PuG Goodness

As 80 Disc Priest:

After first boss down with only 4 people shown on recount, me, the healer, one of them (SW:P!)

Tank: "Is a DPS AFK?"

Hunter: "Piety?"

Me: "I'm the healer... see the green plus sign on my name? And the heals?"

Tank: "Why do I have Earthshield?"

Shammy says nothing...

Me: "NameOfShammy, if you're a healer, don't sign up as DPS? Or switch specs?"

Shammy: "i italian"

Tank: "Can one of you switch specs?"

And because the shammy shows no inclination to, and though I'm clearly the healer, who signed as a healer, and was assigned as a healer, of course I do. Because I'm not Italian. And therefore not RETARDED.

*

On 63 DK Tank (with 9k HP in Slave Pens)

Half-way through a run that starts every pull with all out AoE nukage, nobody gets aggro, I survive entire pulls without the healer doing anything (he preferred healing me AFTER the mobs were DEAD), suddenly out of the blue the comment:

DK DPS: "lol y u 62 to 64 low hp i c healers wit 7k"

Me: lost for words... partly because his English is mind-boggling enough.

Piety's Rant Box: Lowbie Tanking

We interrupt the Disco guides with the following rant:

I normally play a healer.

I'm a nice healer.

And, my dear tank, I treat you well.

I have excellent gear, I keep up when you pull recklessly, and when your gear is terrible I compensate with shields and heals, casting PoM on you on every cooldown and reserving Pain Suppression only for emergencies to ensure your maximum threat.

I very rarely get recognition for this, and that's ok.

I've also played tank. My former main was a prot pally. I keep an eye on my healer's mana, I don't pull if I see them standing a good distance away, not moving. I give recognition after at least one big pull per instance (complimenting good healing on easy healing pulls is something I don't do, because I want the recognition to mean something).

And so, as I was leveling a baby DK the other day and figured I might as well go into frost and tank some instances in BC along the way. Even before the random daily dungeon system, I leveled largely in instances on the prot pally so I figured it must be even faster now...

My first instance made me want to quit. A shitty attitude healer and his harebrained warlock friend had clearly managed to drive away the previous tank after just 2 trash pulls of Hellfire Ramparts, and I instantly found out why.

We pull the caster dudes with the growy guy in the middle. When I say we, I mean the warlock starts casting and I run in to try and get aggro. On the several caster mobs standing a good distance apart. The warlock then pulls the next group behind as well. Now I have the still-alive growy guy plus beastmaster and friends and several casters nuking the shit out of me. I die, then the group dies.

The healer starts off with "WTF tank y u take so much dmg i heal u like 4 times!!!"

I honestly just stared at the chat screen.

Out of sheer bafflement (particularly at the "healed u 4 times" comment) I pointed out the size of the pull, and suggested people not "help" me pull more adds.

We kill the remaining mobs and one more 4pack of trash. Then the next 4 pack. The warlock somehow again manages to pull the entire rest of the corridor, but not until after I've engaged the other pack and put all my runes on cooldown. He of course maximizes his dps by starting the AoE before they reach my Death and Decay. I deathgrip one to me, throw icy touch on another and start praying for a Blood Rune. The healer's oom by the end of the pull and I managed to keep many, but not all, of the mobs on me. The fact that all of the dps were dpsing different mobs didn't help, but that was partly my fault, as I probably wasted time in panic and I should have started marking skulls.

We all live, and the healer already shouts: "WTF how u not hold aggro ffs!?!?"
I start commenting on the warlock's aoe on mobs that weren't pulled and the healer just rants at me that it doesn't matter, I should be able to hold aggro on everything, in the appropriate lack of spelling. At this point I am fuming, demoralized and just plain flabbergasted at the sheer amount of abuse being piled on me.

Aside from the fact that I'm not overgeared, I'm lvl 60 and a DK. This means that unless I skipped the beginning DK zone, this is going to be one of the first, if not the first, instance I've ever tanked as a DK. The only way I could have experience tanking as a DK is if I leveled another DK as tank on another server already. And then in the middle of the warlock's GOGOGOGOGOGOGOGO and his ranting, he suddenly says "afk phone".

Somebody, not me so it must have been one of the non-warlock DPSers, votes to kick him. I instantly agree. So, apparently, does the other DPS. I assume the warlock doesn't as they were friends, and he leaves once the healer's been kicked. Somebody, may have been me, says "thank God for that" in party chat.

We requeue and wait a couple of minutes for a new healer and DPS. A tree drood shows up, and a DPS content with me pulling initial aggro. We clear the whole instance with no deaths, and while I sometimes lose aggro to the hunter or DK on the big AoE pulls, it's nothing the healer can't handle and I am trying my best. Nobody rages, we move swiftly through, we clear the whole place with no deaths despite just AoEing everything.

