Rebuttal

Ok so as some of you know I got into it with Dark/Soth over at Clearcasting  during this post in the comments section.  Today Arioch had Dark post his viewpoint.  Instead of posting a really long comment I am going to utilize this blog to reply to his post. ^_^

Don’t look at me like that!  It gives me a blog post 😀

Dark feels that people in heroics should be doing a minimum of 2k dps in heroics.  Thinks there is no reason why everyone should not be taking advantage of all of the resources available online and all the BoE gear out there.  Since DPS is easy, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to pull off 2k.  If they can’t pull off 2k then they shouldn’t be in heroics and need to stay in regular dungeons until they do.

Now this assumes that every person who hits 80 has already spent a lot of time researching their spec, their gearing needs and has a bank full of gear ready to go.  This is being called min/maxing.  I call it twink leveling.

Your average player is NOT going to do this.  You mostly find this with people who already have a main who can support this kind of money sink.  Yes it is a money sink.  Instead of using quest gear from Storm Peaks and Ice Crown to start regular dungeons you will pay money for BoEs that drop in heroics or raids or even crafted epic gear.  They will have the best gems that are appropriate.  Might not use the epic gems, but usually the blue quality.  Everything will have the best enchants that aren’t the really expensive ones.

Now I am not saying that you shouldn’t have gems or enchants on your gear.  Far from it.  I just think it is a waste to put an epic gem in a piece of gear I am going to replace quickly.  Epic gems go for the minimum of 150g on my server.  That is for both uncut and cut gems.  Half the time you can get the gem cheaper when it is already cut on the AH.  If you have an enchanter then you probably don’t have too much of an issue of getting enchanting materials.  I feel enchants follow along the same lines as the gems.  You don’t need to use the +10 stats on a chest piece that you are going to replace right away.  +8 stats is perfectly viable.  Hell if it is still a blue or a green you could even put +200 health on it without having too much of an issue.  Although I am sure Dark will disagree with me on that one as he has in the past.  Since we are talking about a fresh 80, they most likely will not be exalted with the Northrend factions, but they should be at the least friendly or even honored.  At honored, most of the factions will offer the lower tiered head enchant.  Failing having any rep with these guys, you can always get the PvP ones from WG.  Those are definitely not ideal, but are much better than having nothing.  Stone keeper shards are fairly simple to come across.  You just need to do a couple WG dailies and you have enough.  They even sell shoulder enchants if you don’t have rep with Sons of Hodir or are a scribe.

There is a huge difference between a brand new player coming into heroics and an alt.  New players usually, not always but usually, will not have access to the resources an alt will have.  New players don’t always know that they should go online and look up information on their class and spec.  They tend to not know about the blogging community and the gems that are found in it.  Until someone mentions to them that these resources are out there, they usually won’t go looking.  I look back when I first started playing.  I knew nothing of EJ or bloggers.  I was told about wowwiki by Andrew and that was in reference to picking a class for the game.  I used to use that to tell me what each of the stats did.  I had no idea that spirit was horrible for a rogue.  When I went back and looked at my lower level toons after I had been playing for about a year and saw what kind of gear I had them in I cringed.  At the time though I was thrilled I had such “good” gear for them.  To give you an idea: the rogue had all spirit gear, the balance druid was decked out in agility and the hunter had intellect stacked.  I still can’t believe how stupid those choices were, or that I spent money buying the gear off the AH.  Hell, my ret pally had a one hander and a shield as did my warrior >.>

These are the people who probably don’t do too too bad with their limited knowledge.  Most of them are quite responsive if you give them tips.  I was in a heroic VH with an affliction warlock that was spamming seed of corruption on a single target.  I told him my main was an affliction warlock and would he be willing to get some rotation advice.  He said “sure!”  I told him the rotation he wanted to use, when to use seed of corruption and even some ideas of where to put his teleport.  We got really lucky with the bosses in that run.  We had the dog and the giant alien.  Essentially stand there and dps fights.  His dps on the dog was 1100 using essentially shadowbolt spam.  On the alien he jumped up to almost 1500.  He was thrilled.  He wasn’t that geared out, not even fully ilvl 200.  Just right for heroics.

