QFT.

Gnomer's another place where the shortcuts buggers take drives me nuts. We's saving 10 seconds, we's saving another 10 seconds, oops someone slipped or missed the jump and pulled 50 mobs. Peachy.

If you get a group that can do the shortcuts correctly, then it's a bonus.

To be honest, at this stage in the game, most of us are sick and tired of seeing the same heroics and doing the same thing over for the sake of 2 frost badges or to try to gear up another alt.

I don't mind the content some times, but lately, I keep getting more and more new players or people who are absolutely clueless at their chosen class. (4pc T9 and getting outdpsed by a tank in Naxx gear.)

Frankly, I'd rather deal with trade chat.

Psst, "clever" doesn't have an a in it. :)

And I completely agree with this post. Why is it so terrible to kill an extra pack of mobs or two? It's just weird. The worst case of this I've ever seen was a heroic PoS where the tank "sneakily" pulled Ick and Krick without killing any of the surrounding trash first. Needless to say that that was a wipe.

I got sick enough of the ramp shortcut in PoS that I've just been breaking it any time I'm in there. Right after the boss goes down I run to the bottom of the stairs, triggering the event. Occasionally someone comments ("Oh, never mind - he triggered it already. Noob.") but there's never been a particularly negative reaction, vote kick, etc. They think they're smart for knowing about the shortcut? See how you feel about potentially saving yourself a repair bill or three and a significant amount of time and hassle. Priceless.

Of course, I only do this when I think the group can handle the ramp fights. :)

I was a bit stunned the other day when my random tank leaped up and charged at the skeletons at the side of the Utgard Pinnacle entrance in order to miss one trash group. However, it didn't go quite to plan because dps hadn't even noticed what he'd done.. Missing trash annoys me a little, skipping bosses - especially when they take under one minute to kill - annoys me a lot.

Your Pit of Saron story made me giggle though.. Let's split up so we're alone and vulnerable :D

Some people's idea of a shortcut is to skip one or two bosses in dungeons. Drak Tharon Keep is notorious for this; the tank runs into the room with Novos, then runs through the room without fighting, keeps going and not bothering with King Dred, then on to the final steps to the final boss. "Shortcut guys, I have a date in 5 minutes" (meaning he has to wash his mom's car and go buy some eggs at the store).

Shortcuts and me don't get along at all!!!

I'm jealous, Friday night for you is Friday morning for me, I still have to make it through work, ugh!

Hehe shortcuts that end in everyone getting pwned are soooo wonderfully ironical, I used to love it when this happened! =D

and indeed, I think the constant shortcutting takes away part of the experience of places - but as long as a group agrees on doing it a certain way without leaving anyone out, it's okay. forcing you to skip stuff you'd like to kill (for kicks or rep or whatever) is rather lousy. unfortunately communication doesn't always work so well in PUGs.

I'm starting to wonder if its inherently in human nature to cut corners whenever we can manage? my first encounter with a shortcut that didn't work 80% of the time was in Slave pens. there is a bridge you can jump off of just so that lends you on a ledge surrounding the water, ledge you can carefully walk around to land almost directly in front of the Makura Clacker boss. the problem is is most people never made that first jump, landing in water instead meaning they had to run all the way around to the bridge to jump again. that shortcut took more time then clearing few packs that you skip that way almost every single time.

The sad part is that the game merely illustrates people's attitudes in real life. ever seen Jaywalkers playing frogger with traffic crossing the street down the middle, instead of walking few steps over, waiting for light to change and crossing the street with no danger to themselves or drivers? if they are successful, they might save a minute at most, but more often then not, they end up not getting anywhere until light changes still.

I can avoid taking shortcuts in real life, when they are not worth the bother (like you said, some shortcuts are worth the bother, in game example that's fresh in my mind is scaling a hill in Blackfathom Debths, avoiding to jump over the broken bridge that people still fall off off, me included).

In game (after ranting to anyone that listens first), I have chosen to learn about the shortcuts people like to use and either adopt so that I'm not that one person who messes it up, or warn them of potential pitfalls, if the group doesn't seem to be all on the same page. Helped me avoid quite a few PoS wipes (for some reason, I'm getting that place daily now, as a random) If you cannot change them, adopt to their way of doing things to save yourself some headache is my moto. not very enlightened some might say, but in my own way I'm just as lazy as shortcut takers, I just try to be a little more intelligent about it :)

I think they skip the mobs in PoS if they can since people have forgotten how to interrupt casters or perform simple crowd control.

I know many people are running instances only for the frost badges but why not take the time to buy all of the BoA gear and throw it in an alt bank somewhere? It's what I've been doing with my unneeded badges.

