Do you remember you first MB instance run?

[Frojax]

I can remember mine and will be waking up screaming for weeks to come because of it :)

My 5xDK team is sitting at almost 67 now and because I'm not quite there, Netherstorm is no go as you need 67 to get the quests. So, I decided to get my feet wet for the first time in an instance.

"I'm almost 67 now, from what I've read, Ramparts will be a cake walk!!" ... Famous last words.

I jump in, kill the first two guys with ease and this makes me smile as I see the exp. "Cake walk, no problem". Then on my way to the first boss, I manage to get my main guy killed, not once, but three times. I guess it's time to pick up Dark Command now, so I can grab the unwanted agro with another of my toons and if that fails .. I wonder if I can multibox Hello Kitty Online :)

[horiziel]

my first was ragefire casm. The paladin was mostly naked, the mages would not switch targets between poly and nukes, so i would polymorf to set up pulls and then proceed to nuke the sheep. The solution was to keep polying and have the paladin and shaman kill the fist 2 on their own.

There was no macros for healing anyone but the tank, so the healers and mages kept dying

second time i had focus macros for sheep and f1-f5 for party heals so much smoother.

[Yamio]

My team is a mixture of old and new toons so they all finally got together at 60, and I thought it would be a good idea to clear Scholomance since I knew it like the back of my hand. Pulled those first two skellies fine. Opened the gate right behind those two, and killed that patrolling mob. Three mobs down. "This shit ain't hard! *snicker" Turned to the left and those mobs at the bottom of the steps chewed my team up like you wouldn't believe. They defeated my team so thoroughly that I decided it would be best to learn how to play five toons at once before doing any instances.

[Frojax]

They defeated my team so thoroughly that I decided it would be best to learn how to play five toons at once before doing any instances.

Hehe, this could be my problem, but if you also add to the fact, I've never done much in the way of instancing as I usually don't have the patience for PUG's, I guess I'm not doing too bad. And each cock up points out the need for another macro to cover the mistake the next time through.

EDIT: I managed to get to and kill Omor, but he had wiped my team before I finished him, it was only the fact that I came back as 5xghouls that I got the kill :)
I decided to rez at the graveyard and almost shit purple bricks as my repair bill came in at almost 120gold, perhaps I should stick with my 5xWarlock or 5xHunter teams, their pets don't need repairs :D

[Hachoo]

I don't exactly remember but I think my first was SFK - although because of Blizzard re-leveling everything I was way above the level required (I think I was like 26 and most mobs are 21) so it was cake. I had planned on running Wailing Caverns but RAF was so fast by the time I got the quests I was like 8 levels above it.

[Lance]

Mine was RFC with warrior, priest, lock and 2 mages. I had virtually nothing set up properly. It was a bit of a disaster with loads of wipes. At 60 i stopped playing that group and started over with a pally tank. The difference was great. The old group felt like work. The new group of pally, priest and 3 mages was fun. Trying out my warrior now that they are less hassle to mb with is something on my very long "to do" list :)

[Siaea]

I decided to rez at the graveyard and almost shit purple bricks as my repair bill came in at almost 120gold,
That made me laugh pretty hard here at work. And it's mainly because I've done the same thing :D

[nischette]

Since my RAF expired on the first, hubby and I took our first try at a 10-man instance running lower blackrock spire. Having never run a higher level instance before he took 5x pallys and I took my 3xmages and 2xpriests. It was a blast I can't wait to see what other instances have in store!

[Natch]

Ah yes. I remember walking into RFC at level 13 with broken heal macros and paladin tank in white gear and dying horribly :D But man, it was exciting!

[Dorffo]

wailing caverns without noticing the mobs had nature resistance... was exciting!

[Bigfish]

Sweet, sweet RFC...

[Souca]

Dead mines. Pally and 4 shaman. I don't remember the exact level I was, or if I even finished, but I do know that I it took 6 hours and part way through I had to start escorting characters that died back with my 47 rogue since the entire place had repopped. I would send the rogue in to clear out the trash then run her back out and run the poor shammy back to the group and pray they didn't get killed by a back pat. I was physically exhausted afterward, but I did learn alot about what needed to change in my macro set up.

I stayed out of instances until I took a poke at Ramparts at 61. Then it was another hiatus until I hit 70 and started farming for totems.

