Every so often you get these bad PUGs. You bitch about them to your friends, and if they’re too horrendous, you drop group. Hell, every so often, you might even get terrible PUGs.

And then you get ones like this.

Setting: Nexus. Actors: A poor random DK, an elemental shaman. Then this huntard to shame all huntards, and a paladin from his guild. And poor Lumi who had to queue as tank today because I was in a hurry to get the heroic done.

So we start off, it’s all going well, I’m asked to pull more, etc, etc. In one of these big pulls, I get a whisper:

“Druid innervate me”

Boggled, I glance at the party frames. Yes, this request is indeed, coming from the hunter. That’s fine, maybe he’s asking on behalf of the healer or something… except, nah, the healer hasn’t even spent 50% of his mana pool. However, the hunter is maybe on 25% mana. So I sort of ignore the request – I couldn’t innervate even if I wanted to, it would have been suicide to drop form with six mobs beating on me.

After the pull, in party chat, the paladin goes:

“Durid u know what innervate means?”

Um, excuse me?

Was a tank, honestly expected to, during a pull, drop form, Innervate a hunter, and go back to tanking presumably with zero rage? You know, the class that gets Aspect of the Viper at level 20 to accommodate all their mana needs?

I replied that the hunter, perhaps, could make use of this spell to regenerate mana between pulls, instead of expecting a tank to Innervate in the middle of a pull, lose all her rage, and more than likely cause a wipe.

“Teamplayer lol”

Um. Okay.

Now at this point, perhaps you might guess that this hunter had never trained said aspect and didn’t even know what it meant. I mean, I’d be sort of okay with it, perhaps even lend him some drinks and teach what the Aspect does, be on our merry way. Nope, this sadly wasn’t the case.

This hunter wouldn’t to pop Aspect of the Viper, because, wait for this…

…he didn’t want to lose DPS. It was just so much more practical for him to receive an Innervate every cooldown, you see, instead of changing aspects between pulls. He was making the most numbarz on the metarz, so this made the most sense. Except, this whole thing wasn’t explained as politely as I put it here, sprinkled with random “lol”s and explanations as to why I was bad from his pocket paladin.

At that point I wouldn’t Innervate this guy if Tyrande herself asked me to, and I mentioned this was likely the stupidest thing I’d heard from a hunter in four years of playing (and I’ve heard a lot). Yeah, I was well pissed.

He asked for an explanation of why this was stupid, which I ignored because I was trying to tank Anomalus.

And then they began a game of  “Hey, if we aren’t able to get her to give us an Innervate, let’s start in on her tanking abilities!”

[Party][Paladin]: lol im a much better tank than this
[Party][Paladin]: in my mainspec

Note that at this point I:

• Haven’t lost aggro to anyone
• Haven’t caused a wipe
• Have handled much bigger pulls than usual
• Am pulling 2k DPS while tanking

In response, I went “Really? Feel free to do that now, then!” and dropped group.

Honestly, it was way too early in the morning to put up with that bullshit, even if I was pressed for time. So I thought to myself “perhaps the next time they’re waiting in LFG for twenty minutes to get a tank, they can contemplate where they went wrong  to cause this tank shortage”.

But that’d probably be too much to hope for.

For everyone.

The vote kick system, in theory, is an excellent idea. Someone’s messing up your heroic run, so you can cast a vote to remove them. It takes three people out of the remaining four to agree to remove the person in question, and since  you cannot whisper people cross-realm, it’s hard to negotiate a vote kick behind the scenes. You can’t remove people until their dungeon cooldown debuff runs out, so that stops the *inspect* “OMG HE HAS BLUES!?!?! KICK NOW” kind of crazies. However, in its current incarnation, the system seems to be designed to punish people who perform, while rewarding those who don’t.

As I’ve mentioned, you can’t cast a vote to kick someone who still has the dungeon cooldown debuff. That’s all good, but no sane group needs fifteen minutes to discern whether someone’s going to be a good addition to the group. The people who are so bad that they need to be weeded out as soon as possible – you can smell those in about a minute. Full T9 but no gems, no enchants? Yup. The hunter with a 71/0/0 spec and spellpower mail? I don’t need to carry this guy for 15 minutes.

I’ll stop here and explain something – there will be people reading this and going “WTF, how about if you try to teach them instead of lolkick?” I’m big on personal responsibility. There are a ton of resources on the internet that explain how to play, gear, gem and enchant any spec of any class. Anyone who’s somehow managed to get to level 80 and wants to be a part of group play should be researching how to do that effectively.

It’s not my responsibility in a random heroic to teach someone the basics of their class, and if we stopped so that every newbie we got in our group could get a lecture of “How To Play Class X 101″? The number of heroics I can get done every day would be about halved. I don’t mean one can never ask questions or receive advice from more experienced people, but if you haven’t bothered to at least get the basics down? You haven’t bothered, why should we?

Going back to the point, so you have one of these people in your group, and you want to remove them after a couple of pulls. You can’t. Worse, perhaps you have a non-participant, which seems to be a trend these days. You get someone joining and going AFK without saying a word, putting another character on follow. There’s nothing you can do.

Most people finish the majority of an instance, if not all of it, in the 15 minutes it takes to be able to vote kick someone. No one wants to wait around just to be able to remove the troublemaker and get a replacement. Everyone’d rather just move on one man short. And most people are counting on… precisely this. So what if you’re put on ignore? Plenty more where this PUG came from, just collect your badges while going about other business.

