Never boost someone through an instance when you need a boost yourself. That’s the lesson I learned last night when I volunteered to boost SaladFork‘s new warlock through the Deadmines on my ill-prepared druid. I recently transferred my druid to Draenor to play with some of the BA folks I’ve recently met. This druid has spent the better part of the last year as a leather bank. This means his inventory was basically stripped to make room for as much storage as possible.

Fast forward to the new server. I’ve played around with him in STV a few times trying to get my bearings back with this character. So far I’ve probably spent a couple of hours playing solo tops. In this time I never bothered to buy food, water, or battle rez seeds. Why bother, I’m soloing after all.

There I am, in the Deadmines. In my rush I still haven’t bought food, water, or battle rez seeds. Also I have no pots. Why would I? The first thing I need to overcome is the fact that this druid’s key bindings don’t match the key bindings of my other druid. The level 70 druid with the key bindings I’m used to. Of course this means I’m constantly hitting the wrong abilities. Let’s see this goes here, that goes there. Okay, we can continue.

I manage well enough until the first boss. Even at 35 I’m still a bit under geared* and the boss along with the two archers are too much and we wipe. I did try to heal myself, but this was attempted too late and led to a quicker death. I run back to the instance the first of many times. This time we kill the boss.

The rest of the clear continues with many deaths for me, my warlock companion or both of us. In the end we clear the entire place. Mr. Smite and Van Cleef need some sneaky OP warlock tactics to die, but die they did.

In the end I had a lot of fun running this dungeon and was glad help someone out. The lesson I learned though was to take a minute, breath, and ensure that you’re actually prepared. This is especially true when you think you out gear a place and it is going to be a cake walk.

*The reason I’m under geared is that I messed around with balance for a while a sold off a lot of my feral gear. What I have now is the stuff in the AH that wasn’t 50g an item.