But I heard good things about the new Dungeon Finder that was introduced with patch 3.3. People were saying that the groups were fun, that the gear matching meant that you ended up in a reasonably balanced group, and, most interesting of all, they were fast.

I will admit that it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I pressed the “random dungeon” button the first time. I had been waiting to see if a Guild group would want me, but most were raiding or busy, so I thought it was time to jump in and see how PUGs had changed. Plus the lure of a little Pug pet had a small amount to do with it…

I’m pleased to report that the dungeon finder is every bit as good as everyone has been saying. It took a couple of minutes for me to get assigned to a group, but then we were in and running. And because most people are trying to run as many instances as possible, there was barely a pause to buff before the tank was heading off towards the first pull. Thankfully I spotted the little icons on people’s character portraits so that I could suss out who the tank was or we might have been in a bit of a pickle! My first dungeon was the Temple of Ahn’Kahet, and apart from my letting the tank die once during a big pull where I couldn’t keep up with the healing, we charged through it. As we progressed the tank complimented me on my healing a couple of times, which really boosted my confidence. It took less than an hour, we killed all the bosses, no loot drama, and at the end said our goodbyes, left the group and were ported straight back where we started from.

I enjoyed it so much I went back and did another one! And even more amazingly I must have been raving about it because my husband logged in to join me for the second one as well

I’m pleased I ran these dungeons a lot of times with Guild groups, because I can just about remember the strats, and my experience has been that nobody stops to explain strats or make sure you know what you’re doing. In fact, my main challenge is the tanks racing ahead and getting out of healing range! I’m dreading the day my random dungeon ends up being The Occulus because I haven’t been there much (twice) and I get lost when I have to follow people in three dimensions! Plus I hate the healing mechanic on the green drake. But other than that, I’m a big fan of the new dungeon finder, and looking forward to many more groups with it

Apparently I do do PUGs! Who would have thought?!

Whilst I read blogs and listen to podcasts that talk about upcoming changes, I don’t go out of my way to test things. I have not set foot on the PTR, and I like it that way. Oftentimes a change will be reported as a nerf, and then not have as big an impact on the game as expected when it goes live. Things change so much on the PTR that I’d rather focus on playing the real game, and cope with the changes when they happen.

There’s a nice write-up on the Rolling HoTs blog with some testing that Sylly has done by changing her rotation before the patch hit. This gives me hope that my healing style will not need to change too dramatically, and will remain a primarily pro-active style. I’m at work today, so I hope that the servers will be back up and operational by the time I get home. I won’t be raiding tonight. I’ll be sorting out my main and dual specs, and making sure all my UI mods work.

For any other druids out there, like me, who don’t feel prepared for the 3.1 patch, I’d like to recommend the excellent Restokin list of resources for all druids in 3.1 – I’m going to be finding that very useful I think

But the server stability has been awful!

On Saturday night my guild assembled a full 25-man raid, all ready to kick some booty in Mount Hyjal. And we couldn’t zone in. “Transfer Aborted: Instance not found”. So we dispatched scouts all over Azeroth, to see if we could get in to any instance. No luck. Eventually someone zoned into BRS, and 10 of us headed off to get our “Leeeeeerrooooyy” title.

Sunday I put the baby down for her nap, and decided to reward myself with a little WoW time. Got a group together for the Headless Horseman, and headed over to SM. Zoned in and….. nothing….. I was stuck in limbo. 30 minutes of that, and then the server came down. And remained down all night

Last night the server was back, but instances were still unreliable. I didn’t try for the HH, but a guild group did, and although they got there eventually, there was 30 minutes of characters getting stuck trying to zone in beforehand.

Hope everything goes well for our SSC raid tonight. Crossing my branches!