Bad Groups

[Merusk]

Everyone has them. The stories are fun to share, and help blow off steam.. just don't let it devolve into a "so this noob with a crappy spec" slap fights.

My latest:

So last night I decide to start gearing-up my newly-80 priest and join the LFG widget and channel.  I make sure to spam that I'm a new-80 so no Heroics or raids.  After a short wait I get a group for HoL, normal.  "Great" I think, no heroics, no raid shouldn't be a problem. 

So they summon me, and we zone in and I immediately notice that most of the first room trash is clear.  Their previous healer must have bailed on them, so I begin to feel tense, amplified by the fact the first boss is still up and I've seen 3 groups of bones from the entrance to the first platform.  We run up to the first boss and the DK tank proceeds to deathgrip it before I'm done drinking from buffing and we're all together.. WHILE he still has his lightning charge.  First Death as I struggle to keep up healing and we wipe.

So we run back, and find the ret pally hasn't run back.  "Can I get a rez, plz"  he says when he sees us.  While i'm thinking "wtf" the shadow priest has already finished the rez. 

This time the tank waits after her guildmate says "wait.. wait.. backup.. wait.. ok now." and we give a legitimate engagement on the boss.  During the fight there are a few spikes on the tank that drove her down to 500hps that have me worried.  Maybe, just maybe, I'm thinking, this was a bad idea. The ret pally's repentance being resisted and both adds deciding the healer looked like a nice squishy plaything lend to this idea.  The tank obviously can't keep aggro on multiple targets.. something I can't fathom as a DK myself.   I die to one of the adds OOM from binding heal as they kill the boss, and the ret pally and shadow priest keep the rest alive long enough to down them. Death two.

So we start the charge through the earth elemental room, after explaining "don't stop, just run to the end and tank them there."  We make it through, me living because I'm spamming my AOE dispel for the armor debuff and binding heal on the tank.  Because of this, though, the ret pally dies.

 We rez him and begin on one of the stair packs.  You know.. the ones with a knockback.

Yes, you guessed it, tank gets knocked-back into the other group, we have 8 mobs, we manage to kill 3 but die because I've got too many on me and the tank runs down the stairs... into the earth elementals.  "Wtf, I thought we  killed those" is the first thing typed after my 3rd death, group death #2, followed by "what happened there anyway?" 

We explain the knock-back and that the eles respawn on the run back and buff up at the entrance to the ele room.  The ret pally hasn't released yet , and asks for another rez.  I think, this jackass is going to do this all night because he's too good to run back or something.   So we run through, kill the eles and rez the pally.  While rezzing the tank runs back DOWN into the ele room after typing, "Ok, let's kill these guys." 

So we live, despite me having 4k mana when she did that.  I'm irritated at this point and begin to wonder just how many deaths I'm going to tolerate while manaing up.  My upper limit is usually 4, but we're not that far in. Surely I can tough it out for a little while longer.  Maybe I'm just being an elitist prick.

  The tank says "Hey let me beat on them first so I can get aggro before you lay-in guys. I can't hold aggro like a pally!"  I think "oh shit." and she rips into the mobs, no pestilence, no blood boil, no D&D dropped.  I find myself using binding heal very often as mobs beat on my cloth-wearing aggro-generating ass.   To her credit, she did keep her back to the wall for a bit and we managed to kill the first group on the stairs. I'm seriously considering dropping, though, because I'm tanking as much as the tank it seems.

So we go up the stairs and tackle the first group there.  Again, no D&D, or pest & BB.. but the shadow priest backs into the patrol AND the group behind us.  After my death I just leave group, camp and decide it's "old world faction grind" night for my DK.

[Morfiend]

Nice one.