And again, let’s say you have that semi-AFK huntard who pulled barely 400 DPS through the entire thing. You’re almost at the last boss and the timer is about to run out. You could initiate a vote kick, but most people would think, what’s the point? The instance has been smooth, no one died, just let the guy get some emblems.

The point is that you just carried someone — and if he didn’t know he was bad, he didn’t learn. If he learned, or already knew, that he was not up to standards, who cares? There was no penalty, he did the heroic fine, so he doesn’t really need to improve, does he? He’ll just join another party, secure in the knowledge that his playstyle is just fine. Congrats, the lack of a solid vote kick system just encouraged another “noob” to stay a noob.

So how to fix? First off, it’s clear that 15 minutes’ wait to be able to vote kick is way too long. Lowering it down to 5 minutes is fair – 5 minutes are enough to know whether someone is an asset or a liability. It also encourages people to perform right off the bat.

Second, the implementation of a Deserter-like debuff for being AFK too long. Again, the principle is simple – if you need an AFK of longer than five minutes in a heroic, you don’t belong in there. IRL > badges, sort it out before joining a group.

Third – the way people think! It’s not wrong to vote kick people for legitimate reasons, but I see people feeling like this very, very frequently on wow_ladies, dear_gnome, or other blogs. There are many posts that basically go “This player was not up to standards, and it really annoyed me, but I was too shy to start a vote kick.” You don’t have to carry anyone who isn’t up to par. You don’t have to feel bad for them because “we’re so close to the end”. The system doesn’t even tell others who initiated a kick. Again, not kicking them will encourage them to stay bad, and you don’t want that!

There has been a massive ongoing discussion on LJ’s wow_ladies, which can basically summed up as follows:

Let’s say you’re randoming a heroic as a tank or healer, and you ended up in a group with a couple of DPSers who are not pulling their weight, but the instance is going smoothly. Do you comment on it, or do you let it pass because it’s all good anyway?

I’ll sum up my stance with an anecdote from the other day.

Lumi ended up in a heroic Strat group through the random dungeon option. I was tanking. Lumi was fairly well geared at that point, rocking an unbuffed 38ish thousand HP, and other appropriate stats. The healer was one of the top guilds on Grim Batol, with the best raid gear one could get. It looks all fine to me, we go ahead and begin.

Meathook seems to take his sweet time dying, and I take a look at Skada. I’ve done an average of 1300 DPS and I’m right there on top of damage done. Um, really now?

After Meathook died, I inspected my fellow group mates. All of them were in a hodgepodge of greens and blues, with the occasional ilvl200 epic thrown in. This much is fine. What wasn’t fine was the all the empty sockets glaring at me from their gear, as well as the lack of enchants even on the higher quality pieces. Really, how do you win an epic helm that is leaps and bounds better than any of your other pieces, and then think to yourself  “Nvm, don’t need to socket or enchant that”? How can anyone not afford all of three gold needed to buy a green quality gem from the AH?

I asked my group members to please up their DPS as they were all really low (DK, arms warrior, and hunter, for the record). The responses ranged from “We haven’t even wiped, what’s your problem?” “I’m a new 80, lol” to “I’m an alt”.

Does one need to wipe in an instance to notice that they have to get better? Why is it that most people don’t bother to go above that minimum “do this, else we’ll wipe” threshold, and think that this is fair to everyone else in the group? Since when is “I’m a new 80″ or “I’m an alt” an excuse for subpar performance in a heroic?

To me, all of those responses indicated a gratuitous lack of respect. As one of my friends put it, manners don’t seem to be included in the new patches. You are disrespecting your group members when you’re in a heroic with unenchanted, ungemmed gear, with full knowledge that you don’t belong there, not trying to squeeze out the best DPS you have. You are telling strangers “I know I’m not good enough, so please carry me through this, okay?” in an extremely cheeky way.

I have a friend. She dinged 80 a couple of days ago, a moonkin who had to reroll EU from US, leaving two years of investment in her character. Even while she was leveling, she was planning out her gear at 80, ranking pieces, eyeballing things she could cheaply buy from the AH. She had a set of gemmed, enchanted gear waiting for her as soon as she dinged 80, a mix of blues and cheap 200-219 epics. The results? ~1800 DPS sustained on a target dummy the day she dinged. She had 1600ish spellpower at this point and was fully hitcapped.

This, my friends, is how you respect others.

The four of us, our little friends group, take her along to heroic runs now. Most of the time she’s dead last on the meters. Does it bother any of us? Hell no. We all outgear her by miles, but even more important than that, she has already done the best she can to improve her gear, tweak her rotation, and to get herself to an acceptable level for heroics. The rest can come with time. She has shown respect for herself and for everyone else she’s going to be grouped with, and that goes much, much further than any epic loot can ever take her.

In the same vein, if everyone in my Strat group had bothered to enchant and gem the shinies they had? Even if they did less damage than Lumi afterwards? I wouldn’t care. Not at all. They’ve already shown some respect, so I’d gladly “carry” those people. We were all new to 80 once. No one is expected to do 3k+ DPS sustained the day they hit 80.

If you’re ever a fresh 80 on any character out to do heroics, ask yourself this question: “If everyone’s gear, performance and knowledge were equal to my own, would we able to get through this instance smoothly?” The answer you want to this question is a resounding yes. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. If the answer is anything but yes, go back and try again until it is.

This whole debacle does, though, get the goat of all the people who legitimately earned their gear when people don’t bother, which is part of where the whole casual/elitist debate stems from. Here’s news, guys – when you don’t bother making some effort towards pulling your weight before grouping with other people? That’s not being casual.

