So awful, it was awesome

Everybody’s got pick-up group (“PUG”) horror stories.  If you’ve played WoW for any length of time, and grouped with total strangers to try and get a quest or instance or raid completed, you’ll quickly start building a list of tales of woe.  If nothing else, PUGs should make you feel much better about yourself, I think…after all, since you’re smart enough to be reading this fine blog, obviously you are a top-notch human being in general and WoW player in particular, and do not deserve to group with people so stupid that they have to put a sticky note on their monitor to remind themselves to breathe.

But even the best of us–and I–sometimes have to PUG.  And last night, I ran across a doozy.

I was on my hunter alt, and wanted to run the daily heroic, which was Gundrak.  Now Gundrak isn’t the easiest WotLK heroic out there, in my opinion.  Slad’ran (the poison snake boss) has wiped me more times than I care to think about; even with excellent players and a top healer in T7/T8 raid gear, his Poison Nova can throw out more damage than we can power through.  The Drakkari Colossus is a pain-in-the-ass pray-your-and-your-healer’s-latency-is-low movement fight.  Even Gal’darah, who’s pretty straightforward, will gib a strong tank if the tank has a brain fart and doesn’t get out of whirlwinds.  (Don’t ask me how I know this.  Please.)

But, against my better judgement, I joined the LFG queue for it anyway.  And a couple of minutes later, I got a whisper–”h gun?”

Let’s see.  No complete words, all lowercase, and this on an RP server.  I feel a winner of a run coming on.  Eh, toujours de l’audace, dude, what the hell…”Sure!”, I replied.  I immediately found myself in a group with the group leader (a boomchicken), a warlock, and a male human paladin–obviously the tank, since he had over 40,000 health–named…Hotbox.

Ohhhhh yeah.  The stench of quality is overpowering with this one.

I flew for Gundrak while the leader druid rustled up a healer (another druid), and the five of us headed inside.  I was immediately greeted with Blizzard’s lovely new feature…the “ZOMG are you sure you want to save to this instance??!?!?11?” dialog box.  Hmm.  That’s not supposed to happen.  Well, we were all a bit confused by this, but all of us accepted and thus saved ourselves to that heroic Gundrak instance.  And down the stairs we went toward Slad’ran’s area.

We got to the entrance, ate a Fish Feast, and the paladin “Hotbox” pulled.  Without warning.  Two groups.  Hoo boy.  A frenetic and confused fight ensued in which the warlock and tree died, but we got both the trash groups.  The resto druid popped (yay soulstones) and started rezzing the warlock…as the paladin pulled more trash without saying anything.  Ugh.  We four-manned the trash, got the warlock back in…and then the tree said, “no boss.”

We looked.  Slad’ran wasn’t in his alcove.  We walked over to the alcove and saw that the alcove bridge gizmo had been activated.  In fact, all the gizmos had been activated, the bridge to Gal’darah’s ramp was aligned, and had the trolls and rhinos in position.  That meant that Slad’ran, the Colossus, and Moorabi were all dead.

Now people started getting pissed.  The critchicken who had the “hat” denied vehemently that he’d been in Gundrak that day, as did the rest of us.  And yet somehow, we were looking at an instance where the trash was up, but the bosses weren’t, the worst possible combination.

So the rest of the party started jumping off the ledge into the water.  I was last because, of course, I had to dismiss my pet.  In that period of time, people started getting eaten by the fish.  A clusterfuck ensued, resulting eventually in us getting to the ramp with two more deaths, to which the group leader said, and I quote exactly, “lol.”

Yeeeeah.

We formed back up, buffed, and fought our way up the ramp to Gal’darah’s area…

…and he wasn’t there.  His bodyguards and their rhinos were.  But he wasn’t.

The paladin pulled the rhinos (without saying anything) anyway, and nearly died because we were all too busy going “wtf?!?” in party chat, but we got them.  A ferocious argument ensued where the boomkin protested his innocence and swore he hadn’t been in Gundrak for at least a week.  Hotbox also said he hadn’t been in Gundrak for at least a week.  The other two said it had been longer than that, and I hadn’t had my dwarf in there for literally a couple of months.

So there our tale ends.  Hotbox (!) the male paladin, plus the other four of us, all hearthed our separate ways, probably to never see each other again except amidst the bustling crowds of Dalaran…or in the LFG tool someday, God forbid.  I had a pittance of silver and a locked instance with no way to score the two Triumph badges I wanted.  Either somebody was lying their ass off, or had gotten tricked, or we had a bugged instance.  And it was 25 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.

