WoW Journal - 22-February-2006

Another evening, another pickup group to Scholomance. Only this time it was a pickup raid group of 10 people. That *does* make the place a lot easier, and instead of just reaching Rattlegore after 2 hours, in the same time we had finished the whole dungeon.

We still wiped a couple of times. It is depressing if you take care to explain beforehand that in the chamber of summoning the summoners need to be killed quickly, and then nobody listens, some badly controlled pets aggro more summoners, and your raid gets wiped by over 30 summoned skeletons. Okay, it *was* kind of funny, and certainly a sight to see, but not really a good way to handle that place.

Transfer of information in a pickup group seems to be a problem. There were several people in the raid who had been to Scholomance before, and who all tried to warn the others of the more dangerous features, like ghouls exploding into poisonous clouds. Nevertheless most people who hadn't been there before only learned to stay out of the cloud by dying at least once from them.

We also had the usual fights of a warrior rolling "need" on some bow of which the hunters in the group thought that it should be reserved for them. But that isn't really a pickup group problem, we have exactly the same discussion on our guild forums. It is actually a running joke on many WoW discussion forums to call any good melee weapon a "hunter weapon", due to the fact that such a good melee weapon is often useable by hunters, and they will roll on it even if somebody else in the group is obviously doing a lot more melee combat.

The raid got me some Argent Dawn reputation, and one minor green item that I disenchanted into eternal essences. But we were extremely unlucky with cloth drops, most of the stuff that did drop was leather. The only cloth we found was giving additional frost spell damage, and was obviously a mage item, not for priests.

But the major disadvantage of the pickup raid was that in a raid I couldn't do any quests. I really want to do the quest series starting with the ghost of the woman standing in front of Scholomance, which ends up giving you a trinket that allows you to speak with all the ghosts of Caer Darrow. But that one requires three trips to Scholomance, each with a group, not a raid. I'd also like to do the Barov family fortune quest, as it gives a nice item to summon zombies to fight for you. But that requires a really good group, as the last deed you have to collect for that in Scholomance is guarded by a rather tough boss mob. I never got that far with Raslebol, I hope I can do it with Kyroc.