Casual is not an excuse for being bad. Casual is when you have limited time to devote to the game, and I’m pretty sure you can still conjure up some respect for others with that limited time. You’re oh so busy with whatever things you do in real life, and can’t be bothered to read a wiki page or one forum thread before you engage in group play? Fine. Then you don’t really belong in group play, so don’t be surprised or hurt when you get removed. You can take a few minutes to read up on your class and the instances, spec properly, gem properly, enchant properly. There are a great many “casual” people out there who do that, moonkin!friend being just one of them.

When you’re playing in a group, in a MMO no less, you make an implied promise to others that you’ll perform your assigned role to the best of your ability. You end up taking on responsibilities, and not fulfilling those responsibilities shows a great lack of respect towards the people you play with – and this is what gets me and a lot of the people who kicked you out of their party.

Well, I thought I’d contribute my bad PUG story of the week, and the raiding week has just started.

It all started when I saw an ad in trade advertising a TotC10 PUG. The guy doing the advertising was from one of the top guilds on the server, and supposedly, the group was 70% that guild – they just wanted 2 heals and a tank. Sounds like a good deal. I hopped on my priest, whispered the guy, and got invited.

The tank needed was eventually found, a DK from another top guild, and the original guild managed to dredge up a disc priest from their ranks, so we were ready to go.

We started. And promptly wiped on Beasts.

“What happened? TotC wipe, ugh!” cried the people from the uberleet guilds, most of whom were sporting Astral Walker titles. Turns out that not many people from the uberleet guilds were bothering to DPS down the snobolds, and both healers had one. The raid leader instructed them, and back we went.

And we wiped again – this time it was the paladin tank being clueless about the debuff management on Jormungars. There were more incredulous cries, and the other priest and DK left without a word.

The raid leader, making it clear how extremely disgusted he was that we had dared wipe in TotC, convinced the DK to come back, and they picked up yet another priest from their guild.

And then we wiped, and then we wiped some more. The paladin tank turning the worms towards the casters, no one caring about snobolds, people setting up camp in the fires, we had it all.

During one of the fights, my WoW crashed right at the start of the fight, and when I came back, my Grid was completely messed up, not giving accurate information, hell, not showing half the people at all. I hastily pulled out the standard raid frames, and tried to heal as best as I could. After we wiped, the disc priest piped up in the raid chat that I wasn’t pulling my weight – he was just below me on the meters and that wasn’t supposed to happen.

I whispered him and explained that my raid frames were messed up, it’ll be better next try, apologies.

He found it appropriate to keep going on. He isn’t a paladin with Beacon. It was so hard to solo heal everything. Blah blah blah, his epeen is so big.

I wanted to point out that it’s not really solo healing when I’ve still done more healing than he did – but you know, there’s that thing that happens when you feel in the wrong, especially against someone who’s clearly more experienced then you are. I knew that our healing numbers should not have been so close together, and I knew he was more experienced than I was, so I was pretty much intimidated into shutting up.

Next try, we go again. I think I’m really going to be on top of my game this time (I’m not even sure how that happens, since you don’t just see damage and consciously choose not to heal it as a healer, but yeah). I’m going to outheal that disc priest by miles and show him how it’s done.

Then I get snobolded, and proceed to spend the majority of the fight doing nothing but casting CoH and PoM on cooldown, sprinkling a bit of Renew, and using Surge procs to try to heal people up. It’s a wonder we didn’t lose anyone.

They finally bother to kill the snobold, and then we promptly wipe because the DK tank AMS’s out of Burning Bile just as four poisoned people are running towards him.

People leave in rage and disgust at this point, and we disband, having killed a grand total of 0 bosses.

This PUG was actually the embodiment of the reason why high-end guilds usually get a bad name – it’s not only that they’re stuck up, it’s that they’re both stuck up, and firmly convinced that the content they have had to PUG is so easy, they can just tear up the how-to-play book and throw it away. Oh, we don’t have to kill snobolds – someone else will. We don’t need to stay out of the fire, healers have enough mana to heal. No need to pay attention to basic things such as “don’t turn a mob that spews poison towards your casters” or “don’t hit it before the tank”. We don’t need a good group balance, it’s just x instance. It’s only their guild raids that are hard and important, and it’s inevitably someone else’s fault when they die on such easy content.

On the other hand, I had another TotC10 PUG Tuesday night – a ton of people from no-name guilds, some people guildless, mediocre performance. We wiped once, and that was on Anub.

So, I got kicked from a raid for the first time in ages, for basically… being bad.

Here’s the setting.

Icehowl. Being tanked in such an odd spot that, when he does the knockback, about half of the group end on the same spot. My camera angle ends up weird, and I can’t see anything, like, the DBM skull I have to see to know where to run away from. I don’t even know if I should run or if I’m safe.

And Icehowl appears to be turned towards us. Well, shit, sayeth I.

And randomly pick a direction to run to. That happens to be in his path.

Tank gets twoshotted, we wipe.

I summarily get yelled at in /ra, and mortified, I try to explain why and how I couldn’t run away, suggesting if he gets tanked in the middle I can know whether to run or not.

(Basically, this is how I did the fight previously. He would get tanked in the middle with everyone spread in a circle around him – if DBM didn’t have your name, you didn’t have to run anyplace, because everyone was already spread.)

