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!
This week I bring you a story of a monumental event. Something so earth shattering that babies cried, women ushered their children home and men cowered before it’s terror inducing visage! You may need to sit down for this… ready? Lodur was vote kicked from a heroic group! Now I’m sure there are some questions about what happened and what was the build up. Here goes my tale of woe.
I’ll start by saying yes I was healing, and yes the mace was equipped. I was decked out in my shiny new T10 loot after freshly enchanting and gemifying them. I queue up and promptly my invite button pops up. I join the group and off I am to an adventure… or so I thought. The screen load shows the Pit of Saron and I’m a bit excited. I enjoy healing the place and it beats out Gundrak any day of the week! The instance loads and I’m looking around for the rest of the group. I notice that most of the mobs have been cleared. This is red flag number one. My immediate response, in a joking tone of course
“What did you guys do to the last healer?”
I get a response from the rogue of the group
“Horrible healer we vote kicked him.”
Ok, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Mainly DPS folks have been rolling in as healers to get quick frost badges so it wouldn’t surprise me too terribly if that’s what happened. I see they are over at the Ick and Krick encounter and make my way over. We buff up and pull. Things go smoothly until two things happen. First I notice the prot warrior is taking a whole lot more damage than he should be and his health is only at 29k total. Second thing that happens is the poison nova. The rogue tries to cast Cloak and run but instead becomes a stain in the ground. Not believing that you can release and come back while the encounter is happening , they wait dead. We’re doing fantastic though otherwise until the boss marks the hunter and chases after them. The hunter then proceeded to drag the boss back past it’s threshold point and the boss leashes… at 1%. Ok, stuff happens I’ll just res the rogue and we’ll get started again right? Wrong! As I’m sitting to drink so I can resurrect the rogue, and before the tank is ready, the hunter pulls, runs to us and then casts FD. Needless to say I got squashed with the rest of the group. We run back in and drink and buff and get ready for round two. I inspect the tank and see he’s in some pretty low tanking gear… and a bunch of dps gear. I make a mental note of the fact he’s not defense capped and look to see I still have 7 minutes left on my LFG debuff. Time to soldier on! Before we’re ready again the hunter pulls, this time the tank picks it up and we proceed as normal. The rogue dies again to poison nova but this time we kill the boss.
This happens two more times with various mobs on the ramp leading to the final leg of the instance until finally I say something
“Dude, stop pulling. I need to drink and you’re wiping the group .”
It was then I noticed something I had not noticed before. All of them were in the same guild. Everyone stopped moving and there we were sitting at the base of the ramp leading to the collapsing tunnel. There’s this long, hanging silence while we sit there and then next thing I know I’m booted from the group!
Back in Dalaran I’m in shock at what just happened. Seriously I got kicked because I called the hunter out on pulling and doing stupid things! I look up at my buffs and notice the debuff was just wearing off and that I can re-queue, but still… wow just wow.
Luckily the next one I get is full of people who communicate and pull sensibly. All from different guilds but all with the same rough gear level. We plow through Halls of Lightning, I get my two Frost Emblems and we part ways.
Seriously I’m alright if you want to do wacky things in a guild run. One of our DPS raiders rolled a healer so when I’m on my tank I like to do silly things (within reason) to mess with her (Hi Jaha!) but we always laugh about it, and I never do it when it’s a non guild run. If there is even one pugger in the group I try my best to behave. But to be kicked for calling someone out on pulling and feigning while watching the group wipe, that dog just won’t hunt monseigneur!
Any interesting P.U.G. stories from this week? Good, bad, awesome or terrible? That’s it for today folks.
Until next time, Happy Healing!
Image courtesy of CBS
I always get a goofy feeling when I get into a pug with four members of the same guild. I’ve had it happen on multiple occasions now and have been booted for no reason on multiple occasions. Every time I see 4 toons from the same guild I debate clicking that “leave group” button and just eating the 15 minute debuff, but I soldier on and hope for the best in people.
Or something like that.
Getting kicked from a heroic pug is proof that you’re a nub!
Hehe, just kidding 😉 It happens to the best: this post is the proof. It’s frustrating though… when a group shows the least of respect for your role within the group and then blames you for things going wrong. There is little one can do about it except to move on!
I started playing as prot paladin tank to get to instances without waiting and that’s how I level since I was 15 (I’m fiftish now), so I meet lots of different puggers.
I treat pulling mages/hunters/rogues as an extra excercise in keeping threat but what I usually need is a good healer and so comes my story.
I think it was in Maraudon, I noticed that our druid healer isn’t healing that much, quite often he was in bear form mauling all around. I asked kindly if maybe I could get a heal now and then, he said: “I heal when I have mana” 😐
same happened to me, twice. Once I was playing my warlock, the other time on my disc priest.
First time, I got kicked with my lock because I said I’d roll need on the Nevermelting Ice crystal. ‘cos, yeah, I kind of need it, and the arcane mage told me something like : “k so I need this trinkt its the 30th time i do ths dungon so dont u roll need kk or i kik u kk”, which is not exactly the best way to obtain a favor.
Second time, I was with a tank DK who had less health than my priest. Which is disturbing, since I have something like 25k health full buffed? Anyway, he behaved really badly, and even insulted me when we wiped on garfrost. Then I got kicked.
Good thing is, on the many pug runs I did, these are the two worse, and 95% of those were fine.
