World of Warcraft

[saint777]

Coming from a noob perspective I would say the worst classic dungeon by far is The Stockades. Every single enemy running away at low health, no variety in enemies, no cool bosses and just one area made for a mindnumbing experience. The first dungeon that I really liked was Shadowfang Keep with the cool atmosphere and monsters. I liked Sunken Temple because I love fighting dragons and didn't find the dungeon confusing once I got the layout.

Other dungeons I didn't care for were Razorfen Kraul and the Wailing Caverns which is way too long and boring save for a cool end fight. Blackrock Depths and Lower Blackrock Spire were confusing and too long, although the BRD end fights starting with Magma were pretty good. Most of the rest of the dungeons I liked, even the ones that took days to get into with DF.

I'm finding the BC dungeons much shorter and easier but I figure the heroic versions are the real versions and will tackle those once I finish the eight or so dungeons I got left with BC.

Currently lvl 70 and questing in Borean Tundra. I eleked to Dalaran only to hike back to get cold weather training and then fly back. Gonna try to finish the BC content before Cataclysm but probably won't get much if any classic and BC raids done. The only "raid" I've done was a two man into UBS. The Beast was a cool fight and went out and got a core hound for my hunter. Also got an Ironhide Devilsaur and a Black wolf from the Blade Edge Mountains. i need to get a tank pet next.

[Kalbear]

BRD I loved because while it was long, it felt right. The place was huge, had tons of weird things in it, and it really felt like a place, not just a set of random mobs. And it was hard as fuck at the appropriate level. I dont want to chain-run it, but I had lots of fun memories of being in Kara-lite.

Sunken Temple was just horrible design with great bosses. The actual layout was hideously bad. The rewards stank. Overall, just meh.

I liked LBRS a little bit but didn't like UBRS. Too weird of moving around.

My favorite classic dungeons...hmm. WC has some really amusing memories of people getting lost. But for the money, the best was SM. So much to do there, nice layouts, interesting fights. A runner up would be Strat.

For BC, I liked SHalls and SLabs. Both had tons of hard, interesting pulls and good bosses. Arcatraz was good too. Hated the SSC ones after a while, and the Auch ones save SLabs were so very, very horrible.

For WotLK HoR was awesome if amazingly short. Very good tuning and neat ideas. I'm a fan of Oculus now too. I love AN and AK just for the sheer size of the areas, though the actual fights aren't that great. Most of them are kinda bleh now, honestly.

[Kouran]

My favorit instances:

Classic:

Razorfin downs and kraul. I just loved the way the zones were layed out and the stories behind them. I just wished that Alliance had gotten more lore/quests with them

SM: one of the best layed out instances ever

Maurdon: I know a lot of people hate the place but I loved it for how large and varied it is.

BRD: BRD actually felt like a city, that made the whole place fit together

Stratholm: Both live and dead side are just awesome

TBC:

Shattered Halls, Shadow Labs and Arcatraz: they all felt like a large dungon that had a coherent theme and cool fights/bosses

WotLK:

Utgard: both pinnacle and keep were nice instances very themeatic and tied together with the questing and lore if you did it all

Draktharon and Gundrak: ok the troll thing got old by ZA but the quests and lore tied this one up nicely, with the bonus of being able to kill the troll at the end of the quests in ZD

ICC instances: I loved these as they were harder and tied together a bunch of lore and themes.

[Inigima]

My votes:

Best Classic Dungeon: Blackrock Depths. Despite being obnoxious to get to -- at least for Horde -- and having a terribly long corpse run that baffles most pubbies (most of my groups don't wipe, but when they do, they rarely reform), it feels really epic and is laid out well. It doesn't take that long to get through these days if your group is any good, and with a good group it's an absolute blast.

Honorable mention: Shadowfang Keep.