I get screamed at yet more. “RUN. AWAY. FROM THE SKULL.” “Just run, it’s not hard ffs.” I apologise and say won’t happen again. Raid chat is quiet. I get ressed, buffed, drop a Fish Feast.

And summarily am removed without a word.

I was the only PUG in a group of guildies, so I pretty much expected being ridden hard for my mistakes, both real and imagined. What I didn’t expect was being removed after making a single mistake, for which I apologised profusely and explained reasons for.

Part of me says “well, fuck that” – had I been the group leader, a single mistake, politely explained and suggestions made for, wouldn’t have been grounds for removal. I’d probably feel happier knowing that, you know, someone owned up to their screwup and explained why. The other half says “well, it’s their group, and you did fuck up”.

I do feel totally depressed because… it’s been ages since I singlehandedly wiped a raid. I might just have acted with the best of intentions, and obviously it wasn’t deliberate, but it happened. And now I have an entire raid probably thinking “Lol, she was bad.”

Correspondingly, part of me just wants to explain “Look, I really don’t always do things like that, I swear.” And another part just doesn’t care because, hey, if you remove someone who made a single honest mistake and apologised, without even bothering to tell them anything, I probably don’t really want to group with you anyway.

But yeah. Sigh, indeed.

I had been planning for a long time to get back into PVP – the only reason I hadn’t been doing it so far is the fact that I really miss TBC style PVP. The slow, carefully planned matches and the concept that as a healer, I actually was capable of staying alive and contributing without needing a lot of babysitting encouraged me to participate.

With Wrath it felt like we were straight back to 1.x era PvP. Feeling like I was made of paper hadn’t been fun back then and it wasn’t fun now. So I pretty much quit cold turkey with 3.0 and didn’t look back.

But the new season is here and so is the resilience change, so I decided to give it a go again. My prep work was done weeks ago – I had enough Conquest for three pieces of Deadly, capped out honor, the Hateful robe lying in my bank (thanks Archavon) and the Furious boots and belt lying in my bank (thanks Emalon). All gemmed and enchanted I’m rocking 21k HP, 650 resilience selfbuffed.

So far it’s just been some AV, but I generally like what I see. It’s not what it used to be, but it’s getting better – and I can’t realistically expect everything to be the same, going from a priest with capped resilience in great gear to one with mediocre gear.

I’m due for three more upgrades today. I’m 16 badges short of the Deadly gloves, yielding me the 4set, 5k honor short of a ring, and 3 WG marks short of the resilience trinket. I think I’ll be opting for the haste one over spellpower one for maximum throughput.

My preferred bracket is 2v2, considering I’m not remotely ambitious when it comes to titles or shoulders (in fact, thanks to Blizzard’s horribly borked title system, there have been past seasons where my teammates with the exact same games played got titles and my priest did not). That, and also the facts that 1. We don’t know any mages to play RMP with us 2. 3v3 is still way too bursty for my taste. As a result, I’ve been gathering spirit pieces over crit pieces.  If I don’t find myself OOM, I could go back to gathering crit – at least making the swap from Mooncloth to Satin should be easy considering the speed with which we are able to grind heroics.

Speaking about PVP gear, here’s my bad PUG story for the day.

Did both versions of Vault last night hoping the Deadly gloves would drop and save me from grinding the badges for the last piece. Emalon goes down, lo and behold, the Deadly Mooncloth gloves in all their glory, Calissa yelling “Ely you lucky bitch” on Vent. They were literally the only piece of loot I needed from Emalon, and being one of the two healing priests in the raid, I thought I had a fighting chance.

Gloves go up for roll. The highest roll belongs to a shadow priest. The master looter has been dodgy so far with keeping track of who’s what spec, previously handing the elemental gloves to the resto shaman over the ele one, so I immediately whisper him with “Hey, that guy’s shadow, please only consider the rolls of the healing priests.” (For reference, the server etiquette is that for any and all pieces of gear, your main spec is what goes, except in the case of tanks, who obviously don’t have PVP gear made for them.)

“This is PVP, who cares about spec?”

Gloves get looted to the shadow priest.

I blow up on Vent to Moonky and Calissa, who are both in the raid. Rageudder who’s an assist in the raid also hears of it, as well as Cupid and Ita who are in the raid on their alts. The guy quickly changes his story saying he never said “who cares”, he was just confused because of all the whispers he was getting. This is funny because earlier he had kicked Ita on her warrior, and when the raid exploded, he had said that she and Cupid had left out of their own accord, because he wouldn’t invite their friend. Yeah.

But of course what’s done is done, and the priest who got the gloves isn’t willing to trade them. The raid ended with the masterlooter on six people’s ignore list, six people with whom he’d probably like to group with again in the future. Oh wellz.

Part I of the series is here. Part II of the series will deal with how to lead the raid during the actual raiding phase.

To begin with, you need to make sure that you have authority over the raid and that you will be listened to. It’s important that your raiders don’t go running around and ignoring your commands. This might sound like an ego-trip on the part of the raid leader – but there is a fine line between ego-tripping and asserting your authority. There’s nothing worse than deciding on a strat on a boss, trying to implement it, then some other guy deciding to follow his own strategy anyway, and that needs to be prevented.

Yes, leading a large PUG is very reminiscent of herding cats, why do you ask?

The easiest way of asserting your authority is commanding respect. Let your raid follow you not out of threat of a raid removal, but because they have respect for you.

