There's been a low-level murmur for weeks in the Raids and Dungeons forum about the amount of trash in Serpentshrine Cavern. Words like "nightmare", "soul-destroying", and "worse than Twin Emps-C'thun trash" were bandied about. The problem wasn't just the amount of trash, but the respawn time -- with 45-minute respawns, guilds were literally watching trash respawn behind them as they cleared. And as more guilds check into early Tempest Keep, they're finding the same situation.

This week, the wave finally crested, with members of Death and Taxes, Curse, and other top guilds arguing that the trash situation has become unbearable. Selected comments from the threads follow:

• Guass of Ret, Mal'Ganis: "I personally enjoy when trash respawns in the middle of a boss fight because it isn't linked to anything. It's things like this which make me feel like I wasn't meant to be raiding this zone yet ... nor was anyone else."
• Marolla of Crimson, Greymane: "Since typically one dungeon is being started while another is released, I can only assume that the crew that did MC, AQ40 and SSC is a bunch of sadists and needs to be burned at the stake. Please let the crew that did BWL and Naxx be in charge of all hiring decisions from this point forward."
• Mek, raid leader of Curse, Vek'linash-EU: "Trash should be killed once in a night of tries on a boss. Fine, it respawns on a soft reset or a 6 hour timer, but not this garbage we have now. If you do not fix this you are eventually going to kill off high-end raiding because we just do not want to do this anymore."
• Cherrie of Death and Taxes, Korgath: "I personally love hours upon hours of trash. I especially enjoy having to kill it multiple times because the respawn is so quick. I enjoy it ALMOST as much as fighting untuned bosses. THE SARCASM, IT'S OVERWHELMING!"
• Plastique of Death and Taxes, Korgath: "As much as I know you need us to play-test all of these new instances, we might not volunteer for it anymore since it's threatening our sanity ... please don't release Black Temple. It's too soon." (Italics added for emphasis.)
• And finally, Clockwork of the reformed Overrated, Korgath, wins the thread and the entire internet with: "Wow, what a bunch of whiners. Stop crying and just clear the trash, OK?"

I haven't seen much of 25-man raiding in TBC beyond what a rogue, a mage, and a quick portal to Shattrath can show you, but the trash situation sounds like it's really wearing on the top guilds. When a member of Death and Taxes asks Blizzard NOT to release new content, something is not right. It also looks like there's near-universal hatred of the trash clears, inasmuch as every guild that's posted in these threads has decried them.

Have you seen the trash in SSC and Tempest Keep? Does it sound excessive to you, or is multiple trash clears the price you pay for being on the cutting edge?

The Raids and Dungeons forumgoers are up in arms about major bugs in Tempest Keep's Mechanar and the Caverns of Time Black Morass event.

The Black Morass, also known as Opening the Dark Portal, features portals of angry dragons coming to stop Medivh from opening the Dark Portal. You have to kill these mobs to preserve the timeline. However, it looks like the spawns of the portals are either really random or really bugged. Sometimes multiple portals spawn at the same time, and sometimes you wait ten minutes and nothing spawns at all. Poptrix of Bloodhoof suggests that setting loot to free-for-all and looting everything off the corpses evens out the spawn times a bit.

Tempest Keep's Mechanar features an elevator that appears to have some issues being visible. Some people can see it and others can't. This bug killed a run of Mechanar for my guild a couple nights ago. Hortus on the Bug Report Forum says that Blizzard is working on it, but many people trying to get attuned for Karazhan are pretty upset that they can't progress in Mechanar. Kink of the infamous "PALS FOR LIFE" suggests a fix:

1. Leave a group of trash at the very back corner up.
2. Kill the boss, rez, and loot.
3. Have a rezzer who can see the elevator go up the elevator and stand at the top.
4. Pull the last trash group, using crowd control methods to make sure they don't leash, and die to them in line of sight of the rezzer.
5. Have the rezzer rez your group. Voila, you are now at the top of the elevator!

Durnk of Ropetown also suggests the Overrated fix, where you replace the elevator with some spiral stairs.

There have also been some reportedly bugged invincible trash mobs in the Botanica, but they're easily avoided. Have you run into any bugged instances lately?