On the other side of the spectrum you have the people who should know better but don’t care.  These are the ones that piss off most people.  They stand in the fire, they roll need on spellpower plate as a warrior, because “it makes their thunderclap more powerful” and they wont accept help from anyone.  These people have no excuse for their 800 dps in a heroic.  These people usually grow up to become the ones spamming trade and general looking for more for their raid and requiring the achievement and 5k dps for Naxx.  >.<  These are the ones that not only want to be carried, but expect you to do it.  Screw these guys.  They will probably ninja the loot anyway.

What most people (elitists) tend to forget, or choose to forget I am not sure, is earlier in the year when heroics and Naxx was the only thing around, 1-1.5k was the norm.  People who could regularly pull off 2k+ dps were awesome to have in your group.  I remember when I started doing 1600 dps on my warlock.  I was over the moon.  The people I was running with were also proud of me.  I didn’t manage to pull off 2k dps regularly until I got into the T7 level of gear.  My guild didn’t raid so I didn’t have acess to that gear outside of pugging, which I didn’t want to do.  For running heroics though, I was perfectly fine.  We didn’t have issues getting bosses killed.  We might not have gotten the heroics completed in 15-20 mins, but most people didn’t get them completed that fast either.

Fast forward to today.  The badge available in heroics is the T9 level of gear.  If you run regular dungeons, you don’t get badges outside of your first random of the day.  At least I didn’t on my mage.  After you get 30 badges you can get your first piece of tier gear and move up from there.  Just queue up and go.  Some people will say that they have been seeing people in the harder heroics that don’t belong there.  I think people forget that you can still queue up for specific dungeons and the dungeon finder is not necessarily broken.  If you actually stop and think about it for a moment though, you will see that these people are perfectly geared for the instance.  They are doing the standard dps for the level.  You are the overgeared one doing above average dps.  Why are you holding these people to your standards?

It puts an unfair burdon on a game that is supposed to be fun.  I joke about my fail mage because she is a fail mage.  I have no intention of raiding with her.  I just want her to be compitent to run heroics when I get tired of healing and want a change.  I love my warlock, but I need to work on my key bind situation and currently hers is all messed up which makes her not very fun to play.  My mage fills this hole.  I will admit I get lazy in my guild heroics runs and don’t really do as well as I should.  When I am in a total random I put out the very best that I can.  This is on top of being a good mage by providing  a table, buffing and removing curses.  I manage 1600-1900 on bosses, if I am lucky with the hot streaks I can pull off over 2k.  My overall dps is usually around 1800-1900.  For the level I am playing, this is perfectly viable.  Could I be doing more?  Most likely.  My spec isn’t ideal, I don’t have enough crit and a bit too much hit.  However, I am having fun.  I like being able to use a blast wave to knock the zombies off the healer in CoS then follow up with a free flamestrike.  If I went with the raiding fire spec I would have to say goodbye to my fun spells.  I refuse to get duel spec on a dps toon unless I am going to PvP with them, which most likely will not happen.  I play this game to have fun.  I don’t need to be at the top of the meters to have fun.

I just like to be at the top of the meters to piss off Zakk, but hey that is another story ^_^

Ultimately you should do what makes the game fun for you.  For Dark it is having every last drop of dps being wrung out of his toon 😉 for me it is laughing at my fail mage.  I don’t doubt we both have a blast in what we do.  I also don’t think there is a right or wrong to this.  I just have a problem with people telling me I am bad for wanting to have fun.

Heroics are not srz bzns, raids are, but heroics aren’t.

So let’s take the stick out and have fun playing the game that is our addiction.  ^_^

I am out of mana!

Twitter is AWESOME!