Worst Classic Dungeon: Wailing Caverns. Fuck this steaming turd of a dungeon. Even with a map it's fuck-awful to find your way through. As a tank at that level you have virtually no tools to keep hate and mobs are spread out and difficult to grab and hold. As a healer you will enjoy one of the most absurdly long sleeps in the game and tanks who don't yet have the health pools to wait for you to wake up (before you're chain sleeped again) -- as a healer, nothing is worse than watching your babies die and not being able to do anything about it, through no fault of your own. DPS mostly just wander around confused, and wonder why their tank can't keep hate off them and their healer can't keep them alive.

Honorable mention: Gnomeregan, although you don't have to do all of it and if your tank knows where he's going you can get through without too much hassle these days.

Best Burning Crusade Dungeon: The Arcatraz. I love all of the Tempest Keep 5-mans, but the Arcatraz is probably my favorite. The Botanica's a bit over-long, and the Mechanar is nice enough but less distinctive. The Arcatraz is pretty and fun and has a lot of neat design choices.

Honorable mentions: The Botanica, the Mechanar, Magister's Terrace.

Worst Burning Crusade Dungeon: Sethekk Halls. The ultimate "bring a shaman or fuck off" dungeon, with its fearing mobs next to fearing mobs next to fearing mobs, and the Time-Lost Controllers whose Charming Totems every single retard in your group will be too stupid to kill.

Honorable mentions: Auchenai Crypts, fuck that first pull; Shadow Labyrinth and that fucking mind control boss, and at-level Murmur was really rough.

Best Lich King Dungeon: The Forge of Souls. The ICC 5-mans are far better designed than most of the other Wrath dungeons, so that they're not too hard if your group is good but will kick your ass if you're dumb, and Forge is the most accessible of the lot. Great pre-raid loot that's actually worth going for too.

Honorable mentions: Pit of Saron and Halls of Reflections are both very well-designed, but the ease with which a group can wipe can be frustrating, particularly HoR.

Worst Lich King Dungeon: Three-way tie between the Nexus, Culling of Stratholme and Halls of Stone. Even with ICC25 gear these take way too fucking long.

Honorable mentions: Oculus, though it's a joke these days. Huge pain in the ass back in the day.

[Shryke]

PoS is a PoS.

Terrible fucking dungeon. The other 2 ICC 5-mans are actually pretty good (after they fixed HoR waves) but PoS is just long and dull. The first 2 boss fights are at least interesting though. But the trash is endless and boring till after the 2nd boss.

Hell, even FoS is too long for what it is. Needs a few less samey trash pulls at the start.

[Kymeera]

ST was fun the first time around when the game was new, but it got stale fast. It didn't help that I was playing a tauren, and with the low ceilings plus vines hanging down I couldn't see anything half the time.

I forget who posted that they liked Mara, but I also loved it. It gets a lot of hate, but I remember when it was first patched in. I went with a group of friends and we had no idea what it was like beforehand. We ended up wiping near the end because we all still needed a level or two. Went back a few days later and crawled through the place and had so much fun. To this day those first few Mara runs still put a smile on my face.

I could also run Black Rock Spire (upper and lower) all day. I remember one time, right before the General's room, looking down and realizing I was seeing a ton of levels from lower spire. It felt so vast and epic. It was also a ton of fun doing stealth runs with another druid. We duo-ed the dog that drops the druid T0 shoulders. It felt so OP to sneak past half the dungeon and kill a mob intended for a full group.

Scholo and Strath get honorable mentions because the atmosphere was so spooky, and I still remember going in with a full raid and wiping. The forums erupted when they announced they were capping it to a 5 man. Clearly it would be impossible to complete them!

I actually enjoy most of the WotLK dungeons. Well, except for the fact they're nothing but long hallways with intermittent bosses. I'd love to have numerous optional side areas like the original dungeons. Also, fuck vehicles and any event or dungeon requiring them. Anyway, I don't mind how easy they are. They were tricky when we all first hit 80 and were wearing crap gear, but not brutal. They don't serve much purpose since they opened up raiding to the masses, so go ahead and make them nothing much more than a diversion or loot pinata for alts.

