Well on the off chance you missed it patch 3.3 is live! and with it comes the next installment of it came from the P.U.G., a column where I throw myself into random groups and the report the end results.
With the patch last night we got three new heroics, The forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection. After much server raid instance stability issues, my guild decided to call it an early night, breaking off into heroic groups to knock out the three new heroics. I have things to take care of administration side so I bow out and take care of some behind the scenes guild maintenance. When I was done all the guildies had gone for the day, so it was time to open up the brand new LFG tool and get my rear in The Forge of Souls.
I open up the tool and put my check mark in The Forge of Souls and then sit and wait. After about 10 minutes the group fills up and I’m delighted to try to use the new port to instance function. I hit my button and the zone loads and one by one everyone pops into the instance. I myself am on the Zul’jin server, I get two people from Arthas a Gnome Warrior and a hunter, and then a rogue and a mage. Everyone is fitzing with their UI’s so we give them a few minutes and while we’re waiting around the Gnome Warrior notices I have a Val’anyr.
“well shit, guess I don’t have to worry about this pugging tool, that or I hit the konami code before I went in, this should be sweeeeeeeettttttt”
we go through and we do our pulls and things are going smoothly, then my earth shield tracking mod goes on the fritz. I type out in party that I need a minute to reload my UI and then hit the /RL to get it going. When I come back, all of the party is nearly dead! Apparently they missed my message and pulled not one, not two, but three groups. Before I can catch up to them the mage and the rogue explode. The hunter follows as soon as his deterrence drops, so it’s just me and the Gnome versus about 5 mobs. I’m dispelling curses and refreshing earth shield and dpsing when I can and eventually we stave off a wipe and down the mobs. I res up the dead, and the hunter asks
I point out that I had to reload my ui and we carry on. The group goes on to finish the zone before the server explodes and dumps us all back in Dalaran. All in all a good run.
I decide to give the random tool another go and this time leave it completely on random. I wind up in a group with a mage, a warrior, a paladin and a DK. We wind up in heroic gundrak. First question I ask
“Ok, who’s the tank!?”
The paladin pipes up
“the one that’s got 45k health”
I look over the party list and see that the paladin, warrior, and dk all have roughly the same health and the paladin and war are in prot spec.
“well.. I’m just asking cause all of you are pretty much prot spec. That’s cool though at least we’ll never die!”
The paladin tries to reply but then must have looked and saw in face all three plate classes were in prot spec. We all have a good laugh about it and go on. The run goes smooth and we complete it and go our separate ways.
I dare say the smoothest pugs I’ve had in a while. Everyone was good natured and equally geared, and now that we can pull from other servers finding groups is much easier. There is no waiting to get to the instance you can just click on the tool and port in, and then when you’re done you can port out. It’s handy and I’ll be honest this was the highlight for me on the first day of patch 3.3. The tool works and works really well. Everyone in my groups was of comparable gear levels, the groups were actually fairly balanced and well… quite honestly it made me a little giddy. I know I’ve been eagerly awaiting this tool since I heard about it at Blizzcon and it was nice to see how it worked in a live environment. Good job Blizz I think you hit this one out of the park!
So have you guys gotten to try the new LFG tool? Any good stories to share? Any horrible stories to share?
Next time maybe I’ll have more drama to share but until then, happy healing!
My first go on the random LFG put me in a group for Ramparts. All looked good until the DK tank ported in. We notice straight away some thing is up because he has no gear on so we ask him to put his stuff on and lets get going.
He then proceeds to tell us that his account has been hacked and is waiting for his gear to come back and then asks us to run him through the instance (we are a mix of level 60’s) and pleads to us not to kick him!
When we replaced him we got another tank pretty quickly and I have to say the LFG tool has worked very well and the waiting times to get a group going are very low.
I’m finding this tool to be nothing but pure win. The one time we did have a punk in the group it took all of four seconds to vote him out and he was promptly replaced. A job very well done.
.-= Psynister´s last blog ..Druid Twinking: Hotstuffbaby =-.
