Pickup: 1: composed of or employing whatever persons are available on a more or less impromptu basis:
It was a Monday. It was 1800 hours when I got the call. My healing services were need in SSC. The Carnage strike team already cleared it out on Sunday so I tasked myself to bring in my alt, Saphfira.
It was 3 hours of hell that I wish I had back. It didn’t help that my beloved Canucks were getting stomped on by Minnesota (was listening to it on the radio).
Anyway, this is definitely the last time I ever sign onboard a pickup raid of any sort in the 25 man region, and here’s why:
Incompetent/Knowledgeless Raid Leader: The guy quarterbacking the raid clearly did not know the entire details of the Tidewalker encounter. He did not know that the Naga patrol behind Morogrim can be despawned by aggroing him. There’s a little tip for you budding SSC Guilds. If you want to clear out a quick group of Naga’s behind him, send in a Hunter with control of his pet and aggro Tidewalker. Make sure your raid is safely out of the way by falling back to the wooden bridges on the way in there. Once the pet dies, the patrol behind him will despawn saving you about 4 minutes worth of trash. He also did not know about Tidewalker’s ~50 yard Water Tombing ability. And when your Paladin tank is in the same area as Tidewalker lighting up consecrate and suddenly gets tombed…
Lack of Common Sense: Warlocks DoTTing up sheep targets. Tanks not grabbing targets fast enough. Not following instructions to move when asked to. Not running back when your corpse is literally on a boss. Shall I go on?
Attempting to Shortcut Mobs: Normally I’m a huge proponent of optimizing raid time. But when you’re pugging a difficult 25 man instance like this, it’s way better to be safe than sorry. In this case, we circumvented some of the Nagas by swimming underneath the wooden bridge towards Tidewalker and got up on to the platform on the other side. Naturally someone pulls a Boglord, which chain pulls nagas, which chain pulls murlocs. Time to break out the toilet paper. It’s another wipe. Rather than trying to skip 4 pulls, it would’ve been better to regroup on the bridge and just plow through them. 5 minutes of dealing with trash is better then 20 minutes of wiping twice and running back.
Inefficient Use of Time: Looking for people instead of actually raiding. A good hour and a half was spent trying to find the necessary players geared enough and willing enough to go in. The problem with SSC and TK right now is that most players only have one main that’s even anywhere close to being able to try out this content. Rarely are they ever going to have 2. Players on their mains are more than likely to raid T5 instances with their own Guild instead of a pug.
Lack of Consistent Work Ethic: People were asked to bring pots and flasks and other consumables to a raid. Clearly not everyone did. If some people aren’t going to be putting in 100% then they should not be there.
The Murphy Factor: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. And yeah it went wrong in a very big way.
In other news, Carnage will not be raiding on next Sunday. There are only 3 weekends in the entire year that we do not raid on.
1: Christmas
2: New Years
3: Super Bowl
It’s going to be a short week but a good week.
Hey Matt?
Sunday, January 27 isn’t Super Bowl Sunday; February 3 is. 🙂
Thanks Kestrel :D. You know, I should seriously stop writing at 1 AM. Last week, Phaelia pointed out to me that I used the wrong poll :(. And now I did this, this week =D. Oh my. Shows that I’m only human.
You the odd thing was we did Lurker a few days before and it went rather smoothly
But I have to agree it was poorly run and had enough idiots in it to make it worse
I sent the Leader a long PST after and told him I wouldnt “pug” SSC/TK with this guild anymore eventhough I am in it
Ill wait for the Friday night SSC with the alts of people that are in BT/Hyjal. They clear 5/6 SSC and 3/4 TK in about 4-5 hours
Sorry to hear about how your raid went lastnight matt 🙁
It’s a good thing you decided not to go.
I was busy leveling my shaman alt (still am) and when i was level 62 i joined a ZG pug.. i was pretty sure it wasn’t a smart move but my curiocity won the tug of war with my brains.
As in your raid the Raidleader was an idiot.. by mere luck and due to half of the raid being level 70’s we managed to down the bloodlord surprisingly enough. Also the snakeboss but that one is hardly a challenge 🙂
The spiderboss is were things went bad, we wiped due to lack of tactics and the whole thing fell apart. Another 3 hours of my life wasted.. ah well.
PuGs suck. I’m sorry 🙁
I don’t think I’m ever going to pug anything past perhaps heroic. I’ve tried Kara a few times with no-so-desirable results.
One exception may be a guild run (someone else’s guild) who are a few men short due to unavoidable circumstances and they need, say, one more healer and a dps. As long as the guild had been there before.