To help with this, always speak in correct English, with proper grammar, punctuation, and capitalisation. Stay calm and collected, don’t spew obscenities or use all caps. People are a lot likely to listen to you when you sound like you’re someone worth listening to. Don’t abuse /rw, in fact don’t use it at all if the information you’re conveying is not crucial. Most players start ignoring raid chat altogether if /rw is being overused.

You need your assistants to be listened to, too, since they’ll also be leading when you’re for one reason or another busy. The raid also needs to be respecting them. Don’t contradict them publicly, don’t have a disagreement with one of them in raid chat. If you want to sort something out, sort it out in whispers or a chat channel. Let the leadership present a unified front.

Loot is a very big part of any raid, and there is nothing that puts a damper in a good PUG quite like masterlooting issues. Make your loot rules crystal clear, before the run starts. There needs to be absolutely no mistake on that, make sure everyone has understood them.

A set of loot rules I like to use, that has worked for me so far is:

Every item is open for regular rolls, highest wins. Mainspec before offspec. Armor class priority – as in, if a cloth wearer and leather wearer covet the same cloth item, the clothie has priority on the item. Otherwise, use of common sense is required, otherwise the leadership may interfere. (As in, if a hunter and a rogue both roll on Sinister Revenge, we may well tell the hunter to fuck off.) If someone wins too many items, too many meaning > 5, again, the leadership reserves the right to interfere. BOE items may be won on mainspec rolls, but the winner is required to equip it right away and be inspected. BOE items may not be won on offspec rolls, they will be raidrolled if no one wants them for their mainspec. If no one wants a piece of loot, it goes to a designated disenchanter.

Note that in these set of rules, you have to define what mainspec is. We define it as “the spec you have been in for the majority of the raid”. Letting people define their own mainspecs, especially with the dual spec system, is way too complex. And again, you can’t trust them to not abuse the system.

As for offspec rolling. I try not to permit offspec rolling as it’s not fair to other people – offspec rolling in this context meaning that someone forfeits the right to roll on anything for their mainspec, but gains the right to roll on offspec loot as if it was their mainspec. This can go pretty badly if everyone decides that they want to roll offspec, it’s again open to exploitation, it’s overcomplex, and more often than not leads to drama. If I have to, though, I’ll let one or two people roll offspec, with the agreement of other people who are interested in the same loot.

If someone will be rolling offspec, make sure everyone in the raid is made aware of that fact so as to prevent potential drama.

Reserving loot also tends to lead to drama. I’ll never do it, out of principle, because I feel it’s very unfair. I suggest that all PUG leaders avoid it.

If you’re the raid leader – don’t masterloot. Just don’t. You have more important things to be doing, so resist the temptation and pass it off to an assistant you have confidence in to do it right.

Your assistant will need to know very well who’s rolling on what, for what spec. Make no mistake, people will try to cheat others out of loot, and that needs to be nipped in the bud. There will be people who will try to roll multiple times, hoping their duplicate rolls are hidden among other rolls. There will be people rolling on offspec items, hoping the masterlooter isn’t paying enough attention and will give them the item.

If there is no one else you trust to do it right, do it yourself, but this will quite likely slow down the raid.

From the first pull onwards, the raid leader has a very important role: Assessing your group. I’ve mentioned in part I of my guide that no matter how many achievements and epics someone has, they might make mistakes, or just have areas they are weak at. It’s your responsibility as the raid leader to find those weak spots and patch them up, or otherwise compensate for them.

This endeavor has tiers. First off, you’d like to weed out the people who are clearly underperforming. If someone’s damage done is below the tanks’ on Patchwerk, that person has to go, unless they had a good reason why they did badly.

In fact, as a side note, everytime I start a Naxx PUG, I do Patchwerk first, since it’s a pretty good indication of your DPS, healing, threat, and general survival capability. If  you wipe on Patchwerk, the reason is generally pretty obvious, and the people who caused it can easily be spotted.

This is also part of the mistake compensation that I’ve mentioned. Sometimes, a player is not bad enough to warrant removal from the raid – they are just weak at one thing or the other.

Some people who are otherwise good inexplicably fail at certain fights. You might have a really great DPSer who’s bad at kiting. Your amazing single-target tank might be bad at add pickup. Your holy priest might be great, just don’t ask her to juggle her cooldowns with the tank’s. Until I got a new computer, I was incapable of tanking Heigan because I had about 5 FPS maximum during the entire fight. My amazing co-raidleader’s computer always froze whenever he got a void zone underneath him on KT, which resulted in him eating dirt for the majority of the fight. A good raid leader keeps an eye on these things and moves people around as needed.

Part of mistake compensation is putting people on roles they’re familiar with, unless you’re confident they’re capable of learning quickly. If a tank has never done tunnel on Thorim, off into arena he goes, even if his specific class would have functioned better in the tunnel.

Speaking of learning, as the raid leader, there will inevitably be times where you’ll have to teach people a fight. Handling these times well will make the difference between success and failure. Remember that in a PUG, you cannot afford to fail repeatedly, as you will, more than likely, lose people doing so – as a result, helping people learn the fight quickly with the minimum amount of attempts is important.

Keep the explanation simple. I cannot stress this enough. As simple as you possibly can make it. The less they have to keep in mind, the better.

Don’t use ability names if you can help it – “big spell with 8 second cast time” is easier for a lot of people to remember than “Flash Freeze”. Obviously though if it’s a well known spell, like Blizzard, Rain of Fire, void zone, etc, go for it.

