Lo-Quality WoW

PUGs are the bane for most players.  Getting people who may or may not know what they are doing.  Players who are “loot ninjas”.  And of course, the players who just downright jackasses.  Given the nature of the random dungeon in the looking for group interface, you’re going to have some of each.  And unfortunately, my night started with the last set.

Now don’t get me wrong, you can usually live with a clueless player, unless they are clueless in a way that repeatedly wipes the group.  There are formal ways to deal with “loot ninjas”.  The jackasses?  Not much you can do about them for the most part.  Especially when they include your tank and healer.

So we start in the Halls of Lightning.  We blast through General Bjarngrim quickly and I notice I’m fourth in dps.  But a quick check shows that while my dps output is my usual average, my gearscore is from 1,000 to 1,500 points lower than anyone else.  So fine, I’m in an overpowered group.  That’s usually a good thing.

Volkhan goes down quickly as well, however on the way to Ionar, the healer “mistakenly” says on the party chat “r this warrior sucks.”  “whoops, that was meant for the mt.”  A quick check also shows that the tank, healer and one of the dps are all from the same server, Boulderfist and it’s obvious the joined the random as a group.  Now the “mistake” is pure bullshit.  He tried to fake like he forgot the “/”, however the “r” would be a raid channel, not a “w” (whisper) or “g” (guild) channel, which he would have used if he really meant for me not to see it. 

Then on the way to Ionar, the healer demands for me to “beg him for heals”.  I promptly tell him to “bite me”.  “fine, no heals for you coward.”  I don’t know he thought I was a coward because my dps was so low or because I was from a PvE server.  After all, I’ve had players from PvP servers in real life call me a coward to my face.  I figure, fine, he wants to be a dick?  All I have to do is watch my health more than usual.

We do Ionar and all the way Loken I’m being insulted.  And it’s also obvious that true to his word, the healer wasn’t throwing heals my way except by accident.  The tank and the other Boulderfist dps also join in on the abuse but hell, I’ve dealt with worst in real life, I’m not going to worry about it.

Then on Loken, the tank engages, and then stops.  This was obviously worked out between the rest of them, since I immediately pulled aggro and there was no way my dps should have been enough to pull threat off anyone.  The healer repeats his demand for me to beg.  I don’t say anything, just stand right on top of him so that once I die, the rest will be forced to engage Loken.

Which is exactly what happened.  So I got to watch the Loken fight and then once he was done, I collected my emblems and left, with some parting insults from the jackasses.  And in hindsight, I should have been a jerk right back at them and tried to be a loot ninja, but I wasn’ t exactly thinking clearly at the moment.

Let’s analyze this a little.  For Heroic:  Halls of Loken, you generally have a gearscore above 3k and I have a gs of 4k.  So the fact that they were all 5k gs and above meant that they were overgeared, not that I was undergeared.  So it wasn’t that I was a low-geared person sneaking in on a high-level instance to gear up. 

As I said, it was obvious that they worked out their little trick on me for the last fight.  It was also obvious that they could have 4-man the instance.  If they really objected to my presence, they simply had to kick me from the group.  All you need is a majority vote, which they had.  So if I was such a drag, why keep me around? 

My conclusion?  They just wanted to bully someone and frankly, I couldn’t give a damn for the most part.  I sure wasn’t going to waste my time “getting back” at them.  They weren’t on my server in the first place and the chances of me being grouped with them again is relatively slim.  Maybe they laughed themselves silly on how they showed that “coward warrior”.  So what?  I got the emblems, which is what I wanted in the first place.  My only regret was that I hadn’t been on my Hunter who could have used Misdirection and Feign Death to have Loken play with the healer a bit. 

Now, I realize all this but it still put me in a rather foul mood for the night.  Even getting my 250 Stone Keeper’s Shards achievements didn’t alleviate my mood.  But it was still early in the night, so I did another random.

This one was to Azjol-Nerub.  For the most part, this run went better.  Everyone was in the 4k gs range and my dps was closer in line to all the other dps.  I even picked up the Hadronox Denied achievement, almost by accident really. 

Except during the Hadronox fight, one of the other dps died.  The healer coped to it being his fault.  They bantered a bit.  Then suddenly the dps says “I really blame Aleania.”  Now I don’t know if he was joking or not, but I was already pretty mad and that didn’t help any.  We finished the instance and again, I left the group as soon as loot was rolled on.  Now when I don’t even bother thanking people for the run, even a crappy run, it’s a general sign that I’m just pissed. 

And almost as a glutton for punishment, I decide on one last random.  This one ended up being a Nexus run.  However, to my surprise, we were half-way through the instance.  The rest informed me and another member that we were replacing a couple of guys who just wanted that Chaos Theory achievement and dropped from the group as soon as they got it. 

Which is another PUG pet peeve of mine.  When you do those random dungeons, it’s with the understanding that you’ll do the full run.  Unless you talk about it before hand.  But if you are just doing achievements, do a guild run.  Don’t go around screwing up runs for other people.

The main problem with this run was that the tank was a little off.  I don’t think it was his main spec and he mentioned something to that effect.  Not that he wasn’t able to hold threat, but he had a bad habit of moving around a lot, which meant the bosses moved and made it hard for me to position myself correctly to attack.  Even some of the mob fights were twitchy because of his constant movement.

Either way, at that point I couldn’t put up with it anymore.  I browsed through emblem vendors for a bit but I just couldn’t focus anymore.  So I logged off to go kill things on my xbox 360.  Sometimes, all it takes is a few assholes to ruin ones night.  We’ll see if I can avoid devolving into a raving lunatic again tonight.