The Syphilis Meme

Tam over at Righteousorbs.com started a Syphilis meme, aka a blog content exchange and I was given a topic:

Ooooh, I notice you’ve been PUGing a lot recently.  Bwahahaha.

In which case: What are your 7 Deadly Sins of PUGs, and how should those who transgress them be punished by the WoW gods?

Hmmmm, my deadly sins of pugging.  I had fairly decent PuGs on my mage this weekend, but the horrid ones on my druid are still fresh in my memory, so I will do my best to not be too too bitter.

1.  Running away from your healer.

Yes I know you are totally uber and leet and you don’t have to have a healer with you, because you know, you could totally solo heroic Halls of Reflection.  Who needs to make sure the healer is even in the same room?  You don’t!  You also don’t need to make sure the mobs are gnawing away on your healer’s face, because you are so leet the mobs will be dead before the healer does.  They can heal themselves, they will be fine.

First of all, if you DIDN’T need a healer then the group would be queued up without one.  There is a reason there is a shortage of healers.  It is you dipshits who ignore us, run away from us and allow the mobs to chew our faces off.  I will not heal you and most likely I will drop group.  If you keep running away from me then I know that you don’t need me and I will not waste my time playing with you.

Punishment – Being one shot by Hogger every time they log in

2.  Running so fast that you should have the final boss killed by the time everyone has zoned in.

OMG why is this taking so long?  We have been in here for a whole 2 minutes!  We should totally be done by now!  God you are so fucking slow!  I’m going to pull this entire instance in the first 5 seconds because my DPS is so awesome that I can just AOE the shit out of everything and then move onto the next instance and fly through it!

Not everything is better faster.  In fact most things are better savored.  No I am not saying that you have to take an hour to do once instance, but would it kill you to wait 30 seconds for everyone to be on the same page?  Faster pulls are sloppy.  It is one thing when everyone in the group is ICC 25 heroic geared, but shocking fact, NOT everyone is that geared.  Not everyone is doing 5-6k dps.  I know, I know, HUGE surprise, but there it is.  If the whole group is good for moving at lightning speed, then go for it.  If however your healer is 3 rooms behind you getting mana back because she had to rez the dipshit DPS that died on that last boss fight, then maybe you should WAIT THE FUCKING 20 SECONDS IT TAKES FOR HER TO GET MANA BACK!  Just saying.

Punishment – Every time they do a heroic they are stuck inside for an hour and they cannot zone out or log out.  The instance will always take a minimum of 1 hour no matter how quickly they try to go.

3.  Kicking low DPS.

Oh what a nub!  They are only doing 1k-2k dps.  They suck!  We should totally kick them!  They aren’t good enough to play with us.  Everyone vote kick to get rid of this fail dps! /votekick

Not everyone rolls into level 80 fully geared to the teeth in T10.  Some of us are still in quest/crafted greens/blues/purples.  We are running heroics to gear ourselves up.  We are not running them to mindlessly farm badges.  When everyone starts out in heroics they should be pulling 1k-2k dps.  If they are on the upper reaches of 2k, then they know their shit no matter what gear they are in.  Give the people a chance before you immediately kick them.  Remember you were here at one point too.  Or if you weren’t, then you were carried by your friends/guild and are a blight on the game, L2P.

Punishment – Every time they are zoned into a group they will be kicked out, no matter what dps they put out.

4.  Assuming everyone knows the fights, especially in the new dungeons.

The patch has been out a whole 2 hours, you should know this fight by heart.  There is no possible way you have never been here before so I am not even going to bother telling you anything about it.  You can learn by mutely following behind me, cause I am so UBER that I don’t really need you to know how to do anything in here.

Thanks to the new LFG system a lot of people who never did instances are dipping their toes into instances.  Many of these people have never been in even the most basic heroic dungeons.  What is routine and boring to you just might be brand spanking new and confusing to them.  This does not mean they are a bad player.  I did a regular HoL with a hunter this weekend who had never been there before.  When I let him know about the fire room and to put his pet on passive, he said he already did that and knew to do that before we went in.  He was a great hunter and knew what he should do even without having been somewhere.  He was not a “nub” he just hadn’t been in that particular dungeon before.  The guy knew his shit.  I’d rather run instances with guys like him and have to explain every fight than just be dragged behind some jerk who blithely assumes I know what the hell is going on.

