Overpowered on the forums wonders what the least popular instance is, and I'd say his guess of Blackfathom Deeps is probably pretty close-- it's a long run away for pretty much everyone but Night Elves, and at 25-30, there's so many more quests and things to do that BFD usually gets passed up. The other good guesses, I'd say, are the "old" late game instances like Naxx and LBRS. Unfortunately, while Blizzard tells us all about the most popular stuff in the game, they are pretty mum on what players don't like, for obvious reasons.

So how do you make an instance that makes players want to visit? Relmstein walks us through his idea of what makes a perfect instance ambiance: music, visuals, interactive features (the Chess Event is one of my favorite dungeon features, although almost all the dungeon dialogue "cut scenes" are fun for me), and memorable boss encounters.

But then again, BFD seems to have all of them-- it's a very pretty dungeon (I especially like the temple at the end), and while it might be a little short on interactive features, I really like the lore and the unleashing of the monster at the end. The last ingredient, I think, to a good dungeon, is just a storyline that drives you there. I'm sure Scarlet Monastery (except the Graveyard), and Deadmines are definitely among the most popular instances, and both of those have huge amounts of lore and mystery to make them interesting. Maybe if more players realized that Aku'mai was actually a pet of the Old Gods (or, you know, if there was a quest to kill him that explained that), BFD would see more traffic.

Before the expansion came out, we wondered and wondered what would happen to the old level 60 instances when the Dark Portal opened. And now that it's here, we know: no one's running them. Oh, there's a few quest groups here and there of people working their way up to 58 (the bare minimum to come through to Outland), but there's almost zero reason to run AQ or ZG 20-mans, considering the loot is just so much better, even just in Hellfire Peninsula. And MC, on my server at least, is a barren wasteland-- why take four hours with 40 people just for a few good pieces when you can get much better loot in 15 minutes of questing in Outland?

So what to do? We're sure Blizzard will come up with a way to make these instances relevant again-- in fact, I'd be surprised if, despite what they said earlier, they weren't already working on it now. But just to help them, here's a few suggestions of how to fix the old instances.

-First, and most obvious, is enabling Heroic mode. We already have dungeons in Outland that will be able to be tuned to Heroic mode, which means bosses and mobs are harder, but give much better drops. In the same way, Blizzard is likely going to let us optionally turn up the difficulty in UBRS or Stratholme, offering better loot for a bigger challenge.

My priest has been, for some time now, looking for a pattern for the Truefaith Vestments - the epic crafted priest robes. While I would occasionally see a Robe of the Archmage or a Robe of the Void pattern, I've not seen any of my own. However, over the past couple of weeks, I've seen more and more Robe of the Archmage patterns - as seen above. The cost has dropped dramatically, as well - what once sold for a hundred gold and up is now, as you see, more often selling for 30 to 40, when they sell at all.

This has started to puzzle me, as the pattern drops off of Pyromancers in lower Blackrock Spire, of which there are few, and difficult to get to. I've gone with a number of groups that refuses to attempt the pull with the Pyromancers, simply because it's large and difficult. So where then, do these patterns come from? Several commenters on Thottbot claim that you can solo your way to the right area with the use of stealth or invisibility potions, and one poster goes into some detail about two rogues taking the group down with timely use of sap, vanish, and evasion.

But even if the pattern can be acquired with the efforts of one or two players, this doesn't explain the sudden appearance of so many in the marketplace. It's possible that the drop rate has been increased, but it seems unlikely that the drop rate of one of the epic robe patterns would go up while the other two remain the same. In my past experience with the game, a sudden flood of rare items on the market has been an indication of a new farming technique or hack, allowing farmers to now easily acquire something that was usually difficult. (For an example of similar circumstances in the past, see this old Dire Maul hack.) However, at present, there's no evidence one way or the other - so this remains simply an oddity...