It’s the little things, really

We took Tiernen on his first Instance last night (for those non World of Warcraft folks, this is a thing in the game where you take a portal into a special dungeon just for your group). It’s quite challenging and you have to be a good team player. Everyone has a job to do and tactics are very important, as we found out. The front line fighters (slang term-“tanks”) try to keep the enemy standing and fighting in one place while the rest of the party heals or does damage with distance weapons and spells from behind. This can be very hard, because some enemies will break and run when they get low on health (should provoke an Attack of Opportunity, but I’m mixing my games here). A lot of times when they run, or if you chase them, it brings a new monster into the fight. We got killed a few times by “adds”, new monsters jumping in, provoked by people and their pets running after creatures that someone could have killed with an arrow or spell before they got out of range. We were a group of mostly new players, or people playing new characters, so it’s not completely unexpected, but it shows me lots of places for us to focus on in the future. The use of the voice program is very helpful, as the in-game text chat can be very unwieldy to use. I’m becoming more comfortable with joining new people for groups and such as it speeds up gameplay tremendously and is very exciting with all the spells going off and people running and jumping around. We’re going to try to do the Deadmines instance some time this week, so watch for us.