My first trip to Lost Vale

Despite several attempts at finding a group within my guild to do any content, I wasn’t able to secure a group to do anything at all.  No one does the city dungeons anymore (and I still do not have a single piece of Sentinel gear) and they all operate within their own cliques of which I am not apart.  I don’t really blame them for finding a group that works for them and sticking with it, but it leaves me out in the cold a lot.  I decided to turn to pugs with hopes that I could do something – anything – in Land of the Dead.  Nothing.  No bites for an hour.  Then Order took control.

My one last attempt at finding a group went into alliance chat “Anyone need a 5/5 gw Shammy for anything?” and I got a bite.  Someone wanted to form a group for Lost Vale!  I had never been and this was as good a chance as any.  I didn’t get my hopes up because, afterall, it’s a pug.  I was expecting a couple frustrating boss attempts and people who constantly afk or don’t listen to instructions while talking about their girlfriends or drugs – you know, usual pug stuff.  Furthermore, I was scared since half of us had never done LV at all.  I wasn’t expecting to meet genuine decent people who listen, know how to play their class, and wanted to group with me again in the future.  You can imagine my surprise when I did.

We cleared the left wing with one accidental wipe and two of my Darkpromise pieces dropped.  All of the pulls went very smooth and the tank, who also led the group, carefully explained all of the fights and the group listened.  The first boss was tank and spank and went down in a matter of seconds thanks to our great DPS.  The next couple of bosses were also tank and spank with little quirks such as mist you have to avoid or other usual mmorpg boss encounter mechanics.  The last boss of the left wing was a spider who would knock back and web you if you (which also silenced); this had to be burned off with a torch you obtain from a quest that you had to complete as you killed each boss up to that point.  During the spider fight lots of little spiders would swarm towards the boss and if they reached her they would enrage her (not a good thing).  It went incredibly smooth and we had a lot of great item drops.

After the left wing we went to the right wing which is a lot harder.  We wiped twice here but recovered my running out and resetting the boss.  These deaths were due to learning the fight but man… we sure learned well from our mistakes and came back to kick the crap out of even more bosses after each wipe.  One boss in particular we had to keep resetting because he had a gnoblar companion that would enrage the more damage you dealt to the boss.  When the gnoblar enraged to 200% he needed to be killed, but the catch is when he dies the boss gets harder.  We figured out that we kill him at certain increments of the main boss’ health and it was cake from there.

I had to handle most of the healing because our other healer only had two greater wards (which meant he died a lot to cleaves and aoe’s), but I enjoyed the responsibility that came with having to constantly heal with everything I had.  Every boss kill was exciting for our group and we were all constantly telling each other “good job” because each of us really was doing a good job.  We’re scheduled to return and complete the instance tonight where I hope to get more Darkpromise gear and have more fun.  I’m hoping that these guys will want to run dungeons together regularly and become a static group – something that is very important in a game like WAR.

Two upgrade, a trip to one of the top-end dungeons in the game, and new friends all thanks to a PUG.  Go figure.