An Event Every Guild Leader Goes Through Once in Their Career

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fate

At present, my healing corps consists of the following: 2 Priests, 4 Druids, 2 Paladins, and 2 Shamans. Note that both 1 Druid and 1 Shaman are on a part time rotation. I figure that’s more than enough to handle any sort of outages or benches that need to occur.

But a few nights ago, I received an in game mail from one of my Paladins. Let’s call him Wayne.

“Hey Matt, I’ve decided to take a break from WoW until Ulduar comes out. I’ve gotten what I need to prepare myself for it and I don’t want to burn myself too early. Thanks for understanding.”

The feeling I experienced after reading his in game mail could only be described as “disappointment”. Here was a player that had showed up to all of the raids we asked him to do before the holiday break. He was one of the earliest healers we had in the guild. For a time, he was the only Holy Paladin we had in our raids as our other one wasn’t ready to go yet.

Perhaps in this aspect, Loot Council may have failed as we awarded him nearly all the spell power plate gear until our second Paladin was able to join us.

The alternative would have been to shard upgrades to keep him coming for more. My guild and my friends would know that I would never consider that as an option.

Skepticism

Hmm… – I shouldn’t have to question the motives of my raiders. My experience in the game has taught me that there are some legitimate excuses for going on a hiatus and some that make you raise your eyebrow and go “really?”. This is one of those times. I would’ve been more than happy to accept a temporary leave of absence if a player was going out of town. Life does happen and there’s nothing I can do to change that (nor would I).

Conquest is now able to effectively clear out all heroic level content in the game.

Actually, we took down Sarth with 2 drakes up tonight.

And we’re able to do this within 6 hours. I intentionally split this into 2 days of 3 hour raid nights to avoid wear and tear on my troops.

Short term effects

Newsflash – This reduced our number of active healers down to 6 but I plan to rotate the other 2 healers I have on standby as needed. Both myself and my other Priest were both deep Holy. After some consultations and careful consideration, I decided to join Vonya and respec Discipline myself. This means I have to toss out the 16 Spirit gems in my blues and replace them with some Intellect heavy gems (Dazzling Forest Emerald although I probably should’ve used Seer’s Forest Emerald instead, but alas the AH doesn’t always have what you need).

Feel free to check out my character’s armory.

The impact this has on our healer corps is the fact that we are back up to having 2 solid tank healers who are myself and a Holy Paladin. We still have a strong supplement of Resto Druids, Shamans, and another CoH Priest to maintain raid wide heals.

Long term effects

We are down to 1 Holy Paladin. That’s 1 less set of blessings and auras among other things. I know for the time being I am willing to stand pat on my corps. But I would not be against the idea of recruiting another Holy Paladin for part time purposes. I’ve spoken with several around the server, but they’re all interested in a full time raiding and starting position. That’s not something I can promise. I don’t want to say one thing only for them to switch over and find out that I failed to deliver. I try to maintain a record of meaning what I say.

As for Wayne, I’m not going to think about any actions for the present. Those are his choices to make and I have to react accordingly. I can’t help but feel anything else but disappointment right now.

To me, it’s just another day behind the desk.

PS – If you’re a Holy Paladin looking for for a home and not expecting a lot of raiding hours, get in touch with me.

Image courtesy of TouTouke

Keeping your Healers Happy: a Death Knight Tank’s Perspective

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deathknight

This is a guest post by Scourge of his self titled Death Knight blog, The Scourge!

First of all, I’d like to thank Matticus, Wynthea, and Sydera for allowing me to guest post. I have been reading this blog for a long time and followed SYTYCB intently. I didn’t participate at the time for two reasons. One, I don’t heal and two, I didn’t have a niche to discuss. Wrath changed one of those drawbacks.

I originally planned on continuing to tank on my Feral Druid but I rolled a Death Knight for fun. Next thing I know I’m the 3rd level 80 in my guild as an Unholy Death Knight and I specced to tank.

Now let’s talk about keeping your healers happy. Some of this advice will apply to all tanks and some to Unholy Death Knights only.

I love healers.

I love the two healers in my small guild
I love all the healers that are on my friends lists from guilds past
I love all the healers that I pug with.

I pug a lot.

My first goal in every Heroic or raid is to complete the run. The second is to make my healers so happy that they want to heal me again. As I write this, patch 3.08 is still on the PTR and keeping healers happy as a DK isn’t always easy. It seems the damage we take can be inconsistent. For some reason healers like consistency, I figure Matticus and crew can tell you why.