Now, I freely admit I am not the best DK tank evar. It was my first and only time yet tanking as DK and if it hadn't been for the tree and the patience of the other 3 dps, it would have been my only one. But once I had people with me willing to actually give me a shot, it went smoothly and quite reasonably fast.

And so I have a new rule. It's apt for a DK, we're supposed to be so dark and emo after all. And that is to preserve my enjoyment of tanking with great determination. I may be subscribing to the primadonna attitude people are lamenting all over the web, but if I don't do this, if I don't follow this basic self-respect rule, I will not tank instances. I have the thick skin of any long-time MMO player but I also have a limited tolerance for abuse. I will become too demoralized, too exhausted, by the kind of attitude I encountered, because tanking stresses me out. It's a high-pressure position. I play DPS and healer, those two are also stressful, but there's a whole kind of stress reserved for tanks: the stress of leadership. And to quote a gem of truth from a very experienced tank: leadership is a service role and tanks are the leaders. Once you realise this, you start viewing complaints from your party members as you would complaints from clients or customers, and it means you're failing to do your job, even if you're pressing all your buttons in the right order. You set the pace and make the rules in service to the group. You take up tasks and responsibilities that others can ignore because somebody has to and that inevitably falls more easily to the guy pulling things and getting stomped on.

I still enjoy it, and I'll do it because I know not a lot of people are doing it, and because I am actually good at it, but I won't do it with people who are jerks. If a group member is abusive, I'm going to start aggressively vote-kicking, and barring that I will leave. If that means I'll be spending a lot of time with a random dungeon cooldown, so be it.

(edited to add: posts like these are the motivation to keep going)

The Importance of Fun

I've been reading a lot about the reactions to the new LFG system. Most seem to feel it is a definite improvement but that it also makes pugs less civilized. I remember my partner's first reaction was "Awesome! But damn , ninja-ing is going to become a plague." The reasoning there being that because you didn't have realm-related consequences to being a Bad (social consequences), or because people were only civilized due to it being time-consuming to replace players (time-related consequences), bad attitudes would be fostered with the new system.

I don't agree. I think the new LFG system makes WoW more fun, not less, and that there are just as many reasons for being civilized. In my experience, people are generally nicer. And my common sense theory is that the elements that made bad behavior "unprofitable" in the past are still at work, albeit in a different manner. The ease with which a player can be replaced is matched with the ease of finding a new group. This means that being an ass may not cost you a lot of time in finding a replacement for someone you upset, but it also means that if someone's upset, they can easily leave and find a group with more amiable players. And because time-to-emblem ratios have become so low, replacing people is almost always a loss (time-related consequences).

The social consequences may not seem as obvious, and I'm sure they vary between battlegroups. I happen to be on a very competitive one (Cyclone EU) and I suspect that is a big influence. No longer are you merely representing yourself and your guild, but your realm as well, and you've got the chance to show off to players from other realms. With server transfers being such a simple transactions these days, we're becoming more aware of other realms and the top guilds around us, and realms are no longer the isolated worlds they once were. While individually the chances of grouping with a certain person again are very slight, there is still reason to maintain a good reputation, both for the chance of possibly furthering your personal reputation for some good ol' epeen pride, and to enhance the reputation of your guild/realm. Performing well and treating a group with a little civility also increases the chances they'll be happy to re-queue for another instance, saving wait time and uncertainty for further runs.

The basic principle behind it all, in my opinion, is that WoW is a game, and we play because we want to have fun. Bads are not fun at all. You may be running a heroic for frost emblems as a "necessary evil" for something more fun, but the underlying presumption remains that you are trying to achieve something you think is fun, and there's only a certain limit of not-fun anyone is willing to put up with. If your tongue-lashing makes the atmosphere more not-fun than someone's mistake or poor gear, you might not find yourself a part of the group for very long. If your behavior/playing makes the experience not-fun for the others, you'll find yourself teleported home. Some people's tolerance is higher (or their motivation is greater), others' is lower, but ultimately, if the people you play with are not having fun, they'll leave and then you can't have fun either. Very basic playground rules, but ultimately that's what we play by.

So be nice. Because it's fun!

Pounding Through the Heroics

I am a lucky healer.

I play with an excellent tank and dps (one is druid the other paladin, they switch roles from time to time) and my strengths and weaknesses as a Discipline Priest are well known to them both. And because we all like to challenge ourselves, even as we run UK for the umpteenth time, we've gotten in the habit of "power-pulling".

The tank never stops. I never drink. Pain Suppression, Shield and Aegis and the awesome power of Penance keeps us ploughing through no matter how many adds we seem to pull. The druid innervates me if I'm down to half mana; Shadowfiend and a Borrowed Time Hymn of Hope keep me going if for some odd reason I'm running low. We just keep going and going and going, pulling 2-3 packs at a time and AoEing everything down. We've done AN in 7 minutes. We did a PuG UK in 9:48 the other day. Most everything except the ICC heroics is cleared in 15 or less, regardless of the DPS that joins us. 2k DPS means we'll only have 5 minutes left on the CoS timer instead of 10.