When I'm tanking, some of the short cuts I do (the one at the beginning of PoS is one) and some I don't (Hill boss in PoS being one). On my server, skipping that first set of mobs is so common that, if I WERE to pull the trash pack people would just get confused. That being said I do wait until everyone has moved past the danger zone before I follow just in case one of the DPS is a little slow. Wipes after a botched attempt don't bother me either as it will show that trigger happy person how big of an idiot they are and (hopefully) they will think about it before doing it again. Just to make sure they understand, I will always type some sort of remark in party pointing out the fact that they screwed up and should probably attempt to learn something from it.

As for skipping bosses, I do this a lot as well. I'm a very social person and sitting in a silent group of grumpies for 20 mins is not my idea of a good time. I always ask if they wish to skip said bosses though and I have no problem doing them if someone asks that we don't.

Long story short, I really don't see a problem with short cuts or skipping bosses. As long as it's laid out before hand that that is what is going to happen. The time to badges earned ratio is extremely critical to a lot of players now adays. Since it doens't matter either way to me, giving in to them really isn't all the big of a deal.

yes, yes, a hundred (thousand?) times yes!

I think the bigger problem is not shortcuts but the general lack of communication in five man groups today.

A shortcut is great if everyone on the group is on the same page. Right now though, everyone seems to play through 5-mans like they're playing a single player game with four bots.

There's no talking or joking, there's no strategy, and there's definitely no coordination. Just wade in, blast AoE, and move as quickly as possible to the next group.

So when someone decides to take a shortcut, of course you don't run it by the rest of the group. Just take off sprinting - your group will follow. They are, after all, bots who just follow you and AoE things ...

Hopefully Cataclysm will force groups to start communicating with each other again. It will be a welcome break from the soulless (and boring) grind for daily frost badges that WotLK can become.

Regarding PoS: Some players just HAVE to mount up and rush up, trying to beat the timer and pass the spot where the mobs will spawn shortly.

As far as I've seen, that timer doesn't start til you reach the bottom of the hill. So the ideal strategy to take that shortcut (which I don't like) would be to ... wait for loot, wait for rezzes and mana, have everyone mount up together, throw on Crusader Aura, and ride up the hill in unison.

But that would involve ... you know ... talking to your group. And we just can't have that. :)

There's apparently some kind of short-cut/bug exploit in Deadmines using the big wheel? I got thrown in there by LFG a whooole lot while leveling my first alliance character, and I hated people who assumed that everyone knew wtf they were doing. I still don't know what the trick was supposed to be, just that we died *every time* someone tried it.

It's even more silly to me to do it in lowbie dungeons - everyone is there for the XP! Kill the mobs!

(I deleted my last comment because of a spelling error. Here it is with the error fixed.)

Even if these short-cuts often take more time than just running the instance as it's supposed to be run would take, the fact is they're still something to do to break up the monotony that 5-mans have become. They add some challenge back to what has become a guaranteed victory, and the fact that players die in attempting them only proves this fact. I don't think it's a matter of what's faster vs. what's slower; I think it's a matter of what's more interesting to attempt, and killing another group of mobs like so many thousand we have killed before, a group of mobs that really poses no threat to us, just isn't as interesting as trying to take a shortcut, a shortcut which requires some level of skillful playing, a shortcut which might get us killed. Players like to be challenged, whether they admit it or not, and these shortcuts provide that challenge.

100% agree!

The way I look at it is like this: If I've waited from 13-19 minutes to get into a random heroic PuG, why would I want to complete the run in less time than I've waited? Makes no sense to me.

/cheers

Have a good weekend, all. And, for my fellow Americans, have a happy Labor Day weekend as well. My god, where does the summer go?

Not long ago I ran into one of those "PoS spawn skippers". He called everyone a moron for this or that (most of which was actually his fault), then proceeded to ride straight into the spawns and died. I bubble-hearthed.

Heh.

I have a guildy who recently switched mains to a new 80 shaman who was running PoS daily with his SO as they both needed drops from it. I can't remember exactly what he called it, but my brain has summarised it as "the place brain cells go to die".

The hill-o-death particularly irritates me. It's a great opportunity to practice your CC, or your position pulling (if you're a tank), or even your AoE control. CC a/both casters, pull the others down. Go nuts.

Or, if you're not in a CC mood, it's a great opportunity for kerrrazy AoE deepsing. Give the tank a chance to gather them into a tight knot, then pewpewpew big numbers. It's a little tougher on your healer this way, but by the time you get there a thinking person will know whether the group can do it.

