Fun with Irradiated Sludge

Last night I participated in something and will pay today for it. I’ve kept a fairly firm rule that I try not to get engaged in much within Classic after about 8 pm CST. The reasoning being that I generally head to bed around 9:30 pm and go do my winding down activities before falling asleep. Very few dungeons take less time than a minimum of an hour and a half. Gnomeregan was one that I had expected would take roughly 2 hours, and was ultimately right. When I got home however we had all of the members of a group minus one player, that was expected to be logging in soon… so I allowed myself to commit to tanking.

The challenge there is that soon was a little longer than I expected and we had not started the instance until about 8:40… which had us leaving the instance around 10:40 two full hours later. It was a lot of fun, but I also need to not allow myself to get pulled into this practice on the regular because I definitely can feel its toll this morning, as I am a little groggier and creakier than I normally am. 5 am comes really really early. There was a time when I was in the habit of going to bed at midnight every night, but I have gotten out of that habit and it is probably for the better health wise. Classic and timezones are conspiring to try and shift that however.

I think everyone has memories of Gnomeregan being a giant pain in the butt, but to be honest I wasn’t exactly sure why until setting foot into the dungeon last night. There are a bunch of mechanics that just conspire to make the player suffer. Everything seems significantly higher aggro than most areas, and there are a bunch of “gotcha” mechanics that allow what was a stable pull to snowball with a large number of adds quickly. There is also the deep level range of the stuff at the top of the zone being level 25 and the final content being around 36. That deep level range is felt significantly as you gain confidence on the early packs and start paying for it later on the final trench clear to Thermaplugg.

For the most part I had been praising the fact that we had the old feel with some of the more modern conveniences of reasonable pathing. Pets for example do a good job of not pulling everything in the zone if you hop down off something. For the most part they now just despawn and you summon them back. Chain aggro also had seemingly been less of a thing, that was until getting into Gnomeregan. While doing the final clear the mobs are packed so tightly between two sides of a trench and the basin of the trench… that things get really twitchy making it extremely easy to wind up with a massive train of Dark Iron Dwarves seemingly coming from out of nowhere.

The above image shows what happened to us twice as we started pulling that last stretch. At first we were trying to hug the lefthand wall and pull only the mobs along that catwalk, and managed to get a massive train from the trench. Then we opted to pull our way down the trench and had almost reached the bottom… when we got a massive train coming from either side. There was no fighting through the sheer volume of mobs that came at us. The first time we had shaman reincarnation to get us back up and running, but the second time we remembered the back door to the instance and the fact that ghosts can apparently run through doors. We had the key in our inventory from a previous encounter and were able to get back down to the Thermaplugg area rather quickly.

We successfully completed all of the quests associated with Gnomeregan that were available to the horde, and I finished off one level and managed to make a little bit of a dent into the next. Another funny thing happened on the way to the irradiated cesspool however. We were waiting on the boat at Ratchet and up rolls another Undead player named Blodghast. We were talking about it in party chat when he sent me a tell saying something to the effect that “we might be cousins”. I need to friend the character and actually run some stuff with them given they have a good taste in names.

All in all it was a really fun night, but I need to ration this whole staying up way later than I intended thing. I guess Thursday is a reasonable night to do this on given that my Fridays are generally fairly light. Given that it is Friday however we might do some more late night shenanigans because I am starting to collect quests for Scarlet Monastery. I do feel a bit bad because Grace is going to more or less be out of commission for the next three weeks. By that point I will have leveled well out of her optimal range, but I plan on running a bunch of dungeons to help her catch back up.