As for repair bills I thought it was funny that leveling my 70 druid to 80 was more expensive than my DK in terms of repair. Those 70 epics are expensive to repair even if they are leather.

- Souca -

[daviddoran]

My first was at lvl 20 in the deadmines, with my 5 class team, Prot pally holy priest, fire mage, ele sham, and balance druid. I had no idea what I was doing, had no macros other than targeting, and all of my buttons were based on cast times, so i had a 'short cast' button and a 'long cast' button, as well as instants. I dont even remember how I healed, I must have had party1targettarget or something, as I didn't use Focus yet. I remember doing quite well though, much better run with that team than my 5 shaman or my 4 mages/priest team, so im not sure if I was just lucky, or what. I quit that team shortly after after wiping horribly in SFK, but I think it was because my gear was red on all 5 toons, and i just didn't have the stats any more. Thats when I started simplifying, fewer classes, and instance boosting with my 70 holy pally (he went prot pretty quickly after that, although he did a great job pulling SM Cath as full holy, didnt need survivability if he could just kill everyone faster)

[Seldum]

My first was DM - only a couple of months ago.

Im not very expirenced in wow at all, and I hit DM at lvl 18? or 16? the lowest lvl anyway....

Got my ass wooped all over the place... redid my macros etc. gained a level or two and made it to the last boss in the end. I haven't killed him yet though.... went questing.

Currently at lvl. 37-38 and doing all wings of SM.... and loving it. I play 5xdruid - one tank, one healer rest dps.

Im able to farm the bosses using prowl (stealth)..... its nice for gear :)

Thanks for everyone sharing theire expirences and viewpoints on this forum. You rock!

[Vmpwraith]

My first Instance was deadmines. Running my team had been sweet until here Macros running well (or so i thought) content droping like flys then I hit DM and it all changed. I think once you hit an Instance it can really change your setup. My healing macros were a complete failure as they had been untested until then and my DPS rotation was terrible and my adds were placed poorly and adds were a problem. With a little tweaking everything went smooth on run two and have ever since with the exception of the lizard guy in ZF and Princes in Mauradon (but I will spank her today... fingers crossed). In my opinion, outside of instances teams pretty much rule its inside where you really test your setup and must overcome boxings weaknesses and releavl in its strengths.

[mrmcgee21]

I wiped probably 60 times to that felguard boss in RFC ( my initial setup and yes I did heroics in TBC like this was just 4 shamans and a HOLY paladin, so no tank .. just healed the fuck out of my shamans ). Eventually got him down and farmed RFC stupid, from lvl 13 to lvl 19 .. the moved onto WC .. must say after doing RFC every other instance leading up to heroics in BC was a cake walk, even with no tank. In LK I had to swap to a Prot paladin setup in order to beat the heroics, which is my current setup.

[turbopinto]

My first run was deadmines at 16 with my 5x huntards. Everything was going great until i hit Rhakzor. he hit the pets really, really hard and when I went to heal them, his 2 archer buddies aggoed on my team and as the last pet went down, the first character went down. the carnage lasted about 3 seconds after that.

[Perrigrin]

RFC at 13 with 5x shammies, went decent (http://thegrins.blogspot.com/2008/07/first-go-at-rfc.html) - Cleared it at 14 (http://thegrins.blogspot.com/2008/07/farming-rfc.html). This was what really got me hooked at boxing - I spent most of my leveling to 30 something running instances with 5x shammies.

Have to say that when I cleared my first heroic the other day, that created the same great feeling.

Looking back at the fact that I changed from running instances boxing to boosting to get 4 sham+tank instead makes me think that I should start a level 1 box team that will clear instances appropriate for their level - Should be fun ;)

[Kaynin]

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/951/wowscrnshot031508183936pb4.jpg

My first MB instance run.

RFC cleared at level 12 (dinged before end. :P )

[Bloodcloud]

RFC:

- with 5 shammies at lvl 10. - EPIC FAIL
It didn't help that I was just before in with a LVL 70 Priest scouting and feeling all UBER :

I got the heads of my shammies handed on a silver platter.

===

Ramparts:

After I levels my very diverse group lvls between 61 and 70 I didn't have macros for CC nor for assigning OT (Pets).
First 2 pulls where fine, then it went bad .....
I never did play a tank character before (always casters and hunter) so I had a steep learning curve there, but eventually cleared the instance.