Or, you can try to skip it. Which, as you say, mostly ends in a split party. Then you can try to skip the first pack at the top, which mostly ends up in a mess too.

I guess I'm weird. Or maybe it's because I'm a WotLK "noob".Don't get me wrong, I'll follow a group if they're insistent on skipping bits of trash. But I still *like* dungeon running (provided the group isn't 100% pondscum). I *like* killing stuff, or healing people who are killing stuff.

It's why I play.

Even if these short-cuts often take more time than just running the instance as it's supposed to be run would take, the fact is they're still something to do to break up the monotony that 5-mans have become. They add some challenge back to what has become a guaranteed victory, and the fact that players die in attempting them only proves this fact.

Agree stongly with this comment. In BC I was part of a 3 druid/2 rogue all stealth group which tried to clear the minimum amount to kill the bosses. I doubt it was quicker than doing the instance in the conventional way, but it was definitely more fun.

The one that really gets me going is the "feature" where in A-N where a Hunter goes down to where the Hadronox fight is to happen, feigns death, and resets all the trash. Everyone is then supposed to run past the resetting trash and hit Hadronox right as he's coming up the hallway.

I mean, this is Azjol-Nerub we're talking about. The ten minute wonder in heroic mode. Why shave a freaking minute off of it? What's the big deal?

I was in a run about three weeks ago where the Hunter refused to do it, and after the tank started berating her about it ("be a man!") she dropped. The next DPS brought in was melee DPS, so we had to wait anyway.

Good for her, if you ask me.

@Ratshag

Except in gnomer, you can actually skip a good half an hour of trash, still get enough kills for the drop quest, walk by enough objects for the gather quest, and make it to the last boss before the tank or healer goes "lol guys i g2g my mum sez its dinner time" and ninja quits.

-

Had me an A-N run where the group insisted on gimmicking the big spider. Except, the healer thought the plan were ta stop and fight the bugger at the bottom of his layer, and the tank thought the plan were ta run past him and jump down the hole. Sure enough, we ends up with a split party and no way ta reassemble. Bugger this, I sez, and drops.

II - Is all fun and games and time-savings until somebody causes a wipe.

I hate those shortcuts, too. There's usually no good reason to take them, and like you said, more often than not they backfire. Then you end up spending quite a few minutes more recovering from what could have easily just been another normal pull. le sigh

The funniest thing is that this is going on in low level dungeons too. First these people queue for 20 minutes to get some XP, and once in the dungeon everyone have the GOGO GOTTA BE DONE FAST mentality. A good example is Maraudon, where you can skip 3-4 trash packs by jumping down at the beginning. Everyone who levelled through dungeons know that you are stuck in that instance for 2 levels, so better get as much XP as possible while there, right?

Nono. Gotta go fast and be done fast so we can requeue! When I was tanking there I got nerd raged at for taking the "long" (2 minutes and thousands of XP) way.

I think this is partly because of the "new WoW" fast food mentality; 2 minutes is considered "too long". Rewards (satchel / badges) are supposed to be almost instant for as little effort as possible.

Makes you wanna teleport those guys back in time to 5 man prenerf Scholomance and tie them to their chairs until they kill Gandling.

@Leah

The slave pens example you mentioned is probably the best one. It's however one of the few ones that actually takes some experience/skill to pull of reliably.

When I did slave pens I usually urged on avoiding that jump for the reasons you mentioned.

Another skip opportunity I don't like is the often discussed PoS 2nd boss ramp. It backfires a lot and isn't that great. But after those 2 packs you can easily skip 1 back by just hugging the wall and I've never seen that backfire.

This is the case with a lot of opportunities to skip monsters, it's very hard to mess up and if it does end up going wrong at least it'll add a bit of a change of pace. Having to recover from a bad situation, messing around with the person that messed up (hoping it doesn't turn into a flamefest), it keeps it a bit more interesting than just running into mobs and stomping them into the ground.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Just had a PoS wipe today. My comment is always: "in a PUG, shortcuts rarely are"

At this stage, I do not mind skipping bosses. But "clever" tricks are not good risks.

And the worse place to skip trash is where they can drop battered Hilt.

There are a few shortcuts though which are both easy to execute and silly to not.

Slave Pens at level 70 in TBC, for example. As long as you were doing it on heroic, and thus all 80 and had the same aggro radius, in the second large room there was a diagonal path that you always took that allowed you to negotiate the room and kill only one stationary pack plus a patrol, rather than three additional packs (annoying ones to boot) and then you'd round a rock pillar and face the two Coilfang Defenders guarding the entrance to the first boss.