[Solmyr]

No, even in Vanilla WoW, Sunken Temple was shit.

It was out of the way, the only quests for it involved LONG pre-dungeon chains, it was easy for newbs to get lost in, it's really long and, most of all, it's the same fucking pull OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

Many dungeons were out of the way back in the day. ST was no harder getting into that BFD, BRD(horde), RFD(ally), SM(ally), DireM(ally), all BRM ones(horde), etc.

Long pre-dungeon chains were the bread and butter of classic WoW. The Hakkar chain actually involves 4 dungeons - ZF, Jintha'Alor (basically an outdoor dungeon), ST and LBRS. In that regard ST was an important part of the lore and zone chains. As a comparison, many "beloved" dungeons like SM only had 1 quest (ok, 2 for horde but no one ever did the GY one) and it was pretty straightforward.

Yes it was easy for noobs to get lost in. But so is RFC, DeadM, WC, Gnomer, BFD, RFD, Uldaman, Mara, BRD. Basically, most of the pre-60 dungeons. And ST was as high as lvl52-58 so one should assume noobs who like doing dungeons must've learned by then.

Personally I count "being very long" as the biggest advantage. Again, back in the day, creating a dungeon group was a pain in the ass. I remember using the /who system and asking everyone of the appropriate level/class just to have a chance. Then you needed to travel there - all 5 of you. No stones, no lazy bs. And once you get there, 30mins later, you'd probably want to enjoy the dungeon for at least some time. A full ST run used to take around 2 hours, if we factor in a few wipes.

As for the "same fucking pull over and over again" - this is the part where you're mistaken the most. If you compare ST with most of the 15-60 dungeons, you'll actually find out very few offer a wider variety of mobs.

We have: 1. Snakes and oozes in the basement, cool troll boss and indiana jones kind of stuff. 2. Undead trolls of several varieties, combination of caster, melee, corpse-eating undead and non-elite demons. 3. Elite dragonkins of 4 varieties (including casters) combined with non-elite. 4. More undead trolls, but of a completely different kind, spawning undead spirits, fearing and with shadow priests. 5. Flying serpents leading to an amazing Hakkar event with snakes, serpents, dragonkin and a cool boss fight. 6. Huge emerald dragons, flying in pairs of 2. 7. Eranicus himself - cool, but very hard fight, calls all alive dragonkins to aid (usually wiping noobs once), banishing the main tank and etc.

Now let us quickly compare this with the array of mobs elsewhere. Take SM: You get to fight ONLY scarlet folks. There are 4-5 different kinds per wing. In total there is less variety in mobs in the entire SM and a far greater variety in race in ST compared to SM.

You can compare with other dungeons yourself, you'll hardly find many with greater variety of mobs and events.

I forget who posted that they liked Mara, but I also loved it.

I did in the previous thread :). I guess it's worth mentioning it again. Awesome place, hard bosses and quest chains, amazing design.

[Third Knight on the Left]

Best Dungeon ever- Magister's Terrace

Worst Dungeons ever- All of the Wrath dungeons before HoR. So mind numbingly easy, there were people in F&B getting Bronze Drakes with no raid gear around a month after release if my memory isn't faulty. I'm very excited for what they are doing with Cata heroics, seems like a return to form.

[jurble]

Hard dungeons are bad mmmmkay. Near release, of HoR when some people wanted gear, pugging it with dungeon finder was fine. Near the end of my play-time, either I was outgearing every else so badly that the tanks couldn't handle me, or only the shittier skilled players were doing HHoR but it was teeeeeeeerrrrrrible.

[Kalbear]

After a couple weeks, finally managed to kill LK again. We switched tanks from the DK who had been doing LK before to me (druid). His average melee was 32k, mine was 22k - and I avoided 9% more than he did over all attempts. Druids are kinda broken in current play right now.

But we killed him for the first time since the patch, so that was good.

[RaceBannon42]

I think everyone to many people in my guild are tired of HLK. Last week we cleared 11/12 HM in just over 3 hours. We should have had 2 good nights of attmepts. Instead we got half a night because people didn't show up.

