Pug Tidbits

After taking a bit of a break from instancing for several weeks, I've finally started to hit the dungeon finder again, partly because I was starting to feel somewhat guilty about basically collecting no valour points on my main at all outside of raids, partly because I felt like seeing some low-level instances on my alts again after having levelled several of them purely through questing as of late. I've noticed that I generally seem to go through certain cycles in my play patterns, alternating between max-level and low-level play, instancing and questing, feeling very enthused about the game and feeling very burnt out.

Anyway, as usual many of my pugs didn't leave much of an impression either way, but here are some things that stood out:

Best Player

When I zoned into heroic Lost City of the Tol'vir, the bear tank called Bob immediately asked everyone to be patient with him because it was his first time tanking the instance. I told him not to worry, and as it turned out he didn't really have to ask us to be particularly patient because he did a great job anyway. It might have been his first time tanking the place, but he was clearly already familiar with tanking in general and knew the pulls and boss strategies of the instance inside out.

Since it was such a smooth and pleasant run, the entire group immediately requeued for another dungeon. This time we got Blackrock Caverns, which went slightly less smoothly due to no fault of Bob's, but he managed to save several bad situations through good cooldown usage. If only all tanks in LFG were like him...

Worst Player

Me! Okay, I probably wasn't the worst player among all the people I grouped with, but I've definitely had some serious herp derp moments in my last couple of runs. In the aforementioned BRC run I managed to aggro and die to one of the patrolling dragonkin just as the rest of the group had jumped down the slope to Corla and pulled two additional packs. Fortunately Bob managed to salvage the situation by shifting out of bear form and throwing me a combat res.

Then there was the Zul'Gurub run where, while trying to dodge Venoxis' poison maze, I managed to fall off his terrace and into the water, where I immediately died to the various mobs there. Fortunately the dps was very good and they managed to down the boss anyway, but I still felt like a huge dolt.

And then there was the Grim Batol run with the paladin tank who kept pulling as if he had ants in his pants, so that I could barely keep up with healing even while outgearing the instance by two tiers. I think this threw off my mojo right from the start, so maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when I managed to die to General Umbriss' Blitz. I just remember thinking: "Oh good, he's not targeting me with it, I can stay where I am... wait, he's still facing in my general direction, so I do have to - oh poo, I'm dead". Again the group managed to down him even with me dead (who needs healers anyway) and I was even rewarded with an achievement. Way to go!

Then the group skipped the last two trash packs in the inner circle of the city and I somehow managed to aggro one of them even though I usually never have problems running past them. Since everyone else had already charged way ahead while I was still looting a mob, I was the only one who died. They just continued to kill the next pack without me and said nothing while I corpse-ran back. In a way I almost found myself wishing that they would laugh at me or make some sort of snarky comment... somehow just being ignored and left behind felt even more humiliating, especially as a healer. I have to admit I felt a certain mix of glee and relief when the tank's rogue friend got himself blown up by one of the adds on Drahga, as it at least meant that I wasn't the only one who had made a stupid mistake during the run.

Player With The Best Attitude

On my low level draenei shaman I had a slightly messy but strangely enjoyable Dire Maul West run the other day, in which I ended up with a paladin tank who was retribution spec. No biggie in a lowbie instance as far as I'm concerned, as long as he knows what he's doing and isn't too squishy. He did do reasonably well at holding aggro, and healing him wasn't a problem either with the exception of a couple of bosses where he went splat, but the rest of the group still managed to beat them without wiping.

Still, he was clearly new to the instance, as he felt the urge to run back to the quest giver immediately every time he completed a quest objective and kept going the wrong way. He also might not have been able to speak English, as he never said anything in chat and more importantly never reacted to anything that was said in there either. All the party's well-meaning attempts to tell him "no, this way, over here" were in vain. Eventually we just gave up on trying to steer him and followed him during his meandering through random trash packs, because sooner or later there'd be nothing left but the boss anyway.

Now, all this might sound pretty bad, but somehow I still couldn't help liking the guy. Yes, I generally prefer to have some communication going on, but on the plus side he never complained about all the times he died either. In fact, he never even waited for a res and always released instantly and started running back, even if he had been the only one who had died. This was in fact another thing that convinced me that he must have been a newbie, because he clearly wasn't jaded or entitled - instead he was curious and driven. Death was merely a minor setback, and he was always happy to pick himself up again and try again. In a time where the game has made it so easy to drop any group activity at the drop of a hat without any negative consequences, that kind of perseverance impressed me. Here's to you, little newbie tank. Just keep working at it and you might go far in this game.