Another shortcut that works in that instance which isn't so much a shortcut is, after jumping from the broken bridges into the water, to climb up onto the rock and drop down on the far left. You wouldn't always skip two packs, sometimes it would only be one, but it wasn't a risky shortcut at all, simply a different way to go.

For me, the shortcuts aren't a way to save time, since sometimes the time spent executing the shortcut, even done correctly, exceeds the time it would have taken to kill the packs, especially in a high-DPS group. But its fun. For me, its a way to liven up the same old heroics, and see what can be done with the mechanics of an instance.

For me, speed runs have the potential to put some of the challenge back in heroics. When you're pulling three packs at once, or fighting two bosses at the same time (utgarde pinnacle magnataur boss + gauntlet), or taking tricky shortcuts, it all adds an element of skill and finesse to an otherwise yawnfest. Sure, I could just throw on an episode of South Park and half-pay attention as I tank my way through, but I'd much prefer to make things a little harder on the party so we can have more fun.

That said, doing so in a standard dungeon PUG if you queued alone is foolish. You're best of doing it when you're a tank and a healer combo, or if the tank and healer are known to you.

And skipping bosses, when it takes no risk to do so, is also something I like to do, as that genuinely does save significant amounts of time.

Five minutes of saved time across an entire run might not sound like much, but when the run is only fifteen minutes long to begin with, thats a significant saving if you need to quickly get a heroic out of the way before raid time.

This is something I often do with four raiders from the guild fifteen minutes before raid time. We queue up for a random and hope we get something we can either chain pull really fast (Utgarde Keep, Pinnacle, Nexus) or skip a lot of bosses (Pinnacle, Drak'tharon).

At the end of the day its not always worth it to do the shortcuts. It depends on your mood, your group's abilities, and your available time. But doing shortcuts and different ways of going through the instances are a great way to make heroics interesting again, and its intriguing to me how many people who complain about how boring heroics have become are also the people who deride the use of such fun and interesting methods.

@Ratshag: And the problem with Gnomer is that it's so hard to find your way in there, due to the lack of proper maps. So a lost shortcut tends to make people... lost.

: I don't argue with that it's nice and fun provided that the group can handle it. However you can't count on it in LFD.

@Shintar: Thanks, fixed. Sneaky pulls of Ick and krick? That's a new version.

: You're smarter than the smart guys. Honestly.

@Issy: Yeah, I've seen some wonky stuff going on in the UP entrance. Which really is silly since it's so easy if you just kill stuff.

@Gronthe: Skipping bosses isn't very popular with me either. Everyone isn't in there for the frost emblems. Some can make use of triumph ones. Or even - gasp - the loot that drops.

@Syl: That's the right way to take it I think. With giggles rather than curses.

@Leah: oh that jump, I remember it! It was painful for a bad jumper like me. The jump in DK is alright I guess - I don't think I've seen any group failing at that, although the fish tends to eat squishes like me alive.

Playing frogger in real life trafic? Actually yes, now that you say it, I've seen it too and it's not just silly, it's upfront dangerous. It is a mentality of our time, definitely.

@Inno: If people have forgotten about it, it's definitely time that they learn. And yeah, it's strangely rare that you see cc in those packs. Or interrupts. It's just the same old aoe mentality and it can be quite a pain in the ass for a healer to deal with it.

: In one way I can understand you. The silence is deafening and often makes you want to get out of the instance asap. Which is so saddening. Isn't it that culture we should try to change though rather than rushing through the instances so quickly that we can't feel the taste of them. We - the players - are really ruining the gaming experience to ourselves.

@Ali: Yes!

@Tom: You put it very well. A single player game with four bots. It's just that people aren't bots and that's why shortcuts won't work. I too long for better communication.

@Tm: Shortcut in deadmines? Hm. Never heard of. And yeah, while you're levelling it DEFINITELY doesn't make sense. The content of the bags you get isn't that impressive anyway. It's the xp we want. Not some kind of badge/hour.

@Ardol: Again: as long as there's communication going on in the group I'm with you. But do you get a thrill out of someone rushing off and you're supposed to be a mind reader, figuring out what he's up to? That's just messy and not really testing your skill, is it?

: Happy Labor Day! I have no idea what it is but you're good at finding reasons to have a special weekend over there!

: Isn't it typical? The ones causing it calls everyone else out, in the hope that noone will notice. We do. Even though we don't always say something about it, being too polite.

: You LIKE killing stuff? What planet are you from? What are you doing in a game like wow? You really think you should kill stuff to get your loot and badges? You're out of touch with our time. WoW isn't a game where you kill, it's a game where you sneak and exploit!