Overall basics to keep your healer happy

  • First: Make sure you are geared for the content you are running. That means defense capped, plenty of health, armor and avoidance, proper gems, chants, and glyphs and a kitchen sink. You never know when you’ll need the kitchen sink.
  • Second: you better be specced properly for the job. When Ghostcrawler says all DK specs can tank he doesn’t mean spend 71 talent points willy-nilly however you want and you’re golden. There are clear mitigation talents in every tree and you need to have them if you want to tank.
  • Third: come prepared. Food, pots, flasks, repaired, all standard stuff. But if you want to get on a healers friends list, which makes pugging a heroic real easy, you need to be prepared.
  • Fourth: Healers get mad when other players take unnecessary damage because they have aggro. Now Ron White says you can’t fix stupid and any DPS who focus fires secondary targets get what’s coming to them, but you should provide enough AOE or set up enough CC so you are the only one taking non AOE damage.

Death Knights take inconsistent damage because we try to avoid it altogether. Let’s face it we stack parry and dodge to avoid incoming damage and reasonably geared have around 50% avoidance. That’s a coin flip. Every time the boss swings we either get hit or we don’t. Right from the start we are inconsistent in the damage we take.

Death Knights also have a number of talents, spells, and abilities that either increase our avoidance or pump up our mitigation for a short period of time. These also lend themselves to taking inconsistent damage.

To start us out, let’s look at the two abilities all DKs have.

Anti-Magic Shell and Icebound Fortitude

Both of these are on a one-minute cooldown and provide great mitigation. For 5 seconds, Anti-Magic Shell will mitigate 75% of the magic damage a DK is taking, while Icebound Fortitude will reduce all damage by 50% currently for 12 seconds. Fantastic mitigation while in use, if we use these whenever the cooldown is up that creates sudden drops in the damage we take which may lead to greater over healing. Whoops. Healers don’t like wasting their mana.

That leaves talented mitigation abilities. Any DK tank worth their salt will have at least 3 of these, some may have four. We’ll break these down into avoidance, mitigation, and healing efficiency.

Avoidance talents

The avoidance talents are Blade Barrier and Lichborne. Blade Barrier procs off of using both your blood runes and increases your parry by 10%. A good tank will have this up just about the entire fight, which contributes to the coin flip. Lichborne, on the other hand, adds a flat 25% chance to be missed and has a cooldown. Needless to say, when your healer is charging up a big one and the tank pops this and the boss misses a couple in a row the healer may have wasted their time and mana.

Mitigation talents

For mitigation DK tanks will have either Bone Shield, Unbreakable Armor, or even Anti-Magic Zone. Once again, all three have a cooldown and provide excellent mitigation when active. BS can by glyphed and kept up around half the time in most boss fights. UA increases the armor damage reduction even further, while AMZ drops a stationary bubble everyone can get into to avoid all the magic damage flying around.

Healing efficiency

Blood tanks (yeah I know lolbloodtank, for now) have a couple talents that help with the healing load. Mark of blood will give back 4% of damage dealt by the boss for 20 seconds out of every three minutes and Vampiric Blood will increase healing efficiency by 50% when its in use. Want to see a big fat heal, crit a blood tank when Vampiric Blood is up.

The trick to keeping your healers happy with all these talents at our disposal is to use them judiciously. Pop them when you know there is an incoming damage spike, whether an enrage, adds, or whatever. The other time to use them is when your healers are low on mana; just let them know you will be giving them a break. Nothing says healer love like telling them the next 16,000 in damage won’t need to be healed and they can score some non-casting MP5.

I’d like to close this guest post with a shameless plug. My blog titled The Scourge has several posts dealing with achieving and maintaining the defense cap, talent discussions, and tanking strategies.

Warning: Bad Targeting can Lead to Raid Deaths

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targeting

"Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment."

– Baltasar Gracian, The Oracle

I bet this is something not many healers even think about. I’m not here to talk about your raid frames or your raid UIs. They all represent the same thing (health bars).

But a good healer knows better then to simply rely on clicking health bars to heal or to target their fellow raiders.

Targeting methods

There’s two different ways to target your allies.