Try to draw parallels between fights that your raid is likely to already know, and the one you’re working on. When I’m introducing a bunch of oldschool raiders to Mimiron, telling them that Spinning Up/Laser Barrage is the same as C’thun’s Dark Glare is a lot simpler than explaining the ability. They’ll know exactly how to avoid it, and feel a lot more confident in their ability to do so.

Don’t explain to people anything they don’t have to know. Your DPSers don’t have to know about Thorim’s tank switch requirement, only your tanks and healers do. To explain it to the DPS is just overcomplicating things.

As an example, here is how I explained the Twin Valkyrs fight to a DPSer who was new to it.

“Okay, we’ll split into two groups. You’ll either be DPSing the light twin, white, or the dark twin, black.

“In the beginning of the fight, touch the portal that is the opposite color to your twin for a debuff. This debuff is called your essence, and it’s a DPS boost.

“There will be little orbs floating around during the fight. Run into the orbs that are the same color as your essence. That’s also a DPS boost and it prevents the bosses from getting stronger.

“If your twin is casting the long Vortex spell, you immediately have to run to a portal and take on the same color essence as the twin. Otherwise you will die.

“Once in a while any of them will shield up and start casting a big spell. It’s the same deal as Kael in  MGT – break down the shield and interrupt the spell, except the end result of the spell is a heal instead of Pyro. If it’s not your twin that is casting it, you should change essences, go to the other twin, and help DPS and interrupt.

“So to sum up: Have the opposite color as your DPS target, absorb the same color orbs as yourself, have the same color as the twin that’s casting Vortex, help burst down shields and interrupt. DPS target = opposite color, orbs = same color, Vortex = same color. ”

You can see how the explanation is getting progressively shorter as I go on. First a rundown of the fight, then a simpler summary, and yet another even simpler one. The repetition also helps reinforce the basic concepts of the fight. Also note how I’ve omitted the damage spike ability on tanks, as it has nothing to do with a DPSer.

Keep up the pace! Efficiency and speed are key to a happy group. Encourage tanks to pull for as long as healer mana looks okay. Don’t waste time on looting – as soon as a boss dies, resses need to immediately go out, rebuffs done, and trash should be pulled. The master looter stays behind to link items and take the rolls. 15 seconds after the roll command goes out, close the rolls, there’s really no reason to wait longer. If someone hasn’t done their homework on loot, that’s their problem, not yours.

Speed up wipe recovery, encourage people to heal and buff on the run. After a wipe, remember that it’s faster if everyone releases and runs. If someone dies, there’s no need for the entire raidgroup to sit and wait around. Go pull the next group (but yeah, don’t put your resser in combat).

Set master looter threshold to Epic, anything less can be individually looted with no penalty.

Ask your raid to cut down on AFK breaks. If anyone needs to go AFK, they should do so between bosses and be back before the next boss, or wait until you announce a break. Here is where that authority and respect comes in handy!

This is it for Part II of the series. Part III will deal with common problems that arise in a PUG, and how to solve them most efficiently.

Lately I’ve been reading many accounts and listening to many, well, stories in trade. These sob stories inevitably deal with how some person was not accepted into some PUG or the PUG fell apart because his gear was not deemed adequate, even though the person in question firmly believes that their gear was adequate.

Here’s the thing.

Your gear might well be sufficient for the instance.

That doesn’t mean that the group has to accept you. No really, it doesn’t.

Groups of well-geared people generally seek other well-geared people to steamroll the instance. This might not be the most fun way of doing things, but the really well-geared people in question are usually already tired of running the same instance over and over again. They probably don’t want their agony prolonged by having someone around who will slow them down. They just want their Conquest badges to get whatever item they didn’t get.

You might think they’re being funny, asking for your [Epic] to run a couple of heroics or “loleasy” raids. They’re not. They’re merely saving themselves some time and pain, especially with the new badge system bringing everyone out to PUG these days.

They could of course accept you, and try you, and then decide which wrist to slit first when they wipe, because some guy in the group isn’t keeping up the pace. Or because they’re running a speed makeup and someone is not performing as they should.

Don’t take not being accepted as a personal affront. Most of the time, the guy on the other end of the line doesn’t mean it as an insult. No one is laughing at you for not being clad in epics. And if they are, they’re probably dicks.

If you’re not accepted, you’re not accepted. It was the group leader’s choice, and they opted for a no. If your gear is adequate, surely there are other groups out there that will take you. Do not despair.

(P.S Please note that I rarely decline people with sufficient gear – on the other hand, I completely feel the people who do so for speedruns and odd makeups.)

Ever since I hit level 15 on Kaliah, my first character, and was introduced into the wonderful world of instancing, I’ve loved it. For reasons I myself can’t explain either, I love group play in WoW. However, the boyfriend and friends who introduced me to the game were higher level, and as such, didn’t have much interest in spending time with little Kaliah ingame. This meant that I was doomed to PUG, rather a lot.

I’ve been in countless PUGs into countless places ever since, leading anything from a 5-man to a 25. Let me say that, in my opinion, PUGs aren’t disasters, unbearable, horrible, etc, all the time.

Perhaps half the time.

Although, I can say with certainty that a good leader plays a great part in a successful PUG. So without further ado, to today’s post: How to lead your PUG to success. I will mainly focus on PUG raiding, however, everything I say can easily be applied to a 5-man context.

First things first: If this is anything larger than a 5-man, having an assistant or two, who are knowledgeable and handy, helps tremendously. Don’t randomly give assist to people who you think might invite more people. Make sure that your assistants are people whom you trust to handle things fairly and appropriately.

