Other tips we’ve heard: finding an instance as tank or healer will go even faster than trying to get in one as DPS, so if you can specialize into a more useful role and just want to grind out instances fast, do that. Damage meters are supposedly broken — they haven’t figured out how to track ranged damage across realms quite yet. Which may be a good thing, as lots of players never liked following those meters anyway. The vote kicking system seems to be working well — the number one reason we’ve heard that players are kicking each other is that they’re going AFK without notice, so if you’re in a random PuG queue, be sure to be ready when it pops up to do the instance ASAP. Oh, and let’s just agree right here and now: Frozen Orbs are Need, unless you don’t want them for some reason.

And maybe the most important tip we’ve heard: it’s important to make sure that your gear matches the instance you’re doing. The number one issue so far seems to be players who show up for a Heroic in greens, or people who queue up to tank without having any tanking gear or experience at all. Thanks to the new system, there’s lots of groups to run, and everyone will get the gear they need to do what they want. So don’t waste players’ time now by trying to take on something you can’t do and ending the group in wipes or making other players step up for you. Start out low and easy, running regular instances, and then when you think you’re ready for something tougher, move on up the ladder to Heroics.

Let’s take a better look at this new feature.

A little bit of history…
First, we’re going to talk about why we have this cool tool. Back in the days of “Additional instances cannot be launched,” the servers were set up so that each realm had its own instance server. At least, this is how we understand it, because Blizzard doesn’t exactly share its network layout.

However, before Wrath, people didn’t run that many instances. It was something that guilds did, but not something the general player base got into. When Wrath hit and pugging became the cool new fad, the instance servers weren’t ready for it. To stop the servers from collapsing under the burden of so many instances being run on them, Blizzard implemented a cap on the number of instances that could run at one time. This made instances nice and stable, but very difficult to get into and causing the “Additional instances” problem we all came to know.

That was just a stopgap fix until they could implement their big plan. In order to fix the issue with “Additional instances” they removed all of the instance servers from being attached to a single realm and let them be available to all realms in their battlegroup. Now, if your old instance server was completely full, you just got sent to an instance server that still had slots available on it. Tada, “Additional instances” is now fixed. Again, this is a guesstimation as Blizzard won’t release that info.

This opened up a lot of possibilities for Blizzard. Since your instance servers were shared throughout the battlegroup, that means you suddenly had the opportunity to do an instance with anyone from your battlegroup. All you need is a swank interface and away you go. Okay, we’re oversimplifying, but that’s essentially what they did. Let’s take a look at it.

Quick and Dirty Dungeons…
I’ve included a gallery at the end of this guide if you want to see the same text next to images to see what I’m talking about a little better.

If you hop into World of Warcraft right now and hit your button for the old Looking for Group window, you’ll get the new ‘Dungeon Finder’ instead. It looks kinda close to how the old one was laid out. You’ve got your role selection at the top of tank, healer or DPS. You’ve also got the option to be the leader of the party.

However, where it differs is that instead of the normal selection of your 3 dungeons, heroics, or raids, you’ve got a quest. Not only that, but at 80, it’s your heroic daily quest. All you need to do for the daily is hit ‘Find Group’ and you’re in like Wrynn. Lower level characters will get a cool goody bag which can include blue quality items for leveling and dungeon running.

Give it about 2 seconds (that was the average I was getting on the PTR, but your mileage may vary) and you’ll be told what role you’ll be filling as well as what quest rewards you should be expecting upon completion of this dungeon. I used that graphic for the opener.
Hit ‘Enter Dungeon’ and you’ll see a little ready-check window pop up. That will let you know if everyone else has hit their enter dungeon buttons as well. Check marks are the people who are ready, question marks are the people you’re waiting on. If you get a big red X on one of the members (in my case, the healer declined), then the Dungeon Finder will pop your pre-assembled team out of ready and find a replacement. You’re still at the top of the queue, so the first appropriate healer that pops up is yours. It will repeat the same ready-check procedure until it finally gets everyone assembled and ready to enter the dungeon.
Please note that at this time, you still haven’t had to talk to anyone, form any parties, or debate who is the healer and who is dps.

