Level 18

The team is entering the goblin forge inside the Deadmines instance.

Instances are a bit different from doing quests in the respect that they are made for five people, while most quests are designed to be done solo or with minimal assistance. With my party's killing power being quite high, non-elite regular monsters are dead withhin seconds, often without a chance to even run to my party of casters. For that reason questing out in the game surface world offers little challenge. Instances on the other hand are designed to challenge five people who act indepentantly and generally have elite monsters. Elite monsters have approximately five times as many hit points as a non-elite version would have. Consequently they are not as easily put down and do have the time to cause trouble.

When I attempted the deadmines the first time, I was ill prepared. I had insufficent control over my mage and warlocks to use them efficiently in a more hectic or longer fight. I worked my action bar setup and the WoW macro's on there a bit and changed a number of key bindings to allow for a number of needed things. This way I was able to use ancient and proven military tactics: the feigned retreat.

I will leave the warlocks and mages where I want to fight, and then pull what I want to fight using the priest. I put a shield up before I pull and use either my wand or the instant Shadow Word: Pain to pull the mob. As I am running back to the other characters, I will already start attacking the mob or mobs I pulled with the damage dealing characters as soon as they are in sight. If there is an add, I am prepared to use the mages crowd control abilitiy to sheep it.

Using these tactics, I cleared the way to the mast room where I defeated lumbermaster Sneed and his buddies. The patrols that spawn as soon as a named boss has been killed are a real nuissance in this dungeon and made my life hard. Fighting on, I reached the forge, as shown in the picture above. I did manage to kill Gilnid. As it was getting rather late, my patience was sorely tested already and I really wanted the Staff of Westfall for my team I replaced Elaire with my level 60 mage and nuked the rest of the dungeon in a few minutes. Sweet sweet revenge!