  • Raid frames: This is the method that just about every healer is familiar with. Simply put, you click on the player’s frame, and you hit the heal button.
  • Heads up: This method involves you directly clicking on the target on your screen. As in selecting their character model. It can take some practice to do. The reason why it’s called heads up is that you have to keep your head “up” on to the screen instead of glued to the frames.

Why should I care about the heads up method?

A fair question to ask. I can easily heal players at will by clicking on their frames, you might say to yourself. But if you keep your head up on the action, you can make an estimated guess as to who the next person to get hit will be. Or give the impression of having really fast reflexes!

It’s like being psychic and being able to to tell the future!

And in the end, being able to predict where the damage is about to go to can only make you a better player. Don’t pigeon hole yourself into using one method or the other. Learn when to use each one.

Allow me to illustrate.

Kel'Thuzad's room, phase 2 with a player ice blocked

This is Kel’Thuzad’s room. Specifically, we’re witnessing yours truly in action during phase 2. See that Ice Block? That is not a friendly one. Any player trapped within loses 104% of their health in 4 seconds. Note that it’s a percent not an absolute.

You have 4 seconds to react. Or else they die.

What’s faster?

Looking for the raid warning, running towards the player, targeting them in raid frames and then healing them? Or targetting the big chunk of ice in the middle of the screen and dumping spell after spell in a desperate attempt to keep them alive?

Your brain takes time to function. Sure we all make split second decisions and react accordingly. But in a situation like this, you take more time waiting for the cue and finding the player in your raid frames as opposed to just clicking the big blue block.

Why is that?

Because the less tasks that are involved in a goal, the faster the goal is achieved. The brain is an interesting part of our physiology and it takes time to “shift” between tasks.

But that’s an extreme example!

Okay, that’s fair enough. I did talk about trying to predict who would take damage and Kel’Thuzad is a bad example of that since it’s nearly impossible to predict ice blocks.

Let’s take a look at Sartharion’s fire walls.

His basic attack is that he sweeps that area from right to left and vice versa with a giant wall of fire that has gaps where your raid can hide.

If you have an absent minded raider or just a really slow person, you can reduce the damage they take. A quick Shield and a Prayer of Mending helps to ensure they live through the worse parts of it. Raid frames can’t exactly tell you that your absent minded raider is about to get slammed with a fire wall. But at least they’ll live through one this time due to your diligence.

Practice, practice, practice!

For some players, targeting heads up can be difficult. Perhaps their mouse sensitivity isn’t high enough or its too low. Maybe their screen resolution doesn’t allow for enough room. Maybe you just don’t have enough real estate or open room to click on stuff.

But trust me when I say that it is an awesome skill to learn to be able to run and gun heal your party. Practice healing while moving. Practice it from different zoom settings. Try it with the zoom as far away as possible and click on the little dots that is your party. Learn to work the mouse to angle around large player models or objects. PvP battlegrounds is a great place to practice heads up healing since you can tell who’s about to engage players within your area.

Try to activate health bars by pressing Shift V. This allows you see the health of your party as the bar is located above their characters in game.

Be diverse as much as possible in your targeting methods and you will go a long way toward being the best you can be.

Image courtesy of theRIAA

Loot Council and You: One Player’s Take On Loot Council and Casual Raiding

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froggy

This is a guest post from @katagirl, Matt’s fellow guildie and a WoW Twitterati

Since this blog has its fair share of priests and druid posters – I thought it was high time for a Paladin to step up and give her two cents. There’s been a lot of discussion about the way the Loot Council structure is set up, and I wanted to share my take on it.

My story

My name is Kata, and I’ve been playing WoW for about two and a half years. I’m currently in Conquest, being known as “Queen Pally” or “hey, you’re on Rez Duty…” depending on the day.

Up until WotLK came out, I was part of a few very casual raiding guilds. It was first come, first serve to raid signups, very relaxed hours and atmospheres and don’t even get me started on Ventrilo during raids on Lurker. You’d need pain meds just to log in. I popped around a bit, even launched my own guild for a while that never got to raiding (that’s another saga completely). When Matticus started pitching Conquest, I chimed in pretty quick with ideas and feedback through Twitter and got a good dialogue going. I transferred in and the rest is history.

Anyways, back to loot distribution. I’ve raided with guilds that both use the standard /roll with a Master Looter, and with some version of DKP/ EPGP. Conquest was my first experience with a Loot Council, and to be honest I was a bit hesitant. I was spending money to transfer servers to put myself at the mercy of leadership that mostly knew each other. There was nothing keeping them from looting everything to each other based on their friendships in times previous.

