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.

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.