I've started getting into a good routine of finishing a group of quests, usually 5-6 that all take place in the same area. Then I go turn those in and queue for a dungeon. The tank queue has been just a couple minutes so usually by the time I grab all the new quests and start heading out in their direction I get teleported to the instance. It's made leveling very fun and hasn't felt like a grind yet.
Here's what I've been getting:
69/70: UK
71: Nexus and all of the above
72: AN and all of the above
73: Old Kingdom and all of the above
It's really great because the one thing that does get old is if you have to run the exact same instance over and over. They're all fun, but not when you run them 4 times in a row. So now at level 73, I queue up and really do get a good mix of stuff to run.
The other thing that I've been getting a wide variety of is the quality of pugs. I was in a Nexus run over the weeked where the healer just kept saying "pull more, pull more" and wasn't having any mana problems so I was pulling entire halls at the time - in the snowing hall leading up to Ormorok I didn't even stop moving, I just kept running from pull to pull, spamming a couple swipes and charging into the next pack while AOE finished off the previous one. It made me realize one of the awesome things about druids is their Infected Wounds talent. I got it for the attack speed reduction, but the movement speed reduction is awesome because mobs can't keep up when you're charging off to the next pull and they're foced to slowly waddle through a mage's blizzard, a few seeds of corruption and a divine storming ret pally.
But I haven't only gotten good groups. I was in a UK run with a Shaman who spammed the damage meter after the first couple pulls. Usually I don't mind this too much because at least if someone cares about 5man meters, they're doing good DPS and making the run fast. But then we get to the first boss and I get frost trapped right as the skeleton adds spawn. So I'm sitting there, yelling for someone to break me free so that I can pick up the skeletons and stop them from destroying the healer, but the shaman just keeps on tunnel visioning the boss and the healer dies while I'm still waiting out the ~20 second or so ice trap. We ended up wiping so I made fun of the shaman for ignoring me and therefore letting the healer die and he goes "you're the tank, it's your job to pick up the adds". At that point I knew he was just clueless. Granted, I probably wasn't overly polite when I told him off, but based on his response he couldn't even comprehend what had happened. He obviously wasn't looking at anything that was going on besides alternating between his action bar and the damage meter. He probably had no idea that the boss even put people in ice traps.
And I think that's the defining difference between "good" players and "bad" players. Anyone can put out good DPS. But good players have situational awareness while simultatenously doing good DPS. In so many of my runs, I'm the only one breaking people out of ice traps or web wraps, or moving out of poison clouds, fire, or void zones. The problem is that normal 5mans are so fogriving that a half decent healer can keep an entire party alive even if they're all standing in a firey poisonous void zone while the tank is web wrapped. What I'd like to see in 5mans, or even raids, is more accountability for DPSers and more tests of situational awareness in general. But now I'm starting to get off on a tangent that is probably best used for another blog entry in the future.
Suffice to say that 69-73 has been enjoyable and the pugs are getting much more interesting.
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