Player With The Worst Attitude

In heroic Shadowfang Keep I got a raid-geared bear tank who had some serious issues. After Baron Ashbury's first Asphyxiate I healed the party up to about thirty percent health, as that's more than sufficient to survive the occasional tick from his (dispellable) dot. But Mr Bear Tank didn't think so. He started to yell at me to heal more, then in all caps, then calling me a whore. I politely told him to calm down and that there was no need to top everyone off until near the final phase since the boss just kept putting people back down to one hit point anyway, but he wouldn't believe me.

He and his dps shaman friend then stopped attacking and interrupting the boss and just stood there, letting him heal back up to full repeatedly while the bear claimed to have problems with his mouse. I don't know, maybe it was true, but considering how worked up he had just got about me not topping people off it seemed more like a passive aggressive attempt to wipe us, especially since the shaman stopped too. Eventually they seemed to get bored of it though and we managed to burn the boss down. Then there was an awkward pause during which I can only guess he tried to kick me, but if he did it didn't work, so both he and his shaman friend then dropped group. Their replacements were more sensible fortunately.

Anyway, raging at people in the dungeon finder is generally never a good idea, but raging about people doing it wrong when in fact you are the one who doesn't seem to understand the mechanics just makes you look like an even bigger idiot.

Bad in Blackrock

I continue to be amazed at the current state of pugs for the old heroics. I honestly couldn't make up things as bizarre as the behaviour that some players display there. Good thing I was on my hunter on Friday night, feeling relatively unaffected by other people's failures, and in one of those moods where I was able to detach myself emotionally and just laugh at the whole situation from a distance.

Basically, I had queued up for an old random heroic because I didn't just want to run Zuls and nothing else, and because my hunter still has an old trinket for which about three possible drops in the old heroics would serve as good replacements. I ended up in Blackrock Caverns with a druid tank, accompanied by a priest healer from his guild, a mage and a dps warrior who did over 20k dps on the first pull. Clearly he was an experienced valour point farmer who was also aching for a bit of variety. He would soon regret it.

My spider sense started tingling as soon as the tank decided to pull the first boss with the vast majority of the trash in the room still alive. When I'd seen people try the same thing in the past, he had always called for help and pulled everything nearby into the fight regardless. This time however he didn't, the druid pulled the boss back into the tunnel and I thought "oh well, I guess it works after all". Then the boss suddenly turned around, ran back into the middle of the room to cast his chain spell, and landed us all smack in the middle of three different trash pulls. Mayhem ensued and we wiped.

The druid apologised, we chucked it up to the learning experience and ran back. This time we cleared the room beforehand and killed the boss without any further problems.

On Corla, the druid launched into a lengthy explanation of the fight even though nobody had asked for one and at least one person had asked to just pull already. He also explained it wrong, claiming that the transformation happened at 80 stacks, which we corrected him about. Eventually we started the fight, and the mage messed up despite of the explanation, causing us to wipe again. He apologised though and promised that he'd do it right next time. So he did. I took note of the warrior interrupting all of Corla's fear like clockwork.

When we approached Karsh Steelbender, the druid asked for tactics, claiming that he had never done this boss before. After his elaborate explanation of Corla, this didn't strike me as a very good sign. I misdirected the fire elementals on him when they were on the far side of the boss and explained the strategy. "Oh, I remember! I have done this before!" he exclaimed all of a sudden... and proceeded to pull the boss and just tank him next to the pillar. After a while the warrior ran to the other side and taunted the boss briefly to pull him through and melt his armour. After that the druid seemed to get the idea, though he still moved the boss in a fairly messy manner. We got add spawns several times, but the warrior just soloed them and they appeared to have been stealth-nerfed to not leave lava puddles upon death anymore, which made them a complete non-issue. Anyway, the boss died.

Up to this point I hadn't really considered the run bad. A bit bumpy perhaps, with the better players having to compensate for the worse ones, but that's not at all unusual in a pug. However, things were going to get a lot more interesting still. I foolishly hoped that I would be able to watch Castle in a few minutes, seeing how the last boss was just around the corner... oh, how wrong I was going to be.

We killed the elemental patrol and snuck past the first trash pack on the side by running along the wall. Then the druid asked me to trap the closest mob belonging to the second pack, so that we could "run past it". I probably should have known that this wasn't going to be a good idea, considering the druid's earlier displays of expertise, but with 4.2's crowd control changes, who knew? So I did as he asked, we walked past and I feigned for good measure. Then he pulled Beauty. The trap ran out and the entire mob pack joined the fight, causing us to wipe.

