How to Avoid Getting Lost in CavesFollow

Well, you only have to wander around for no more than 30 mins. By then your hearth will be off cooldown. It's a Get Out of Cave Free card.

I'm not sure if there are maps online for the various cave layouts or not. Like a few others have said, they reuse a lot of the cave layouts though when they use different 'scenery' inside, it is not always obvious right away. You might find one with a stream and another with a deep cleft and another with a lot of ice areas that all turn out to be the same layout.

Sometimes you will come upon a familiar cave/mine system that doesn't quite feel right. This is because sometimes they will connect several layouts together or use parts of a few to make up a different one. They actually do this a lot with the Barrow Den style ones as I have seen ones with loops off of a single chamber, loops connecting two chambers and an elaborate three chamber layout (Stonetalon Peak area) and those are particularly easy to get lost in though the trick I find with those is to always pick upwards sloping paths when I want to get out and that usually works.

Generally, most of the layouts (with the exception of the Barrow Den type) are either linear or a loop. The linear ones can sometimes branch but usually the branches lead to dead ends so I would suggest finding the central place that the paths branch off of and just go down each path in turn until you find the ones that leads out. The looping ones (especially with branches) are a bit harder because the layout I see the most has a double bend on the path leading out so it's easy to miss once you are moving around the loop. If you suspect a loop, find what appears to be an outer wall (by looking at the minimap and not seeing adjacent tunnels) and just carefully follow that and take any passages that show up in that wall. The wall following will probably work in most caves actually as long as you pick a wall that is on the outside perimeter of the cave system.

Wailing Caverns has been shortened, I've heard. I haven't been in there since they changed it. I didn't really learn to get through that one easily until I had solo ran it a few times. I still kind of get lost in Maruadon though and find the best way sometimes is to just kill everything so I know where I have been (respawn is much slower in the dungeons). I'm guessing that they will shorten Mara about the time I finally feel like I know my way around it. Heheh

ROFL! Love it!

Thank you all for your continued responses and great suggestions for cave-navigating. Following a wall around sounds like a great idea. Now that I think of it, I do see similarities in many caves. I'm running into the "enter a main area with a stone stalagmite/tite thing in the middle that separates it into areas with a small round lake in the back" type. The type I am getting lost in. Going into one and studying the layout sounds like another great idea.

A low-level dungeon I ran recently that was actually harder to find than get out of is the instance in Westfall (I think that's correct) - near Sentinel Hill. The first time I was in the middle of a quest and accidentally stumbled into it. (Well I saw the whirling entrance, I mean stumbled onto the entrance.) What was frustrating was that later when I *wanted* to go to the instance, I ran around endlessly until I managed to find it again. Decided to never do that one again. The next day a friend who had recently returned to WoW sent a whisper to me: "I'm lost trying to find the Westfall dungeon."

I second that!!! I have a miner's hat I think I'm going to start wearing in caves. Amazingly this one is plate so I could even use it as a transmog.