Heh. I’ve gotten into the same habit now when I zone into a half finished instance of saying, “So what happened to your last tank?”
.-= Spinks´s last blog ..It came from the PUG: Move it, slackers! =-.
A lesser person would’ve broadcast the guild name to the world, with big arrows and warnings of asshatery.
I admit I’ve *never* received that kind of abuse as a healer. And I’m “one of those guys” — I heal without shifting to druid form so I can hurricane mob packs and chain cast wrath on bosses. At this point rejuve and wild growth are really all that’s typically needed to keep up a group anyway. And it’s fun trying to out dps the lowest dps.
And despite that behavior, which I consider pretty poor behavior on my part, I’ve *never* been vote kicked.
Also here I have been booted twice, for no reason at all – the run had gone well without any sort of problems.
In both cases there were 3 (4 in second case) guys from same server and guild.
It wasn’t personal: it’s just that they kicked players who could have rolled on the item they were trying to get for one of them.
Wow – my guild must terrify people regularly! We often have four people in a group and random pug the fifth. However, we do the heroics for the badges, not to annoy people.
In the above situation, I’d be relieved to be out of there!
Csara – Suramar
I’ve only been kicked once… I’m on my lock going through a painful H HoR with a couple wipes putting us back at the start before we made it to the first boss the first time. After one of those wipes I notice the tree is healing us up spamming glyphed healing touch. My healer’s a shammy so I hold my tongue inspite of being under the impression that glyph primarily for druids pre-nourish. We make it to the first boss and pretty soon it’s clear we’re not getting enough heals to survive the second fear. The tank starts yelling at the healer before we’re even dead. As I’m flying my ghost back to my body, I nose around recount and notice both for the boss fight and overall the tree is at more than 50% healing from healing touch. At this point I can’t help myself and chime in “I hate to tell another class how to play, but I don’t see many trees with half their healing from healing touch”. Next thing I know I’m back in Dal. I’m telling myself the people who voted to kick me just saw a vote kick and assumed it was for the healer that caused the wipe, so they hit yes without checking the name. Or was my comment that out of line?
Wow.. I wish I was surprised but a similar thing happened to me the other day. I’m levelling a pally alt (tank) and got randomed into Nexus. It transpired quickly that the dps was pretty bad (they were all below me, and as tank I’m only doing about 800dps), the hunter kept pulling even when the healer was blatantly out of mana.
First I asked kindly if he wouldn’t mind doing it – no response, neither in chat nor did he stop pulling stuff. Then I started to get slightly narky about it, telling him to feel free to pull the next group and die because the healer had no mana. No response, not from him, not from anyone. Was contemplating vote-kicking him, but then I realised they were all in the same guild!
Change of strategy I thought I’d better pipe down, they weren’t the greatest players but I just want my emblems and don’t want to get kicked and waste even more time that way.
So we slooowly make our way through the instance, then we’re at the rift boss and the hunter is way behind. So I wait, because I guess I’m nice like that? And then this other party member speaks up telling me “GOGO”…
It just boggles the mind that kind of thing. Finished the instance but *shudders* it wasn’t much fun. The lack of communication (ANY party chat..) is just disconcerting. At least when people go “omg lulusuck” you can shrug it off but groups like that make me question my own judgement (oh god the psychological impact of pugging lol).
Heh, yeah I get kicked for drinking too, even on my mage. Go figure.
Happened a few times for me too, the latest being when I rolled on the Edge of Ruin on my ret pally against a death knight (and two of his guildies who I assume intended to trade it to him as one had the 2h axe from PoS HC and the other had (i think) Totc 25 gear.
I rolled (as EoR was the only reason i came there), they rolled and i won…Welcome to Dalaran, and four people magically appeared on the ignore list.
Not a story of booting, but rather one that I’m sure all healers can appreciate:
I queue for daily and zone into HoR, 0/3 bosses dead, entirely dead group.
Me: Looks like you guys have had a bad time at it. What was the problem?
Mage: The healer was awful.
Me: No really, what was your problem?
Rogue: No really man, the healer was total crap.
So I give them the benefit of the doubt and get myself ready to spam heal. The tank had ~38k hp, which was low but definitely not the lowest I’ve healed, so I was feeling ok. 4 waves of complete agony later, none of the dps is beating the tank on meters (the tank was doing 2.4k) and the first boss is going down like everyone is wielding wiffle bats. We forstall the wipe for maybe 3-4 minutes and then succumb. On the run back, I simply state: “I’m sorry guys, this group simply does not have the dps to finish this heroic. You were all ranging, in epics, between 1.5 and 2k dps. Heals aren’t your problem.”
Mage: Dude, we can do this. That was much better than last time around.
Lock: Yeah, we didn’t even make it to the boss last time.
Rogue: We’re doing heroics so we can get better gear dude, don’t hate on our dps.
Me: …
/Leave Group
I can only imagine what they told the next healer who fell prey to their re-queue.
.-= Vixsin´s last blog ..The 5 Whys of Wiping: A Healer’s Lessons =-.
I wonder how long it took that group to realize that no healer would be able to heal through their stupid.
Maybe they’re still in there, cycling through healers.
.-= Ophelie´s last blog ..Shared Topic: Leave of WoW Absense =-.