On second thought I realised that I had had a similar wipe to this one in Zul'Aman before, on a different character. I think it's highly ironic that a change that was introduced to make pugging less painful has ended up adding another way for people to wipe stupidly, though I guess I can't blame the players entirely for this one. After all it's very unintuitive for CC not to cause aggro when you cast it, but then cause aggro when it runs out. Sap doesn't do that, and people think that everything works exactly like sap now. Let this be a public service announcement that this is not the case.

Anyway, the funny thing is, the druid didn't even notice. While running back he just talked about how he was confused by the fact that the pups and Beauty aggroed all at once, and when I brought up the trash mobs joining in he was just bewildered. This is when the warrior decided to throw in the towel and left. Then the healer, who was the druid's friend, dropped as well. "Sorry guys," the druid said, "but my healer friend wants to do ZA/ZG so I'm going to leave too." I think I laughed out loud at the screen. If you can't even make it through BRC, you're not doing anyone a favour by queuing for a Zulroic instead.

The mage and I made it back to the trash pull in question and requeued. After about a minute we got a new druid tank in heroic tier eleven gear, another priest healer and a shadow priest. "Oh good," I thought, "this should be finished quickly then". We finished killing the trash. As I tried to move on, I noticed that I was taking damage because the healer hadn't bothered to dispel the shadow prison debuff, so I stopped and waited for it to wear off. Our tank didn't and kept running until he fell over and died at the entrance to Beauty's lair. /facepalm. Once again, heroic raid gear is no indicator of anything.

Meanwhile, the healer asked the mage to create a table. The mage told him that he didn't have reagents on him. The healer ignored this response and kept repeating his request, adding a swear here and there for good measure. The mage finally got him to acknowledge his response by repeating it in all caps. I think they tried to manually trade a stack of food after that, but the mage claimed that it didn't work. Eventually the priest just said "fine" and ported out to fetch some of his own drinks.

The rest of us sat around and waited. Finally the healer ported back into the instance and said "ok go", no less than three times - while he was still at the instance entrance. The tank didn't pay attention to the priest's actual location and just took him by his word. Of course we wiped with no heals. "I didn't mean go right now," the priest snarked in an exasperated tone. What the hell did he mean then? Who says "gogogo" when they don't actually want the tank to pull?

We ran back in and gathered up once again. Except... we were still missing our healer. He was dawdling around somewhere in the middle of the instance, claiming to be lost and demanding that someone should come and fetch him, though as soon as someone started moving he said that he had finally found his way.

When he arrived, we finally got to kill Beauty, though it was awkward and took ages. The druid didn't want any CC and just tanked everything, but nobody but me bothered to dps the adds. When I noticed this I eventually switched to Beauty as well, since me staying on the pups on my own wasn't going to achieve anything. Afterwards the healer chided us for having bad dps, saying that we really needed to pick up our game even if his healing was "grate" [sic].

On the next pull he then just let the tank die and dropped group mid-combat. Okaaay. Our next healer was a paladin called "Deathlol" (with some accents), which I thought was hilariously appropriate. With him we finally finished the instance. I offered to kite the adds on the last boss even though I wasn't very good at it, but apparently I've improved over time as we got the Ascendant Descening achievement. I also got a new bow, but my tv show was already halfway over by then. Two bosses and three trash pulls really shouldn't take over half an hour, but I guess you can't win them all.

State of the dungeon finder

I still haven't dared to brave the dungeon finder for a random heroic on my own, but I'm slowly trying to wean myself from only running with guild groups. To be honest I kind of have to - unsurprisingly, the tanks have finished their heroic gearing before anyone else, and I'm pretty sure that even some of the tanking alts have overtaken me on gear progression by now... either way the number of guildies that are interested in joining a heroic group is going down each day, and being able to get a full guild run together is rapidly becoming a luxury. I don't see that as an entirely bad thing though, as I've said in the past that - unlike many other players - I do like pugs. I think at the moment the main thing that still scares me a little is that I haven't done all the heroic dungeons yet, and I'm terrified of having my "first time" with a bad group. Once I know what to expect I'm usually a lot more confident.

Nonetheless, I'm working on it. Initially I only ran with full guild groups; then we had some runs where we pugged one person. The players we got were all very good and we didn't have any problems with them. From there I dared to take it to runs where it was three guildies vs. two puggers. We only got one completely hopeless dps at one point, but after we kicked him it was smooth sailing again. And last night I finally braved the dungeon finder with only a single guildie of mine by my side, an elemental shaman.