I balmed my wounded soul by wandering off to the Pig and Whistle in Old Town Stormwind for four hours of the best RP I’ve had in many a month…culminating in a raid by the Stormwind Guard, two near-arrests, three strained marriages, a couple of damaged friendships, and one of the Wildfire Riders’ red-haired paladins telling another of the Wildfire Riders’ red-haired paladins to go fuck themselves, while the third of the Wildfire Riders’ red-haired paladins stood there and shook her head in disbelief.

What’s two Triumph badges in comparison to that?

Now why didn’t I think of this?

This idea from Llanion at Mad Cow Chronicles may be the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.  Get some friends together, strip down naked, start at Ragefire Chasm (or Deadmines for you Alliance types), and tear through instances of increasing difficulty, equipping only what you loot.  How cool is this?

If you’ve ever been That Guy in a PUG:

Hannelore over at The Egotistical Priest has a few things to say to you.  Take them to heart, and you may spontaneously evolve into something with an actual functioning nervous system.

Good things come to those who wait

Last night I noodled around on my alt hunters a bit before logging on Lin and doing a couple of Icecrown quests.  Meanwhile, my wife Rashona was running through normal Halls of Lightning with some mutual friends.  Suddenly on one of my chat channels, I see a member of that party asking “can anybody come and finish HoL with us?  Z’s connection is going flaky.”  Well, I’d been planning to give my aching wrists a night off from tanking, but these are my friends, and that is my wife, and it is Halls of Lightning…

15 minutes, five trash pulls, and one dead Loken later, look what I found.

Happy Panzercow, I am.  Picking the Seal up in place of my old Coren’s Lucky Coin let me yank a +16 defense gem out of my T6 shoulders and replace it with a +7 crit/+11 stamina sparkly out of the guild bank.  Then this morning, I made Revered with the Argent Crusade (I hate you, Alchemist Finklestein, so much) and got the +20 defense/+37 stamina enchant on ye olde Crusader’s Resolution.  23637 health and 21661 armor unbuffed now, 555 defense–and that’s without Titanweave on my cloak and without +20 defense on my shield, so I’ve got a good solid defense cushion now.  Overall, my stats are now solidly enough for most heroics, maybe even the really hard ones like Pinnacle and HoL with a good healer.

I do feel bad about my bud Zemmen not getting this, though.  Don’t worry, Z.  Get that connection fixed and I’ll give Loken the pimp hand all you want until he coughs one up for you.

Heroic cow is heroic

So Linedan is finally starting to tank a few heroics; so far, just Nexus, Drak’theron Keep, and Violet Hold. 

I was admittedly very skittish starting out; folks who know me know that I tend to be pretty insecure about my ability as a tank, even though I’m perfectly competent at it.  But after a few horrid experiences with Burning Crusade heroics–the worst of which was a seven- or eight-wipe run in heroic Slave Pens, the “easy” heroic, back in the day–I basically gave up tanking heroic five-mans until 3.0 and WotLK came out.  I concentrated on raid tanking in Karazhan and beyond for my badges, and left the overtuned BC five-man heroics to the paladins.

Well, despite my fears that Lin’s 22,500 health and 21,500 armor weren’t going to be enough, it all worked out OK.  The Nexus run went well aside from a couple of wipes on Telestra.  The Drak’theron and VH runs were with three people cranking out insane DPS and a very good druid healer, and other than a wipe on King Dred in DK, there were no worries.  We nailed VH with the shield still at 100% and got the achievement for never using a defense crystal…not that I even knew where they were if we did need them.  22-and-a-half-thousand unbuffed health is low for some instances, when you consider that King Dred landed a mangling hit on me for well over 12,000 at one point.  But a good healer, and intelligent planning of cooldown use (saving Shield Wall or Shield Block for special attacks, for example) can help with that.

He’s gotten a few upgrades, and now he’s at 23127 health, 21661 armor, 17% dodge, 15.5% parry, 13.8% block, and 544 defense, all unbuffed.  Tricked out with level 80 buffs in a five-man, he checks in at about 25,500 health, which can be pushed close to 28,000 if I go with Commanding Shout.  I don’t know if that’s enough for Naxx or not (one month and counting!) but it’s enough to get him through heroics for now.  Now, if we can convince Loken to drop his trinket, and Ymiron to part with a Red Sword of Courage…