Hehe first! 😀 LOL always wanted to say that. Now that my geek moment has passed…
I was in a few Pug’s myself yesterday and I feel you on the “Who’s the tank?” question because as a healer, you have to ask that question so you know who to put in focus and who is the priority to keep alive (Because as all good healers know, tank dies….you go SQUISH) So I ask this question and I am on the Emberstorm battlegroup, so I had someone from Borean Tundra, two from Mok’Nathal and another from Drenden. I ask the “So, who’s the tank then?” question again, and they all look at me blank- like I should have read their minds and I should already know the answer to the question. Eventually, the pally spoke up and things went going. We spent close to about two hours in the Pit of Saron, and I was slowly tearing my hair out cause I kept getting my ass pwnd by an invisible poison nova on Ick/Krick. Blah.
Apart from that hiccup, all my pugs have been okay. Hopefully, Lady Luck will continue to shine down on me this week 😀
.-= Fiorra´s last blog ..ROFLMAO !!!! =-.
Oh hell. It took me so long to write my reply that two people beat me. Well, drat. 😛
.-= Fiorra´s last blog ..ROFLMAO !!!! =-.
Decided to try it out yesterday to get the last dps and a tank for FoS. We added our roles and joined the queue. Out of habit we also called out in /1 and even if it usually takes an hour to get a tank through /1 we had a full group in 5 minutes. We figured we could at least utilize the porting feature, added us to the queue again and hit port. It seems that until you have been fully ported you are still where you began according to the server. After about 30 seconds of load screen I am back where I started but with half a health bar and a cultist whacking away at my behind. Seems you can get the “No available instance servers” that way too.
.-= Uskan´s last blog ..A story of death and deceit =-.
I’ve had nothing but good experiences with the new dungeon finder tool. It seems to do a good job grouping me with people of similar gear levels, and as a result I’ve learned how much faster heroics can be when you’re not pulling along DPS that are only putting out 1.5k or so. 🙂 Also, this has to be a fluke, but I’ve been amazed by the number of people with good attitudes that I’ve been grouped with. I was in a group for heroic Pit of Saron last night that, despite many wipes due to none of us knowing the fights, managed to stay in good spirits and work together to figure out the strategies. It reminded me of WoW in the days of old… In short, the dungeon finder has made WoW *a lot* more fun for me, so thanks Blizz!
When people queue up as a tank and it forms the group, they get a little shield on their picture (dps get swords and healers get the cross).
Now, this doesn’t mean that everyone pays attention to the role they are chosen for when the “found group” box pops up.
There’s no way this tool is completely random. I though I’d heard that it takes gear score into account, and that would make a lot of sense. I tried the new tool out with one of our raid tanks. My gear is decent, his rocks. Our group had pug DPS like I’d never seen. I wish recount had been working because that shaman blew us all away. Best. PUG. Ever.
The LFG window should have little symbols over who is tank and healer etc etc.
But that is for the random part. So far I have only done randoms and they have been done well except when people die and release they get disconnected
Also, when I was done with the instance it put me back where I came from, in mid air, with no mount
So I fell to my death
.-= Angry Gamer´s last blog ..angrygamer_blog: @alachia So far the LFG tool has been greatest thing since sliced bread although my guild is full of cliques and snobs so I have to use it =-.
Apparently I spoke too soon:
We have recently implemented a fix that allows players to walk up the ramp and open the item chest at the end of Halls of Reflection as intended. We are actively working through the tickets we received on this issue and will handle them as quickly as possible. We thank you for your patience as we worked through this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.
.-= Angry Gamer´s last blog ..A blue report says the Halls of Reflection won’t DC us anymore =-.
I loved it. No issues. Tried the random. We got the Gun’Drak. Our team was errily quiet. But we worked silently and deadly. No wipes. No deaths either now that I think of it. All in all a great run. Quickly falling in love with this tool.
All good this new PuG system! Most of the groups where equally geared and always in a good mood, making things easy and smooth.
Finally the end of waiting hours to fill in a group to chain Heroics farming.
LFG is great for heroics, but I was giddy while running Slave Pens, Blood Furnace, and Mana Tombs on (Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.
I haven’t had that much fun in months. I had to force myself to go to bed. This has turned out exactly like I hoped and it is possible to instance while leveling again.
I love the new tool. I’ve only left one group and that was because after 6 wipes, we only got the first boss down in HoR.
As far as having to ask who the tank is, it seems that most unit frame addons have not added that to their functionality. I have to ask every time, but I make sure to explain that I can’t see it. Everyone has been cool about it so far.
