Last night, Himalountain gained his 70th level, and has joined my other two Horde 70s and one Alliance 70. He then became my third character to get an epic flying mount. This felt like a real accomplishment, but it was nothing compared to what it would feel like, less than 24 hours later, to gain 19 more levels across two characters in one evening! 
Last night we had planned to just try out Black Morass. We were not hopeful. Of course, our usual limitation is that we only have three players for a five-man instance, but we've learned to overcome that. Nominally, BM is a level 69 instance, but many consider it harder than some of the level 70 instances. Indeed, with a 68 tank, 69 dpser and a 69 healer who dinged 70 while we were there (grats Chepi!), we were clearly on the hairy edge, but after an initial wipe and our lessons learned, we actually won!
Ever since The Burning Crusade came out, I've been a fan of the Caverns of Time instances, and Old Hillsbrad is probably my favorite. Being transformed into a human, saving Thrall, and seeing a favorite zone from the game returned to its previous state is just too cool. So you can imagine that as Saturnalia have been leveling and 3-manning all the 5-man instances, I've wanted to know how we would fare here....
The 3-Man Guide to Blackrock Depths (BRD) is intended for World of Warcraft groups that want to follow in the footsteps of Saturnalia,
doing old-world content at appropriate level. If you're 70 then you can
probably solo BRD (depending on class and spec), but if you're a group
of 3 with an average party level of around 55, you can still do it if
you know how. This guide will teach you.
Saturnalia took on the 3.0 PTR today, in our usual 3-man grouping style. We are all 65, so we decided to do Underbog which was a little low for us, hopefully counteracting the fact that we all had UI brokenness due to the loss of settings and mods. It was really enlightening, and we can see that some things are likely to change. Here's how it went.
Party: Chepi (heals,dps), Jazred (dps), Himalountain (tank, aoedps)
Levels: 63-64
Status: Blood Furnace full clear
Between this last week and our normal Saturday get-together we cleared Slave Pens
and Underbog except for The Black Stalker.
The final boss of Underbog had some horrible reset issues, resetting as
soon as it had me (tank) in its beam. We'll figure that one out and
give him another go.
Party: Chepi (heals,dps), Jazred (dps), Himalountain (tank, aoedps)
Levels: 62-63
Status: Blood Furnace full clear
Well, Blood Furnace
turns out to be a dungeon I'd avoided somehow, so it was all new to me.
What struck me most was how gimicky the trash was. When you compare it
to the old world, almost all old world 5-man dungeons had a mix of
groups that you pulled, fought and killed and those groups that had a
gimmick of some sort that made you have to switch up tactics, take out
certain guys first or use your tanks in odd ways. Blood Furnace (and Ramparts)
had almost nothing but gimmick groups. There's trash that stuns,
silences, drops bombs ala Gnomeregan, knocks back, knocks down, charges
and lots of stuff I imagine I'm forgetting. Broggok
was probably the toughest boss fight, and he went down on our first try
without even a glimmer of doubt about the outcome, but we wiped 2-3
times on trash.
Party: Chepi (heals,dps), Jazred (dps), Himalountain (tank, aoedps)
Levels: 62
Status: Scholomance full clear
Milestones: none, really
We're 62 now, and so Scholomance
isn't all that much of a challenge, even for 3. Still, it was on our
list, and since we didn't get to it before now, we wanted to clear it
out to be complete. It was a fun run. We did Rattlegore first, then we went down into Darkmaster Gandling's area and killed him before leaving via Jandice Barov, though we forgot to grab the chest after killing her, doh! Ras Frostwhisper was an interesting fight, though he went down too fast for it to be all that much of a challenge.
Party: Chepi (heals,dps), Jazred (dps), Himalountain (tank, aoedps)
Levels: 61
Status: Ramparts, full clear
Milestones: Omor and Vazruden down
Our first Outlands instance (Hellfire Ramparts
AKA Ramps) went smoothly. We had a fair amount of trouble with the
Destroyers (as usual, trash is almost always harder than bosses), but
for a group of three 61s, we kicked some serious orc ass. Of note were
the flawless executions on Omor and Vazruden (pictured, right). We
cleared them both on the first try with our newly specced Resto Shammy
barely breaking a sweat keeping our crazy selves alive! Edit: our shammy tells me that he just made it look easy, and in reality, the last fight was very close.
