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.

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.

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.

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? =-.

I queue up for random and get Forge of Souls.
It’s me, another pug mage, and 3 from same guild (rogue, tank and some other random dps).

We finish buffs and tank pulls first two mobs. I immediately DC’d. maybe happens once a day, but pretty bad timing. I get back in and everyone sez ‘wtf?’ I apologized for the DC and assured them it wasn’t likely to happen again. We get through two more trash pulls and I finally cast a Penance. The rogue chimes up “HOLD UP”. “YOU’RE DISC!? YOUR A F**KING IDIOT.”

The other mage whispers “stop healing him” Ofcourse I had already made the decision to do that.

Next pull, the rogue is doing everything he can to avoid dying, but dies anyway. I say, “how you like them disc heals?” Next thing I see is a votekick box come up. I assume it was started by the pug mage, so I vote to kick rogue. Next thing I know he’s gone. Which means one of his guildies voted him off the island.

A quick exchange of trash talk with the warrior tank. We pug another dps and finish the rest of the instance without a wipe.

Every. Single. Pull.

So I ask him to stop. He still does it. I ask them to stop over and over again because this happens every single pull. I eventually initiate a Vote to Kick which fails because I notice that 3 of the 5 members of this PuG are in the same guild. So I ignore the rogue. And then the tank starts posting damage meters every pull. Seriously.

We get to the first boss. We win with no talking. As soon as the boss drops, the group stands there in silence for a few seconds, and I find myself in Dalaran. I was incredibly angry at this, but like you, I noticed that my timer was low at this point and requeued and got my Emblems in a much less stressful group.
.-= Professor Beej´s last blog ..Beej’s Trick to Making Easy, Fast Gold in World of Warcraft =-.

Now, I could maybe put up with all that (on my main healer at least: I’m well geared and honestly it’s sorta fun in a weird way to see how bad a group is that you can still manage to drag thru a heroic), but the rudeness that often goes with groups like that is just terrible. If we wipe I know they’ll all afk while I run back to res them all, and if something like a glyph book drops they’ll all need on it. Or, there will be some 12 year old rogue who spams recount after every trash fight, or worse, asks over and over in party chat for someone else to. I generally spam something like dispells at that point…

So I am ok with taking the debuff: I have my tank and dps toon to run as well, along with my baby healer, so who cares. I do heroics for the frost bages only, and I just won’t tolerate crap anymore.

I think the average player age on my server is 12.