Also, i was very excited to see that my level 77 paladin got 2 frost emblems for doing the random option. She can’t use them yet, but they will be building up nicely. I will be leveling her pretty much only in dungeons now.
I love the new pug tool. I didn’t have any UI changes running the first day, so it was quite nice to see that WoW made it so that it shows you a little icon on the default display pictures to mark who is healer, tank, and dps. Most people use some sort of UI addon, though, and don’t see those icons, so the questions are still asked constantly.
I’ve had great experiences with it so far. Like other people said, amazingly everyone has been polite and had no problems explaining any of the new heroics to me or someone else who hasn’t seen them before.
Even on a HoR run last night with many wipes everyone stayed cool while we learned the encounters and slowly but surely progressed through the instance. We were right on the cusp gear wise of being able to complete the encounters, and it was really really fun to see us slowly inch forward, discuss and modify our strategies, and finally have our victory 🙂
Even though my repair bill might have said otherwise, it was by far the most fun I’ve had in a pug at least since Vanilla, and possibly ever!
I got paired with a hunter using a grey quality bow.
FML.
I had tons of fun! not every pug was amazing, and while in some pugs we chatted and joked and stayed to do a few more instances, others were silent and deadly like Lychordia aptly put 😛
TLDR version – system is awsome!
one of the more memorable experiences was today when I got FoS as my random heroic. now I really wanted to heal on my pally so I deselected the tank option (it seems that tanks are harder to find then healers so if you’re both, it alwasy slots you as a tank) it wasn’t a horrible run, but we hada few wipes, at least one of them being completely and utterly my fault. well, we finish the place and one of the dps asks if we want to go on. tank leaves silently so we try to look for a new tank, cannot find one so I tell them I can tank, but I’ve been really off my game lately, so it might be rough. they are up for it, the tool matches us up with this amazing shammy and we end up finishing up both pit of Saron and Halls of reflections 🙂 sure we wipe. most of us are unfamiliar with the instances, which makes tanking even more of a challenge, we wipe at least once on each gauntlet in HoR (but we also got an achievement for not getting hit by ice in that hallway before Tiranus – hell yeah!), but everyone is being very positive, we try different things, there’s no blame wars or snide remarks and basically, it made me reconsider giving up tanking for good 🙂 plus I got a shiny new tanking sword /squeeee!
I’ve had good and bad groups. Mostly good but sometimes the bad weighs more heavily on impressions. I am loving the ease to find players.
I had a paladin ask if I was healing or dps when I joined as a healer which boggled me at first, then I figured she had joined as both dps and healing. Chances are those three tanks joined as dps and tank and were unsure which they got invited as. That was pretty funny though!
.-= kaozz´s last blog ..Working as Intended: Part 2 =-.
I’ve had a pretty good time so far 🙂
Not sure why everyone is asking who’s the tank though – in the random dungeons I did, everyone had a little symbol beside their portrait to say which role they were there as.
Some runs I choose DPS/Heal n other times its great being able to choose not to heal, gotta love that 😀 … i’m not not sure I like how the Raid browsing is working tho, seems maybe ppl dont know about it.
My biggest concern with the new system is precisely that it is so good. people are able to chain heroic like never before, which of course means that as soon as you get a group with someone who doesnt have 45k health or who doesnt do 6000 dps they get screamed at for being a noob. i healed for a tank in AN who was in in 200 lvl purples and a few quest blues. in my opinion he’s well geared enough to pull of that place, but the insanely overgeared dps would pull agro like mad then scream at him to to do his job better. finally i had to manipulate the conversation into getting everyone to yell at the biggest whiner, but not before they tried to boot him for being undergeared.
I have a plea to all the melee dps that might be reading this:
When in Halls of Stone, right after the first boss, you have to run through the room with the stone-thingys, you have to stay behind the tank and then run to the _top_ of the stairs, just as the tank told you before he went in.
I know you are a melee dps class, and I know you need to be in melee range to kill stuff – but really, there is a reason for this advice – it is to keep you alive.
I do not know why this is so difficult, but I have seen it 3 times when using the new dungeon finder tool.