I know I overuse that word, but damn if the people on Twitter, especially those on my follow list, aren’t just the bestest people around.  They helped me spread the word about this guy and the sheer amount of comments made me squee with glee.  Thanks again you guys! 😀

Last night was interesting to say the least.  I logged in and queued up in LFG on my fail mage when Vel logged in and asked if anyone wanted to do a random with him.  I pipped up and we queued up together.  After a few minutes we got heroic HoL.  We zone in and while I am making the strudel table the tank has already pulled the first group of mobs, all by himself mind you.  Vel won’t heal people who pull stupid stuff.  If the tank runs off and starts the instance before everyone is there or before Vel is ready, he will stand there and watch the tank die.  He says that he won’t heal stupid and would rather pay a repair bill.  As I am sitting there next to Vel eating some stat food we are watching the tank and the DK dps die.  There was also a nicely geared hunter in the group who was smart enough to stay with Vel and I.  The tank dies, of course, and starts spewing off at Vel.  Vel just tells him “Now what did we learn today?”  This of course makes me laugh.  The tank tells us “good luck finding another tank” and leaves group, leaving his corpse in the instance.  We got a new tank rather quickly, so much for the “long wait” for a tank.  She was a decent bear tank and we completed the instance without any further issues.  Vel did keep logging over to the tank’s server to see if he was online.  He didn’t tell us what he was planning on doing, but we were laughing all the same.

When the rest of the regulars logged in we started doing randoms as a group.  Heleva/Trixy doesn’t like tanking PuGs because she isn’t super geared on her tank and most people won’t put up with a tank that isn’t over geared.  So we grouped up with her tanking then switched it up where she healed and Andrew tanked on his pally.  While we were in DTK they decided it was “fuck with Millea” night.  We had zoned in and Heleva starts spamming that she is oom.  I don’t know what it was but the Draenei voice talking just had me busting up laughing.  She seriously must have spammed that continuously for several minutes.  Then Andrew joined in asking for heals.  I was laughing so hard I had started to choke.  The custom emotes they kept posting back and forth were hilarious as well.  For the rest of the instance they would spam the oom macros and heal me macros.  I still don’t know how I manged to dps that instance at all, I spent most of it bent over laughing.

Yes I am easily amused, so what. :-p

I meant to take screenshots of it, but it just didn’t seem like it would make much sense to see the chat window filled with Heleva saying she was low on mana.  Heleva said that she was just trying to help me get blog material.  I ❤ my guildies. 😀

The jerk tank and why you don’t piss off a blogger

This weekend I had the misfortune to be in a group with this guy for heroic Oculus.  Now from what I have heard, most people drop group the moment they see it is Oculus.  Since I had never done it on my mage I hoped that the group would stay.  Well I got lucky in that everyone stayed.  I was unlucky with the tank.  *sigh*

Before I start any instance I like to scan over the people I am with to gauge what kind of run I am going to get.  The tank and the rogue were very well geared.  The resto druid, the hunter and myself were fresh 80s gear.  No prob, we could do it.  Before we started the hunter apologized and had to AFK really quick, no biggie, we told him we could wait.  Everyone but the tank stayed and waited for the hunter to come back.  The tank decided he was going to get the party started and ran into the first pile of mobs.  The rest of us had no choice but to follow him.  As we started AoEing the crap out of the whelplings the hunter came back and joined us in the AoE storm.

The first part of the instance is fairly straightforward, you run down the row and dps the mobs.  Afterwards it can get slightly confusing if you have never been there before.  The hunter and the druid had never been there before.

We killed the first boss, who btw is a huge PITA for casters >.>, and the tank, the rogue and myself mounted up on drakes.  The druid had no idea what to do and ended up picking a ruby drake.  The poor hunter was totally lost.  The tank starts in on them and calls them retards and said that we were in for a ride because the retards don’t know shit.  I piped up and told him to cut it out.  I told the druid to get on a green drake and explained to the hunter how to get an amber drake.  Before the hunter could even mount up the tank was off to where he was going to have us start.  I tried to help the hunter find us, but he somehow got killed.  The tank kept berating him the entire time.  The hunter zoned back in, apologized and dropped group.

The tank of course was the party leader and so he queued us up for another dps.  We got another hunter.  I let him know where we were and we continued to dps the mobs down.

In the absence of the newbie hunter the tank starts in on the tree.  He starts calling her a retard and saying “I have such a fail healer.  What the fuck are you doing spamming healing touch?”  I stood up for the healer and said she was probably a fresh 80 and hadn’t gotten her healing rotation down.  I then told the tree, “My main is a resto druid.  Your best healing rotation is to put 1 or 2 HoTs up on the target then spam Nourish if you need bigger heals.”  She thanked me then dropped group.