When I’m out to lead a raid, I’m the person who looks at the raid makeup and decides what classes/specs we want, and keeps track of the people we already have. I do things such as be on top of “Who’s tanking?” “Who’s healing?” “Who’s rolling on offspec gear?” “Do we have too many melee for KT25?” “Do we have kiters for Gluth?” “Are our priests able to MC on Raz?”.

I then tell my assistants who to look for, and they find people who fit the bill. One of us checks Armory, necessary questions are asked and answered, if all of us agree, an invite goes out.

This accomplishes a few things. First, you don’t get burned out from the responsibility of leading, because now there are other people who share it. Second, keeping track of everything, especially in a 25-man, is much easier when you delegate duties. Third, more people to discuss things with lead to easier, and in most cases fairer, solutions to problems.

So you have your raid, and you have your assistants. Time to find more people.

I’ve already written a post about how to write a good trade ad. Put yourself out there, and see what you get. Make sure you reply to everyone. I don’t care how much time it takes, make a “/r No thanks, not what we’re looking for” macro if you need to. Most people consider not getting a reply back very rude, not to mention that unless you reply, they can’t be sure you even received and read their whisper!

This is where assistants also are great, as they will help field many of the whispers themselves.

As for picking people – remember that gear, and achievements, aren’t everything. Try to pick people who have the right attitude (and yes, even a two-line whisper can give away a lot of things about your attitude). A lot of the time, I’ve recruited people with no achievement, and merely decent gear, after they were honest with me and said “Look, I’ve never done this, but I’ve read strats, watched videos, and I’m ready. Just try me.” I’ve rarely been disappointed in such recruits, whereas some people I’ve had a lot of trouble with were people who had the gear and achievement for the fight.

Striking a balance is a good thing. Decent gear, partial or no achievement, but great attitude: Gets in. Good gear, achievement, and bearable attitude: Gets in. But if any of the two lacks strongly, the person stays out. I’m not going to recruit someone who can’t pull their weight, or someone for whom I have to spare ten minutes before every boss fight to explain how it goes. It isn’t fair to the rest of raid if someone is getting carried, and during a raid, the leading team already has enough on their plate without having to deal with explaining tactics from scratch. On the other hand, I’m not going to recruit someone with a terrible attitude either, for obvious reasons.

The discussion of recruiting also brings us to another point about leading a PUG.

A bad PUG leader checks gear, checks achievements, and often has unrealistic expectations for the content that’s being done (”LFM Ulduar10, be in full T8,5″). When he gets his, in his eyes “uber”, group together, he is very sure that the instance will be cleared with no hiccups.

A good PUG leader knows that no matter how geared, skilled, and experienced people are, mistakes will happen. He sets up in his group in such a way that those mistakes will be compensated for.

My point here is that group makeup matters a lot in this compensation. While you can bring ten druids and beat Naxx10, doing that is not the fastest or the most advantageous route. Different classes bring different things to the table – and all of those things, you might need to beat the instance.

As far as classes and specs go, start by looking for diversity, and looking for balance. You know how many tanks, healers and DPS the instance requires. Now you should be picking various types of those.

Let’s say you want to bring three tanks. You can pick three warriors and they can do the job just fine – but remember, you want tanks capable of doing different flavors of jobs, so you can use different ones for different situations. Put in a warrior, a DK, and a paladin instead, and now you have:

1. A jack of all trades tank
2. A tank strong against magic damage, and bosses with occasional hard-hitting damage phases
3. A very strong AoE tank.

They all bring different things to the table, and while they can individually tank everything, they all have encounters they are best at. That little edge X type of tank has on Y boss is your mistake compensation.

Same with your healers. Six shamans? Will do the job. But it won’t be pretty. Seek diversity. Two paladins, a disc priest, a holy priest, a resto druid, and a resto shaman is a much better healing setup. You have your strong single-target healers, raid stabilizers, and massive AoE damage healers.

Last but not least, the DPS. You can’t expect to stack a single type of DPSer to success. Some fights favor melee, and some fights favor ranged. There are fights you can’t do without a healthy mix of both.

Buffs and debuffs are another important point. Anything that causes the boss to die faster, or do less damage, or gives your group more resources to do so, is something that will make up for inevitable mistakes.

In a 25-man, this doesn’t matter much. Because of the number of people involved, crucial buffs and debuffs come naturally. It’s hard to set up a PUG 25man raid that lacks Replenishment, or Bloodlust/Heroism, or basic stat buffs. In a 10-man, this changes drastically.

Blizzard has said that they balance raid encounters assuming that the group will have Replenishment. Assuming your group doesn’t completely overgear the instance, you will need someone that can provide it. Ret paladins, survival hunters, destruction warlocks, frost mages and shadow priests fill that role.

While, to my knowledge, Blizzard hasn’t said that they balance encounters around Bloodlust/Heroism, it is a massive DPS boost and can give you that final push you need. Get a shaman. Considering that shamans also come with a great variety of raidwide buffs, having one in your PUG is pretty much mandatory.

Try to get as many primary stat buffs as you can. Fortitude from a priest helps tremendously in fights that have heavy raid damage (which is pretty much everything in Ulduar). Your healers and casters love their intellect from a mage. Mark of the Wild is a nice overall stat and resist buff.

