For those who might not know yet, my gluttony for abuse knows no bounds. As a result I find myself in a rather large number of P.U.G. groups. At the end of the day I bring you, my readers, the stories of my travels in the random grouping of Azerothian adventure!
So we’ve had one hell of a couple weeks haven’t we? I know I was busy with talk of addons and macros but more importantly, last week we had the Shaman class changes. Don’t worry I won’t gush about it, there will be plenty of time for that later. For today I’d like to share with you the latest in my P.U.G stories.
Tuesday I logged back in a couple hours after the raid to get my auction house items up and then do my daily heroic. It is about 2 am est at this point which is my normal heroic time. That night however I get Heroic Culling of Stratholme. Now I haven’t done CoS since they updated it with the fast forward button. We start out and I take a look at the group, bear tank decently geared, shadow priest and warlock ok geared and a fury warrior. To give you an idea the sp and lock were hovering around a 4k gear score, the fury warrior was just about 5k and the bear was almost at 6k.
It should be a quick run right? I forgot that you could talk to Chromie and port right there now, so the tank and twoDPS start before I get there (D’oh!), but they don’t die. I show up and we blow through the first two bosses and their respective waves, and head into the town hall. We down the first wave and head upstairs, the next group spawns and the fury warrior goes down. I look around and notice that the tank was still sitting downstairs. I heal the hell out of the priest and lock and eventually the tank comes upstairs and wrangles everything. I quickly rest the warrior and the tank apologizes and says hit a massive lag spike. It’s ok it happens so no harm no foul. We get through the hallway and kill the third boss, and then the tank DC’s. The warrior freaks out “should we wait? the timer’s running out”
The priest pipes up “we can probably 4 man it, the healer’s good. As long as he’s ok with it that is. “
I say sure, set my focus macros and head off careening for the gauntlet. What happens is the fury warrior and I both wind up tanking. I just keep getting aggro from healing and apparently he only had dps specs (fury and arms caught me off guard). We tear through the gauntlet and make it to the corrupter. I frost shock and start healing. Corrupter goes down and chat starts up again.
Priest ” told you we’d be fine.”
Warrior “wow, that was cool, but shouldn’t we find a tank for the last boss?”
Me “pfft, I got this we’ll be fine”
I run in aggro Mal’ganis and immediately drop Earth Elemental. Toss an earth shield on the elemental and start healing. The group manages their aggro and the elemental tanks Mal’ganis for the entire fight. We end successfully and there are three very excited people in party with me
Warrior “that was seriously awesome, I don’t think I’ve seen something like that before”
Priest “thank you for that, most fun I’ve had in a while”
Warrior “yeah never realized shaman could do that”
Me “np, had a blast myself. “
Everyone parts ways and I have a huge shit-eating-grin on my face. Late night tanks are still hard to find, getting one to stick around when the instance is almost over is even tougher. Being able to finish the run, and have people have a blast while doing it is priceless to me. I play this game to have fun and honestly nights like this are some of my favorite moments. I get to do something out of the ordinary, and get to make some people happy. All in all a good night I’d say.
As some of you know, I’m big on community. I like helping members of the community out, so when someone approaches me and asks for a shout out, I’ll look it over and if it doesn’t seem bad I’ll go ahead and give it a push. So a moment of your time if you please. This one is a favor for a friend’s friend. Ginny who did the lovely artwork for my Dwarf Shaman and the artwork featured in my spells and totems article on wow.com asked if I would be so kind as to help spread word of her friend’s attempt to raise money for charity. This is from will draw 4 food who is attempting to raise money to donate to the Jake Wetchler foundation. The foundation’s focus is the research and treatment of pediatric cancer. Their main site should be done in may so feel free to stop by and take a gander.
That’s it for today folks.
Do you have any interesting pug stories? Anything fun you did this week?
Until next time, Happy Healing!
Image courtesy of PolyGram Filmed Entertainment Gramercy Pictures and the Cohen brothers.
Great job with the tanking! Us Shamans still have some kickassery to contribute!
.-= Wulfy´s last blog ..RIP Sentry Totem =-.
@wulfy I love heal tanking. My crowning achievement was heal taking karazhan at 70 as the off tank. Main tank was a boomkin in full pvp gear. Been in love with it ever since.
Abide your heals! fast falls the ungeared tank;
The end boss enrages.
Lodur, with me please heal!
When other healers fail and mana drains,
Help of the shaman, lodur please heal!
*edit: now that I reread that I wounder if it sounds more like lodur is just sitting on his butt doing nothing.*
You get these every so often – something goes haywire, but everyone just stays cool and gives it a shot anyway – and you pull off some seriously crazy crap you’ll be telling stories about for years.