Then the tank started in on me and my dps.  I was doing 1800-2000 btw.  Started going off about how bad my dps was and how he was doing double mine, he was doing 2600.  I said “First of all we were NOT over geared and were doing quite well for our gear levels.  Secondly you are an asshole.”  I then put him on ignore and dropped group.  I still can’t believe I put up with that for as long as I did.

So to all of you on the Ruin battlegroup, if you get this guy drop group and take the 15 min wait time.  Or better yet, put him on ignore, THEN drop group.  I want this jerk to never get a good group again.  There is NO REASON to treat people like that ever.

Also, if you are a jerk I will totally call you out on it and tell the small corner of the Internet that reads my blog.

Asshole.

Screenshot Friday

Last night I was doing a quest in the Shadow Vault and I somehow ended up below the quarry.  I also couldn’t stop moving.   It was really odd.

So this is what a rogue feels like

A little treat

Andrew decided to make me another hilarious comic/picture for this blog.  So I thought I would share it with you.

Enjoy!

I want to send out a special shout out to 4 awesome people on the Arthas server:  Airstream, Lyssarra, Lalune and Feralelf.  I got into a PuG with them on my druid and they were so awesome we did another instance together.  Thank you guys so much for the fantastic runs.  I hope we get paired up again!  Good luck in the game guys!

Fail Mage Powers Activate!

Yesterday was a fun filled adventure in fail mage dps.  I didn’t do too too bad according to Dily.  Of course with him he then went on to tell me all about the tier gear and which would be better for me here and there etc.  I had to stop him because I just wont remember it.  I am not the best when it comes to gear.  I can’t grind for hours/days/weeks/months for a shiny new piece of gear.  As long as the character I choose to raid with is geared for the encounter we are raiding, I am good.  Right now both of my raiders (Millea & Tatia) are geared for TotC.  Millea is geared for 10 man and Tatia is geared for 25 man.  We are running 10 man regular.  I am perfectly fine for what we are raiding.  When we decide we want to move further along, I will get the appropriate gear then.  I don’t need to be fully geared out in 245 ilvl gear on every toon to be happy.  Is that not putting the optimal amount of dps or hps out there?  Probably, but then that is why I am not in a hardcore raiding guild.  We take raiding seriously, but we aren’t going to tell you to spec a certain way or squeeze out every last drop of dps that you can by turning yourself into a machine.  I can hold my own when I dps.  I might not always be #1, but I am usually up in the top 3.  When I heal, we usually stay alive.  Although I don’t know if that is because of the other healers in the group or if we just all work so well together that we have less deaths.  Couldn’t tell you.

I got into it a bit yesterday with Dark/Soth over at Clearcasting and I agree with some of his points but I also think that his mentality is what a lot of people have now.  Since so much better gear is now available sooner, everyone should be maxing out on their dps and there should be no such thing as a learning curve.  I call bullshit right there.  The VAST majority of the people playing don’t hit 80 with an entire set of epics waiting for them complete with a rotation that they have down pat.  I know not everyone does the regular dungeons before they hit the heroics, even though they should.  Most people are content to have their guildies carry them through Naxx to get them geared out to do chain heroics.  I don’t want to be “that guy” so I went the PuG route.  I did the regular dungeons until I got better gear then I started on heroics.  I am following the natural chain of progression.  Since I am doing that, I WONT BE DOING 2K DPS RIGHT OUT THE DOOR.  I am sorry but it just doesn’t work that way.  As I do instances more and get a piece of gear here and there, my dps slowly climbs.  Hell I managed to pull off 2k dps overall in Heroic VH with my guild.  I did around 1700 on each boss.  I was ecstatic.  Then we went to the next instance and I was fail dps all over again.  It happens.

