(This post contains information that has been updated – Read the New Post Here)

Instances are brilliant, and I love them. I know they are not the most popular thing for mid-level characters, and some people avoid them like nuts, but they are only hurting themselves. Once you get to level 70, that’s about all that’s left besides serious PVP, so you better start now enjoying yourself.

Instances are important because they teach you how to play as a member of a team. The best gear always drops in instances, and when it boils down to it, the experience is excellent if you are there at the right levels. Now, I understand that it can be tough to find a good group, and we’ll discuss that a little later in an article on guilds, but you should really just suck it up and do them all.

Starting at level 20 I’ll run through the deadmines, Stockades and Blackfathom Deeps on all my alliance toons. Those three runs are good for usually 4-6 levels and 4 or five blue gear items. Since my guild’s power players all have alts, we go do runs like that a few times a week so they are super fast. We’ll usually get through all three of those runs in about 4 hours. You could probably level almost as fast going it solo in Ashenvale at that level, but you sure wouldn’t get the gear.

But the real reason to do instances is the same reason you simply must spend some time in battlegrounds and dueling. If you don’t ever do them, you won’t be any good at them when you really need to be.

You may be able to pull mobs great in the wild when you need to separate one or two from a congested area, but that won’t work in an instance a lot of the time. Normally in an instance if you pull one you’re going to get them all. So you are forced to work as a team where a mage sheeps right after a rogue saps, and then you pull whatever is left. If your hunter is any good they can trap another one and now your tank and healer only have to worry about 1 poor little dead elite walking with the fury of a rogue coming in from behind and a nice fat fireball in his face, oh – and a ravager tearing his eyes out.

You can really crush through an instance run with a good team. Some difficult mobs at low levels (assuming you don’t have a great group) include the Princess in Maraudon – I hate that woman – and Archaedes in Uldamann. For some reason those guys at that level can be really tough to handle. But it is a very satisfying feeling when they hit the ground with a big thud.

Instance tips to live by.
1. Spend some time as a lowbie toon making a few friends and playing together as much as possible. If you can build a decent friends list, you can normally have a party of three before you ever launch the “Looking for Group” function.
2. Always try to play in a balanced group. Instances are much harder with more than one kind of any particular class – the possible exception to this being two druids or paladins where one is a healer and the other a tank. (if the players are very experienced this doesn’t matter nearly as much until Outlands)
3. If things are not going well, don’t flame people, just ride it out: BE NICE! I have had groups where one guy quit on the run; we picked up another pretty easy because we already had 4, and for some reason it went twice as fast with a non-complainer.
4. Don’t get in a tizzy over who wins loot drops. You’re likely going to replace the item in a few levels anyway. So it’s not worth getting upset about. It’s a GAME folks.
5. Try to balance your play time to include at least 25% of your time in instances. This will give you the very best gear when you are solo, and plenty of time to refine your play style and talent build.
6. Play with authority and practice the really hard moves; doing this will ensure that by the time you get to heroic level dungeons, you’re not upsetting runs by playing poorly. Lower level instances are the very best place to practice using multiple skills on tough mobs.
7. Have fun. IT’s A GAME!

Probably not anything you haven’t heard before; no real mind-blowing information here. But you might have needed a little kick in the pants to get in there and do every instance in the game as you level up your next toon. And if you skip all this stuff you’ll never know how much fun the whole thing really is. For years the old world instances were all that people had to play through, and the game still grew. There’s a lot of good content you will miss if you just rush through to level 70 before you start hitting the dungeons.