But I wonder how it must appear to all those joining our group. Because the complaints I hear all over the place are about the demand for speed, and all we ever hear is the unfortunate mage shouting, "I need mana!" Well sit down and drink then. You'll catch up. Two DPS can handle a heroic trash pull, and the only person who needs to have mana for every single pull is me, and I'm just fine...

I want the tank to pull fast. I want to run after him with arms flailing as I try to keep him alive through the initial onslaught. I want the dps to go nuts and pound out everything they can. The tank gets bored if the DPS don't give him something to fight for. I get bored if the tank isn't taking damage. Who wants to play a boring game?

If you want to take it slow, to experience the content, to do achievements, to marvel at the wonderful lore and environment Blizzard have created, I encourage you to do so. Just not in my group. There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking it slow and learning the ropes with other people who also want to do it. You don't want to group with them because you might end up wiping quite a bit as you learn? You should relish the fact that they also have no clue what they're doing. And if you don't, if you prefer the players who want to go fast to go slowly, just so that you have an easier time going slowly, aren't you really just hoping to leach off other people?

I use Gear Score and check my DPSers. Low Gear Score isn't the end of the world -I've seen some mighty impressive dps (comparatively, of course) coming from skilled players who just dinged. But it's also a useful tool. It tells me who is likely to take aggro. They have a shield before the mob even targets them. It tells me who won't survive until a flash heal lands. It also tells me that the 5.4k GS hunter who's just barely pulling 3k dps is definitely going to pull the trash pack we skipped, because he's asleep on the job. Little pieces of information can tell you a lot in a short amount of time, and knowledge is power when you're supposed to look after everybody.

Sometimes my tank pulls before I'm ready and dies. Sometimes I get distracted by shiny things and don't notice him running (in cat form, sprinting ahead) into massive groups of mobs. Sometimes I'm just not able to keep up with the splurge of damage. But without those pulls, I'd grow lazy and stale, and I wouldn't know truly where my limits are. Those frantic, fast-paced, stressful heroics are where you learn to reflexively use every spell in your arsenal to keep from wiping, and that may not be what you're after every single time, but doing it consistently will make you a better healer, guaranteed.

Jerking the PuG

As a healer recently returned to the game almost solely due to the awesomeness of the new LFG tool - I freely admit that since I play with my partner and our mutual friend, who are the Amazing Tank and PewPew Deeps, our groups are devoid of the main pitfalls of most PuGs.

However, there are a few worthy mentions.

For instance, a group we joined after first boss of AN was dead. Two DPS remained, so the tank and healer (and one dps) had obviously given up. We quickly saw why, as the two dps left, a dk and mage, did well under 2k dps, the arcane mage as low as 1.2k... I was pulling that on my mage at lvl 70! My overgeared self, friend (tank) and partner (dps) decided we might as well carry them. We've got one solid dpser, I can heal most anything and the tank is awesome, so why not? They might actually use some of the gear.

We start the encounter for the second boss, and since the dps is low the boss comes running up. Now the Death Knight decides that running right into him (and a swarm of mini mobs) is not only a good idea, but AoE'ing him and continuing this constantly despite various yells to stop is even better. With his self heals and the sadly uncontrollable jump of PoM, and feral druid crit heals, he stayed up as long as the tank did until we all died. We release, run in, vote to kick the DK, and proceed to try again. Except the mage is still lying there dead.

"Rez" comes the demand. My eyebrows rise... being newly dinged and not knowing how to play your class very well in heroics is one thing. Running in after a wipe is just plain common courtesy and *not related to Gear Score at all*.

I reply "Everyone else ran in, just release and run."

"I had to let dogs out" comes the excuse.

We still haven't replaced the DK and are waiting around. It's AN, it takes 30 seconds to run back in.

"There's plenty of time, just release and run."

And this is where he really starts complaining. Apparently we aren't even half decent people, not handing him a res. My wonderful tanky friend, the paladin, replies that we are evil people and we're not resing him because we'd rather just kill the boss than annoy it for 30 minutes. The mage's contribution is minimal which was his idea of an easy ride but also means he's totally superfluous to our efforts. He still lies there, bitching at us in /p as we get in a new DK, one that isn't an idiot, who runs in to us, we buff and just start the encounter.

When it's clear that we really are going to let him lie there, and have engaged the boss himself, he releases and runs in, jumping down just in time for the last half of the fight.

Now, a lot of people would just whine at me for being stubborn about the rez. And if he'd been either a decent player or just a decent person, I'd have ressed him without any fuss. But a bad attitude from a bad player in bad gear makes me a prickly healer, and that's not elitism, it's just what you get for being lazy and rude.