I figure that bad groups are always doing us a favor by removing good people from their groups. 🙂
.-= Lissanna´s last blog ..I like puppies. =-.
That is exactly why, when I zone in for a pug, I check to see if there are more than two people from the same guild. If there are, I quickly leave group. It only took me twice to realize people can be mean and idiotic.
@ Baseball – I don’t see why it would be less of him to post the guild name and server, The only “lesser” people are the ones who thinks it’s okay to treat people anyway they like, because this is the “internets”.
It is interesting to read all these issues. I have three healers and one tank that are gathering frost badges and I can say that I have had experienced many of the same issues. The biggest issue I have are the tanks who believe they are invincible and run off in to large mobs without so much as a “hello” or “rdy?” I have even had a tank rip through an instance and complain to the rest of the group how lousy everyone is because we keep wiping. Then this person pulls a large group and exits from the party for us to fend for ourselves.
I have a solution for all that:
/ignore Name-Server
If everyone started to do that, it wouldnt take long before these people could not find group or have much longer queue times.
Last night in a random PUG on my shammie healer I am leveling. Just dinged 55 and so in my very first group with a newly minted DK (oh joy) in BRD. The DK kept pulling mobs as if she were solo questing, despite calls for her to let the tank do his job. On closer inspection, the DK had selected NO talents and was in mediocre gear. We kept her around a bit for laughs and giggles and offered some advice to her – esp since progression through trash wasn’t a real issue – until she went and tried to solo a boss. We watched her die and then picked up the boss and downed him. Vote kick afterwards. Apparently, this kid had never played WoW before and claimed to have bought the DK toon. Sure seemed like it, too…
Indeed — when four of the five (or 3 of the five) are from the same guild there’s often bad things afoot. These folks consider themselves an unbreakable voting bloc and will kick on a whim. They tend to be less respectful of needs that don’t serve their own (for instance, if they want to hit every boss while you’re just there for the frost emblems or vice versa).
I run a ton of pugs (got the perky pug achievement within four days of the patch). This experience has taught me not to trust groups with many same-guild members.
We have a thread on our guild forums just for these types of stories. Helps to warn everyone else in the guild about real jerks in our battlegroup.
As a veteran healer I can assure you that any time you find a pug in progress, one in which the members claim the last healer “was awful”, you’re better off leaving group right then.
Trust me. That group will bring you only pain and repair bills before they kick you out too for not being able to cover their own inadequacies.
@Sherry I don’t find that to be the case 100% of the time and that’s not fair to everyone. I give them a shot first. There was a case where me and two guildies were in OCC, our healer was an 80 priest in tier 9/9.5 but couldn’t heal worth a lick. (I was on my tank) the healer then dropped the group. If the next healer had shoe-horned us into that “oh crap gotta get outta here!” pile we never would have finished, but the next healer didn’t leave, threw their weight in and we beat the place into the ground. Everyone deserves at least one chance, I may be a healer but I do know not all of us are great and some are barely passable. It happens. Like spiderman on the family guy, everyone gets one. after that… bounce!
I’ve just started tanking on my DK for the first time in my hodgepodge of handmedowns and I’ve seens DPS do some amazing stuff(Hunter pulls…). It stressed me out until I came to terms with the fact that if the Healer draws aggro it’s a Tragedy, if the DPS draw aggro it’s a Comedy. Sure it’s a comedy with a repair bill and sitting back in Dalran, but a comedy all the same.
I only had this happen to me once on my healer, I joined a PoS where Garfrost was down already, and one of the DPS told me to drop group if I knew what was best for me, then left.
I just shrugged and trudged on, but yeah, it was a semi-horrible experience, we ended up replacing the tank and one especially obnoxious paladin, but I got the instance finished.
I guess Misery(EU) simply is a very nice battlegroup, because I very rarely end up in PuGs like the one described. Heck, I think I was in a group with 4 people from the same guild about twice, and both times were awesome. They were all in ICC gear though, so they weren’t just random idiots from some random guild, but people who actually knew what teamwork is.
I have read this blog for about a year now, maybe a little longer and have never commented before, but this article spoke to me, for lack of a better term. I play a tank DK, and am currently leveling a healer (just to give you some perspective on my gaming habits) and I have noticed recently a terrible, terrible trend in the P.U.G. world getting worse with dps pulling (especially hunters) before the group is ready. I find myself more and more running around spamming Blood Boil, Death and Decay and other AoE’s to get aggro off of the rest of the group, only to be told at the end of the Heroic that I “suck” at being a tank and was told just recently that I should quit the game because I’m so horrible. Now, I’m not the best tank in the world (or player) but lately I feel that more and more dps just do whatever they want so they can flash the recount data to prove how “good” they are. What is the world coming too?
Had a bad experience myself this morning. Now, I don’t consider myself the best healer in the world, still learning how to manage my mana for sure. It doesn’t help that I just came back from an 8 month break. So far, things have not been too bad. So far I have been kicked from 2 heroics.
One, the tank had 500 defense and was bleeding hp like no ones business. My main is a tank, I tried to explain that resilience doesnt make up for the lack of defense, as it doesnt increase your avoidance like def does. Oh, wait, I quit that group when they started talking about getting a guildie in full raid gear to heal.
