For those who might not know yet, my gluttony for abuse knows no bounds. As a result I find myself in a rather large number of P.U.G. groups. At the end of the day I bring you, my readers, the stories of my travels in the random grouping of Azerothian adventure!
This week I bring you a story of a monumental event. Something so earth shattering that babies cried, women ushered their children home and men cowered before it’s terror inducing visage! You may need to sit down for this… ready? Lodur was vote kicked from a heroic group! Now I’m sure there are some questions about what happened and what was the build up. Here goes my tale of woe.
I’ll start by saying yes I was healing, and yes the mace was equipped. I was decked out in my shiny new T10 loot after freshly enchanting and gemifying them. I queue up and promptly my invite button pops up. I join the group and off I am to an adventure… or so I thought. The screen load shows the Pit of Saron and I’m a bit excited. I enjoy healing the place and it beats out Gundrak any day of the week! The instance loads and I’m looking around for the rest of the group. I notice that most of the mobs have been cleared. This is red flag number one. My immediate response, in a joking tone of course
“What did you guys do to the last healer?”
I get a response from the rogue of the group
“Horrible healer we vote kicked him.”
Ok, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Mainly DPS folks have been rolling in as healers to get quick frost badges so it wouldn’t surprise me too terribly if that’s what happened. I see they are over at the Ick and Krick encounter and make my way over. We buff up and pull. Things go smoothly until two things happen. First I notice the prot warrior is taking a whole lot more damage than he should be and his health is only at 29k total. Second thing that happens is the poison nova. The rogue tries to cast Cloak and run but instead becomes a stain in the ground. Not believing that you can release and come back while the encounter is happening , they wait dead. We’re doing fantastic though otherwise until the boss marks the hunter and chases after them. The hunter then proceeded to drag the boss back past it’s threshold point and the boss leashes… at 1%. Ok, stuff happens I’ll just res the rogue and we’ll get started again right? Wrong! As I’m sitting to drink so I can resurrect the rogue, and before the tank is ready, the hunter pulls, runs to us and then casts FD. Needless to say I got squashed with the rest of the group. We run back in and drink and buff and get ready for round two. I inspect the tank and see he’s in some pretty low tanking gear… and a bunch of dps gear. I make a mental note of the fact he’s not defense capped and look to see I still have 7 minutes left on my LFG debuff. Time to soldier on! Before we’re ready again the hunter pulls, this time the tank picks it up and we proceed as normal. The rogue dies again to poison nova but this time we kill the boss.
This happens two more times with various mobs on the ramp leading to the final leg of the instance until finally I say something
“Dude, stop pulling. I need to drink and you’re wiping the group .”
It was then I noticed something I had not noticed before. All of them were in the same guild. Everyone stopped moving and there we were sitting at the base of the ramp leading to the collapsing tunnel. There’s this long, hanging silence while we sit there and then next thing I know I’m booted from the group!
Back in Dalaran I’m in shock at what just happened. Seriously I got kicked because I called the hunter out on pulling and doing stupid things! I look up at my buffs and notice the debuff was just wearing off and that I can re-queue, but still… wow just wow.
Luckily the next one I get is full of people who communicate and pull sensibly. All from different guilds but all with the same rough gear level. We plow through Halls of Lightning, I get my two Frost Emblems and we part ways.
Seriously I’m alright if you want to do wacky things in a guild run. One of our DPS raiders rolled a healer so when I’m on my tank I like to do silly things (within reason) to mess with her (Hi Jaha!) but we always laugh about it, and I never do it when it’s a non guild run. If there is even one pugger in the group I try my best to behave. But to be kicked for calling someone out on pulling and feigning while watching the group wipe, that dog just won’t hunt monseigneur!
Any interesting P.U.G. stories from this week? Good, bad, awesome or terrible? That’s it for today folks.
Until next time, Happy Healing!
Image courtesy of CBS
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For all the bad comments, I had to come back and post a comment about a lowbie level dungeon PUG I encountered the other night. I’m the BM hunter who posted a comment above. I recently rolled a shaman and my boyfriend rolled a priest and we’ve been PUGing for gear and XP. The other night we PUG’d into RFZ and had a really great time – we almost didn’t want the dungeon to end. The tank was great, told my bf about halfway through that it was great running with a really good healer (which boosted my bf’s ego since this is his first healer toon). I wish there was a way to “friend” people from other servers and re-group with them. Had it not been so late on a work night, I think we’d have seen if he wanted to stay grouped and re-queue.