So I think we will switch things up this week and wipe on H Halion instead. Think I'll need to respec for imp fire nova for that fight though.

[saint777]

Did my first two raids yesterday and they were awesome.

Blackwing Lair was first with an 18 man raid. Great gaming moment: Fighting Nefarious and then instructed to take out his adds I lost sight of Nefarious but was almost done with the adds when this looming shadow comes up from behind me and I turn around and HOLY SHIT IT IS BIG FUCKING DRAGON!!! Just awesome experience.

Molten Core started as an 8 man run but halfway through turned into a 5 man raid with the party composed of 2 80's 2 70's and a 60. Lots of cool monsters and bosses with a huge cool end boss.

That was almost two much for one day but also did a really cool dungeon(Magister's Terrace). Now I need to do Zul'Gurub and The Anh'Qiraj raids to finish Classic raid achievement.

[RaceBannon42]

So I made the decision to cut raids to two nights a week until we are up and running in Cata. We cleared 11/12 HM in just over 2.5 hours last night, and with people seeming unwilling to keep working on HLK, there isnt really anything to do for a 3rd night. Maybe with only one night of wiping people will show up and try harder. So tonight we work on Heroic Halion.

I did manage to pull 15.4k on Saurfang, still about 1k behind where I was pre patch. I did some WoL surfing yesterday and discoverd one parse post patch where a Enhancement pulling 18.4k dps which is the highest post since 4.0.1. and the 14th best overall. so thats pretty good. He was still only 17th highest dps in his own riad though. So the best shaman dps in the world is dead last in his own raid. That makes me sad.

[Inigima]

AQ40 is the one classic raid I've never completed even at 80. Twin Emperors are such a pain in the ass.

[Inigima]

When we did AQ40 there were only a couple of us. We had no casters and it was very difficult as a paladin tank to them from getting together every switch, especially because I couldn't fucking see anything half the time because they're enormous.

[Greywolf2375]

Things are starting to come together - downed LK for the first time as the new guild, got about 10 people their LK title. 8/12HM's, so things are looking better.

We almost couldn't go last night as we had about a 1/2 dozen people that couldn't log in due to whatever glitch was happening with authenticators. Filled in some holes, had some go offspec and after working out some kinks, got him down.

Tonights going to be running a few things for reps - ZG, AQ, BT and finishing off the final items for the red drake cheeve.

[RaceBannon42]

yeah last night sucked.

People couldnt log in so we were trying to clear RS trash with 1 tank.

The once people finally got in we tried to do hard mode, but every go 1 or 2 people would dc and not be able to get back in.

So we tried to split into 2 to man groups, but it said we were saved. Apparently the mini bosses that drop no loot save you to heroic.

We 24 manned it on normal then did TOGC. We did get a Heroic Deaths Choice to drop, but since we loot counciled it, it caused drama. One hunter felt he deserved it more than the hunter we gave it to. That shit is why I dont want to go to loot council. Its the best system imo, but its to hard to find 25 good players who will agree with your decisions. Frankly if we had given it to the person who "deserved" it the most, I would have taken it. Its BiS for me as well.

In other new Ghostcrawler responded to Enhancement threads.

He more or less says we are fine L2P. :/

[Poobah]

Because he has a clue what the fuck he is talking about? Yeahright.

[Zadok]

I'm suprised Blizzard even wastes their time addressing the whines about balance at level 80. All the nerds that care about shit like the miniscule difference between the "best" and the "worst" DPS in a raid made up of good players beat the game 6 months ago. There's a couple more weeks of who gives a shit raiding if you're so addicted that you can't take a few weeks off before Cata and then none of this crap means anything. Do people really expect them to work on stuff that's going to be obsolete so quickly?

[Kalbear]

Do people really expect them to work on stuff that's going to be obsolete so quickly?

When they say they will and they already have, yes. At the very least addressing it for 85 is expected.