We got Vortex Pinnacle, which I hadn't done on heroic before, so I was slightly nervous even though I had heard that it was definitely one of the easier heroics. Fortunately my shaman friend was an absolute star, assigning crowd control on trash and patiently explaining fight mechanics to me and the tank, who hadn't done the instance before either. The dps did their job admirably, using crowd control, interrupts and doing good damage.

The tank was kind of an interesting case. As I mentioned, he admitted that it was his first time in there, but he didn't say so up front. In fact, he charged into the first pull with no crowd control and I immediately broke into a cold sweat at the thought of what that kind of tanking was going to mean for the rest of the run. However, my shammy friend nagged him about marks, so he set some... and then didn't really follow them himself. Again he was asked about this, at which point he finally admitted that he didn't really know what he was doing, and could someone else please mark for him? No problem! I'm just glad that he fessed up.

On those pulls with the tol'vir in the anti-magic field he was advised to make a line-of-sight pull... and had apparently no idea what that meant, as he charged right in anyway. We lived through it, but I couldn't help but wonder whether the tank hadn't just outed himself as a Wrath baby, as anyone that learned the ropes before WOTLK would have known what doing a LOS pull meant. Still, aside from that our tank did very well, used his tools appropriately and generally came across as a genuinely nice fellow. We had a pretty smooth run in the end, with only two wipes on the second boss as some of us had to get used to dodging the tornadoes first. It makes me hopeful for my future pugs; I'll just have to remember to also keep an open mind and to encourage communication like my shaman friend did.

Now, normal pugs are something that I've been doing aplenty, mostly on my druid. Unfortunately they've largely been less fun than my heroics. There is less wiping, mind you, though people have become a bit more tolerant of it even in normals, but the attitudes are rarely pleasant.

Especially in the low-level instances, that is Blackrock Caverns and Throne of the Tides, you'll often run into people that behave as if they've freshly stepped out of a WOTLK heroic and haven't got a clue about what's changed this expansion. "Gogogo"-ing, pulling for the tank, you name it. This isn't helped by the fact that BRC in particular seems somewhat undertuned on normal mode so that you can completely ignore many boss mechanics, such as Corla's zealots and the crepuscular veil of Obsidius's adds.

As you go up in levels this gets a bit better and people will at least wait for the tank to pull, but crowd control is still something that nobody really bothers with. On some pulls it really doesn't matter; on others it means that the healer has to do overtime and then hope that the tank is willing to wait for mana before charging into the next group.

Boss mechanics, interestingly enough, are something I've had few problems with on normal. Occasionally someone will mess up because they didn't know what to do and didn't ask for an explanation either, but even if that leads to a wipe it's usually not a problem to do it right next time. Sometimes the one who messed up will rage-quit because clearly the rest of the group sucks and wiped him, but then you'll only have an even easier time with his replacment, so you still win. Today in Grim Batol I had a warrior who seemed to consider it hilarious to intentionally do the wrong thing on bosses (such as charging Drahga's elemental add to make it explode or running all over the place during Erudax' shadow gale) and we still made it through.

The thing that has really been bugging me in my normal runs however is the incredible loot greed. For example I was healing a normal Stonecore run where the party repeatedly commented favourably on how I had managed to heal through some very sticky situations when we got multiple trash groups at once - and then when Azil dropped her healing trinket, the mage took it and left. /sigh. Why are classes with no healing spells even allowed to roll on trinkets with a healing proc?

Today in Grim Batol, a similar scene. Drahga drops his spirit cloak and the warlock wins the roll over me. I call him out on it and he says that it was better than "the crap cloak" he had - he was wearing the same cloak as me actually, another drop with spirit on it. Maybe he should try rolling on dps gear for a change? In a funny twist of fate, I then won the caster trinket off the last boss which works for both damage dealers and healers, and suddenly the lock offered to trade me the cloak for the trinket. So let me get this straight, you roll on a healer cloak - which you shouldn't have done in the first place - and then graciously offer to trade it to me in exchange for an item that you want as well? How about NO? Is this some sick new kind of loot whoring strategy, needing on everything you can in hopes of being able to use it as a bargaining chip against your competition later on? "Oh hey, I'll trade you that item I ninjaed from you earlier if you give me this drop now..." What will they come up with next?

Likewise I was tanking a normal BRC run today, when I saw a mage roll against the healer on a spirit ring, the healer won, and then the mage got all pouty because the healer had already won some other healing loot earlier as well. Yes, because if someone gets lucky with drops for their class/role, you obviously should try to take some of their loot away just to spite them. What.

I miss the times when people were able to be genuinely happy for someone else getting a great item for their class and spec instead of greedily trying to grab everything that the system will let them roll on just because it has a single useful stat for them on it.

What have other people's pugging experiences been like?