I only hit 80 on my mage on Sunday early evening.  While I have been doing a bunch of heroics, I haven’t been sitting there doing nothing but.  I don’t have a ton of badges.  On Monday I got my first piece of badge gear, an ilvl 200 off-hand that has hit on it.  I had 29 badges and I was able to get that with 25.  I went and got the rep weapon from Kirin Tor and I was finally able to lose my heirloom staff.  I was EXCITED when I did this.  I was so happy to get those two items you would have thought that I had gotten a legendary weapon.  I ran heroic VH on Monday night.  I walked away with three upgrades.  I swear I was floating I was so thrilled.  Yesterday I found I had 31 badges, so what did I do?  I went and got myself tier 9 shoulders.  Why did I do that?  Well having already leveled a clothie I know that shoulder upgrades are for shit until you raid.  The best shoulders I had on my warlock were the ones that drop in heroic CoS.  I had those shoulders for almost a whole year.  When we did raid Naxx and I got to go on my warlock, the T7 shoulders never dropped for me.  I had to wait until I could save up 30 triumph badges when I could only get 2 a day in order to upgrade my shoulders.  Even then it took forever because my guild needed me to heal, so Millea got benched.  My getting those shoulders was a big deal.  I am not quite ready to see if I want to get this tier set or that tier bonus, I just wanted to get the biggest gear hurdle knocked down.  I am not sure I explained that to Dily correctly.

One of the cool things from last night was I got randomly put into a PuG group with Trixy, Heleva’s tank.  She had been telling us in vent and gchat how she had made this macro for when she tanks PuGs.  The next thing I knew I was in a heroic AN and her macro was being posted in party chat.  We laughed in vent that we got put into the same group and she told me that I now had blog fodder.  Yeah I kind of do ^_^

That run was a piece of work >.>

The highest geared toon was the DK dpser.  Then Trixy, then me (fail right there if that tells you anything) the pally healer and then the rogue.  The rogue was still in mostly greens and some quest blues.  Considering that, he actually didn’t do too badly on his dps.  I don’t know if the pally was just new to healing, if his gear was the reason, or something else, but he had a hell of a time keeping us all healed.  He was really bad about keeping the poisons off us.  Especially that leeching poison the 2nd boss does that heals her.  I died on the first pulls in the room with the first boss, then he wasn’t making any move to rez me.  I died trying to save him and he couldn’t be arsed to rez me.  It took Trixy running over to try to rez me with the army knife before the pally figured out I was dead. >.> *sigh*  I actually won Essence of Gossamer which I thought was hilarious.  So many tanks ran that instance over and over again to get that trinket, and here I am on my mage and I win it.  I laughed a lot.

We ended up doing heroic Nexus next and when Trixy popped up her macro the healer started laughing.  Said they couldn’t kick her because they had to wait 5 mins.  They were a pretty cool group of people, who might not have been had she not posted that.  There was a moment of “oh shit” when the hunter targeted the rift and pulled the whole group.  He was all “When the hell did that change!?”  Trixy replied “2 patches ago.”  Yeah I laughed again.  I think I was the only death, as per usual.  Totally wasn’t my fault though.  We were on the 4th boss and just as I started to move away from the spikes, he rooted me into place and I died instantly.  *sigh* fail mage.  Trixy was all “why didn’t you blink or ice block?”  Well it happened too quickly for me to react, and I just didn’t think to use those abilities at that time.  When the spikes come, you move.  I think I need to move my “oh shit” buttons around.  I did manage to get the achievement off the final boss though.  That was awesome.  I’ve only ever gotten it on my druid because she can shapeshift to get out of the ice.  I love being a human :D.

I’d like to think that once I get used to doing instances on my mage that I will stop being such a fail dpser.  I noticed that over the course of the evening I got progressively better.  Dily and I were talking about that and he wanted to know if I thought it was the upgrades or if I just fixed my rotation.  I honestly think it was me getting better with my rotation.  Considering I normally play an affliction warlock, you would think I wouldn’t have a problem with keeping my mage DoTs up, but apparently I do.  I am REALLY bad about making sure living bomb is always up.  I am bad about clipping fireball when I get a hot streak and scorch falls off before I realize it.  I know there are add-ons I can get that will help me keep everything in line, but frankly I don’t want to rely on an add-on to tell me how to play.  It will take practice, and I need to do it.  I haven’t had an opportunity to hit up a training dummy as of yet, but I will soon.  I like to use the ones in Darn.  No one is ever there.  I am not sure where the ones in the Exodar are, but that place just confuses me so I avoid it when I can.  All the bright lights from the crystals make it difficult for me to see stuff.