PUGs have their moments – in the lower levels, so far the bad groups have outnumbered the good ones – when it seems like there are noobs, we try to help them out, give them pointers, especially if they’re playing classes we’re used to, and keep on going, doing our best to keep things together. Sometimes they accept the pointers with grace, other times not so much (“STFU, noob, I know what I’m doing!” said the hunter who insisted on melee combat…. and “f**k you” said the rogue when a tank said, “stop running ahead and pulling aggro!” after a wipe).
When you know you’re dealing with newer players, it’s not so bad to keep going because at least you know they’re still learning and so you take a little durability damage or you change your play style a little bit to help carry them while they’re learning (hehe, “shammy tank ftw!” in Dead Mines last week when our tank bailed and my bf’s asked me to drop a heal on a tank here or there when we have a loose group).
…and sometimes you just have to cross your fingers, vote to kick, and hope the replacement you get is not another fail lol
.-= Myst´s last blog ..Where in the World is…Me? =-.
On my 80 hunter, I queue up for a heroic random this evening, and I head out to the Foote Steppes to kill rhinos while I wait for my queue to pop. After about twenty minutes, it does.
I arrive in Halls of Lightning, and it’s immediately clear there has just been a wipe. There are four in the group and a healer joins and materializes behind me. We run to catch up at the elementals gauntlet. We buff up and the tank charges in and gathers up the mobs. The tank properly stands just above the bottom of the stairs. I’ve misdirected onto him and I sweep by, stop three-quarters of the way up, turn, and hit the group with Volley. I’m doing around 5000 dps on packs of four and so probably went quite a bit higher for a short burst on so many of these normal elementals.
One of the other DPS players runs past me onto the landing and runs over directly into the mobs on the right, agros them, and then comes back straight at us. The elementals are dead now, but apparently another DPS decided to stand with the tank and was blown up. The tank runs up the stairs to try and and pick up the mobs, but the pulling-DPS toon and the healer are cut down before this can occur. It’s me and the tank. I Feign Death to get one off me. I then look at the tank and see he has quite a bit of health left and I start moving and firing to try and burn them down, to no avail. We both die. The healer and tank left, and then so did I, there being little left that could be salvaged at that point. I flew back, rezzed, and teleported out. Thirty minutes tossed away.
I am back at the Foote Steppes once more. Another fifteen or so minutes later, and I get another queue pop and I’m in Nexus. I think, ok, Nexus is super easy and it’s seven emblem, no worries. Oh, how wrong I was. The healer left immediately. We queued to pick up another healer and then the tank left. We three DPS sat there, waiting to get a tank and a healer, and nothing comes in, we just sit and sit and sit. (I checked to make sure we were queued and we were.) One DPS, a mage, decides to start whirling/dancing back and forth around the first room. He agros a wyrmkin, drags it over to DPS #2 (standing by the end of the hallway into the first room), and then blinks down the hallway, turns, and goes out the entrance. The wyrmkin turns to DPS #2 and kills that player. I Feign Death to avoid a similar fate. DPS #2 immediately leaves the party, followed by “how-to-be-an-unPvP-flagged player-killer” DPS #1. Another thirty minutes tossed away.
I queue up again, wait another fifteen minutes, and finally get into another instance. It’s Occulus. Joy. Two people immediately leave. No, Blizzard, the added awards have had no effect on Occulus-avoidance follies. The tank, I, and the healer queue up for more DPS and begin clearing trash. We get two more DPS and clear the instance with no difficulties. Nobody picks a green drake and we still burned Eregos down without losing a single player.
I have to agree completely with the general position that the nerfing of the game has gone much too far.
I am actually not in favor of changing the mechanics of the game or it’s environment, although I do think the changes to the basic instances to make them even easier was just ridiculous.
No, I think Blizzard needs to do the one thing it finds oh so difficult to do, communicate to its players, especially about tanking.
The majority of casual players are not going to study anything about the game on the web, and no amount of hoping will change this. Expecting new tanks to figure out how to tank by doing something they’re not going to do isn’t reasonable. This is an undeniable fact.
If Blizzard put some extra informational elements about tanking directly into the game where they could be accessed and reviewed by people who were actively playing, about Defense Skill/Cap, etc., and perhaps as well for the other roles, that alone would provide some measure of assistance against the incoming tide of under-skilled players.
