Lo-Quality WoW

Now PUGs are something people both love and hate, although it’s usually just hate.  Hate it when people don’t do their jobs or have no idea what they should be doing.  Strike that, not knowing what you should be doing isn’t cause for hate, it’s not knowing and not saying anything about it! 

On the other hand, sometimes a PUG is a good thing since you might run across a player who happens to be good but just not a “guildie” type.  Me for instance.  But after proving myself to a couple of people, I used to, and still occassionally do, receive group requests from them.  Sometimes I’m not the best suited or, rarely, sometimes I’m not familiar with the fight, but they would rather have a known good player backing them up then a complete unknown that wipes the group.

Of course, that was also before the cross-realm random dailies, but the same principle applies.  Given the time I play and the fact the realm I’m on is a Pacific coast one, I often do get put into a cross-realm pug with people from Draenor, and if they’re good I make a note of it.  However, that still bites me in the butt sometimes.

The first instance I hit was the Nexus.  And everything was fine and dandy until the healer says “oh, I have to go eat dinner.  Bye now!” in the middle of fighting the very first boss!  If you can’t set aside time for a complete instance run, don’t sign up for a random!!!  Fortunately, one of the other dps guys was able to do spot heals long enough to defeat the boss. 

Fortunately, we were provided with another healer shortly thereafter.  And he didn’t complain that we had already downed one boss.  (Which I’ve had people do before.)  Otherwise, the whole instance was pretty smooth sailing, although I was again struck as to the difference in being melee dps and ranged dps.  If anything, I’m a lot more aware of a bosses hit box as a melee!

After earning my Heroic: The Nexus achievment, my next run was a Drak’Tharon Keep run.  Having just run it with my Hunter two days ago, it was a little odd to be doing it on my Warrior.  Actually, it was an interesting contrast between my Hunter’s run, where everyone had a gearscore above 5,000 and my Warrior’s where everyone was in the high 3k, low 4k gs area. 

In all that, we only got one extra achievement besides the Heroic: Drak’Tharon Keep one.  And it was the Oh Novos! achievement.  It was kind of funny because I believe everyone pretty much ran up the stairs except myself and the tank.  Either way, it worked.

Next up was actually a run at Trial of the Champion.  This was a complete PUG, I don’t think there were two people from the same guild in it.  Now, the main reason I even voluntered for this particular run was that the raid leader was a tank I had just run with the night before.  I figured he knew what he was doing then, he’d know it now.

Nope.  Then again, I doubt many people in the raid knew what they were doing.  Now the raid leader did tell everyone to concentrate on snobolds.  And naturally, when the first one came out, I immediately went after it. 

The way it seems to work in most guilds, when a person get’s a snobold on them, they run towards the melee.  Why?  It allows the melee to use aoe attacks to hit both the boss and the snobold.  Except this guy didn’t run towards the melee, he stayed at range.  Not only that, he begins to dance around while casting, making it that much harder for me to hit the stupid snobold!

Which became important when I realized I was the only one attacking the stupid thing.  And frankly, I just didn’t have the dps output to be doing that by myself.  Heck, the only reason I was doing damage at all was because another snobold was tossed on to me and it helped to keep my rage up!

So we actually go into the second fight with snobolds up.  And people still weren’t assisting me.  Then we wipe when a bunch of us are hit by the paralyzing toxin.  Apparently the tank with the flame debuff on them, didn’t know that he had to come by to clear the paralytic from us. 

So, wipe.  And try again.  And the same thing, except this time it’s a healer who’s dancing around while I’m trying to peel the little annoyance off him.  And this time, the tank decides to tank one of the worms while standing in a slime pool, or whatever that green damaging pool was.  Very disheartening.  And it takes about two seconds after that third wipe, the third wipe when we barely got passed the first boss, that people start dropping out.

Now, this frustrated me to no end.  Among other things, based on gearscore, that first fight should have been a cakewalk!  Another was the lack of vent use.  Or for all I know, they had ven but didn’t tell me the channel.  I really should have been clued off when I first entered the instance and ALREADY saw bodies on the ground!

So after that little disaster, I went back to random dungeons.  This time it was Oculus, which I still consider one of the more annoying instances.  Fortunately, the group was pretty well geared.  And everything was fine, up until we got the dragons.  Now there is basically three types of dragons, a tank, a healer, and a dps.  Normally you take the dragon based on the role you are currently doing.  Not this group.  The tank took a healing dragon and the healer took a dps, leaving us with one healing dragon and four dps dragons!

Of course, I didn’t help any when I got lost almost immediately and got killed by a couple of mobs.  Then everything was fine until we faced Mage-Lord Urom.  This is normally a running battle but the tank decided to stay put.  Which meant myself and the other melee dps, also stayed put.  I didn’t realize the bad position I was in in time and died.

Which in itself wasn’t an issue.  That is, until I got resurrected.  Right on the edge of a frostbomb area.  Where I died again, almost immediately.  I was more or less put out.

then it wsa Ley-Guardian Eregos.  And naturally, our 4 dps, 1 healer dragon formation got ourselves slaughtered readily.  And instead of switching around properly, all the tank said was “we need someone on the red dragon!”.  You know, the one she would normally have taken?

So I bit the bullet and rode that dragon.  Wasn’t quite as familiar with the controls on it, I’ve done the dps and healing dragons on my Hunter several times each.  Fortunately, the tank did give me some helpful tips and we got through it.  Walked away with my The Oculus and Heroic: The Oculus achievements, along with something like a 30 gold repair bill.  Such is life.

My last run was a Trial of the Champion instance.  That one was rather straightforward.  And I was actually glad to have an easier instance after Oculus. 

By then, it was getting too late for me to run a random, so on a whim, I decided to work on some quest related achievements.  One quick quest in Zul’Drak got me The Empire of Zul’Drak achievement.  Five more quests and I got my Might of Dragonblight achievement.  Unfortunately, that was it for the easy stuff, most of the other areas I’m at least two dozen quests short of getting the related quest achievements.  If anything, I really, really could use the money from those old quests…