From there on, fill in the other buffs that you would like to have according to the makeup of your raid, and whether you overgear the instance. For your melee, Sunder or Expose Armor, Leader of the Pack, and a 10% AP buff from a blood DK, enhancement shaman or survival hunter are some of the basic ones you might want to have. Their magic equivalents are Curse of the Elements (warlock), Earth and Moon (moonkin) or Ebon Plague (unholy DK) for increased magic damage taken, a moonkin or elemental shaman for the 5% crit, and a spell damage totem from a shaman or the spellpower buff from a demonology warlock. Mutilate rogues, elemental shamans and ret paladins give the whole raid an extra 3% crit on the relevant mob.

There are more buffs that stack with these and can build on those – pick and choose according to your raid’s makeup. If you’re melee heavy, stacking melee buffs is to your advantage, a caster heavy raid, the other way around. At any rate, try to maximize the number of buffs given to both camps while keeping a balanced raid.

Here is an example Ulduar10 raid I might want to make. Let’s say I started off with myself, dual specced disc/holy priest. Plus my prot paladin and arms warrior friends (happens a lot these days, incidentally).

I’m going to take two tanks. I already have a strong AoE tank, so I want a strong single-target tank now. My primary choice would be a warrior, jack of all trades tank plus provides Sunders and Commanding Shout for the whole raid. However, I’m already bringing a warrior who can Sunder and CS if needed, so I’ll take a feral druid instead for all around 5% crit to all melee classes.

But really, any of the two will do, and I might prefer the prot warrior anyway because both Last Stand and Shield Wall will see some use on various chain-cooldown dependent bosses.

I have myself, healing. I want a resto druid for great raid stabilizing capability plus a combat res. In a real PUG situation, I typically leave the last healing spot open till the end – if I can find an elemental shaman, the last healing spot will be covered by a paladin. If not, I will take a resto shaman. But for now, I will assume I have an elemental shaman, so I am taking a holy paladin.

“But we have two paladins!?!?!” Yes, paladins are one of the rare classes that stack well, because they can provide different blessings. So I will not hesitate to take a second one.

Our healing team is quite well-rounded now, with a holy paladin as the strong single-target healer, a resto druid as the raid stabilizer and the holy priest on the AoE. If I get a resto shaman, I go as disc and cover the single target healing slot.

Ideally, I would take two melee DPS and three ranged ones. I’ll take an elemental shaman for amazing all-around raid buffs. If I do find a destro warlock that can supply Replenishment, I will take a mage for the last ranged spot, otherwise I’ll go for a survival hunter (a ranged Misdirect is quite handy). The reasoning here is as follows: I like having warlocks around because Soulstones and summoning stones are fairly handy to speed a raid up, they have good AoE, 13% more magic damage taken for the entire raid, and high personal DPS. Mages, if fire or FFB specced, supply a 5% spell crit debuff on the target, buffing both the elemental shaman and the warlock, and come with an intellect buff.

If my warlock cannot provide Replenishment, a hunter is the next best thing for it, however, remember that the hunter will benefit from melee buffs rather than the ranged ones.

This brings us to the melee. I’ll go for a blood DK for 10% AP for all my physical DPS plus extra threat for tanks. I already have an arms warrior for the last slot. Raid complete.

Our final lineup is:

*Tanks: Prot paladin, feral druid
*Heals: Holy priest, holy paladin, resto druid
*Melee DPS: Blood DK, arms warrior
*Ranged DPS: Elemental shaman, warlock, mage

I hope the example gave some insight into the line of thinking that goes into forming a balanced PUG. This would be pretty close to the kind of lineup that I want, with a balanced set of buffs and debuffs. I feel that this group will give me quite a high margin for error.

So you have your group, you’re all summoned, and ready to go. Part II of the series will deal with how to lead the raid during the actual raiding phase for maximum success.

So we pugged a 25 Naxx today, cause, it’s fun.

Enter this priest. Not badly geared, and says that he’s specced for AoE heals. No Guardian Spirit, no Imp Healing, but yeah, we give him the benefit of the doubt, and sure enough, he’s topping the meters every boss.

Except he’s being really obnoxious about it. Boss dies, link healing meters, gloat gloat, point out how much more healing he has done than the others and is clearly special.

Well, bad, but bearable.

Every time I do a ready check, this guy is never ready.

He’s either afk drooling on loot (by his admission), or he is missing this minor buff or that, or he absolutely needs to make this important comment about how this boss should be done.

Oh well, we grin and bear it.

But then he starts dropping subtle hints about how he needs this piece or that, and that said piece would be much better off in his hands because he has the most healing done. Apparently there’s this bit we missed about loot not being determined by rolls, but rather, who’s topping the meters.

He gets outrolled on Forethought Talisman next boss. A disc priest wins it.

He immediately posts the healing meter, and starts going on about how the loot is “so very fair, right”. People point out that disc priests heal through damage absorbed rather than amount healed, and that said disc priest has over twice the dispels he has (for Heigan).

But no, apparently, no matter how much damage the disc priest has absorbed, it wouldn’t have been as much as his healing. Also, if the disc had not dispelled, he would have, anyways, so what’s the difference?

Thankfully, the raid response is /care, so he bitches about how he’s been carrying our raid and got nothing in return, then promptly leaves.

Then proceeds to whisper me that it’s not about epeen, it’s about how he’s been doing so much and went without anything just because he rolled low, but of course noobs like us can’t understand logic, and puts me on ignore.

Sometimes I actually enjoy pugging raids.

Then someone reminds me why I hate it.

On the other hand, Lumi landed Undeath Carrier, Gatekeeper and Cloak of the Shadowed Sun. Happy druid is happy.