I transferred and began the arduous grind to 80. The first official week’s raid schedule I sat out on, gearing up and watching all these strangers get boss loot. I’ve now been raiding with Conquest for a full month.

I really don’t write this kind of thing, so forgive me if I tend to wax narrative.

My verdict: Our Loot Council works. I’m in a unique position as a plate-wearing healer to be able to pick up any gear. At the beginning, even cloth pieces were upgrades for me. I had interest on a lot of pieces. There were many times my major +healing upgrade would be passed over for a minor upgrade for a priest/lock/druid. But just as many times as I sat at the end of a boss fight without gear, I was rewarded with major improvements over the first few weeks. Other players occasionally even withdrew their interest if they saw it’d gear me up – and that is impressive.

Not once have I felt that there has been a partiality in the distribution of loots by the loot council. Sometimes it did take longer to distribute loot at the end of a boss fight, but it was almost always accompanied by an explanation of the decision.

One thing I expected with a loot council system would be the likelihood of raid members to complain or protest decisions. From time to time, there’s the occasional light-hearted bickering – but I have yet to experience someone throw a fit because they did not get a piece of gear. As I mentioned before, I’ve seen players pass on upgrades for others. That was always a rarity when I raided with a DKP model. The Loot Council approach seems to shift the focus from a “me, me!” attitude to a “we, together” attitude. And it seems to be working. At last research, warcrafter.net had Conquest listed as one of the top geared progression guilds on our server, and top 500 out of over 40,000 guilds in US/North America. (not to brag, or anything!)

How can the loot council work in your guild?

Matt’s posted some great guidelines that he’s used for setting up our loot council. From where I sit, the most important things are being approachable and working towards a team mentality. I know that any of our officers are willing to hear me out if I have an issue or complaint. My opinions are valued, which then in turn makes me respect my leaders. As I’ve seen in Conquest, when the focus is on the team first and individual second things work out smoothly.

Other curious raiding notes

  • Naxx music is creepy if you’re the first one in the instance and you have your speakers turned up.
  • Toy Trains need to be patched so that they cannot be dropped in an instance.
  • Of all the bosses in Naxx, Matt has the hardest time with the Frogger boss. Ask me how I got my position…

Just because I have this public forum, I thought I ought to thank two amazing Paladins that guided me on my experience – Alyeska and Xonelith, who both popped around various servers with me. Without them – I wouldn’t be raiding today. (again with the fiction-type writing with a dedication… but I couldn’t help myself). And to all the players I’ve had the honor to work with… except the few that drop toy trains in raids. YOU know who you are.

Syd’s Fantasy Raid Instance: Part 1

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instance-portal

The New Year has given WoW raiders a little something to look forward to. Just now, a dribble of information about Ulduar has started to appear in blue posts. Nothing of substance exists yet–all we know, essentially, is that Ulduar will have lots of encounters and a corresponding amount of loot. Thrilling, isn’t it?

I decided to take advantage of this moment when we know practically nothing about what is to come and imagine what my ideal raid instance might be like. Of course it’s not Ulduar, or even my own design for Ulduar. I don’t think I’m invested enough in the lore surrounding the Makers to give anything like an approximation of the story.

I thought it might be enjoyable to start out 2009 with a series of posts sketching out the kind of instance that I would like to play over and over. I’m very interested, though, in what the readers think is fun–so don’t be shy about making suggestions in the comments!

In this first post, I will be looking back at past Blizzard instances and analyzing what makes them fun (or, I suppose, un-fun). It is my hope that I–and of course the Blizzard designers–can learn from the strengths and weaknesses of past content.

What Makes an Instance Fun?

All truly great dungeons have to follow a set of general principles–let’s call them the 6 Rules of Playability.

1. There must be an engaging story line that develops throughout the dungeon and gets at least a partial resolution at the final boss.

2. There must be adequate rewards for the time spent.

3. Boss encounters must be numerous and varied.

4. The length and difficulty of trash clears has to suit the difficulty level of the dungeon.

5. No part of the dungeon should feel like a pure timewaster. Everything–trash included–needs to serve a purpose.

6. The design should support a sense of gradual progression. The most visually stunning environments and encounters should accompany the end content.

Wait, have there been ANY great instances in WoW?

