WoW Midnight remains on the menu for the instance group, though there have been some initial issues and decisions to make.  The first of those decisions has been who is playing which character/class/race.

I have enough characters for now, as noted in my play time round up, but some people want to start fresh.

Also, we do want to do things as a group, which tends to mean dungeons.  And, since there are only four of us active in the guild now, that means follower dungeons.

Follower dungeons, which came in near the end of Dragonflight, let you fill in missing roles in your group.  For now there is a selection of Dragonflight dungeons that will let you mix and match levels in your group between

This is also why the game gives you a hard shove towards Dragonflight when you’re considering which time walking campaign you might run with your new character.  But more about that in another post.

The downside is that if you were like me and used your boost on your “main” character, they are now level 80 and outside the zone for those dungeons.

Sunday saw three of us get together, myself, Potshot, and Ula, and we tried to sort out what to run and with whom.  Potshot and Ula had both rolled up fresh Dracthyr who had leveled up a bit but who were still down at the bottom end of that 10 – 70 level range.

I, again, had a bounty of choices… 42 characters in retail at my audit a couple weeks back… including a few level 50 characters as I played Battle for Azeroth pretty hard and that was where being at the level cap back then left you after the great level squish.

I pulled a frost spec Death Knight out of the backlog and made sure he had his talent points set and joined the group.

We had run Ruby Life Pools in our first test run last time around, but we were still other options.

Opting to just move down the list we chose Neltharus and Potshot put us in the queue.

We had three DPS so we were going to play the ultimate “you don’t actually have a group” lineup.  The queue popped for us quickly enough and we were soon standing there with our tank, Captain Garrick, and a Tauren druid named Crenna.  Both of them played like they gave no fucks about anything, but before we got to that I had a problem.

I will stipulate right here and now that I know nothing about how follower dungeons work or how the scaling mechanics that allow a couple of level 20-ish characters group up and do a dungeon with a level 50 character.

What I do know is that my guy entered the dungeon and found that my hotbars had been wiped clean.  I already wasn’t sure how to play a DK, but I was pretty sure I might need some combat skills… or at least auto attack… to succeed.

Not wanting to hold the group up while I started in on page one of “You’ve decided to play a Death Knight…” I decided that it was time to test out the two button combat rotation.

The first buttons, mapped to 2, is the single button assist.  Yes, using that button slows the global cool down by 25%.  But you know what else slows stuff down?  Me trying to figure out what to do on a character I haven’t played since 2020.

The second button was a macro that Potshot put together for us.

With that you set the tank as your focus, then triggering the macro will set your target to whoever the tank is currently attacking.  That ended up on the 3 slot because, for reasons I do not understand, it would not trigger when I had it on the 1 slot.  I could click it just fine, but hitting 1 on the keyboard did nothing.

That set I gave the thumbs up and we were off.

As I think I noted last time, Blizzard has accurately modeled a random PUG tank with Captain Garrick.  I feel like the next follower dungeon update should allow you to pick your tank play style, with options like “fastest run,” “hey watch for walkers,” and “full clear, leave not witnesses” or something like that.

But at least you can turn the tank “off” if you need a breather… and they will wait if you are not following them closely (really missed a banter opportunity here by having the tank get impatient and start shouting at the group) but if you take three steps towards the next mob they’ll be on it.

Garrick was in “fastest run” mode and absolutely walked around every mob they could.  There was some absolute hero level pathing going on.

Mob avoidance included mobs that were on the move and which were clearly going to wander back and catch us in a pincer movement.  Garrick didn’t care.  She had Crenna there to back her up, a druid with a seemingly unlimited reserve of combat resses.  It was kind of funny and crazy.

We did wipe once, as we approach Forgemaster Gorek, when Garrick completely ignored wandering patrols who came at us from three sides as we were taking on two sets of stationary mobs.  At that point Crenna was out of options.

But we manage to clear enough that our next run at it, when Garrick did exactly the same thing again, we had thinned out the pack enough to survive.

That was the only real hiccup and we made it through to the end and defeated Warlord Sargha, the final boss.

We got the achievement, got the decor drop, which went to Ula, and wrapped up the quest inside the dungeon, though we had to walk all the way back to the beginning to turn it in, which was a hazard as we had left a few mobs behind untouched.  What happened to quest giver concierge service?  Or is that only for heroic tier and better customers?

For xp this turned out pretty good.  My DK was a level 50 with full blue bar and ended up at level 52.  Now I can put him back in the queue and get somebody else out while his blue bar comes back.  I guess one of the nice side effects of that addon that measures played time is that I logged everybody in and made sure they were in town so they will be ready to level.

That did not take too long, so we decided to do another run.  This time we had an eye on something in the current expansion.  We got out our ostensible main characters, those who had been boosted and had done at least a bit of the expansion, but found that only two of us had done enough in Midnight to unlock the first follower dungeon.

So that was out.

But we could, when grouped up, get into some of The War Within dungeons.

Those were limited to level 70-80 characters, and Vikund and Ula were already past 80, but with Skronk in the group those opened up as an option.  The problem was that when we entered those instances… and we tried it a few times… Ula found half of her mage combat skills locked out, which made player her character difficult at best.

Eventually we gave up on that, gave Potshot the assignment of getting far enough into the expansion to be able to run the first instance, and fell back on alts again.

I dragged out my hunter, Tistann, Potshot got out Fergorin his dwarf pally, and Ula returned to her Dracthyr just to keep the party rolling on leveling them up.

Then we picked the next Dragonflight dungeon on the list, The Nokhud Offensive.

This is a sprawling, overland instance in some green rolling hills where we were killing… something… I will admit I was paying a lot more attention to remembering what my character skills were and where Captain Garrick was running off to than the story.  Again, successful recreation of a PUG dungeon group.

Once again we were three DPS with Captain Garrick and Crenna shepherding us around and doing their usual thing.  In order to get around you ride, or are transformed into, a ghost bird that brings you to the next set of encounters.  However Tistann was still wearing the fish head from Darkmoon Faire… it has probably been on him for five years now, not back for a 60 minute buff… and while everybody else saw just their ghost bird, Tistann saw the bird AND his fish head.

So I had that going for me… which is nice.

The run was mostly as before, with us chasing Garrick around… or Garrick running ahead of us as we approached… whatever… and occasionally getting into trouble.  At one point Garrick did their classic move of running to the next set of mobs, ignoring completely two wandering groups, one to each flank and things looked like they were headed towards a wipe.

But Crenna wasn’t having it.  Getting out there like it was 1999 and they were kiting griffons in North Karana, Crenna managed to grab all the aggro from all the mobs on us, DoT’ing them up and hitting an insta cast heal when needed, then proceeded to run in a circle around Tistann, who had survived due to a timely use of feign death, and who then sat there peeling off mobs one by one as Crenna kept circling.

Every once in a while Crenna would get far enough in to combat ress Garrick.

Garrick would come back to life, run straight at the batch of mobs, grab all the aggro, and then die again.

Tistann would feign death again and Crenna would grab aggro, and the dance would continue.  Once in a while Tistann had to heal or ress his pet, but for the most part Crenna just hero druid tanked the whole extended encounter.

When things were done Crenna then ressed everybody and we were set to go.

After that encounter, the remaining two bosses were pretty tame.  We made it through and everybody who had full blue bar got a couple of levels along the way.

That gives us 16 dungeons to work through, three of which we have done already, plus the dungeons that open up to us as we progress with Midnight.  The question is whether or not that is enough to keep us busy given that we’re going to stick to just our group to play.