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.

Dear 70-79 AV players of Rampage,

If your healer is repeatedly faceplanting while trying to heal Balinda… I somehow don’t reckon the problem is the healing, you know?

I’m sure you guys feel totally awesome because you’re top of damage done, but yeah, Balinda still isn’t dead, and she won’t be dead for a looong while because in this bracket she’s impossible to get down without multiple healers. She outlevels all of you by at least four levels, and she hits like a truck.

Incidentally, so does her water elemental that no one cares about at level 80. I’m getting Frostbolted for 2k a pop, and I only have 11k health.

So it makes you look slightly bad at this game when you charge right in and furiously smash your damage dealing buttons, die after I die because none of you could be bothered to get the elemental off me, then yell in/bg “OMG, healer fail at Balinda AGAIN.”

In conclusion, L2P.

Love,
Baby!tree Starlet, who heals her little branches off every match, trying to keep all of you ungrateful DKs and rets happy.

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.

We fail gusy D:

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.

Take a guild.

A good guild, if you were looking at progression. Everyone Twilight Vanquishers, rolling in epics, going for raid achievements, that kind of guild.

I have had the dubious pleasure of wiping with such a guild on Maly10 today.

It all started when some guy was looking in trade for people for a Maly8. After a five minute interview, he was convinced I’d do a good job, and chucked me an invite.

Mayling, who heard this, also wanted in, so I directed him to the group leader knowing how much resto druids were wanted for Malygos. He got in as well. Great, I thought.

Until he got kicked a minute later, apparently to be replaced by another resto druid, because the priest had threatened to leave if said druid wasn’t invited. It obviously didn’t help that this druid, who had the word “Noob” in his name (and who does that, seriously) had better gear, either.

I gave the group leader a piece of my mind, but I was in the instance already, and oh well, let’s give this a shot.

Try 1: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. Only one person had 18 stacks of the DoT, the others were at… 3. I suggest people put more effort on keeping their stacks up. The DK says DPS is bad in the first two phases. He has a point, since we have only two people breaking 3k.

Try 2: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. No matter how I turn Malygos, the DK doesn’t seem to be able to grip the spark next to the other. I don’t think we ever had two stacks at any point. I point this out, the DK retorts with “DG has a cooldown”. I don’t quite understand how this is relevant, because I mean, with the way I turn Malygos, he ought to be able to catch at least _one_ other spark on top of the one that we killed wherever it was. He also doesn’t manage to ever break 2k dps. Raid buffed. With 4 piece Valorous.

Try 3: Hit berserk timer in P3, wipe. How surprising. I’d say Malygos ate about half the sparks during this try. The non-guildie warrior, who’s been doing decent DPS, is kicked, because the DK will invite a “more imba” warrior.

Try 4: Same stuff, different try. The more imba warrior does 2,5k dps with best in slots.

The shadowpriest, who incidentally was our top DPSer, says he’s had enough and leaves. The hunter, who was the only other guy to break 3k dps, also leaves. The druid, who was a friend of the SP, follows.

The group is quickly filled with… more guildies, as the group leader decides to screw 8man and just go for 10. Everyone has great gear, we have a paladin for blessings, this is going to great, and we move on to…

Try 5: By some grace of God, two sparks end up in the same place. Heroism is popped. The other fury warrior pulls aggro and dies. I get yells of “OMFG CR”, which I can’t do till P2. However, the holy paladin also dies to Vortex (Vortex is srs bznss with a resto shaman and a paladin as your healers), because apparently, he doesn’t have a bubble button.

I combat res the paladin going into P2. He doesn’t accept. The whole group is screaming at me to res, and I’m trying to type that I have, and tank two Nexus Lords. Which is slightly more challenging than it should be, because attacking the skull is hard. The enhancement shaman who was attacking the not-skull also dies. Paladin finally accepts the res, and proceeds to die to the next breath with about… half of the group.

After the wipe, the enhancement shaman loudly proclaims that he is not staying for another try unless we get a priest or druid for Vortex. A resto druid is hastily found. At this point I’m giggling at the irony of them having kicked Mayling only to end up needing him various times.

Then the shaman starts yelling at me. Now I had been expecting that, being that I’m the only non-guildie in the group, the wipes will probably end up being my fault.

He claims that I haven’t been above 3k tps the entire fight (I usually fluctuate near 5k selfbuffed, breaking 6-7k depending on the raidbuffs I have), and that he can’t do as much DPS as he wants to because I’m not building enough threat. However, strangely, he also admits that he doesn’t have a threat meter installed. Because he “doesn’t need it”, because his guild “is very good”. I end up pointing out that half his guildies have died to the breath, and that you can’t get more terrible than that. Not to mention the Death Grip-challenged DK and the holy paladin who can’t find his bubble button.