From my standpoint, the issue about Defense Cap and Defense Skill and Defense Rating, which a huge number of new tanks know absolutely nothing about and so cannot correctly evaluate, entering dungeons with random “tanking” talent specifications and one to three gear slots having Defense Rating and all others having DPS gear items; that is a major issue. These tanks will quite often fail in runs, experience ridicule on top of their personal failure, not understand any of it, and quit tanking.
We need to smooth out the path to allowing new players to successfully learn tanking without expecting them to visit any Internet sources at all. (If we can do it for DPS and Healers, so much the better.) If these in-game resources can, at the end of their discussions, point players out to the Internet for more detailed follow-up, so much the better.
I had to laugh as I had just read this post and guess what I zone into as soon as I hit the LFD button…thats right; a guild run!
I zone into H Gundrak and I am greeted by the pally tank who explains that they are going for the Less Rabi achieve, as well as the impale achieve from the final boss. To my surprise, they were amazingly cool and well skilled. We got along well and followed it up with a quick H DTK run. They were from Undertow on Antonidas and they made my night.
I pressed my luck again and drew a H FoS group. Pally tank, Arms Warrior, Rogue, Mage. I should have given up while I was ahead. The tank from this group was the gogogo type. Usually this is fine and I deal with it. However, one of the DPS ( I think the mage) draws too much aggro and literally gets one shot on a critical hit. Because of the gogogo pally, I have just about enough mana to rez the downed party member, then drink to get back up. Surely he must notice that a party member has died? Of course not…he is running towards the room of mobs right before Bronjahm. I can see him running to the room. I assume he is going to stop short, as he has two DPS in tow and no healer. Just to be sure, I type ‘wait’. He doesn’t. It takes a good 5 more seconds of running for him to get to the room after I tell him to wait. He runs, he dies, etc. I try to reach him, but I can’t even get in range before he dies. When he corpse runs back, he offers the excuse that he “tried not to aggro”. Apparently running into the room seems to draw aggro from the mobs there. I will have to write this little nugget down if I roll a tanking alt. Anyway, I heal everyone back up, proceed to keep everyone alive despite having almost no mana and everyone not stopping DPS during mirrored soul on devourer. ( I was lucky that they downed it just as I was getting the debuff on me) To top it off, pally tank makes some comment about how he should have switched to his healing spec and healed the run. This guy must be really imba. Apparently rezzing one party member while keeping the tank topped up (who is about 150-200 yards away) is no problem for him.
Just wanted to let you know that sometimes the guild pug runs are the nice ones and the randoms are nightmares.
I joined an heroic Nexus PUG with the other four being from the same guild. Checking the lineup I see two well-geared players with a fairly new tank and a DPS DK wearing 200s. Good, this will give me something to do.
As it turns out, the “noob” pally tank chain-pulled, held aggro like an electromagnet and we killed Keristraza with 3 minutes left on the LFG timer. Plus I scored the Split Personality achievement to boot.
This was only last week (2/26). I’m on my Disc priest – sitting at 79+18bubbles. I PUG into yet another endless random in what has been a long week of grinding to get to 80. I know i am gonna ding before the run is complete, so i’m excited. The screen loads; CoS, nice…. i like this instance, it can be a bit slow, but its almost 6AM and i have been at this all night, so slow is not the end of the world. The group appears, and who do I get but 4 guys, all from the same guild, and all in t9/10 gear.
I’m baffled, so i ask, “Ummm… whatcha’ll doing running non-H instances?”
Their response, “Having fun.”
No questions about my hideous gear, no gripes about my low mana pool, just “having fun”.
We RAN through CoS as fast as the mobs could spawn (which is how i prefer to run any instance) and i hit 80 just as we took down Mal’Ganis. It was beautiful timing. I was thrilled, the guys from the other server were happy to have been able to christen a new 80, and it was a SWEET experience.
I wished them luck as they went off to help some other non-80, and they wished me luck as i went of to start my gear grind. I am living proof that not all 4-man guild groups that you pug into are doomed.
Having said all this, on my VERY next instance (and first heroic on this brand-new 80) i am kicked before the group even gets started with the comments: “your gear sucks!” and “learn how to play before you come out with the big boys”. To which i would like to respond to “the big boys” that last night (only 5 days after hitting lvl80) in what started out as a simple rep-run for guild alts and a few pugged ppl, i completed ICC10 up to Saurfang.
Guess this all just goes to show, don’t judge before you give ppl a chance to prove what they are capable of.