Really? I think [Gnomeregan]'s one of the better instances. More
variety to enemies, variety in the areas inside, interesting
architecture, a nice dose of humor, good loot, and some good
challenges.
I, too, echo Darin's view of Gnomeregan and have never understood the
hate for Gnomeregan I've seen here and in other places. I ran it more
than a half-dozen times in my 30s and never disliked the experience
(other than wiping early on versus the Dark Iron Dwarves, which
*everyone* does at least once). Never had difficulty finding groups
for it, either, even in the pre capital cities-wide LFG channel; just
asking around in Ironforge would get a group going quickly.
Gnomer is big, but you can bypass half of it once you get the
workshop key. It's sort of meant to be done in two passes I think.
It's the first "grown up" dungeon. In terms of scale, difficulty slope
(with those Dwarves again being example #1), and the backdoor, it
presages all future Azeroth dungeons. I certainly wish the safe zone
and its vendors and mailbox would've also been emulated in
higher-level dungeons.
That said, the designers clearly realized that the high-end Azeroth
dungeons (let's say from BRD on) became too big and too complex (I've
been in BRD more than a dozen times, including through Emperor, and
still can't find my way around). The most-difficult Outland dungeon
I've tackled is Setekkh Halls, but dividing up large dungeons into
much-smaller, more-digestible chunks is clearly the right way to
go. Auchindoun in Azeroth would've been one ginormous instance, and
that much more difficult and dreary for being so.
--
"Sorry, but I consider lack of a 'pause me' command [in World of
Warcraft] to be a bug. At the very least, a lack of needed feature.
fwiw, I am a programmer by profession."
-Burt Johnson, alt.games.warcraft, 11 Jan 2006