Lo-Quality WoW

Doing Pick Up Groups (PUGs) requires a certain flexibility and patience. You never quite know what you’ll get. Some will group you with guys who really know what they’re doing, who work well together and with you. Others are so dysfunctional that you just want to pull your hair out, where people just can’t get it together no matter what. Most fall in between the two extremes. And it’s very unusual where I get to experience all three in one night.
The first up, the good. I got an invite to a Heroic Halls of Stone with what was apparently a guild run, and they just needed to pick up another dps. Oddly enough, as I get the invite, I get a whisper asking for my crit, ap and hit rating from another group doing a Naxxramas run. Now I had already committed to the HoS run anyway, and I try not to just ditch groups. But the whisper back is “Sorry, you’re too underpowered.” Huh? Now I’m not the most powerful hunter out there but I know I’m not underpowered for Naxx. Whatever, especially since I check later and find out they picked up a hunter who had 400 less ap and was carrying only enough hit for a 2.9% rate. He had a 2% higher crit rate but you don’t crit if you don’t hit your target. But I’m not bitter about being called “underpowered”…

Or maybe I was. The HoS group I’m with, while buffs push me to around 2200 dps, the top dps is hitting close to 4000 dps. (Although even his guildmates were calling him overpowered.) The whole run goes smoothly, the tank actually does a good job of placing target marks, the healer is keeping everyone almost at full health instead of just the tank, and the dps are doing good at concentrating fire and keeping the healer safe. Krystallus goes down so fast, I don’t even remember seeing us getting hit with a Petrifying Grip. Maiden also goes down fast and I get the Good Grief achievement.

The Tribunal of Ages likewise goes well, even when I mess up and get caught in a bad spot by the damage beam. It had pinned me against a wall and by the time I got moved out of it and away from the splash area, I was down very far on my health bar. But as I said, the healer was on top of it and got me back up to almost full in short order. The Tribunal fight is always a bit chaotic by nature and is a challenge to everyone. But at the end of it, I still end up with the Brann Spankin’ New achievement which almost didn’t even happen when a mob broke through our perimeter. Fortunately I caught him at the last second, and the tank was good at grabbing the aggro from me when I did. (Which I really appreciated.)

We actually almost pull the trifecta and get the Abuse the Ooze achievement as well but I think I screwed it up for them. When they said to stop dps, it actually takes me a few seconds to stop shooting and to stop Mudgie from eating things. But instead of complaining or blaming me, they just said “good job” and we were done and I headed off to Sholazar.

As I was doing the Oracle quests, I get a request for Naxx. I check and it’s not a full group yet, so I hop the bird to get there. Sholazar is about the worst plays to be since you have to go around most of Icecrown to get places. I almost get there when I get the “Dammit, why didn’t you tell us you needed a summon?” And yes, I probably should have said something. But if they were in a rush, they should have also mentioned something. Oh well.

I get in and I ask them which quarter they were in and it was Arachanid. I join up with the group as they’re getting ready to attack Anub’Rekhan. Now before I continue, I need to mention that we are on Ventrillo. What is Ventrillo? It’s a software that allows voice communication and is pretty widely used in WoW. It’s actually very useful in raids, which often have somewhat complicated battles or ones that need coordination of some sort. I picked up a headset specifically to use with Vent and I run it off my work laptop so I can have that separate from my personal laptop which runs my WoW. I generally have my mic off though, because most people don’t want to hear whatever show or music I have going on in my apartment. Why is all this important? Because the Vent channel is absolutely quiet, which bothers me a little. There usually is at least a little chatter on the channel.

But we go in and Anub’Rekhan goes down quiet easily and I net the The Arachnid Quarter achievement. In the previous run, they had grabbed me just after him so I was sitting on two bosses down in Arachnid for awhile. What does make it interesting though is that we were actually short a dps with the rogue in the group disconnecting at the start of the battle.