Today I got booted from forge of souls. Tank had not died. No wipes. The tank didnt bother checking to see if we were ready on the first boss, and i was at half mana. The mage died twice, got one shot on the boss, and died while on the phone and someone facepulled. I died on the boss during the soulstorm right before the boss went down, and on the same facepulled group, reincarnated, and saved the rest of the group. After the first boss went down, the shadow priest tells me to go dps and he would heal, and suddenly i am booted from the group. So yeah, 3 deaths from the tank not paying attention to the group, and 2 on the boss, but it’s my fault.
I frequently run heroics with at least one other person in my guild but sometimes there are 4 – 3 of us and we have never kicked anyone. I am the healer and we usually never bring a tank. If we get a terrible tank we just complain about them in G-Chat and try to be vocal about needing mana ect in Party Chat. Sometimes one of our main tank’s alts is in group and he tries to give the tank some advice but that is about it.
Not quite the same as getting kicked but I joined a PUG in progress, by coincedence also PoS. They had already pulled the first boss when I was still at the instance entrance. I rode over at got to the group in time to keep everyone alive and we got the boss down. I didn’t even ask what happened to their first healer or why they were trying to kill a boss without a healer. Whatever, I rarely say anything in PUGs and just avoid drama as much as possible.
We moved on and started killing trash. Then one of the party announces he has to go to the store and will be back in 10 -15 minutes. Huh?! His LFG debuff was off so I voted to kick him. The vote failed. Then I noticed they were all in the same guild.
I’ve never been kicked from a group but I only do one a day to get my frost emblems. I have quit groups when people kept pulling off the tank, or when I got into a HoR group and the tank had less than 30k health.
I have vote kicked one person in a guild group and that was because they (rogue) insisted on pulling instead of the tank.
As long as people don’t act like dicks I’ll stick with just about any PuG.
So my story is not really a story about a bad pug but rather a story about 4 sad guildies so me and 3 others from my guild always que as a 4man tank heals and 2 dps we always pug our 3rd dps so we queue and get forge of souls 2nd pull in battered hilt drops everyones was omfg it dropped instantly everyone needs the pug gets its we all cry finish the instance and go on our merry way just letting yall know sometimes the pug gets bck at the guild group
My guild does full guild runs whenever we are able to, and occasionally we’ll end up with that weird circumstance of 4 80s, just sans a healer…. so we’ll chuck ourselves at the feet of the fates and hope they’re having a good day. We’ve seen our share of some VERY BAD PuGs. We’ve also been blessed with some very, very nice people that I would abduct over to my server and guild in a heart beat if I was able to.
Did that last night, I went on Tzia, my 80 hunter. We get a lovely priest and yanked into ToC. We joust no problem, then we’re on the ground waiting for our warrior tank to set the pull up. Suddenly we saw “Cool, almost a full guild run. These usually go well.”
I’m proud to admit, we didn’t die, kept crap off the healer, and downed the Black Knight no problem. We even grinned at a polite “May I need on [xyz epic cloth item]?” No other clothies…. so he got it, and besides… if you need it on one of our runs… you roll need, the rest of us pass, and we keep moving.
But then, my guild is the cheerful type. We’re almost always on our best behavior… unless part of the group’s blood sugar is running low and they are irratible and snappy (which is VERY rare). Most the time we can remind whichever people get grouchy due to lack of food to eat at some point in the night…
Its all up to the fates what we get in a PuG… keep your chin up, and a smile on your face… sometimes that thing actually FEELS real!
.-= Tzia´s last blog ..Why Bloodriver Rocks =-.
I believe the expressions is “That dog won’t hunt.” Dogs don’t hang.
Good post though.
.-= Brad´s last blog ..Keep On Tankin’ On =-.
Oh, the agony of bad pugs! My main, who is an 80 tree, has endured much struggle since the cross-realm dungeon finder was introduced. I think a cocky (and mouthy) tank who kept running into huge mobs while two dps casters were drinking – therefore making me heal him until my finger was cramping since he in no way had the dps to take down the mobs in a reasonable amount of time – resulted in the one and only time I was so angry that I actually left a group to wipe on a pull. Sure, I’ve had the usual irritations of dps not understanding (or caring about) their aggro and pulling off the tank only to die alarmingly fast, or tanks who couldn’t hold aggro on the best of days, and my own crap heals on an off day. I have also, however, had some of the fastest and most polite runs on my tree with pugs. It’s really just the luck of the draw.
This having been said, I’ve been leveling a pally tank. She’s sitting comfortably at 51 and has done a decent amount of instance tanking. Admittedly, I am a much better healer than I am a tank! However, I now understand why tanks sometimes get so cranky – dps pulling due to sheer stupidity, healers who feel they are gods to be revered and don’t seem to care that they’re actually supposed to cleanse (as a healer, I know that cleansing what my class can cleanse is MY job and needs to be done) and warrior and pally dps who think they can tank without the gear or spec to do it (nevermind that I’m prot spec only so I ONLY queue for tanking). At lower levels, players seem to disregard any instance rules because they think they don’t apply. I actually had a healer who kept hopping around the dps and me while we were fighting … and he was dps’ing while healing (which, as a healer, I feel very strongly is a NO NO). When I called out a mage who kept blinking into mobs and dying, the healer informed me that he didn’t like me (and suggested I do something perverse with what he claimed was a large part of his anatomy) and left us on a pull in Sunken Temple. We wipe, the mage leaves and we are left to try to help one of the remaining dps find his way back in from the gy so we can requeue. I’ve had worse luck with pugs while tanking than healing, by far. But I’ve also had some good ones. Again, luck of the draw.
