Yesterday, Patch 3.3 dropped. With it came new dungeons, new raids, and a whole new way of grouping up with people to run dungeons. It also came with extended downtime, tons of issues with people logging in, not being able to zone into instances and more. Even on a standard patch day, one can expect servers to be down until about 1 p.m. est. But on this day, servers didn’t go back up until about 7:30 or 8. Which left a lot of us a little antsy. I had planned on a little late afternoon trial, but when the servers didn’t come up, I had to do actual work. And laundry. It was sad. I was thinking about all those poor sys admins freaking out as they tried to figure out how to fix the problems.

But once I got in, I was able to run a couple of dungeons fairly quickly. I was anxious to try the new dungeon finder that collects a group across not just your server, but all the servers. Like battlegrounds, where people from many servers can be in one battleground, dungeons now work the same way. And it’s random! Which I really like. So, the way it works is that you click on the dungeon finder, which is where the old LFG icon used to be, and an interface comes up where you select what role or roles you can play. Some healers can heal or dps. I can dps or tank (though I’m off tanking for a while). After a few minutes, you are automagically grouped and transported to the dungeon. No summoning people, no waiting for someone to finish a quest or fly from the boondocks. It’s awesome! There are pictures and more info on how this all works at WoW.com.

Don’t get me wrong. I love running dungeons with my guildies, but sometimes there just aren’t enough people on to run. And we tended to stick with just the daily and maybe ToC. And it sometimes took forever to get a PuG together to run something. The general public also wanted to just run the daily usually. Now, though, I can see myself running enough dungeons until both my 80s have hundreds of emblems of triumph and can buy all the gear they want without wasting a lot of time. So last night, I hopped into the dungeon finder, checked off the dps option and wandered around Dalaran while I waited. The first dungeon I ended up in was my least favorite, Oculus. In fact, the whole group complained about it. But we did it. Because it was the first random dungeon I’d run, not only did I get Emblems of Triumph off each of the bosses, but I also got some gold and 2 Frost Emblems, which gets you gear like this. My next dungeon was Azjol-Nerub, which went very quickly and netted me a couple of extra triumph emblems.

For fear of getting sucked in and playing all night, I logged out after that, but plan to play again later today, after I get my work done. I’m anxious to try the dungeon finder with my lower level priest and with my 80 who lacks decent gear. I really like the fact that it’s random. I’m partial to surprises and back when I played a lot of Civilization IV, I always chose the random option. I like the challenge of dealing with the cards you’re dealt. Though some of my guildies said they’d had some weird groups, with players who weren’t geared at all, the two groups I had seemed really good. I didn’t inspect their gear, but I could tell from how fast we downed mobs that we had a good collection of people. It would be cool if they could add the ability to friend across servers. Then you might end up with a collection of strong people you could call on for raids and dungeons when you can’t or don’t want to rely on randomness.

I’m also looking forward to seeing some of the new content, but that’s definitely something I hope to do with the guild. And, of course, I’ll write about it here when I get there.