My first run of Mana Tombs was mildly successful, in that I did well on my sheeping job, others did well on their jobs and even when we wiped because the tank was undergeared, the general attitude of the players in the group remained positive and non-abusive. I hadn't actually turned in any quests by the time I logged out after that run, however.
The next night I queued up into the LFG tool at about 11 PM realm time after most of my guildmates had gone offline. Funnily enough, the party I landed myself in had the same tank and same healer from the previous night! The tank had taken time to improve his equipment, however, and had a lot more stamina and armor than the previous night.
Costumes, Consortium Rep and Uncommon Drops!
Since Hallow's End is still going on and people are still actively picking up the various wands that can provide "costumes" for players in their party, all of us were in some kind of costume form while we ran the instance. I particularly liked my form at this point - Undead Pirates rock!
In general, the run went a lot better than the night before - the Pally tank had taken time and cash to his equipment and improved his stamina and armor and was much better able to stand up to the beating that the mobs in the instance were giving him - especially the boss.
The healer himself was given huge accolades all through the instance, critting with some 4k heals on occasion - from a 65 Holy Pally! So, I knew that we were in good hands there, when I'm not only staying alive but other people are pretty actively patting the guy on the back for the job he was doing.
Mana Tombs has a fair amount of Adamantite in it, I noticed - from the mining on the ground to the mining of some of the bosses themselves. I'll have to keep that in mind when I'm bringing my Warrior Miner/Blacksmith through, as Adamantite is what I'm stuck on right now.
There's also a nice collection of Ancient Lichen
Trade Goods
Item display is courtesy world of warcraft.allakhazam.com. ',VAUTO,HAUTO,FULLHTML);" onmouseout="return nd();">Ancient Lichen in there, but I'm neither a miner nor an herbalist on this Mage toon.
The drops were way better during this second run than they were during the first run - I got three equipment upgrades from regular trash mobs and then a nice Mage piece dropped from the final guy but the other mage in the group won it (which is fine by me, 3 upgrades is lots).
Consortium Rep - Friendly
By the end of this second run I was Friendly with the Consortium - 534/6000. From what WoWWiki has to say, it'll probably take another 2-3 runs to max out my rep from the dungeon run side of it at 5999/6000 but that's fine by me, I need the experience and levels from this process to head into Nagrand and blast my way through some more Consortium reputation quests that I can do before hitting 68/70.
When I hit Honored here, I'll be honored with two factions that offer heroics keys at the highest reputation level, and one that offers nifty gems each month.
How many heroics keys are there, anyway? Five?