I think pugs are getting far worse in terms of behavior since the new dungeon finder became available. There is really so little worry now of repercussion when they’re on a completely different server from the people they so readily disrespect. Ninjas abound, attitudes are often that of bratty twelve year olds and no one is ‘nudged’ to be accountable for themselves. It’s even worse at lower levels. But, hey, healing the stupids makes my healing stronger and tanking for the stupids makes my tanking more efficient. And how cool is it to be able to actually get non-guild runs for classic instances now? 🙂
Pugs are a necessary evil, but sometimes they’re a pleasant surprise. 😀 Trade chat, at least on Lothar, is another matter. It hurts my head to read it.
Wow, I feel better now. 😛
“Comfort Hug” to you. DPS Shadow Priest here. You should be me. Strangers have made it clear . . .
“DPS isn’t really necessary, you know?”
LOL….Still!
I was pugkicked once because I took too long to get back to the group after a wipe… I was totally lost so, I deserved it. I still cried. It was my first vote off the island.
I don’t know what it is with the Pit of Sauron, but I walked into a similar situation yesterday. They were on the first boss and had kicked the healer. The tank informs me the last healer could not heal, and the hunter (totally geared in t10) whispers to me that he has no idea what the tank is doing. I see the tank is barely geared enough, and a pally who is also from the same guild is not geared at all. I am holy/disc preist, geared and think to myself, this may be challenging, but I can carry most tanks if they are a little undergeared and know what they are doing.
The tank pulls, and the entire group scatters like cockroaches in light. Not one is in my range, so I chase after the tank. I can only single target heal, becasue if I use my group heals, it hits one, maybe two people. We quicly wipe and I inform them they have to stick somewhat together if they all want to be healed. The hunter tells me how sorry he is and tells me not to take the comments personally. I laugh them off.
We get down the boss and move on to Ick. The mobs go down quickly and I think we’re over the first bump. We struggle a bit on Ick but he goes down. The tank is very clueless, and the pally is ret but does not know how to play it. We head for the last part, and start on the gaunlet. The tank pulls a mob and we are all focused on it. The pally runs off the other direction and pulls a second mob. I think the tank is not going to be able to handle it, but I heal away. The pally does not run with the mob to the tank, but instead runs to me to me wth the mob behind him. I am shocked and hesitate, and then get one-shotted.
The tank then informs me that his main is a healer and that I need to learn how to heal better. I was so upset! I did not get kicked, but the tank and pally left. We got 2 replacments and finished it. I was so irritated!!
.-= Arret´s last blog ..TOC On Farm =-.
I was kicked from an HoR heroic the other day on my priest, who is my main in half t10 gear the rest is all t9. The other 4 people were all speaking French and not breaking los for the waves of adds, so I was really working hard to keep everyone up. We get to like wave 8 or 9 and 2 of the mobs are on me, the tank goes down (shock) and calls me out. I was about to reply when I was booted … I wasn’t mad about losing the group so much as I was mad that we were almost to Marwyn and I really would like that trinket of his….
The whole “blame the healer if anything goes wrong” syndrome is really getting old.
Ah, I’ve been punted for calling idiot guilds out on stupidity. H HoR, I’m far outclassing the trio of guildies and the poor guy of a low-geared tank who made a point of at least saying “I don’t know how well I’ll do, but I’ll do my best, this is only my second time in”. After four wipes, me and low-tank were blamed, and the tank was punted, and after I yelled at them for being jerks, they punted me too. I spread the work in General in Dal, and immediately got back “Oh, you dealt with them too?” type responses.
My complete and utter sympathies, Lodur. You’re not alone in this.
I had a similar situation but as a tank where I was watching a group from the same guild play like idiots in H-HoR. After 3 wipes due to running into the middle of the room to fight thanks to unleashed pets. I got the encounter going again and dropped group right after it started.
I’ve been in all guild runs before. A tactic I’ve found works is votekicking the one pissing you off as soon as the debuff drops off everyone. Chances are they’ll have been discussing kicking you and their friends will auto accept. Sure you might get kicked afterwards but its pretty goddamn funny and you’ve just ruined their evening.
Its no surprise also that most of the war stories above are from the new ICC heroics. They tend to be harder to brute force with one decent dps.
.-= Echo´s last blog ..The new LFG system =-.
As hunter got kicked, pet was on passive due to reserect. Tank pulled someone ran wide pulled another mob, so I MD & Volley to try to get threat to the tank. Result in wipe cause healer was not ready. So kick the hunter cause the pet pulled ???
I think I may know what the issue is a lot of the time. I have a DPS I occasionally play and queuing for PUG’s takes forever. So I am pretty sure that DPS warriors/pally’s/druid’s all decide to queue as tank/healer just to get into a group faster. I have even had DK tanks admit half way through, after much struggling with hugely dipping health bars, that they are in fact DPS geared. The problem here is that there just aren’t enough tanks and healers around so the plethora of DPS are half-forced into queuing as them just to get some time in an instance without waiting half an hour or more.
To the discussion farther up regarding dungeons-in-progress: I decline those offers every time. I guess I have that luxury as a healer, but my official excuse is that I don’t want to miss out on badges, and my honest excuse is that groups that kick healers, even if they are competent, will put a microscope on that first replacement, and I don’t need to be micro-managed.