We move on to Grand Widow Faerlina, which is wear things start to go wrong. All the way there, the rogue is disconnecting and even his Vent connection is flaky. Ah well, but we get to the Widow and the leader announces that we’ll just heal through the Frenzy. Now, there is an achievement for that but as I’ve said, PUG runs are generally not the place to be trying to get these achievements since it usually requires a bit more coordination than normal. But if that’s how he wants to run it, fine. And naturally we wipe. We again notice that the rogue wasn’t there for the battle and the decision is made to replace him. We pick up a warlock and there’s a brief comedy of errors as the rogue reconnects but realizes we replaced him. He isn’t mad, even he realized that if he was disconnecting on us then it wasn’t doing us any good. The problem is the warlock hears this and assumes we’ll stay with the rogue and he leaves us. It takes awhile but we get him back and then go for another try.

And again we wipe. This time, the leader starts complaining that we need to kill the worshipper to remove the Frenzy. Well, considering we were told we were healing through the Frenzy and wasn’t told otherwise for the second try, we did the same thing we did to the first. Not only that, but the warlock we used to replace the rogue? He disconnected during the fight! Then he also reveals that his connection has been flaky all night so he’s gonna call it a night. So we work on replacing him when suddenly a healer drops. And it’s only when I ask that the leader reveals that he knew the healer was leaving since it was late for them. At this point, there’s also grumbling from one of the other members. “Can’t we get this done? It took us 3 hours to down the first boss.” What? Now I know I hadn’t been in there for 3 hours, so that tells me they had been there for awhile before I even showed up. And it’s at this point that a sinking feeling starts settling in.

We get our replacements and we go again, this time marking the worshippers. The way this normally works, when Faerlina Frenzy comes up, there’s a call out on a marked target that we take down, which removes the Frenzy. We go in, and I hear “kill Skull”. So I turn, blast away at the skull target, and then turn back to see…the Frenzy still up. What? But the tank is still up and we get through the first Frenzy. Again this goes awhile when I hear “kill Square”. I turn, target, kill, and the Frenzy is still up. We wipe and then start getting yelled at by the raid leader for not kill the worshipper. I mention that we did kill the worshipper but that the call was too early. He then says “I called it out, I even gave a 10 second warning!” That’s when I realize he was counting on an add-on, which does usually help warn you when a special ability is going to hit. The problem was, he called out the kill based on when the add-on said the Frenzy was up, not when he saw it go up. Thus we were killing the worshippers just before the Frenzy kicked in and the worshipper death didn’t remove the effect. Now add-ons, especially for timing, come close but are never exact which is why you use them to help you but you don’t just rely on them.

But we regroup and go for another try. There is a brief “huh” moment when one of our mages says “the warlock is only doing DOTs again.” I point out that we replaced the warlock before our last try. So not only is our communication poor, but people aren’t even paying attention. And predictably, we wipe again. This time, two people drop out and three more, including the raid leader, just go offline. Now the three who went offline were all in the same guild, which told me they just decided to quit without telling the raid. And because the raid leader went out, we couldn’t remove the offline members or find replacements. I myself turn to leave when I find out that we’ve been there long enough that the mobs have respawned and I die a very messy death.

That PUG examples quite a few things that can make a PUG worse than it should. Communication was poor or non-existant, not even making effective use of the voice channel we had with us. They pulled people in, myself included, without warning them that they were joining a group that was already “in” the instance. They wanted to do strategies that require coordination with people who probably have never seen each other before. And there were people joining in a raid when they know they have a bad connection and would more than likely get disconnected during the fights. We were lucky it was just dps, one guy I ran with told me how he did a raid where the main tank kept disconnecting and it wasn’t until much later that the tank finally revealed there was a storm system in his area and that his power had been going off and on all night!

So I’m a little pissed now, locked in a piss poor raid instance, and I go off to do some more dailies to make up the money I lost from repairing. While during this, I get a guy asking me if I knew the Eye of Eternity fight. Now I could have lied but I honestly told him that I had read about the fight but I hadn’t experienced it myself. Later he comes back to say that he’s sorry but the group doesn’t want to have to explain the fight and wanted someone who knew it. I was actually alright with that. Especially groups that are time constrained, some people don’t have the time to explain the fight to someone new to it or the patience to deal with the learning curve inherit to trying a new fight. And I knew that the Malygos fight was pretty complex. So I told him it was no problem and continued on my merry way.

It was maybe half an hour later when I hear from the raid leader of the group from before asking if I wanted in on the fight. I told him I did but I thought he was looking for someone who knew the fight. He then asked if I had seen the video, and I had. “Then you know the fight” and I got an invite! To be honest, it’s more important to me that someone has read the fight and strategy rather than seeing the video. Videos tend to be of rather poor quality and watching them never quite conveys the feeling of being in there. But the raid leader knew I was going for the first time and I guess they were at the point that they just wanted it done, so they were willing to deal with me.