Try 6: We have a Vortex at 51%, which ends up working to our advantage as Malygos goes to about 44% in between the break before Vortex and the one before P2. The Nexus lords go amazingly smoothly, thanks to one of the warriors (the not-failing one) yelling “Let the tank get some threat, and attack the skull” at the start of the phase. You know, to do the things that we learn at level 20 in DM.

P3 goes smoothly, and Malygos finally dies, with the only loss being the retarded fury warrior.

And this, guys, is how a good guild is not really very good.

(P.S.: And me? I admit that I make mistakes. I’m relatively new to druid tanking, having always been resto. I try my best to do everything the way I know how, but obviously I can’t always do it, as the mishaps show. I realise that I’m sometimes missing obvious things. But when I’m putting 100% into it and others aren’t, and I end up being blamed for everything that goes wrong at the end… does not sit well with me.)

…has said Blizzard.

What does this mean? Upon Wrath hitting, all accumulated honor points and marks will be gone (yes, marks too my dears). What about that blue post made months ago saying “Removing accumulated honor is like removing gold, we’d never do that”? Forget it.

The reason given by Blizzard: “We don’t want to give some players an unfair advantage by allowing them to purchase honor gear as soon as they hit 80.”

Of course we know what the real reason is, nothing more than “Hey, thanks for keeping playing till the expansion to do nothing but grind honor, we really enjoyed that 3 months of money you gave us – but guess what? We want to keep your money for even longer, so I guess you have to do that again, good luck!”

Anyway, I’m more than upset with this change – and not in the slightest because my 70s will be affected. My 70s have maximum 5k of honor saved each. As for the marks, my heart will ache for the EOTS ones, but I don’t have many of them anyway, and they can be earned back. I will just blow them on mounts before they are gone.

I have a 19 twink rogue… who really wanted a trinket and battle standard, and was sure she would get it eventually, slowly earning the honor bit by bit. All the work I put towards that will be gone in a few weeks. With the kind of time you need to accumulate honor in the 10-19 bracket (an entire evening’s worth of grinding assuming mostly wins nets 300 to 500 honor), there is no way I can get the full amount I need before Wrath.

I have a baby night elf priest who really wanted a battle standard as well – she’s now 2k towards the required 15k. Again, Alliance in 30-39 Misery has about a 5% to 10% win rate, so even if I grinded my entire waking hours, the max honor I would be accumulating would be 750, maximum. That’s what, 20 days of required nonstop grinding? And since I obviously have neither the time nor patience to grind that, it’s doubtful Kielle will get her battle standard before Wrath.

And what about that black tiger she was saving marks towards so she could buy it as soon as she hit 51 and got the AV marks? Sorry, I guess you’ll have to regrind all them WSG and AB marks… if you don’t need them for gear, that is.

Or level superfast to 51, grind out the marks AND the honor for the battle standard, by which level the battle standard loses the edge it gives in lowbie battlegrounds, and get everything I want by afking in AV… oh wait, that’s what most people do at 70. How different.

An easy solution is, of course, to treat honor and marks like arena points – they are wiped upon leveling up to 71 and not right away at release. And stick a requirement on the new gear that says it can only be purchased at level 71+. Problem solved.

Another solution as suggested is to make every item require a lot more honor than the current system (perhaps five to ten more times), and ramp up the honor gains for level 71+ accordingly. Problem solved.

Yet another solution is for level 80 gear to require a different currency than Honor Points. Call it Grind Points, whatever, and make Grind Points achievable only by participating in level 71+ battlegrounds. Problem solved.

Except with Blizzard, it’s never easy, and those solutions remove the whole “We need you to give us your time and money” for the lowbies, so of course this solution will never, ever be implemented.

I also love every so-called “casual” troll coming out of their caves on the official forums to go “Thanks Blizz for sticking it to the hardcore, too bad you spent all that time farming honor to have an edge at 80, lol nerds”. So basically, people are being punished for having had the foresight to grind out honor, and not all of them are the so-called hardcore – how about the casual who slowly accumulated honor over 3-4 months, doing his dailies every day, who just got shafted?

Of course the 17 year old high school student and the 30 year old programmer with a toddler can’t devote the same amount of time to play every day. So, should a certain percentage of the player base be punished because the other part of the player base doesn’t have as much time as them to devote to the game? Why should a certain percentage of the player base even care if some guy in some other country has a job/kids/wife/elderly mom/other hobbies/all of the above and can’t spend as much time playing as them? As soon as “cater to the casual” turns into “punish the hardcore”, the system loses its meaning.

