Early 4.1 PUG Impressions

I hadn't bothered to do much dungeon running in Cataclysm because of the lengthy queue times - an hour in the queue plus at least that long to clear the dungeon when the expansion was still new was longer than I could commit to.  In the two months or so I spent away from Azeroth, the situation has changes substantially. 

In the regular five mans, it does not appear that the touted "call to arms" feature is active on my server, perhaps because the queue times are already very reasonable.  My guess is that the non-heroic level 85 5-man experience is now very tightly focused.  At Cataclysm's launch, your level 85 in the queue for a normal 5-man had a 40% chance of being tossed into a level 82 dungeon that offered you almost no possible benefit.  At some point between then and now, the list was narrowed to just the three normal dungeons that are actually level 85. 

The bad news is that there isn't much variety.  The good news is that you can gear up and move on very quickly - I completed each dungeon once, with an extra run through Grim Batol, and I was at the gear threshold to LFG heroics.  Maybe this tier is now much less over-crowded with DPS now that the majority of endgame players are already 85 and in heroics, compared to when everyone was leveling. 

When I queued for a random heroic (T1, the new ones are at a higher tier), both tanks and healers had the "call to arms" bonus and queue times were indeed back down to reasonable levels.  I'm not sure that Call To Arms can be credited with this - when I've encountered players who said they haven't done much tanking or healing and asked whether they were trying it for the loot, they had never even heard of the system before.  Perhaps overall gear inflation and greater familiarity with the encounters is making the dungeons more palatable once again. 

You're still looking at about an hour and a half to two hours counting queue times to run a dungeon, which is twice as long as it took in Wrath and long enough that I can't necessarily get a dungeon run in every evening that I would like to run one.  That said, the compromise between difficulty and time is much more tolerable, especially since gear inflation in the next patch will likely speed things up further.