I have only used it as a tank and so far I really like it, I have been paired with undergeared players as well as a group of well overgeared players (3 dps in VH doing 6K = tank feels not needed). I have also been paired with kind people as well as annoying people “gogogogo” …
But in general there have been less hassle than when pugging on my own server.
First one I’ve done was on my alt holy priest.
It was a nightmare. I got voted out of the group because you can’t heal stupid. (I’m not a newbie to H-ToC on my priest either).
H-ToC. People were standing in the poison and I kept getting sheeped. After the first wipe, I asked the pally to please dispell the poison and what not and everyone to move! Second time, same thing happened. Third time, yet again. I got booted.
Next instance was Gundrak. Went much smoother. No wipes. They chain pulled like crazy. Other than that, was a good quick run!
I play a disc priest on sister of elune server, and thats in the wirlwind battle group. I thought the LFG worked wonders for heroics.. and now that you can complete heroics and be locked, then do them over in a random heroic LFG.. That is awesome sauce..
The new tool works great; if you are a healer or tank. Being a dps means you are one of hundreds if not thousands trying to get a spot in the random heroic groups. I’ve found tanking I get back to back heroics, but when dpsing it takes 10+ minutes to get a single group.
Alas, I guess it is time to work on my tank set 😉
.-= Snods´s last blog ..Dungeon Finder: What this really means =-.
love the tool, but usually we are 3-4 geared out guildies…
what they can shove up their asses is the DE tool that strips me of my skills, and further has buried the chat mat market.
I REALLY hate it. I’m working with it and working around it, but there is no reason that your green that would vendor for five gold, becomes what was 21g in dusts, and now ah’s for 10.5 gold should happen.
they’ve cut my balls off. and for this reason i’m not running my chanter in it anymore.
As a healer & tank player, I’m getting groups quickly and hear my guild dpsers complain about waiting times. The few times I actually got tired of yet another heal or tank run, and went for the dps option, I did notice the same. So it just depends if I want to do something right now, or if I am patient.
That being said, I do notice this tool widens the pool of bad players (I’m not elitist, but by god I’ve seen some characters pass by these past days). So now I try to queue up with at least one guildie in the group (good dps, nice tank, nice healer) which smooths whatever is being thrown at us.
Best example was a TOC 5 hc run. I was healing it, tank was a decent warrior with average gear. He topped the dps … clocking in at 2100. The mage, warlock and rogue weren’t even badly geared (half epics at least, going from 200-226 ivl). They just didn’t have a clue how their class worked it seemed 🙁 It does make good practice for my healing or tanking skills :p
I started with mostly blues on my Balance/Resto druid. First day I was trying out the random feature. I got dumped into regular Forge of Souls on my very first random regular, as a healer with only three 219 epics. (The rest 200-187 blues.)
After a few more 219 upgrades, I started queuing for random heroics, and I found myself as DPS in most of the groups. No more of that feeling of getting carried because everyone else are doing 4k DPS in a heroic. I’ve mostly been with people of similar gear level.
But I’ve yet to see a tank with health less than 35k unbuffed. I wonder why. My prot paladin was barely 32k unbuffed with 213+226 gear. I was expecting to see tanks in the range of 25k-30k unbuffed, which would more closely match my gear.
But low level dungeons from Ramparts to Sethekk Halls still takes me anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes to find a group. And there are frequently people AFK and end up declining the group. There’s also more people not taking dungeons seriously at lower level. DPS running Northrend dungeons probably will find a lot of dps-spec&gear “tanks”.
I really wanted to get my pet so I did a lot of pugging the first few days. I had some great experiences and some horrible experiences. One of the best experiences was in a heroic halls of lightening run. The tank we got had never even tanked before. He didn’t know much about tanking and wasn’t even defensed capped because he didn’t even know there was one. Between my geared rogue and the hunter we had enough misdirect to be able to keep the mobs on the tank and our disc priest was great at keeping him up as well. Having a group that was willing to give the instance a go and explain everything really reminded me about everyone starting somewhere. Some of the bad parts for me were the fact that most of the runs I was getting I was doing half the damage because everyone felt that they should be carried. As healing I have had even more horrible experiences, those are to the point where I only do the 1 for the frost and que with a tank I know from my guild
I’m finding its still impossible to find groups – apparently, all the tanks get saved to everything before I come online. I used to sit half an hour in the queue looking for tanks myself, now the game just does it for me.