Hopefully soon I won’t be as much as a fail mage as I am now.  Keep your fingers crossed. ^_^

It’s ok, I’m a rogue

This weekend had its ups and downs.  One of the ups was I finally hit 80 on my mage and went on to pew pew very poorly in some regular dungeons.  I got lucky in several of my groups.  As soon as I zoned in I told them that I had just dinged 80 a few hours ago and might not be geared for the runs (the new 5 mans on reg).  Each group told me I was fine and let me stay.  One of them was REALLY nice and kept giving me good support.  I didn’t have the heart to tell them that this was my 3rd 80.  On Saturday I managed to snag the robes that drop off Loken in regular HoL.  I already had the ebonweave gloves in the bank, so imagine my surprise when I ended up with 2 more pairs of gloves on Sunday.  Of all of the gear that could drop, I got 2 sets of gloves.  One from ToC and one from Heroic Nexus.  I did manage to get a really nice ring from FoS.  The healer needed it as well but he let me have it because it was a better upgrade for me.  Even though it has MP5 on it, it was far and away a huge upgrade over the quest reward rings I had on.  So thank you again Tree healer I ran with on Sunday!

One of the downs was we called our TotC run after a little over an hour and several wipes on the beasts.  I don’t know why we have so much trouble on this fight.  We usually can breeze through Gormock but when the worms come out everything falls to shit.  We do somewhat ok until the worm enrages when we kill the first one.  Then people just drop like flies.  It doesn’t matter how much healing is being thrown out.  No one can stay alive.  When we finally get the damn worm killed there are usually 4 people left alive.  One tank, one dps and two healers.  Or some variation of that.

The highlight of the raid was when we got past the worms and had like 6 people alive.  Mis was tanking, Andrew was on his rogue, I was still alive healing along with Vel and Zakk was dpsing on his ele shammy.  Suddenly Mis went down.  Over vent you hear Andrew say “It’s ok guys.  I’m a rogue.”  He then proceeded to try to tank Icehowl.  Vel and I overloaded heals on him just to see him go splat.  I think I was laughing too hard to really keep the heals up.  I then ran to the door and shadowmelded.  I of course lived while everyone else died.  Shadowmeld saved me 3 corpse runs :D.  Zakk was rather pissy about it each time I did it :D.  I of course bragged about it.  What else would you expect me to do?

Our other tank, Ness, had to leave for work and the PuG dps we picked up dropped group so instead of replacing them, as I wanted to, everyone else said they wanted to call it.  So I was sad that my raiding for the week was ended.  Everyone said to just move it to the next day (Sunday) and we would go from there.  From past experience I knew that this would end up with us not doing ToC for the week.  Sunday raids with our guild never seem to work.  I, of course, was proven right when Dily and Zakk had to call off because of a RL thing that came up.  Several other people who were in the raid the night before didn’t come online until around an hour after when we said we wanted to start.  Needless to say, we didn’t go back into the raid.

Andrew and I ended having dinner together on Sunday and talking about the run brought up the “I’m a rogue” comment and I just about choked on my food.  I seriously wish I could take a picture of the faces he makes when he says these things.  I’m laughing now while I write this just thinking about it.

He brought up that we should start farming the trash in ICC to get our rep up.  Since we have already set up a weekly raid daily day, we might as well add ICC trash farming afterwards.  The people who I have mentioned this to have been on board for it and think it is a great idea.  So here’s hoping we actually can pull it off.

In the meantime I will be plugging away on my mage getting her geared so that she wont be a total embarrassment to mages everywhere.  Also, she needs to start bringing in the dough to pay for her epic flying.  She already has the Valiance Expedition rep to exalted but needs to get her gold up.  I am a little over half way there and she still hasn’t finished the chain to unlock the Sons of Hodir.  I am having way too much fun in IC atm to go back over there.

So if you are on the Ruin battle-group and get stuck with a mage named Calieah from Echo of Fate, be nice, my noob mage will thank you for it and give you strudel :D.

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.

Screenshot Friday

Yesterday I was talking about my bags, so tonight I took a picture of what my mage’s bags look like.

Have I mentioned that my buff timers have to match too?