Well, Malygos ends up being quite an experience. It’s a three phase fight which requires you to do certain things at certain times during the phases. But it looks like it’s a guild raid, with about half being pick-ups, which gives me some hope. And I also hear chatter on the Vent channel, which reassures me after the Naxx raid. I didn’t quite realize how much of a pain this fight is for hunters. Dragons are always annoying. I have to be far enough out so I can still do dps but I have to be still close enough to get heals and the healer has to be close enough to heal the main tank. And with the dragon being so big, I sometimes have to step quite a ways back to be able to range him. Also, when he does his vortex attack, Malygos briefly flies up and hovers over us since we’re huddled up in the center, which again puts me into melee and dropping my dps down the tubes.

But we barrel through and it’s on to phase 2. This phase is a mobile battle, because there are anti-magic shells that you have to fight in so you can survive the dragon blasting away. There are also adds you have to take out that are on floating disks. Taking out the add drops the floating disk, allowing the melee classes to join the fight with those at range. Except the first couple of adds actually come close to the ground and with trying to stay in the shrinking anti-magic shells, well, I find myself in melee half the time for the first minute of the phase. I do make up for it since I tend to be the only ranged attacker who can hit the ones floating above us. Which is probably the only reason I got a battle rez when I get caught by a Deep Breath attack between moving from shell to shell. I still appreciate it since I’m still only about 6th on the dps chart, meaning I wasn’t the most important dps out there. (And before you ask, I wasn’t slacking off but the constant shifting to put me in to melee combat just wrecked havoc with my dps numbers.)

We make it through and we’re on to phase 3, which puts us on dragons. We had already talked strategy so we knew that one guy was going to be the “healer” for the group and was marked with a star. The rest of us were to dps and move when we were told. Now, this fight is a three dimensional fight, making movement coordination a little difficult especially if you have to stay near enough to the healer to stay alive. With the only thing marking the healer is a little raid marker that’s hard to see with all the dragons on the screen, it makes it very difficult. It also requires you to use your mounts ability buttons. Now my general shot macro is my “3” key, which on the dragon is the healing key. Which means, I would occasionally hit it by accident. Otherwise, for my first time, I do pretty well, even managing to get my shield up when Malygos focused on me. But we still wipe because he Enrages and we drop like flies when he does.

Second try and it goes better. I don’t die in phase 2 and we actually hit phase 3 with enough time to down Malygos. That is, until half the raid doesn’t stick with the star and gets wiped out in one blast. Third try and we pause briefly to repair. Fortunately, I do have the Traveler’s mount and we can repair right in the instance instead of running back to the outpost. We go in and again phase 3 is our downfall. So far I did a good job of staying with the healer and I’m usually one of the last to die. This time the raid leader threatens to kick the person who doesn’t stick with the healer out of the raid. Fourth try and this time, I accidentally take an oblique angle from the group and I’m the first to die in phase 3. Fortunately, the raid leader doesn’t kick me out, which I really appreciated but we again wipe, although this time we got Malygos down to his last 100k hp before he kills everyone.

Fifth try and the raid leader calls a last try. We repair and go in. This time we’re on the ball. I do have a brief moment of panic when I accidentally activate a whisper, meaning I sent a whisper to the raid leader full of movement key taps. But I recover and get back in the group. This time, we take Malygos down and I get the The Spellweaver’s Downfall achievement. I’m so elated, that I forget to get out of the static field and die again. (You always need to remember that boss aoe attacks tend to linger around until their timer runs out, even if the boss is long dead.) But the raid leader is nice enough to wait to loot until I and two others who died, get back in. Now among the drops is Black Ice which tempts me quite a bit but I was so grateful for the group for allowing me to stay in that I pass on the opportunity.

Now that last PUG is about average for one, although closer to the good side. Better communication and effective use of it, except for a couple of times when someone called out for a move a little too early. For the most part people were doing their jobs but it wasn’t perfect and I include myself in that criticism. But it was over and I was exhausted at this point, so I went to my warrior to spend the rest of the evening. I was just instanced out.