If I go by my own Rules, WoW has had a lot of misses and only a few hits. I will say that, in general, the trends are encouraging. The Burning Crusade dungeons are a step above Classic, and in Wrath. . . well, we have yet to see.
In order to reveal the areas where I think dungeon design most desperately needs improvement, I’m going to go through a few popular dungeons in terms of the 5 Rules and highlight their strengths and weaknesses.

Instance #1: Deadmines

I know, I know, it isn’t a raid. However, it’s my feeling that the developers took their time with this content. Just like, say, the Northshire Abbey area, it’s a starter zone that stands up extremely well to repeated playthoughs. Deadmines scores 6/6 for my rules–it’s just the right difficulty at the right moment. The story of the Defias gang develops through quests in Goldshire and Westfall and receives an extremely satisfactory conclusion when you finally make that scurvy scalawag Van Cleef walk the plank. Moreover, the letter in his pocket and its resulting quest chain really gives your poor little lowbie the feeling that he or she has affected the game world for the better. As far as the rest of the rules go, the Deadmines hits every high note. You can’t tell me that it wasn’t at least a little bit exciting to blow open the door at the end of the cave to reveal an underground harbor with an enormous pirate ship. Not to mention the rewards–which were always pretty good and got a significant buff last year.

Instance #2: Karazhan

There’s quite a large jump from the Deadmines to Karazhan, and if you, dear reader, choose to take that as censure of the many instances that fall in between, well, I won’t try to dissuade you. As I see it, Blizzard made a lot of raid experiments at the end of Classic, of which the best was surely Naxxramas, but my own thought is that the developers were still learning what made instances fun. Karazhan, the flagship instance of BC, scores 5/6 on my scale, and is in my opinion the best-designed Blizzard raid instance for its level to date. Let’s take a close look at its successes.

1. Story
Karazhan did an excellent job of introducing familiar lore characters–Medivh and his father Nielas Aran–and giving them life. When you play through Karazhan, you’re hanging out in Medivh’s house, interacting with the ghosts of his friends, loved ones, and servants. The Moroes encounter is particularly great–you can even imagine the kinds of conversations Medivh and his steward might have had (Oh dear….). In addition, Karazhan did two things that made the story develop over multiple instance runs. First, the quests give you story information in stages, culminating with the cut scene you get as you learn to summon Nightbane. Those quests give insight into Medivh’s personality. In a certain sense, it’s a shame that Medivh himself never appears as a boss, but I must say I do enjoy him as an opponent in the Chess event. Secondly, the Violet Eye faction and their reputation rings give players a reason to repeat the dungeon. In general, I am always in favor of reputation rewards in dungeons. The interaction with the rep-giving faction is always a plus.

2. Rewards
In terms of bringing down the purples, Karazhan was one of the best instances ever. The sheer number of drops per player for a full clear is truly mind-boggling, and yet the loot tables were varied enough that it took several months to get everything.

3.Variety
Karazhan introduced what I like to think of as 2.0 boss mechanics. I won’t replay the whole dungeon for you, but I think that Shade of Aran, Chess, Netherspite, Nightbane, and Prince were all quite innovative. None of the encounters may have been particularly “hard”–though they certainly were difficult for me personally at the time–but they were all very different from each other.

4.Trash
Here is Karazhan’s weakness. I think that it was originally conceived of as a multi-day instance, and as such it might have seemed appropriate to build in some long slowdowns. However, the trash clear between Curator and Shade should have been streamlined at some point. The rest of the trash in the instance seems proportional, but I remember when it took an hour to clear between Curator and Shade. I think a lot of people used to stop for the night after Curator–I know we did. I would think that–at any difficulty level–a trash clear of even half an hour between bosses is too much. For the sake of fun, 10-15 minutes would be best.

5. Sense of Purpose
The reputation gain with the Violet Eye helps keep even an enormous amount of trash from feeling superfluous. In addition, the trash epics soften the impact of long clears.

6. Design
The movement onward and upward–from the servants’ to the masters’ areas of the castle, and always up toward the parapets–gives Karazhan a nice sense of progress. In addition, the most visually interesting encounters–in my mind, Nightbane, Netherspite, and Prince, are at the end. I like the feeling of creeping through an enchanted castle, room by room, progressing ever onwards toward the source of the place’s madness.

Instance #3: Black Temple

I know, I know, I’ve skipped SSC, TK, and Hyjal. There were good things about them, of course, but I’ve decided to run ahead to my personal favorite instance of all time, Black Temple. Illidan’s House of Pain scores a 4 out of 6 on my scale. Let’s look a little closer at how different aspects of the dungeon measure up.