[Tombs]

Heroic Underbog

Narrow bridge between Fungal Giants and Naga groups and /follow. I'll let you piece together the rest of the story. :)

[genocyde]

My first was also Ramps. I could never forget the humility. Pally tank, 3x mage, Priest.

I had power leveled the mages with the prot pally and hadn't ever had more than PoM+Pyro and Arcane Explosion on my mages bars. Priest was my original main from raiding vanilla wow.

I hit 60 and thought OK Ramps, here i come. I spent a few hours setting up all my UI's and all my macro's and tested everything. I had accounted for everything I had ever seen in this game. I even had formations set up so I could dodge the dragon's fireballs on the last boss. I had an excellent amount of starting information from this community and I was pretty excited.

I zoned in, and I had been talking to a friend of mine, telling him I was ready to tear stuff up. I paused my DNP list and whispered my friend x5 Ok, here I go!

Pally throws out some initial aggro, everything runs to him, I see the priest shield go up and thought everything is working... how easy mode. I started walking my pally backwards to get some distance and watch my mages spells coming at the back of their heads. That was when I saw my fatal mistake.....

I never unpaused my DNP list and I was still broadcasting all keystrokes. As my pally backed up to watch the show he instead saw all 4 of his companions walking backwards and zone out. Luckily, I had planned for EVERYTHING that could have gone wrong. My paladin through up his bubble and headed for the instance entrance as I scrambled to turn on my DNP list again. I was thinking, well that could have been much worse.

I zone out to find a single brave horde nuking my whole team with AOE... I panicked, I thought.. AOE... SPREAD OUT! I hit my formation macro and promptly ran 2 / 4 guys off the cliff to their death while he finished a 3rd, PoM+Pyro'd my priest, and zoned in as the pally came out wearing a bubble.

After an hour break, and a beer with the friend I had been talking to, I headed back in and learned many more lessons. I did finish the instance and I enjoyed it enough I'm still running myself off cliffs in a panicked mess today.

[Kalahan]

Took my first step into an instance just last week, went to RFC with my five shammies.
Started out pretty well, macros all working, totems doing their jobs, snakes going down nice and fast, me taking little damage. Then I came to the first earth elemental, I remembered that they were immune to nature damage so was gonna have to melee him but I#d set up and tested healing macros so I didn't think it would be too much of a problem. Set up totems, used a single ligthning bolt to pull him, he came running in and, for reasons that I still don't understand (since I'd unbound autorun from all but my leader), two of my girls ran off into the lava, and the other three got pounded into mush ;(

[algol]

RFC:

- with 5 shammies at lvl 10. - EPIC FAIL

Walked in, started shooting lightning bolts at the first thing I saw.

It was nature-immune.

WTF, Blizzard? WTF!?

[Kaynin]

The nature immunes are almost all individually pullable. I went into RFC at level 11 and found it very doable with melee+flametongue weapon and some fire nova totems if mana allowed for it.

As I leveled up, I found that melee was a very integral part of shammy boxing until about level 40+, it wasn't until then that melee started to become more of an annoyence then a help. Until 40 however, mana pools and regens just didn't seem to cut it and melee could mean the world of difference. :P

[Kaynin]

-snip-

Accidental double post.

[Skeuomorph]

In my opinion, outside of instances teams pretty much rule. It's inside where you really test your setup and must overcome boxings weaknesses and revel in its strengths.
Tried DM at 16 with my first 5x shammy group, but didn't even make it to the instance. Realized I didn't really understand doing multiple things at once yet, and decided I wanted a tank. Worked on leveling up a paladin and a druid, while thinking about macro conditionals and learning to cast harm and help at the same time. Since it's conveniently located, we kept sticking our noses in Stockade to see if these team skills were gelling. Figured if we could handle the first two rooms, we could keep going. Around level 25, we went in as pally, 3x shaman, and druid, and didn't die. In fact, cleared the whole instance without a death. On the way out, got cocky, but at the top of the middle stairs the halls had filled back up, and we wiped. Oops. Went back to Deadmines to get that achievement and it was a walk in the park.

We'll keep doing level-appropriate instances now, I think, because it definitely sharpens (and wakes!) you up.