I don’t feel that I excel, nor should I have to, in Herioc instances, but if I’m competent, I don’t need itchy kick-clicks watching my every move. It creates an uncomfortable atmosphere for me.
I was running a UP the other night on my resto druid when one of the BOE chests drop (a blue). I wait and see if anyone else needs it or makes a comment about wanting it for an alt, but everyone hits DE.
I say in party chat that I’m taking it for an alt, and I hit need. Immediately, the mage and the tank are crying ninja, and I calmly inform them that I made sure no one else needed it, I’m taking it for an alt. They then say there is no reason why I would have 2 lvl 80 druids (it was spell leather with + spirit). I reply that I never said it was my alt, but for my GF’s toon who was just getting back into the game. I follow up (a bit sarcastically) that if they were that bent out of shape about a single dream shard, then they can do a /roll for on of the 20 I got that day from randoms or they can just kick me – either way I’m going to get my 2 frost badges. A minute later I”m back in Dal, a lil shocked that they actually kicked me. I que back up, finish the run with in 20 minutes, and then go back and look at the party chat logs and realize that 3 of them were from the same server…
I quickly go roll a lvl 1 on the 2 other servers to discover that they are still in UP, waiting on a healer. I whisper the one dps that was from his server alone and ask if he was upset, and his reply was “no, you said you were needing it, I think its sweet its for a GF, and when you realized that everyone was bent out of shape about it, you offered restitution. I just want to get out of here.”
I just shook my head and logged off after wishing the entire group luck, que back up on my druid and finish another run when I get a whisper from the DK “F******g scrub – the group fell apart b/c of you!! GO DIAF!!!!!!!11!!!”
I just sat back and chuckled a bit – only in a pug.
Nice blog 🙂 I got kicked because I couldn’t heal a tank in H POS in level 70-76 gear…. Sure, he had some epics.. but um yea. Keep Kara gear back in Kara.
lol! You shouldn’t have talked dirty to the tank’s girl friend!
I have not gotten kicked from pugs. I normally vote kick others.
Last weekend, my boyfriend and I PUG’d into H HoR. I’m a BM hunter, he’s a ret paly. We get through the waves (I have to mention that I hate HoR…the whole ‘standing in the corner thing’ sucks) and then the third DPS goes AFK before the first boss fight, remains AFK during the first boss fight, and as soon as its over, he says “G2G” and leaves. My bf says, “Well, not like he did much on that boss.” The healer takes offense “STFU, that’s my guildmate!” and initiates a vote to kick my bf, which I decline and which the tank apparently declines. Next boss fight, the healer refuses to heal my bf and he dies during the waves. The healer wouldn’t res him, so we went through the rest of this phase and the next boss that way. The healer was constantly making remarks at my bf, I’m rolling my eyes, the healer leaves, we get new dps and finish the instance.
I think the average player age on my server is 12.
When I zone in, I check the guild tags. I no longer stay if they’re all the same. I’ve had too many horrible groups, where the tank was bad, or the dps were brain dead, and they were all in the same danged guild. From tanks who were, as you found nowhere near defense capped, to dps who could pull a mighty 800 dps, it’s all there.
Now, I could maybe put up with all that (on my main healer at least: I’m well geared and honestly it’s sorta fun in a weird way to see how bad a group is that you can still manage to drag thru a heroic), but the rudeness that often goes with groups like that is just terrible. If we wipe I know they’ll all afk while I run back to res them all, and if something like a glyph book drops they’ll all need on it. Or, there will be some 12 year old rogue who spams recount after every trash fight, or worse, asks over and over in party chat for someone else to. I generally spam something like dispells at that point…
So I am ok with taking the debuff: I have my tank and dps toon to run as well, along with my baby healer, so who cares. I do heroics for the frost bages only, and I just won’t tolerate crap anymore.
I had this happen recently. I was in a group for Forge of Souls, and I tell them we need to CC the star (I’m a Shaman, so I volunteer to Hex it) in difficult pulls. They respond, and it is then that I find out that my entire group speaks Spanish, and I don’t speak more than I had learned in 11th grade. Okay, no big deal. Language barrier, whatever. I can deal with this; I deal with this every day in the classroom. After every pull, the rogue posts damage meters for that fight.
Every. Single. Pull.
So I ask him to stop. He still does it. I ask them to stop over and over again because this happens every single pull. I eventually initiate a Vote to Kick which fails because I notice that 3 of the 5 members of this PuG are in the same guild. So I ignore the rogue. And then the tank starts posting damage meters every pull. Seriously.
We get to the first boss. We win with no talking. As soon as the boss drops, the group stands there in silence for a few seconds, and I find myself in Dalaran. I was incredibly angry at this, but like you, I noticed that my timer was low at this point and requeued and got my Emblems in a much less stressful group.
.-= Professor Beej´s last blog ..Beej’s Trick to Making Easy, Fast Gold in World of Warcraft =-.
My main spec is shadow, but i’ve been the only clothie in our ten man raid guild for so long, that my disc healing gear is just as good as my shadow (ToC/ICC + Frost gear).
I queue up for random and get Forge of Souls.
It’s me, another pug mage, and 3 from same guild (rogue, tank and some other random dps).