Punishment – The tactics for every fight you do change each time you do them.  They are never the same and you never know what you will need to do.

5.  When running lower level instances you run them like you are an overgeared 80.

Why should I slow down and let the healer who has no mana regen get mana back?  The faster we do this instance the quicker we can level and the faster we get better gear!  No I don’t need to slow down, everyone agrees with me that faster is better.  No one but you is complaining!  Shut up and dps noob.

First of all, all healers have shitty mana regen until they are 80 and get gear with mana regen on it.  Most healers (not all I know) usually heal in dps gear when they are not 80.  They might have a piece or 2 of “healing” gear, but they really don’t have a full healing set.  This means that they will need to stop and drink after fights where they have to overheal because your dipshit ass pulled the whole room.  Not everyone is geared to the teeth at lower levels.  There is no reason for it because your gear gets upgraded too quickly for it to be logical and/or practical.  Just remember that you are NOT at max level or overgeared for the instance.  Stop and think, your groupmates will thank you.

Punishment – Anytime you do an instance you are stuck doing auto attacks or standing and not healing because you will always be out of mana/rage/energy/runic power and there is nothing you can do about it.

6.  Pulling more mobs when you are not the tank.

Man this tank sucks.  They keep marking the mobs when everyone knows we need to just dps them all down really fast.  I am going to go pull that group of mobs around the corner so we can kill them faster.  Stupid tank.

If you are not the tank then YOU DO NOT PULL!  No ifs, ands or buts about it.  I don’t care how slow the tank is doing things.  Maybe, just maybe, the tank is not geared enough to do those kinds of pulls with the overgeared DPS in the group.  Not all tanks are UBER upon hitting 80.  I have a guildie who is a fantastic tank.  However, she knows that she cannot pull the entire instance and hold aggro, so she marks and keeps a steady pace.  She gets yelled at for not chain pulling large groups.  This is not acceptable.  If you are in that much of a fucking hurry dps, then you can find another group.  Her favorite tactic when she gets jerks like that is to pull a huge group of mobs then leave group.

Punishment – Every time you go into an instance and start fighting, you will gain aggro on every mob and you will be unable to lose the aggro.  You will die every time.  Enjoy your repair bill.

7.  Not taking care of your healer.

I cannot stop chain pulling or we might not finish the instance in 30 seconds.  Well I cannot stop AoEing because my dps will go down.  So what if the healer has 6 mobs hitting them, they can heal themselves.  Interrupts?  What are those?  What do you mean the healer is dead?  Wait did the healer just leave?  Why would they do that?

KEEP THE MOBS OFF THE HEALER IF YOU WANT THE HEALER TO LIVE.  Healing generates a lot of aggro.  If a healer puts a HoT up on the tank right as the tank pulls, they can sometimes pull the aggro off the tank.  Sometimes when there are a lot of mobs and the tank doesn’t have great aggro on them all, the healer will be the next person they go to.  Some healers *cough* druids *cough* don’t have readily available offensive spells while in healing form.  When I am healing on my druid I cannot cast offensive spells unless I switch out of tree form, which I should NEVER have to do.  When the healer is being gnawed on by 20 million zombies they cannot get any non-instant heals off.  I don’t know about you, but my instant HoTs don’t heal a shitton right off the bat.  I need to use my 1.5 sec cast spell to pull off bigger heals when you are taking a lot of damage.  If I am being whacked around like a hacky sack then I cannot get that big heal off.  All it takes is for one DPS to get those buggers off me.  Trust me, the healers will love you for it and you won’t have to wonder if you are actually getting healed.  Because if you think you aren’t getting heals, then you most likely aren’t.  I know that I won’t heal stupid.

Punishment – No matter when or how many times you put yourself into LFG you will never get a healer.  You will never be able to run instances.

So those are the 7 deadly sins of pugging according to me.  As a return post for Tam – Since you are now on an RP server, how much, if any RP are you doing?  If you are RPing, what kind of characters have you created for your toons?

If anyone else wants to get in on this, you can either post a comment here or on Tam’s original post.