Lo-Quality WoW

A rather short night for my hunter, although that’s become something of a standard lately. I managed to get in my dailies, greatly assisted by the Argent Crusader’s Tabard allowing for a quick port over to the tournament grounds. However, when I tried to get into a Heroic Trial of the Champion, that’s where things took an extremely wrong turn.
I was just about to switch to my mage when I got the invite. I checked and saw that the other three already in the party were all Death Knights, so I knew we were searching for a healer. A quick check in Looking For Group showed only dps people. So I had time to fly back to the Tournament grounds. We search for awhile, when the leader asks if anyone had a guildmate who could heal. I said that I had a healer on but he was currently in Trial of the Crusader. The leader replied “lol, and that’s where we’re going!”

“What?” Apparently he didn’t know there was a difference between Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader. Okay, that’s fine, nothing to worry about. He then finds a shaman who had to respec over to restoration to act as a healer. Then one of the other DK’s asks for a summon and the leader says “there’s no summoning stone here.” “Er, yes there is, I’m standing right next to it.” was my reply. Okay, again, no panic, not everyone knows about that summoning stone for some reason.

So while we’re waiting for the Shaman to respec, I and one of the other DKs start talking about whether we’ll run out after the dismount or not, of which we were both in favor of. “What are you guys talking about?” asks the leader. “We’ll after we are auto-dismounted, usually you run out to give everyone a chance to get setup for the ground fight.” “What do you mean?” Uh, oh. Now I was getting worried. However, I’m interrupted by the Shaman saying that it’ll take him several minutes to respec, which brings in another worry. That tells me is that he’s not dual spec and may not even have a “healing set” on him. Yeah, that’s a big sinking feeling right there.

Anyway, we eventually summon the shaman (and for some reason we try to summon the DK standing at the instance entrance) and one of the DK’s goes in early to kick off the encounter since it takes a minute or two to get going. I get in and mount up in time to see the leader zone in and go “huh? What’s going on?” “Get your lance and get mounted” “Damn, I don’t have a lance” and he runs back out right past the lance rack near the entrance! At this point, I’m already complaining on the guild channel because this shaping up to be one of those PUGs where I just end up banging my head on my table.

The guy comes back in and one of the DK’s asks that he give the tank lead or assist so that the tank can mark the targets. “Okay, who’s the tank?” “Wait. You don’t know who the tank is?” “Isn’t it ‘DK X’?” “No, I’m not the tank, ‘DK Y’ is!” How the heck can a guy be leading a party and not know who his tank is?!? It’s right up there with the guy who I was with who grabbed two priests, expecting them to be heals, only to find that both were shadow priests! You ask that stuff BEFORE you go into an instance.

And then the idiot has the audacity to go “so, what do I need to know about this encounter?” “What? You’ve never been here before.” “Nah, it’s my first time. So what do we do?” But it’s too late and the encounter has started. We do fine until we start facing off against the horde Champions themselves. We knock one off his horse, however our tank also gets dismounted. And instead of running to another horse, he stands there and starts melee combat with the mounted opponents! I’m about to yell at him to remount when I get dismounted. I run to get remounted and when I’m back up, I see that the one horde champion we had dismounted had remounted himself. Nobody had trampled him to keep him down!

We still work at it and managed to dismount all three. So when we auto-dismount, I’m already running for the entrance. The leader DK follows me out but for whatever reason, the other two DKs and the shaman don’t make it out. And instead of waiting to switch back to normal weapons or even rebuff, the leader DK runs back in again! So after the semi-wipe, we go back in and the leader DK is going “why’d we run out? We had them!” Now considering the other three died really quickly after I got out of the instance, but included the tank and the healer, well that should have been a clue that we in no way “had them”.

Okay, still trying not to panic at this point but I can already feel a migraine building. We heal up, get our regular gear on, and someone starts marking. We briefly discuss which one to take on first when the leader DK pipes up with “Why does it matter?” We explain that each one has different class abilities and depending on which ones we were facing, it’s important to take them out in a particular order. “I still don’t see why it matters, we can take them.” Fine, be an idiot.

Just like I am by staying. But we engage. And we wipe quickly after both dps DKs go down. At this point, I’ve had enough. “I’m not in the mood for this. Sorry” and leave the group. I’m dps, so I’m easy to replace after all. I then go over to my mage.

Now I don’t know it they ever got further than that. I know they were in there for at least another hour or so. But this was the second time I got into a Heroic ToC and it was a total waste of time, only I kept it to a minimum and left early. But that leader DK shows all that’s wrong with some players and why I hate PUGs at times.

Even though he was the “leader” he wasn’t really keeping track of who was in what role. And while I personally believe if you don’t know an instance that you should try it normal first, I was alright with him starting with the heroic version. But if he didn’t read up or watch a video on it, he needs to mention sometime before we zone in that he doesn’t know the fight, not when the first encounter is started. Heck, we spent several minutes waiting for the Shaman to respec where we could have leisurely explained the fights to him. And that thing that actually pissed me off the most was when I inspected him and saw that he had a Piccolo of the Flaming Fire equipped. I sure as hell hoped he switched it out during the fight but if he kept it on during the fight, well that would definitely help to explain his barely adequate dps output.

I think I’m starting to understand some of the complaints I’ve been reading about since patch 3.2, the Call of the Crusade came out. Trial of the Champion does drop a lot of nice gear, better than some Naxx stuff in my opinion. But it does seem like there’s a lot of people who are “skipping” content and running willy-nilly into ToC. Yes it’s a 5-man, but you still need some level of gear for it, and if you’re not willing to get at least adequate gear and expect to “coast” to the upgrades while everyone takes the load of the fight, do it with your guild or friends, not in PUGs.

Sigh, sorry, it just really set me off last night. Anyway, I fumed on my mage for awhile when my guildmate let me know they were doing the Vault of Archavon 25-man. So I hop back on my Hunter. Fortunately it was an Agency run and it’s become sort of rote for us. Oddly enough, the shaman from the ToC was also there and caused some controversy, which I’ll get to in a sec. And quite differently from normal, there were about 5 of us hunters in the raid. I’m so used to being either the only hunter or with one or two others in a 25-man. We go in and while it takes me a bit, I end up in the top three total damage dealers, under two other hunters. Considering one guy was hitting around 7k dps and I was around 5k dps with raid buffs, I don’t feel too bad about my ranking.

Anyway, Emalon goes down and there’s a shaman/hunter pvp item that drops. Well, the shaman won it but he had been with us as a resto shaman, which caused the controversy. Yes, he “normally” plays enhancement but he was there as resto and in most 25-man raids, whatever role you’re playing in the raid is what’s considered your “main spec” for loot rolls. For instance my warrior’s “main spec” is her tanking spec but if I’m in a raid as a dps, I could only roll on tanking gear during the “off-spec” roll. Now, either way I still wouldn’t have won the item since I managed to roll a measly “4” but that still urked me a bit. Now I kind of wished I hadn’t cleared out my recount data. I’m curious to see if he was effective as a healer, which would have mollified me a little but still it irritates me when stuff like that happens.

Archavon himself was simple as usual. And naturally, two rogue specific items dropped off him when we didn’t have any rogues at all! I know they talked about doing an Obsidian Sanctum 25-man but I was tired and way too pissed to be playing at that point, so I logged off. Here’s hoping tonight will be a little more relaxing. I can’t keep playing WoW if it’ll keep raising my blood pressure as it has been the past few days.