Instance Servers and You

Now that I'm gearing up my new druid, there have been some things I've taken notice of. Namely, this Too Many Instances nonsense has GOT to get taken care of. I could be in Ulduar gear already, but no, I have to spend 20 minutes humping an instance portal just to get in. Gearing up for Raids has never been harder. At least you can "Usually" get into Trial of the Champion without too much hassle and the gear there is fantastic for the budding tree, however, there's only 5 loot items available and of course, we share them with everyone.

How the TMI issue works:

Every battlegroup shares an instance server. With Wrath, a lot of people returned to WoW. With 3.2, they gave us reasons to farm certain instances for pets that are worth quite a bit of money. Everytime someone farms an instance locks 1 single instance slot. Assuming you have 5 people farming at least 1 instance per server, be it for ZG mounts, Dino pets, Raven mount, whatever, that means 5 locked instances PER realm. There are 18 realms in my battlegroup. 18*5=90 instances being locked out. Assume you have at least 3 major raids going on per day and you add 3*18=54 instances to the lockout. So now we're at 154 locked instances. Double that for the other faction for 308 locked instances. Now you also have to account for the heroic daily and the reg daily, which although they can be the same instance, we'll assume they are separate. We'll go ahead and assume 5 groups running one of those two dailies, times the realms and the factions, brings us to 398 instances being run at the same time. Heroic ToC and Reg ToC also add in because they are more likely to get you in, we'll assume 5 groups doing the heroic for another 180 instances being locked and then assume 5 groups for regular, even though everyone is farming the instance for drops/rep double that to 360. Bringing our grand total to about 758 instances. Throw in a few lowbie groups, runthroughs, solo runs, rep grinds, 10mans, and VoA runs, and you can hit well over 1000 instances being run per day.

1000 locked instances. Blizzard is in the process of upgrading their instance servers to handle the increased usage, but their timeframe is pathetic to say the least. 3 months? I'm supposed to gear up for raids when I'm fighting for instances for 3 months?

So what is a tree to do? How can YOU get the gear you want without the headache of 20 minute waits? The answer is as easy as TBC. Three little letter: P V P. I know, I know. Not everyone likes BGs, BUT, you can always get in them, even if you lose, you still get honor, and you can use that honor to buy PVP gear, which isn't as good as the PVE gear, but it is MosDef better than quest rewards. So, unless you want to farm up the money to get you some nice crafted gear, which is still an option, unless you are saving for epic flying, start hopping in those battlegrounds and make sure you hit up Wintergrasp every 2 hours.