1. Story
By the time I entered Black Temple, I had been hearing about Illidan and fighting his minions for months. I had talked to Akama and Maiev as part of a quest chain, and I had even spent hours upon hours masquerading as a Fel Orc, only to score an interview with Illidan himself when I became exalted with the Netherwing. I think that of all of the BC instances, Black Temple made the best connections to content outside of the raid itself. Moreover, when we killed Illidan, I really had the sense of participating in a drawn-out battle of epic proportions. It was just right for the story. I didn’t even mind Illidan’s speech–and I agree, Akama’s duplicity was hardly surprising. I saw that one coming a mile away.

2. Rewards
Thanks to the purples, the Hearts of Darkness, and the epic gems, adventurers certainly profitted from BT runs. The only change I would have made concerns the allocation of tier pieces. I would have spread them out a bit–I would have put the shoulder token on Gurtogg Bloodboil just to motivate people (ahem, healers) to pay the utmost attention in the pickiest boss fight in the instance.

3.Variety
All of the bosses of BT test different skills. My personal favorites for the sake of sheer ingenuity are Teron Gorefiend, Reliquary of Souls, Illidari Council, and Illidan himself. Gurtogg Bloodboil has unique mechanics too, but I didn’t particularly enjoy that fight. However, I realize that BT offered a chance for players to challenge themselves with many different mechanics.

4. Trash
No points awarded here. The BT trash is monotonous with its reused models and much longer than it needs to be. Particular weak points are the clears between Naj’entus and Supremus and the clear between Akama and Teron Gorefiend. It’s a relief to get to the shorter clears of the end of the instance. The total clear time for BT for an average raiding guild was just too long, especially when BT formed only half of Tier 6. The only “good” trash in the instance is the gauntlet of ghosts before Reliquary. I would like to see more mini-clears of that type.

5. Sense of Purpose
I’m only giving BT a half a point on this question. Yes, we were introduced to Illybeans early on, and we had a good reason to fight him, but other than Teron Gorefiend, all of the other bosses were relative strangers. Yes, the Illidari Council seems like a logical set of advisors for Mr. Illy Dan, but all the others? Why is Naj’entus even in there, especially when he seems to think his boss is Lady Vashj? And why are they even keeping the Reliquary in there? It’s all very unclear.

6.Design
Once again, I’m awarding only a half point. Black Temple is big and scary, and I love that we get to fight Illidan just when he’s stepped out on the rooftop for a moment to collect his thoughts (or maybe smoke a cigarette?), but the instance as a whole reuses too much of the look of Hellfire Peninsula. I think I would have expected something more unique, perhaps with more staircases and outdoor encounters under the eerie stars of Outland. And yes, I know it’s the BLACK temple, but I don’t think that means that every room had to be black. Just a decorating suggestion. . .

Honorable Mentions

I’ve already discussed what I consider the best WoW instances in detail, but some dungeons excelled at certain aspects of design. What follows are my honorable mentions.

1. Best Trash
I have to give this one to the timed bosses of Zul’Aman. The bear run was challenging yet manageable with a well-geared raid, and each of the trash clears was in some way special. This is the one trash clear that really inspired all-start play, and as stressful as it was, I’m glad I did it a few times.

2. Best Boss Fight
Hands down, Lady Vashj is the best ever end-boss fight. To a greater degree than the too-talkative Kael or the overly-emo Illidan, Lady Vashj made a raid really work for a kill. It was all about movement and coordination. I think healers may have had it the easiest of anyone in that fight, but when I imagine what it might have been like to kite a Strider? Pure fun–and lots of difficulty.

3. Best Scenery
This might be a controversial choice, but I have to give the reward to Maraudon. I loved the three discrete areas, each with their own look, color, and indigenous mob types. Jumping down an enormous waterfall into a pool full of Hydras? Very cool. It felt like Elf Fantasyland…except that the princess at the end was rather flatulent and cellulitic. In terms of looks alone, this place is my very favorite.

So what have we learned? It’s no easy thing to make a good dungeon. In the next installment in the series, I’m going to tackle what must be one of the biggest dungeon design challenges–the entryway and initial trash clear. This part of a dungeon can’t give away all the surprises within the instance, but it does have to catch players’ interest.