Ding 80 – A little Disappointment
stargrace 
I finally hit level 80 yesterday on my first ever character in world of warcraft. I was pretty excited to get there – and then once I was there I looked around wondering ‘what now?’ The thing is I don’t know anyone on my server. Thanks to the LFD tool there’s no reason to actually talk (or even group) with anyone, and there’s rarely anyone in my dungeons from my own server any how. I don’t belong to a raid guild, and I don’t know anything about ‘end game’ in world of warcraft, aside from it being a gear grind. Manos has been 80 for a little while now, and had a few suggestions for me. I’m obviously not geared well enough to go jumping into heroic dungeons, even though I do have some available to me.
What we did for the majority of the night was run the Trial of the Champion instance, which is a three part ring event that rewards one epic loot the first round, two the second, and two the third. It’s notorious for it’s trinkets – and bad groups. It seems like after 2am EST all of the groups went significantly down hill. I suppose that’s to be expected on a Thursday night, but I wasn’t prepared for it.
There was the group that wanted to vote someone out simply because they had never been there before. One incredibly impatient person started the event before the new 80 even had time to know what was going on, and then he spent the next little while dying through no real fault of his own. The impatient person screamed for him to be voted off, and in fact a second member of the group /spit on the new player. I decided this was not a group I wanted to heal for, because lets face it I’m just as new, and I left.
The first event can be confusing for any new player. You’re required to grab a lance from the sidelines of a huge arena, and then mount up on a warhorse. The main event is jousting, and you’ve got to run around charging the enemy and knocking them off of their mounts. If players know what they’re doing it can be quite fun, and it’s relatively painless. If you notice your mount is dying the best thing to do is to move to the sidelines and grab a fresh one. A few times I didn’t get there in time and once my mount ‘died’ I was pummeled to death by the enemy, which wasn’t fun. The revive point is very close by, thankfully.
The second event compromises of two different names, it’s random which one you get. The female encounter is the more difficult of the two, but the male is quite simple, you just have to face the other way while he’s blinding everyone. Literally, look towards the wall.
The last encounter is great if you’ve got the dps, and painful if you do not. Since this is one of the entry level dungeons for level 80, you’ll end up with a lot of under geared players very easily.
Needless to say, I started the evening with a gs (gear score) of 2700 and ended with a 3250 or so. Ideally, I’d like 4-5k – and higher than that requires raiding. I ran the instance 6-7 times, and obtained three pieces of gear. A huge upgrade over what I had been wearing, though it quickly became too late for me to test it out and see if dungeons were any easier. I’m attempting to gather shards for both gear (myself) and heirloom (the alts) and in the mean time I’m pondering creating an alliance character on another server simply to experiment with that side of things. I’d rather it not be on my ‘regular’ server because – well because (for those who don’t know, I play on Ravenholdt). That will require some research on my end, maybe I can find myself a good home.
Happy gaming no matter where you find yourself.