I think healing is particularly capable of handling these situations. I think that’s why I love doing it. Tanks have a harder time of it, mostly because tanking is all about *eliminating* these in the first place (planning pulls, managing aggro, etc). Pandemonium is much more fun to *heal* than it is to *tank*.
You remember all those people who say they don’t PUG, or only do the LFG tool with friends and guildmates? They’re missing out on, terrible, rude, obnoxious players, but they are also missing out on this stuff. Pure Awesome.
So just this night I decide to hop on my DK for a random heroic. I used to tank on my DK in Ulduar because DKs were OP then. Naturally I keep all my chars geared in at least good badge stuff if not ICC10 gear. My DK is sitting nice an pretty at 40k hp, 4985 gs, high avoidance, high armor.
So we get into the instance and I kill one of those casters (the one of the right) solo because apparently everyone in my group is still loading. So then I go to the first skeletons group wait for my group. I pull the group and the healer and a shadow priest who are friends decide that they don’t want to pull that group because they usually skip it by jumping down. So they end up pulling the second group of skeletons. Naturally I pick up the group, death grip the caster to me and hold threat easily on all of it.
Here is where all hell breaks loose. I go around the ramp on the right, avoiding the pack on the left, rather than go up through the 3 shoveler mobs and the healer and all the DPS stop following me. I pull the proto-drake/rider and start wailing into it solo assuming they’ll come. They don’t, I die, mobs don’t leash and kill the group. Then the healer and one DPS start going off about how “that’s not the way you go”, and “why would you go that way, that’s stupid, I’m not going that way”. I say “I’m the tank, so we’re going to go this way”.
I move up the way I want to go, 2 dps follow me, the healer and his s. priest buddy stay behind. I can tank the mobs easily with 2 dps on them so I pull and death strike to heal myself. Then, that group on the left with the 2 zombies and 2 casters gets pulled by one of the idiot dps who follow me (apparently running in a straight line past mob groups is hard, right?). Whatever, I pick it up. Deathgrip one, Howling Blast and Strangulate the other it all comes to me. I blow IBF and the healer and his buddy are still not helping. Then one of the shovelers runs at me from nowhere and I die. Then the mobs run over and kill the rest of the group. Then the healer and his s. priest buddy something they obviously thought was clever and leave group getting themselves the deserter buff. So whatever, serves them right. Another dps leaves and it’s now me and a warrior with 3300gs. Requeue.
Pick up a shaman, warlock, and rogue. I proceed to go the way I was going. I pull the group on the left so no one retards into it this time and the healer keeps me up but says. Hey, why are we going this way? I answer, “because I don’t like the shoveler mobs.” The shamans say, “well fuck this if we aren’t going up the ramp” and leaves. I say, what the fuck people, just go this way. I’m going this way if you don’t like it, just leave. TWO MORE PEOPLE LEAVE (all getting the deserter buff). Me and the warrior again… requeue.
Get a new group. Resto druid, warlock, ret paladin. Keep going the way I’m going. Pull the proto-drake and rider to the edge staying away from the shoveler and the “faithful” warrior retard walks right next to it and starts attacking the mobs we’re on. OKAY, I pick it up, whatever. We kill all 3, keep going. Get down Gaurfrost and the Ret leaves… out of nowhere. Now we requeue get a feral druid. So we keep going. Kill 1 shoveler who you have to pull, 2 of those geists, 3 of those weird horrors who drop poison. Then I grab the boss pull him infront of the ramp to the next area. We get him to 30% and he resets. Apparently they made him leashe. We clear the last 2, I blow army and we kill the boss. And finally finish the instance.
Awesome story. And a positive pug one, for a change! Great.
I’m afraid my pocket tank has been getting some heat lately though. They’re laying off me (finally!) but now it seems they’ve got him targetted. Awww.
Great post though ^^
.-= Ari´s last blog ..Achievement earned: Raid Healer =-.
So good to read about fun random LFG experiences – while most of mine in general are ok, the ones that stand out sadly are bad experiences rather than fun ones. But one takes comfort in the fact that at least some of them are so bad that you laugh about them afterwards 😛
Nice story, I did the final boss in DTK without a tank, but that is far easier since you spend half the time as a skeleton.
My best story was an H Occ. On the final boss, we had lots a DPS, so there was only 4 of us (ruby/amber/amber/emerald). I took a number of hits during the healing channel and nearly lost all of my HP. I moved over to one of the platforms in case I died. When did eventually die, with the boss still at 75%, I landed safely and started healing as normal.
Somehow, I was able to heal through it and we beat the boss on that try.