Still have to wait half an hour to run a dungeon.
edit: yes I am a healer.
@felade when you run heroic through the LFG tool you don’t become saved to them. In fact if you use the tool you can actually get the same heroic multiple times and then still go do it with your guild later.
@Lodur
You do get saved. Just go do one random heroic, then open up the Dungeon Finder and look under “Specific Dungeons”. In the heroics list, you’ll see the one you just done to show a lock symbol, with a tooltip telling you that you’ve done it for the day.
It’s just that the Random Dungeon tool ignore lock-outs when making matches.
I stand corrected!
Like many commenters so far, I’ve had awesome experiences with the dungeon finder so far. I’ve run heroics on my disc priest main, mid-70’s instances on the DK alt I’m levelling, and also a couple of Scarlet Monastery wings plus Uldaman on a level 37 druid I hadn’t played for, literally, years.
Funniest experience: doing Culling of Stratholme healing a blood DK tank who was quite ridiculously geared, dripping in TotGC gear, had his Quel’Delar sword already, etc. After killing Epoch, I commented that between his gear and his self-healing, I’d hardly needed to heal at all. He said “yeah, a shadow priest would probably be enough to keep me up.” Jokingly I offered to switch specs, and he said go for it! So we did the Infinite Corruptor and Mal’Ganis with me shadow spec, in shadowform, just with vamp embrace and tossing some shields. Not only were they no problem, frankly, his health hardly dipped below 100%.
And I’ve never seen those two bosses go down so fast as with 4 dps and a DK tank whaling on them.
I joined a random the other day and got ported to HoL. Just as the instance loaded in the tank drops. This is when I learned that only when I’m on my tank do I get a group filled in less than 10 seconds.
After about 3-4 minutes waiting for a new tank, the mage in the group says, “who needs a tank?” and starts pulling.
I jumped in, threw him a Rejuv and then fired off some Moonfire and Wrath. Right then, one of the other DPS drops.
With a smile on my face, and the first mob down, there is only me and two casters standing. So we just kept pulling, actually talking to each other as we coordinate sheeps, cyclones, and other CC to down each mob carefully. We ended up taking out the entire first level before we were left with only Benjamin to contend with.
As we’re strategizing how to work him out, the two slots get filled in, all told about 15-20 minutes after I zoned in.
The rest of the run was quick and painless, done with military precision and hardly a word spoken. Until the very end as the original three gave each other /cheers /bows and /salutes over Loken’s corpse before porting back to Dalaran, badges in hand.
I know I’m late to the party, but I thought I’d chime in too. I love the LFG tool.
As a healer I wait an average of 60 seconds for any dungeon almost any time of day. I went from a 4500 gearscore to a 5020 gearscore in one weekend by getting full tier 9 (plus a trophy I had from a toc25 run).
My only problem, and I know I’m generalizing here, is that I have had the worst experiences with people from the Scilla server, probably coincidence. One Scilla hunter was pulling 4k DPS, which is good but not great IMO and within two pulls he yelled at the tank to “pull faster”, then proceeded to misdirect onto him eventually forcing the tank to leave. He then complained that the other 2k DPS players were bad and left.
Also noticed almost everyone in the LFG tool is an enchanter, looks like easy money for us. 🙂
And I love being able to go on mining circuits while queueing as a DPS warrior. 20 minutes of mining, new dungeon, requeue and repeat.
Now if only I could get that Battered Hilt.
I’m jumping on the bandwagon! I’ve had good experiences with the new LFG tool. First time I used it, we did FoS. No wipes! Then, went into PoS. Wiped a few times while I figured out the mechanics, then we were golden.
I do have to mention that the groups I’ve chances upon are rather stoic. No one talks unless it’s boss strategy. No joking around. It’s one of those, “Get in, Get out quick” kind of things. At first, I was kind of taken aback. I’m used to being chatty and funny in /p chat. However, the more I thought about it, the more I liked it that way. No morons freaking out in chat. If I needed mana, I’d simply type out “mana” in chat and everyone would wait. Then a “kk” would have us off again. It was all business..lol. And it was fun! What’s more fun than no wipes and some purple pixels?
I’ll save my quirky, funny side for guild events and bust out the business woman for the LFG tool!