We finish buffs and tank pulls first two mobs. I immediately DC’d. maybe happens once a day, but pretty bad timing. I get back in and everyone sez ‘wtf?’ I apologized for the DC and assured them it wasn’t likely to happen again. We get through two more trash pulls and I finally cast a Penance. The rogue chimes up “HOLD UP”. “YOU’RE DISC!? YOUR A F**KING IDIOT.”
The other mage whispers “stop healing him” Ofcourse I had already made the decision to do that.
Next pull, the rogue is doing everything he can to avoid dying, but dies anyway. I say, “how you like them disc heals?” Next thing I see is a votekick box come up. I assume it was started by the pug mage, so I vote to kick rogue. Next thing I know he’s gone. Which means one of his guildies voted him off the island.
A quick exchange of trash talk with the warrior tank. We pug another dps and finish the rest of the instance without a wipe.
In HPoS the tank refused to drop his stacks on Garfrost. He died with 26 stacks up. He called me out on being a crappy healer and I said “Dude, no one could heal you through 26 stacks.” He said, “What, did you COUNT THEM?” I said, “NO, they show on Grid”. The other DPS verified this. He called me a “bratty healer” then tried to Vote Kick me. It didn’t pass. I apologized to the rest of the DPSer’s and bailed myself.
For all the bad comments, I had to come back and post a comment about a lowbie level dungeon PUG I encountered the other night. I’m the BM hunter who posted a comment above. I recently rolled a shaman and my boyfriend rolled a priest and we’ve been PUGing for gear and XP. The other night we PUG’d into RFZ and had a really great time – we almost didn’t want the dungeon to end. The tank was great, told my bf about halfway through that it was great running with a really good healer (which boosted my bf’s ego since this is his first healer toon). I wish there was a way to “friend” people from other servers and re-group with them. Had it not been so late on a work night, I think we’d have seen if he wanted to stay grouped and re-queue.
PUGs have their moments – in the lower levels, so far the bad groups have outnumbered the good ones – when it seems like there are noobs, we try to help them out, give them pointers, especially if they’re playing classes we’re used to, and keep on going, doing our best to keep things together. Sometimes they accept the pointers with grace, other times not so much (“STFU, noob, I know what I’m doing!” said the hunter who insisted on melee combat…. and “f**k you” said the rogue when a tank said, “stop running ahead and pulling aggro!” after a wipe).
When you know you’re dealing with newer players, it’s not so bad to keep going because at least you know they’re still learning and so you take a little durability damage or you change your play style a little bit to help carry them while they’re learning (hehe, “shammy tank ftw!” in Dead Mines last week when our tank bailed and my bf’s asked me to drop a heal on a tank here or there when we have a loose group).
…and sometimes you just have to cross your fingers, vote to kick, and hope the replacement you get is not another fail lol
.-= Myst´s last blog ..Where in the World is…Me? =-.
On my 80 hunter, I queue up for a heroic random this evening, and I head out to the Foote Steppes to kill rhinos while I wait for my queue to pop. After about twenty minutes, it does.
I arrive in Halls of Lightning, and it’s immediately clear there has just been a wipe. There are four in the group and a healer joins and materializes behind me. We run to catch up at the elementals gauntlet. We buff up and the tank charges in and gathers up the mobs. The tank properly stands just above the bottom of the stairs. I’ve misdirected onto him and I sweep by, stop three-quarters of the way up, turn, and hit the group with Volley. I’m doing around 5000 dps on packs of four and so probably went quite a bit higher for a short burst on so many of these normal elementals.
One of the other DPS players runs past me onto the landing and runs over directly into the mobs on the right, agros them, and then comes back straight at us. The elementals are dead now, but apparently another DPS decided to stand with the tank and was blown up. The tank runs up the stairs to try and and pick up the mobs, but the pulling-DPS toon and the healer are cut down before this can occur. It’s me and the tank. I Feign Death to get one off me. I then look at the tank and see he has quite a bit of health left and I start moving and firing to try and burn them down, to no avail. We both die. The healer and tank left, and then so did I, there being little left that could be salvaged at that point. I flew back, rezzed, and teleported out. Thirty minutes tossed away.
I am back at the Foote Steppes once more. Another fifteen or so minutes later, and I get another queue pop and I’m in Nexus. I think, ok, Nexus is super easy and it’s seven emblem, no worries. Oh, how wrong I was. The healer left immediately. We queued to pick up another healer and then the tank left. We three DPS sat there, waiting to get a tank and a healer, and nothing comes in, we just sit and sit and sit. (I checked to make sure we were queued and we were.) One DPS, a mage, decides to start whirling/dancing back and forth around the first room. He agros a wyrmkin, drags it over to DPS #2 (standing by the end of the hallway into the first room), and then blinks down the hallway, turns, and goes out the entrance. The wyrmkin turns to DPS #2 and kills that player. I Feign Death to avoid a similar fate. DPS #2 immediately leaves the party, followed by “how-to-be-an-unPvP-flagged player-killer” DPS #1. Another thirty minutes tossed away.
I queue up again, wait another fifteen minutes, and finally get into another instance. It’s Occulus. Joy. Two people immediately leave. No, Blizzard, the added awards have had no effect on Occulus-avoidance follies. The tank, I, and the healer queue up for more DPS and begin clearing trash. We get two more DPS and clear the instance with no difficulties. Nobody picks a green drake and we still burned Eregos down without losing a single player.
