Level 50 and back to work.

My 2 week Burning Crusade launch vacation is now over and I go back to work in... 4 hours so my leveling will likely slow down a lot. :D

I did manage to pull off level 50 before my vacation ended however and I cleared all of Sunken Temple except Eranikus (level 55). I would like to take a moment and comment on how much I hate Maraudon. First off, the instance is *incredibly* difficult without ranged or AoE damage. Specificly, those slow moving slimes that do massive AoE damage to anything in melee range and the huge packs of non-elite larva and snakes. While I was able to do the larva and the snakes just fine those slimes would usually wipe me unless I carefully kited them for 5 minutes shooting with bows/guns/lightning/wrath. Unfortunately none of my characters are geared/specced for ranged damage so it took me forever to drop enough of them to get past. To make matters worse though, you can't farm Maraudon from the portal. If you zone-in via the portal there is no way to get out of the instance except A) dying and running back to a different entrance or B) clearing all the way back to one of the other entrances. Yesterday I went back to Maraudon to finish the Princess quest and spent about 30 minutes clearing up to and including her and then I spent an hour running out of the instance clearing trash far below my level and getting loot that was already outdated and very little experience. By the end I was so pissed off at the instance I finally just got myself killed and spirit resurrected.

Sunken Temple is far better in my opinion. The one problem I ran into in Sunken Temple is the hex spell. My Paladin is usually off-tanking all but the primary creep so he is usually the target of any hexes that go off. Unfortunately he is also the only class that can dispel the hex. On top of that, all my other characters movement is based on his movement so when he gets hexed the other characters finish what they were doing and more or less stand around. To make matters even *worse*, when you get hexed target of target stops working for those around you so my other characters can't even pull a target off him. This means I have to manually control each character which is about 5x less efficient as controlling them all from the main computer, especially since I have most of their movement keys unbound (have to move with the mouse exclusively). Asside from that though the instance overall was pretty easy. I had to do a little bit of cheese to kill the green dragons when they conned red to me that involved tanking in a corner to avoid knockback but in the end I dropped them without too much trouble. I also had a little trouble with the charm that the Prophet does because he would take over my Paladin and, like the hex, that really impacts me heavily (more so then a normal group).

Next up is Blackrock Depths, the first few bosses in there are only level 51, which should go over quite smoothly since it's a fairly open instance (easy to get into/out of for quick resets).