th 2009 7:28PM
If you have someone that bad, i imagine the rest of the party will approve of a kick. It's a good thing that one person can't randomly kick at his whim.
Jen Dec 14th 2009 7:33PM
The key word there was "immediately". It's impossible to kick anyone at the start at the instance, you need to wait 10 or 15 mins (I haven't figured out which). I got the same horrible ninja tank 3 times in a row and no one could iniate the kick because he has only been in the instance for 1 min.
Sleutel Dec 14th 2009 8:06PM
@Zanathos:
I said "immediately," not "personally." It WILL NOT LET YOU vote to kick someone early in the instance, even if everyone in the group wants to. My guess is that you can't do it until the "you've recently used the blah blah blah" debuff wears off. (Fortunately, in my case, the kid left the party when I asked him to, so that we could find a real healer.)
Jami Dec 14th 2009 6:47PM
My husband's tank recently turned 80 so he doesn't have the best gear. We've been trying to use the LFG system to get him geared. I'm a healer in TOCr gear, and he's still in mostly blues and one green trinket.
Over the weekend we queued up for Random Heroics and found that Blizz thinks he's capable of tanking Old Kingdoms in addition to Nexus, Violet Hold, and Drakthron. Is this an error on Blizzards part? Should we avoid the Random Heroic until he gets better gear or is it fine to keep signing up together? Its hard to pass up those extra badges when we are trying to get him geared.
He wasn't able to tank Old Kingdom, but someone else in the group stepped up as tank. We felt really bad, because we honestly wanted to perform our roles, but thought the system would only give us what we were capable of doing.
Zanathos Dec 14th 2009 7:43PM
Heroics aren't really meant for a fresh 80 to step into and tank. If your husband has 535 defense, he should be able to tank heroics reasonably well. (540 defense needs for raids) If he has less than 535, he'll take more damage and it will be less predictable. You'll need a healer who's either really on the ball or overgeared. To reach the defense minimium, he has a few options. He can go on heroics as dps and collect tank gear that no one wants, and badges. There's various BOE crafted tanking items and reputation rewards for tanks, if you want to spend the money he could probably be set to tank heroics very quickly. Or he could tank regular instances until his gear improves. Regular ToC is a bit more forgiving than heroics and drops 200 epics, he might be able to handle that.
Jalaris.Ghostlands Dec 14th 2009 7:00PM
Anyone notice the very weird class distributions? I heavily ran a Mage alt and for roughly 2/3rds of the random groups I was the only caster dps. I'm enjoying Needing caster dps gear, but I'm finding it very strange.
Jami Dec 14th 2009 7:55PM
Thanks Zanathos. Since I'm the healer that's been going with him I feel confident that I can be on the ball. We didn't have any problems until we hit Old Kingdom. I looked on the armory and his defense is 503.
In each run I've been the healer, and I'm over geared for heroics in TOCr gear. But even I can't work miracles, lol :D
After Old Kingdom came up I was frighten the system didn't know his limits. What would happen if Oculus came up or the new Dungeons. I'm not sure what method they are using to calculate which dungeons we can do, but I would say Old Kingdom is one of the hardest heroics.
I'll look into farming TOC reg with him and I apologize to our OK group who had to adjust roles after we wiped a few times.
woot Dec 14th 2009 8:06PM
There are plenty of great things about the new dungeon finder system, but I'd like to mention some negative things:
1. Disenchant rolls can be annoying. A friend needed an item but got disconnected before everyone rolled. The item was disenchanted so we couldn't even trade it back to him.
2. I entered a random heroic and found myself in H Old Kingdom. I wanted to step outside to pick up the daily heroic quest for H Old Kingdom. Nope, that ports me back to where I came from. Sometimes, having to traverse the world is a good thing.
Insanitation Dec 15th 2009 3:05AM
sadfads
artifex Dec 15th 2009 4:38AM
"it's fully possible to do a dungeon more than once in a given day if you're doing randoms."
Yes, been getting Oculus 3 times a day this way :)
Random Dec 16th 2009 12:53AM
I think the system considers gear types when assembling groups if enough players are available... my mage has seen an awful lot of shaman/druid/pally heals and only one priest, and other casters have been almost exclusively shammy/boomkin. One of my arena partners was commenting the other day on how his rogue sees a crapton of priests, dps and heals, and never any druids.
Random Dec 16th 2009 12:54AM
Comment fail... supposed to be a response to Jalaris. Still an interesting tidbit.
BlackTiger™ Dec 16th 2009 4:24AM
Random... Before to post anything try to check it... Sick and tired of persons like you. Open stupid "new LFG" window at level 80 and find ANY BC dungeon there!
This "tool" completely killed all pre-WoLK content.
Previously during weekend I used to visit BC content very often by monitoring LFG channel for any BC activity. Now it's impossible, becouse I have to stay inside city to see LFG.
Yes, "tool" is good for stupid emblems farming. Nothing more. It's even can't assemble a raid group for "weeklies".