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.

IRL, and actually playing the game, getting in the way of blogging these days. I do update my Twitter from time to time over here, though. Thanks for your patience!