Once everyone is actually ready, you will be teleported directly to the dungeon. You will not pass the meeting stone, you will not fight the door boss for the right to enter the dungeon. In the default UI, each party member will have an icon for their particular role on their party nameplate. Healers are marked with the same little plus sign as in the Dungeon Finder screen, dps has a little dagger (or maybe it’s a sword), and the tank has a shield icon. The party leader even gets a little flag icon. Isn’t it cute? Thanks to this, there is no confusion about who does what. After everyone is buffed, the shield just checks to see if the plus sign is ready and pulls.

If everything goes smooth and you kill the final boss of the dungeon the quest rewards pop up in your inventory. If you leave through the dungeon entrance, you’ll be teleported back to where ever you were when you hit ‘Enter Dungeon’ and you can just repeat the process again for more loot and rewards.
The Slow and Meticulous Dungeon Runner…

Let’s say that you’re trying to get a weapon from Heroic Trial of the Champion, a set of legs from Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle, and a belt from Heroic Nexus. That’s all you need. You just want to run those three instances. You can do this, but you can’t do it with any of the perks of doing a random dungeon.

Just hit that little drop-down in the upper right hand corner of your Dungeon Finder frame. It’s the one between the quest and the role icons. Select ‘Specific Dungeons’ from the dropdown and you’ll get a list of all of the dungeons available to you.

Uncheck the box next to the headings of each group and then only check the dungeons or heroics you really really need.

Once you’re done, just hit ‘Find Group’ at the bottom and everything will proceed from there like the random dungeons do. The only difference is that you won’t get any rewards from doing it this way other than those things that drop in the dungeon. No extra badges, no bags of goodies, no extra gold.

However, since most people will be hitting the random dungeons you’ll be able to find a group much faster. The program behind the scenes just picks one of your specific dungeons and grabs 4 people wanting to do random dungeons and tosses you all into a group together. Yes, that means even if you want something from Oculus, you’ll still be able to find a group.

Let’s set some ground rules…

The first rule of the Dungeon Finder is that it does not work on raids.
The second rule of the Dungeon Finder is that it does not work on raids.

Blizzard added a new interface for joining raids. The Dungeon Finder helps you find parties for dungeons using everyone in your battlegroup regardless of server. Being as raids are still going to be same-server only, that means you won’t be using this tool for it. Plus there’s the fact that you can’t use this tool for it. Raids have their own new interface that’s very similar to the specific dungeon interface. See the Raid panel of your Social window for more info on that.

The old Looking for Group channel now has nothing to do with the Dungeon Finder. Looking for Group is now just a channel like trade available in all major cities. That means anyone who is currently spamming trade with group information can now do that on a channel actually designed for it.

You can choose to queue for one of the following at a time, but no more than that: dungeons, battlegrounds, arenas. Pick your queue of choice and commit to it. If you want to queue for a dungeon, get done with that and then queue for an arena or battleground afterward, that’s perfectly fine. You just can’t queue for Halls of Lightning and Alterac Valley at the same time.

Need before Greed is the law of the land. Blizzard put the random dungeon loot requirement as need before greed in order to help prevent as many loot disputes as possible. If you don’t want to use that for your loot distribution, then you’ll have to create your own group by hand. Sorry.
Disenchanting is now a type of roll, but only if you have an appropriately leveled enchanter in your party. This is considered a greed roll. If you happen to win, the game automatically shards the item and puts the resulting mats in your inventory. This might rub a lot of enchanters the wrong way, because of long standing traditions on their servers, but there’s not much you can do about it. The good news is that this should help reduce the price of enchants on the market as more mats should start being available.

The randomness of the random dungeon dailies aren’t completely random. While the text does specify the dailies as random, they’re not really. The system tries to make sure you aren’t running the same dungeon over and over again. With random mode on, it will allow you to bypass your normal heroic lockouts. This means if the dice gods are against you, that random dungeon could be one you really don’t like. However, the system tries really hard not to do that.

If you’re choosing specific dungeons through the interface, it will still take your heroic lockouts into account, so you can’t just choose to run new Icecrown heroics over and over again. Now, if you’ve selected random dungeons and everyone else has selected the new dungeons specifically, like on oh, I don’t know… patch day. You might be able to get the new dungeons over and over again. But that’s just luck if it happens and don’t count on it.