This morning I woke up earlier than usual and I found that I had enough time for a heroic, maybe even the new troll dungeons since they take us so long to complete. So I get into the cue as a dps, hoping to sit back and blast trolls into oblivion. I get up and go make coffee. As the time goes by, the time I spend in the cue is compare to the time it takes to get into a group. For example at one point it said I had been waiting for 6 minutes and time till group was 9 minutes... When 9 minutes came along it told me average time was 12 minutes. When 18 minutes had passed and 21 minutes till cue came up, the call to arms was issued. (I had been checking periodically to see when this would pop)
So at this point, I figured nobody in the world is awake yet and willing to tank, at least all the tankable tanks that is, so I change my armor, activate my offspec for feral tanking, exit the cue and re-cued as a tank/dps. Sure enough I got the dungeon, and the call to arms is available to me. If I completed the entire dungeon, then I'd get a special satchel that contains gold and possibly other rare items, especially the mounts I was looking forward to. Imagine getting Baron Rivendare's Deathcharger, the swift white hawkstrider, the raven lord mount. The possibilities of that are wonderful.
So naturally I cross my fingers and hope to god that the pugs I go with are not all newbs. I ended up in Zul'Aman, the instance in the northern parts of the Eastern Kingdoms. This used to be a raid in the Burning Crusade era and there was a timer to save folks who were about to become sacrificed. We couldn't beat it, but we did manage to clear the instance. To my surprise, we kept wiping on the trash mobs, but the bosses we KO'ed at one shot each. It seems to me that the issue was crowd control: the trash mob trolls tended to hurt us hard, and we had to come up with a way to manage them and keep then from overwhelming us. If a mob of three hits me, then I'll lose a lot of health, as will other players, and the healer runs out of mana and we wipe. If we froze an enemy via frost trap thanks to that hunter we had, and scared another one so he was stuck in place with fear, then only one monster came up and we could kill it without the group suffering too much damage, then the healer wouldn't panic and run out of mana or anything.
After about two hours, at the last two bosses I dropped the seafood feasts (the epic ones) we cleared it all. We didn't save anyone of course, but with the patch just come out and everyone learning and getting used to the fights I figured it was okay. Maybe next time, when I have more gear and everyone knows what to do, to really blaze through the instance like lawnmowers set to sizzle. FA-WHOOSH! That kind...
So in the long run, literally, I got a caster 1H mace, gloves that I don't really need because mine are better and have a set bonus, and a maelstrom crystal that nobody needed. I'm going to try and save those up for my enchanting alt so I can make the epic weapon enchants.
At the end of the instance, an excellent dungeon run where nobody died on the boss fights and we had occasional oops wipes on trash, I got the satchel of spoils.
It only had gold inside of it. No high level potions or scrolls, no epic pets or mounts, not even a fortune card. Just gold. After all that work of coordinating with 4 strangers, one of which was from my server and recognized me from the city, and after all this... all I got was extra gold...
The only good thing I got out of my first ever Call to Arms as a tank was free gold to cover my repair bill. Good job Blizzard. Excellent. You really look out for us tanks and healers so DPSers can pug an instance quicker. Nice! Lovely! Peachy... dandy... cool.... great.
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