I try not to pug to much, but the other day myself (DPS DK) and 2 friends, (Druid Tank, Holy pally) decide to run Heroic Nexus and no one else is around to run it with us. We grab a pug shaman, and he asks if we need a rogue too as he has a rogue friend online. We say sure, invite the rogue and hit Nexus. After zoning in and start moving through the trash, the rogue says "hey does anyone have recount?", and I reply that, yes, I am running recount. He then says "Ok, can you reset it in 5 minutes since I am playing with one hand while I eat and and want to see how leet my DPS is when im done".
So after about five minutes of putting put about 400dps, he asks if I could reset it, and I figure why not. I say ok its reset and he says "ok, now keep posting it, cause you are going to see some leet dps".
I should also mention that the shaman was elemental.
After clearing several trash pulls to the first boss I post recount for them. It looked something like this and pretty much stayed the same through the entire run.

Recount - Damage Done
1 - Me - 2600 dps - 65%
2 - Druid Tank 1400 dps - 24%
3 - Rogue - 800 dps - 7%
4 - Ele Shaman - 450 dps - 3%
5 - Holy Pally - 50 dps - 1%

Turns out the rogue was 14 years old, and the shaman was his 12 year old uncle. The two where so completely bad that it was funny. But it was nexus, and we cleared it with ease. It was really amazing how bad they where. Oh yeah, and both of them had hit 80 that evening right before the run.

[Soulflame]

I try not to PUG too much, mostly because of disasters similar to what Merusk first recounted (except in BC, when heroics were heroics, and made you damn well remember that.)  My relatively minor experience with PUGs though has led me to be extremely wary of rogues; they truly are (at least on our server) the new huntards.  I thought it would be DKs, but I haven't seen as many DKs with absolutely horrifyingly bad DPS as I have rogues.

Hunters seem to be by and large competent at the class, which is sort of nice.  You still see the occasional idiot, but for the most part the hunters I've PUGed with have been able to produce decent dps.

I will admit to complete bafflement on the shaman though.  How could you possibly do 450 dps.  I can push out 600 dps as a holy paladin by pushing two or three buttons...

[kildorn]

That time I bitched about horrible pugs, someone ragequit the guild and called me an unreasonable child. 

[K9]

I could probably do 450 DPS just using SW:P and my wand as a holy priest Oo

[Rasix]

I did a heroic VOA recently where it resulted in around 4-5 wipes and I ended up leaving.

The first two attemps Archavon ended up in the hallway.  Most of the other attempts the tanks just kept him in place after jumps instead of moving him out of the gas clouds.  Just about every melee DPS ended up (voluntarily? heh) dying to the gas clouds.  Once a few DPS died, he would end up hitting the enrage timer, that's if the tank actually managed to live.

Only 5 of the DPS were north of 2K DPS in full fucking raid buffs (3 were DKs).  More than half of the DPS was lower than 1.5K.  A handful were under 1K DPS in FULL RAID BUFFS.  I think I can autoattack to 1K DPS. A hunter, pulling under 800 DPS???  How the fuck does that even happen?  This is like the easiest fight in the world for you.  This is one of the times, where I say if you have some special snowflake spec or are some fresh off the boat 80 that can't even manage 1.5K DPS being buffed out the wazoo, can you not offer yourself up as DPS?  Well.. unless you're a warlock.  Summoning really helps for all of the lazy shits that take 10 minutes to get there.

Did a regular HOL a week ago for a new 80 tank in the guild.  Managed to die 5 times on the first boss.  Everytime he was engaged while charged.  Most of the time I would have the first add down and the tank would just drop dead.  Healer just couldn't keep him up.     Still, nothing like a WOLK instance taking as long as a Heroic Bot run.

And.. two nights ago, well, I got to bag on my guild for this.  Epic wipe time on Patchwerk 10 man.  I don't know if the bugger was glitching or something, but it was pretty sad.  Just about every time I would eat hatefulls 5-10 seconds after I engaged.  A minute in usually all melee were dead.   "Keep hots on the offtank." /facepalm  Tank and hateful taker weren't going in together.  MT would just pull without a ready check.  Ugg, it was just crappy and each attempt got progressively worse.  The guildleader was main healing it,  and I don't think she understood the mechanics of the fight at all.  One of the druids was battling food poisoning, and even at full strength he's one of the worst WoW players I've seen (nice guy though).  Thank god it hit time for me to sleep.