The honor system is better than the old system, because if people call the honor grinders hardcore now, I really wonder what they would call them under the old system. People quit jobs and school to make the push for High Warlord and Grand Marshal. The system certainly required a lot more time played than today’s system to see any kind of tangible reward. It wasn’t healthy, and when it got overhauled for TBC, it became a much better and much more casual-friendly system overall.

It was turned into a system which let everyone get rewards in their own time, except the hardcore still got rewarded in that they could obtain the rewards faster and stomp the still-undergeared casuals. The casuals still weren’t happy, so out came Arena gear purchasable with honor. Wait, they still weren’t happy, so out came the blue PvP set purchasable with less than a hundred gold at 70. If you hit 70, and did your quests and instances along the way, you could instantly have a set with 150-200 resilience.

…wait, once more, they still weren’t happy…

The game has, and always will, reward time spent. The more time you spend and the sooner you can spend the time, the greater the reward. In fact, that’s true for most things in the world (how many of you expect your part time job to make as much as a full time one?). So far, a system has not been invented that will reward something other than time spent in a MMORPG. Demanding that the game cater to you and just you, just because you can’t spend as much time on it as someone else does, to say the least, a bad idea – the game already caters to the casuals quite fairly with Badge gear and accumulation of honor. So why this hate-spewing for someone who put their time into the system, fair and square? Plain jealousy?

While we are at it, why don’t we also remove all accumulated gold and materials upon the expansion? After all, we don’t want to provide an unfair advantage to some of the player base by allowing them to get their epic walrus on wheels (thanks my dear GM for coining the term, always makes me laugh)/whatever item Blizz has designed as a gold-sink carrot at level 80, faster than the others, because they have had the foresight to save the gold. Let’s remove the herbs people have saved to level inscription too – again, we don’t want people who have lacked foresight to lag behind.

All in all, terrible decision made by Blizzard, no matter what all the casuals, who take delight in seeing the hardcore fall, say – Wrath will still reward the hardcore more than the casual, else there would be no reason for the hardcore to keep playing. The hardcore will still level to 80 and obtain their gear within the first couple of weeks, and the casuals who are maybe level 72 by that point will still be steamrolled. All this decision has done is enrage about 90% of the community, but sadly, I don’t expect it to be reverted.

Because it’s my little corner of the interwebs after all, but just a heads up.

Omgtwinky of Eonar EU, is an immature, terrible %&!%ty brat, for lack of better words, so beware if you ever end up in a WSG with him, and he has the flag.

Setting: WSG. Score: 2-1 to Alliance. I’m on Lainie, here, there, everywhere, trying harder than usual to win because it’s WSG weekend and I love the extra rep. Said retard above has the Horde flag. There is a twink hunter on the other side who gives us a lot of trouble, so it’s been pretty hard, and I’m relieved to have eked out a win. I’m just waiting for that final cap so I can go grab a drink and relax.

“I won’t cap lol”

….what?

“You all have to say I’m awesome before I cap haha”
“You are being immature. Cap the flag.”
“Lol no not capping”

This goes on for a couple more minutes, then the Horde recap team storms in.

Yeah, you guessed right, we lost that match. After pretty much doing all we can.

I hope none of you are unlucky enough to come across this particular brand of retard. /spit I can understand griefing the other team (well, most of the time – I am of the opinion that BGs should be played with honor and won/lost with honor), but I will never understand griefing your own team on purpose.

/sigh Wish Blizz would lay the smack down on such people, but of course not…. Money from a paying customer > complaints of other customers. Even if reported, we know all too well that the reply will be “no action can be taken, please QQ more”.

Hope for better matches tomorrow – Lainie just dinged friendly as well, so that’s another goal reached.

Setting – 10-19 WSG. Facing a team with 5 twink hunters being multiboxed.

Random rogue on my team: OMG HAX
Me: It’s called multiboxing, and it’s permitted. 5 accounts, 5 WoW windows, one person. Blizz has said that it is okay, as long as the accounts are all controlled by a person.
RR: OMG NOLIFER!!!!11 BUT HE ATTACKS ALL AT ONCE
Me: I know, he has macros.
RR: BUT ITS NOT A MACRO ITS A SCRIPT BOT REPORT
Me: He has macros, and a program that transfers keystrokes across WoW windows.
RR: BUT HE AUTOATTACKS
Me:….okay.

/facepalm

I hate PuGs.

Blizzard hates me for the past two seasons.

Season 2, we played RMP before RMP was cool.

Andersson got a Rival title out of it, I got fk all with 100% of all games played.

This season, Severian and Moonky get titles with ratings lower than mine. All of my characters? Still fk all.

I don’t care so much on Ely because Stone Guard is a rarer title now and I like how it sounds. But Starlet and Roch… still title-less. Ugh.