Foreword

Which is completely and utterly daft since, with the way blogs work, this will quickly become the aftword. But I feel I am entitled to a little daftness inbetween my incredibly sensible choices.

Such as rolling picking up an old, forgotten L22 shaman on a server where I no longer know anyone, after reading Pugging Pally. I am not quite sure whether this counts as plagiarism and bad form, or if I can chalk it up to being inspired - truthfully, I'm counting on the latter.

At any rate, and in the end, I mostly write for myself. And seeing as how I had half an hour to spare earlier today, the misadventures of Toesies the shaman begun!
I have an 80 main; In fact, I have several. More than you can shake an unwieldy and large portion of a tree vaguely shaped as a stick, at. I play a lot, and I alt a lot, and the consequence is that I've done quite a damn few instances. I do not like fresh-out-of-my-bum estimates and such, but I'm surely up to three digits since 3.3 in pure PuG as far as heroics done go.

After the dreams (and nightmares) detailed by other people so unfortunate as to have characters below 70, I was not quite sure what to expect, queueing up for a random dungeon as healer and dps. I was expecting and hoping for something that wasn't a 13 minute L80 heroic, at least.

In that, at least, it delivered.

Don't get me wrong; it went swimmingly, and in ways I had not anticipated, but it went so damn smooth that I feel I should queue and queue again until I have a sufficiently wierd/bad experience! Alas, for now, I had time only for one instance, as mentioned, and said instance was Stormwind Stockades.

I'm quite sure that's the full name, and it certainly deserves capitalization.
Or is that Capitalization?

The first druid tank was good enough, in that I neither went oom nor did anyone else die, and the dps consisted of a barely-comprehending/comprehensible warrior with true fury in his blood.* The last two spots were taken by a duo of warlocks slightly overlevelled (and thus overaggroing) for the instance.

First thought: Mana Matters. The ten drinks I thought I had espied upon opening my bags quickly before accepting the port turned out to be something quite different. The two warlocks were lifetapping merrily, and it turns out that even "resto specced" - I use quotation marks because I don't feel I got a lot of return for those 12 talent points - I take approximately 8 healing waves to go oom. That or 13-14 LHW's.

A minor adjustment (telling the locks to please bandage or eat up, or I'd have to port for drinks) later, that was solved. Go diplomatic me, eh. Then the tank left, with no warning. It'd gone perfect up until this point.

I feel the paranthesis to my double dots flipping around, but without hesitation the locks, who for the record I would have pegged for a dualboxer if they had not chatted with eachother**, suggested we go voidswalkers and carry on.

Voidwalkers are summoned, the raging warrior is caught up with and healed, bless his eager heart, and we are nearly done when a druid joins us. I realize with a little mental frown that healing his 2k health from zero to joyfully full would take me 60% of my mana pool.

Boss, or bosses - it's Stockades, who can tell - are killed, loot is not had, as it is still Stockades, and goody bags reward the druid with moonkin leather, me with feral/enha leather, and the group disbands, but not before someone comments, "Quickest goody bag ever".

That's when I had my second thought for the day. This really isn't something I'm used to. I usually hop on new stuff in WoW on day 0, and I'm almost always the guy with the tacs. This? Alting old world instances? Not my field, and god damn is that ever sweet.

Stockades cleared, ding 23, and Toesies says "Hi!" while glancing nervously at big scary bear. Apparently.

*This was evident when the first tank left, when he hardly seemed to notice, and kept charging on.

**Schizophrenic dualboxers are notoriously rare.