I Think I Love You, Dungeon Finder

For the first time in my World of Warcraft career, I was able to experience new patch content immediately upon release. Well, I shouldn’t say that; our guild isn’t ready to go raiding Icecrown Citadel, but I ran the Icecrown instance last night for the first time, and others in the guild were in there the first night. It wasn’t until after 3.2 went live that I got my first character to 80, so everything was already in place.

So far, I absolutely love the “Fall of the Lich King” patch.

The first thing I took advantage of was the Dungeon Finder. The night 3.3 went live, most of my guildmates were already doing the Icecrown instance, so I gave the Dungeon Finder a try. The interface was easy to use, and it was only a few moments before I was pulled into a dungeon. That first night the auto-portal didn’t work; which wasn’t terribly surprising. No big deal.

Heroic ToC was the dungeon selected for us, so we all just ran to the tournament grounds on our own servers, entered the coliseum, and there we were. The group performed very well with a Death Knight tank and a tree throwing heals; it probably went more smoothly than some of our all-guild runs. I looted a ring, we congratulated each other when finished, and went our separate ways.

On my second dungeon of the night with guildmates, we discovered the button near the minimap that will port you to and from the dungeon.

I had been hearing of complaints in the Trade channel while in Dalaran about the Dungeon Finder not working, but I or my group have used it a half dozen times or so and haven’t had any difficulties.

Last night while running the Icecrown instance, two of our guildmates had to leave after we finished Pit of Saron. We grabbed another guildmate that had logged on in the meantime, but we had to PUG the fifth. And again, it went very smoothly. It literally took a few seconds between confirming our roles, and having a decently geared Death Knight ready to continue through the Halls of Reflection with us. If it hadn’t been for the Dungeon Finder, we would have had to call off our Icecrown run before the Halls of Reflection.

So yeah, I love the Dungeon Finder. Not only can it keep your group going if a member has to log out, but it will likely be the end of those boring nights when there aren’t enough guildies online to run a heroic. And I’ll be able to run those dungeons I’ve never done (Occulus, Halls of Stone) because no one ever wants to do them.