I have to agree completely with the general position that the nerfing of the game has gone much too far.
I am actually not in favor of changing the mechanics of the game or it’s environment, although I do think the changes to the basic instances to make them even easier was just ridiculous.
No, I think Blizzard needs to do the one thing it finds oh so difficult to do, communicate to its players, especially about tanking.
The majority of casual players are not going to study anything about the game on the web, and no amount of hoping will change this. Expecting new tanks to figure out how to tank by doing something they’re not going to do isn’t reasonable. This is an undeniable fact.
If Blizzard put some extra informational elements about tanking directly into the game where they could be accessed and reviewed by people who were actively playing, about Defense Skill/Cap, etc., and perhaps as well for the other roles, that alone would provide some measure of assistance against the incoming tide of under-skilled players.
From my standpoint, the issue about Defense Cap and Defense Skill and Defense Rating, which a huge number of new tanks know absolutely nothing about and so cannot correctly evaluate, entering dungeons with random “tanking” talent specifications and one to three gear slots having Defense Rating and all others having DPS gear items; that is a major issue. These tanks will quite often fail in runs, experience ridicule on top of their personal failure, not understand any of it, and quit tanking.
We need to smooth out the path to allowing new players to successfully learn tanking without expecting them to visit any Internet sources at all. (If we can do it for DPS and Healers, so much the better.) If these in-game resources can, at the end of their discussions, point players out to the Internet for more detailed follow-up, so much the better.
I had to laugh as I had just read this post and guess what I zone into as soon as I hit the LFD button…thats right; a guild run!
I zone into H Gundrak and I am greeted by the pally tank who explains that they are going for the Less Rabi achieve, as well as the impale achieve from the final boss. To my surprise, they were amazingly cool and well skilled. We got along well and followed it up with a quick H DTK run. They were from Undertow on Antonidas and they made my night.
I pressed my luck again and drew a H FoS group. Pally tank, Arms Warrior, Rogue, Mage. I should have given up while I was ahead. The tank from this group was the gogogo type. Usually this is fine and I deal with it. However, one of the DPS ( I think the mage) draws too much aggro and literally gets one shot on a critical hit. Because of the gogogo pally, I have just about enough mana to rez the downed party member, then drink to get back up. Surely he must notice that a party member has died? Of course not…he is running towards the room of mobs right before Bronjahm. I can see him running to the room. I assume he is going to stop short, as he has two DPS in tow and no healer. Just to be sure, I type ‘wait’. He doesn’t. It takes a good 5 more seconds of running for him to get to the room after I tell him to wait. He runs, he dies, etc. I try to reach him, but I can’t even get in range before he dies. When he corpse runs back, he offers the excuse that he “tried not to aggro”. Apparently running into the room seems to draw aggro from the mobs there. I will have to write this little nugget down if I roll a tanking alt. Anyway, I heal everyone back up, proceed to keep everyone alive despite having almost no mana and everyone not stopping DPS during mirrored soul on devourer. ( I was lucky that they downed it just as I was getting the debuff on me) To top it off, pally tank makes some comment about how he should have switched to his healing spec and healed the run. This guy must be really imba. Apparently rezzing one party member while keeping the tank topped up (who is about 150-200 yards away) is no problem for him.
Just wanted to let you know that sometimes the guild pug runs are the nice ones and the randoms are nightmares.
I joined an heroic Nexus PUG with the other four being from the same guild. Checking the lineup I see two well-geared players with a fairly new tank and a DPS DK wearing 200s. Good, this will give me something to do.
As it turns out, the “noob” pally tank chain-pulled, held aggro like an electromagnet and we killed Keristraza with 3 minutes left on the LFG timer. Plus I scored the Split Personality achievement to boot.
This was only last week (2/26). I’m on my Disc priest – sitting at 79+18bubbles. I PUG into yet another endless random in what has been a long week of grinding to get to 80. I know i am gonna ding before the run is complete, so i’m excited. The screen loads; CoS, nice…. i like this instance, it can be a bit slow, but its almost 6AM and i have been at this all night, so slow is not the end of the world. The group appears, and who do I get but 4 guys, all from the same guild, and all in t9/10 gear.
I’m baffled, so i ask, “Ummm… whatcha’ll doing running non-H instances?”
Their response, “Having fun.”
No questions about my hideous gear, no gripes about my low mana pool, just “having fun”.
We RAN through CoS as fast as the mobs could spawn (which is how i prefer to run any instance) and i hit 80 just as we took down Mal’Ganis. It was beautiful timing. I was thrilled, the guys from the other server were happy to have been able to christen a new 80, and it was a SWEET experience.
I wished them luck as they went off to help some other non-80, and they wished me luck as i went of to start my gear grind. I am living proof that not all 4-man guild groups that you pug into are doomed.
Having said all this, on my VERY next instance (and first heroic on this brand-new 80) i am kicked before the group even gets started with the comments: “your gear sucks!” and “learn how to play before you come out with the big boys”. To which i would like to respond to “the big boys” that last night (only 5 days after hitting lvl80) in what started out as a simple rep-run for guild alts and a few pugged ppl, i completed ICC10 up to Saurfang.
Guess this all just goes to show, don’t judge before you give ppl a chance to prove what they are capable of.