Nah. Just kidding. But yeah. It's strange that you are strange for wanting to kill packs.

: That druid/rogue stealth group sounds SO fun and I'd love to be a part of something like that. I love to run instances with elegance rather than brute force. However I don't think it has a place in a non-communicating pug.

: Oh, the spider. I suppose the point might be that there is an achievement for it. But again it takes communication if you want it. There's another spider that some players tend to skip... Hm is it the first one in OK I think. I remember on one occasion when someone in the group disagreed about the skipping part and stayed there and pulled everything as some sort of protest. It would have been way easier if we'd done it properly from the beginning. Now I think it turned into a wipe.

@Charlie: Yeah. What boggles my mind is that a group can keep going for shortcuts even after such a wipe. Multiple wipes due to shortcuts makes me enrage eventually.

@Master Beavis: That is really incomprehensible. Is it so fun to start the same instance more times than you need to? The fast food mentality s you call it kills a lot of enjoyment tbh.

@Chimpeh: As long as recovery is possible, OK. But you have to be clear in your communications. And have a clue about the level of gear and skill of the other players ; will you have a chance to recover if something backfires? Pay that a thought before you start pulling tricks in a pug. Imho.

@Hagu: That's a point... But does it drop i PoS? I thought it was in FoS, but I might be wrong. If you're right it's definitely another reason not to rush it.

@Dhal: Oh that path yeah... I remember it. I actually never was able to find it myself; I always relied on someone else knowing how to cut it, so I could follow in their footpaths and pace it corredtly.

And yep, I agree that speeding things up can be fun if you're with people you know. A healer/tank combo sounds ideal, but please, please, please, inform the dps very clearly about your plans! Don't count on everyone knowing your clever shortcuts.

Ah yes, the POS uphill run after Ick. I really, really hate it when people try to run up the hill to skip the 2 caster packs without telling anyone about it. One really good one I saw had the pally riding up the hill to avoid the trash packs. The rest of us were rezzing the dead mage and stuff, you know. He failed the trick, and died when the trash ran down and aggroed him; and he had the audacity to blame us for not running up with him. Uh sweetie? If you aggro-ed them running alone, you would have aggro-ed them if we were with you.

I’ve developed a habit of being the last to move when my pug is taking a shortcut. That way, when someone aggros, I’m not insta-gibbed and will be in a better position to respond (esp if I’m tanking).

Another favourite short-cut is the ICC trash in the first room. PUGs love to clear one side and skip the trash in the middle of the room to save a couple of minutes. But someone ALWAYS pulls the middle group halfway thru this, posing an unnecessary and often fatal test to the PUG.

When in doubt, I’m in favour of going the tried and tested way.

Nah, the King of shortcuts is Old Kingdom. There's even a glitch that allows you to run "off" the dungeon (like inside the walls) to avoid certain mobs.
I can understand people trying to avoid certain mobs like the vrykuls in the ramp. When instance was released it was very hard since people wasn't as overgeared as today, but it's strange that I never found it that hard back then... maybe because I did it mainly with guildmates and nobody screwed the encounter. Then seemed like mobs were buffed and everybody was trying to avoid them. Even the two skeleton packs after the ramp, who are very easy, started being avoided (well, the first one).
Right now there's no need to avoid the vrykuls in the ramp since people's gear level ensures they won't die in two seconds.
Another thing that really piss me off in pugs is when somebody asks for some complicated achievement. If you want achievements, specially hard ones (mmm is there any still hard to get nowadays?) just do guild runs. I don't mind trying if everybody agrees, but people should first ask WHCIH one you want. Reaching a boss and just asking "achi?" means jack shit to me. I don't know all the achievements a boss can offer, so seeing linked in /p chat would help.

As to boss skipping, I'll throw a quick look around the players. If folks don't look kitted out beyond the use of triumphs, I'll do the optional bosses in most instances.

As to "creative" trash skips, I don't. I've seen more wipes to folks skip and glitch attempts than doing stuff normal. I too intentionally spawn the Vrykul ramp every time I'm in PoS, and you know what? Haven't had a wipe since I've started, and non-wipe deaths happen very rarely.

And yet, when I try to explain this, I get told I suck. Right. I suck for healing folks through a hard trash pull, even when they don't wait for the tank to get aggro.

My only regret is that I haven't been able to convince any shadow priests to MC the mid mob. I didn't want to on my priest, since it's a perfect multidot situation for really cranking the numbers, but I did it on the second pack and DAMN is it fun. Cleaving 6k shadow bolt with a 2-second cast? :D