What used to be one of my greatest fears in World of Warcraft was pugging. Pugging is one of those fancy words that derives from MMO’s which means “Pick Up Group”. Basically, complete strangers are joining together to do something specific. One of the things you may notice with pugging is that you sometimes get the random people who somehow miraculously landed on level 80 with no clue on how the game works.
I still see multiple pug raiders every week who seems to think; “Standing in fire is good and will make me do more damage.”
Well, it’s not and it won’t.
Our guild didn’t do ICC 25-man because we had too few signups. As a result I ended up pugging it Monday afternoon just to make sure I got some additional badges and hopefully see more then just the first wing on the 25-man raids.
And you know it’s gonna be a bumpy ride when the raid leader who invites people asks for “furthest achievement” but doesn’t have one himself. You also know you’re gonna be carrying him because he has the lowest gearcomposition in there. On every single bossfight his damage was even lower than the tanks… that’s with the 30% buff.
I knew right from the start he had no clue what he was doing when I saw him on Lord Marrowgar. The strategy most commonly used is for dps and healers (unless you’re a hunter since they need space) to stay underneath the red hitbox of the boss to avoid the fire he creates and the two stacking tanks just goes left or right to step out of it. Thus minimizing the damage, but also making it very easy to to remove the “Bone Spike” that randomly happens to dps and healers. (Large spikes trapping 3 people. Needs to be destroyed so they’ll survive.) Our raid leader made sure to stand as far away from Lord Marrowgar as he could, only to complain that no one would break his Bone Spike when he got trapped. And he still wouldn’t move in with the rest of us even after I yelled “Move in, you retard!” twice in raidchat. I hate people who can’t take a simple message.
I had to sigh for myself when he came up with a ridiculous strategy for Lady Deathwhisper that made 24 other people point out “no, that’s not how you do it.” On Lady Deathwhisper you will have waves of smaller adds come out. Some needs to be taken out by melee as they are immune to magic, and some needs to be taken down by range as they are immune to melee. That sorta thing. Still, our clueless raid leader came up with the wonderful strategy of “Range on adds, melee on boss”. He was blatantly ignored after pointing out how wrong he was, and we managed to down the boss with just a few deaths.
Gunship Battle was a breeze. But that may also have something to do with it’s nickname “lootship”. A mage still felt the need to die for some reason. I have no idea why he jumped over to the other ship and started dpsing on the adds, but it sure enough killed him.
Deathbringer Saurfang.. ugh… There’s a fight I hate. The most important part of this fight is to make sure everyone gets in a good spot with a 12 yard range from eachother to decrease the “Blood Power” the boss will gain. Raid leader did a ready check as we were getting mana back up and then just out of the blue started the bossfight barely leaving us with time to get into position. We still downed the boss thanks to rather intensive healing since at least 10 of the people in that raid were frightfully allergic to their range- checker-box.
And for some reason, even though he was there as an elemental shaman, he felt the need to roll on Leather armor with agility on it. I checked what his off-spec was. It was restoration. And to be honest it really pissed people off he randomly rolled need on stuff that weren’t for the Mainspecc which he came in with. Not only that, but a really sweet healing trinket dropped. All five healers rolled on it of course, and then him. And then gave himself the trinket for whatever reason. Untill both I and several others pointed out that “hey, the resto shaman won that! And you don’t get to roll on healing stuff, you’re not a healer!”
I later sold the trinket to the other healing priest that was there. It was a really sweet trinket, but I don’t raid THAT much. And it’s not like I won’t do icc25 again. the priest was also the only one who was able to keep up on the healing charts next to me. The rest were just slacking off apparently since I was constantly around 20-25% overall healing at 4000-4500 hps. The holy priest was right next to me on the charts, and don’t get me started on how far below the overgeared druid and other restoration shaman was doing. Bloody slackers.
My friend asked me if he really had no idea what he was doing, to which I pointed out “I rarely meet good shaman players for some reason. It’s as if it’s too complicated for them to work it out.” Which is true, I don’t meet many shaman players who bothered understanding how the shaman works. And I find that really sad, because I worry other players will be given a bad impression of the class when infact it’s the player that’s the problem.
