And how sweet it is.  I dinged 60 with my shadow priest over the weekend, and I had forgotten just how much better the itemization gets when you hit the outlands.  Not just in terms of the various green drops I could find on the AH to wear, but also in the quest rewards.

After a few of the starting quests in Honor Hold, I made some huge upgrades by way of quest rewards.  I got the [Shadowbrim Travel Hat], which is both dapper and has some great stats.  Then I picked up a new pair of pants, the [Wanderer's Stitched Trousers] along with a very nice and fancy-looking, animated weapon in [The Staff of the Twin Worlds].  The capper though, was the [Goldweave Tunic], which will probably last me into the mid 60′s.  Wow, just wow.  It’s amazing how quickly you can acquire great upgrades in the Outlands.

To celebrate my newfound power, I decided it was time to give my first Outlands instance a try.  So I went about putting together a group for Hellfire Ramparts.  Awlbiste of Awlbiste’s Thicket offered to come out with her freshly 60 Druid to heal, and bring along her freshly 60 Hunter better half.  We picked up a guild tank, and put out the clarion call for a fifth, which was answered by the guild leader in the form of his 66 holy pally.  So, healer heavy isn’t the first thing you want to hear, but that’s what we were.  Also, the warrior we brought along was very new to the game, the warrior being his first character, and didn’t have much experience tanking.

So we had a group, and it was an interesting one.  Gahrie, the tank, had to use a two hander as his one handed weapon skills were quite low, since he had mostly soloed his way to 63.  He was also unable to fill the role the tank often takes, of marking targets and generally leading.  So, I asked if anyone felt up to taking that task, and noone spoke up.  So I found myself marking and leading the run.

Weird.  I never, and I mean NEVER have to mark targets or lead a run.  My main is a healer, and they hang back and do the same thing no matter what:  keep the party alive.  There was a time, long long ago, when I was feral spec’d.  Even then, though, I think I tanked a grand total of 2 Outlands instances.  So though I HAD marked before, it was only a couple times.  This should be interesting.

As I mentioned before, our tank Gahrie is a very green player, and doesn’t have much tanking experience.  As the leader I had to kind of give him advice and walk him through some basics, though my tanking knowledge is limited.  Gahrie was VERY open to my suggestions, and was eager to learn.  That’s a huge plus in my book, and it made the run easier than it could have been.

Anyhow, it becomes obvious to me fairly early on that Gahrie isn’t great at generating threats on multiple targets.  Of course it doesn’t help that he has to tank with a slow 2 hander, either.  My remedy was to use as much CC as we could, whenever we could.  So I often set up trap targets for the hunter where I often might skip them, and also spent a lot of the instance doing some CC myself — Mind Control.

Ok, though I’ve messed with MC a bit through my leveling process, I rarely used it.  But in Ramparts I had a HELL of a lot of fun MCing targets at any opportunity.  It was great for us because it both took one mob out of play and used said mob to bash on the others.  Of course this killed my DPS numbers on the meters, but frankly I didn’t care.  It was just too damn much fun to MC guys left and right.

Sometimes I threw MC on a caster, and blasted away at his buddies, or I MC’d an archer and launch some arrows.  By far my favorite target, though, was the Bonechewer Destroyer.

They hit quite hard for this mostly level appropriate group, so that was a good mob to choose.  They also had a couple nice abilities for me to use, and, to top it all off, they look badass.  Nothing like using the enemy’s best weapon against them, eh?

Now, the only real problem with using MC is the aggro when it breaks.  I very nearly died quite a few times, as it was very difficult to get a mob off me that I had MC’d.  Still, it was a ton of fun.

So in general the run went alright.  It was a little slow, it was a little messy, but we managed fine with that makeup all the way to the last boss, the Dragon and Rider.  After a couple of wipes, the GL hopped on his 70 hunter just so we could get it done and get out of there.  Without the GL on that run, we would not have fared as well.  He was multi-tasking like crazy as his Pally for most of the instance, and then saved our butts with his hunter in the end.

All in all it was a lot of fun for me, we made it all the way through, and I grabbed the [Witching Band] at the end. Nice, very nice. Our tank learned a lot of the basics of tanking, like pulling with a ranged weapon, and trying to LOS pull casters. The hunter got to practice trapping, a LOT. I got to play around with MC, and the GL, surely, got to laugh a little. It was great to group with a fellow blogger for the first time, and I was glad that we were successful. Then, to end my night on another nice loot note, I also picked up the [Mantle of Magical Might] from the Ramparts main quest.

Needless to say, I’m quite happy to be back in the Outlands, and I’m also VERY happy with the shadow priest at this point. It really is a VERY different playstyle from both my Druid and my Hunter, and a lot of fun. Now to tackle the Blood Furnace! Thanks for reading!

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