[Merusk]

Yeah, VoA groups have been getting progressivly worse. I think people are just joining after WG on alts now for free badges and gear.   I ran one tuesday where a DK was pulling 800dps and a rogue was at that 400 mark noted above.  People were standing in clouds, 2nd tank had no idea about taunting after lunge.. it was horrible.

I do PUGs to make me appreciate my guild has good players.  Some days you wipe and wipe and wipe on things and begin to bitch about people you genuinely like.  It's a nice reality check, plus I do manage to find good people that way.

[Chimpy]

Archavon has an enrage timer? 

[Soulflame]

Five minutes for Archavon's enrage timer, I believe.

[Paelos]

You can hit Archavon's timer easily if 3-4 of your dps are tards and die right off the bat in a PuG. In a regular group you could 20 man it no question.

[Azaroth]

Yeah, VoA groups have been getting progressivly worse. I think people are just joining after WG on alts now for free badges and gear.   I ran one tuesday where a DK was pulling 800dps and a rogue was at that 400 mark noted above.  People were standing in clouds, 2nd tank had no idea about taunting after lunge.. it was horrible.

I do PUGs to make me appreciate my guild has good players.  Some days you wipe and wipe and wipe on things and begin to bitch about people you genuinely like.  It's a nice reality check, plus I do manage to find good people that way.

But the thing is that people on alts should be fine, since they've done it a hundred and a million times before on their mains. That kind of thing only hurts on bosses with enrage timers.

I think what you're seeing is that people who had even an ounce of a clue and no 8pm bedtime had leveled up weeks or months ago, and kids who got the game at Christmas have recently managed to level their hunter after school.

One of my most annoying "Kids!!!!!!!!" stories was a 12 year old hunter in a Naxx 25 raid. He was actually in the guild that was hosting, which is like the third ranked Alliance guild on the server.

He continually pulled aggro on Stalagg before Thaddius, wiping the entire raid. When asked why he didn't stop DPS when everyone was asked to, or why he refused to feign death, he replied "FUCK YOU ASSHOLES THAT SHIT WILL LOWER MY DPS".

But really, there are too many stories to get into any of them. H Oculus was a fertile ground for funny/incredibly annoying stories.

I could never really grasp the difficulty people had with learning three new buttons.

But I think the worst shit ever was trying to PUG 25 man Patchwerk the first couple months. Honestly, my fuck. STOP HEALING THE MELEE. HEAL THE TANKS. HEAL THE TANKS!

HEAL THE TANKS!!!!

MOSGSNI HEAL THE MOTHERFUCKING TANKS!!!!!!!!



jesus tapdancing christ it's another wipe











































DON'T RELEASE








DON'T RELEASE YOU.... fuckers

[Azaroth]

You can hit Archavon's timer easily if 3-4 of your dps are tards and die right off the bat in a PuG. In a regular group you could 20 man it no question.

I had absolutely no idea Archavon had a timer.

[Sjofn]

I haven't actually been in a PUG where I didn't know SOMEone else in it yet (this expansion). That's actually really weird for me, in TBC I was one of the only people in my guild that would PUG at all.

[Soulflame]

Patchwerk - We were in the middle of raid recovery when someone aggro'd the slimes in the preceding room.

[Selby]

I got to hear about this one last night.  10-man OS.  Raid starts, 4 people have done it and done it well.  The rest are competent.  It was taking so long to get to the boss, the trash was respawning.

[K9]

wow

[Azaroth]

I got to hear about this one last night.  10-man OS.  Raid starts, 4 people have done it and done it well.  The rest are competent.  It was taking so long to get to the boss, the trash was respawning.

Whoa.

I got brought into a 25 man OS on the last boss where the trash had respawned. But thats' a whole other level of suck.

[Lantyssa]

He continually pulled aggro on Stalagg before Thaddius, wiping the entire raid. When asked why he didn't stop DPS when everyone was asked to, or why he refused to feign death, he replied "FUCK YOU ASSHOLES THAT SHIT WILL LOWER MY DPS".

Did anyone reply that BEING DEAD LOWERS IT EVEN MORE?

[Chimpy]

Guy I used to raid with always said "a dead rogue does no damage".

[Selby]

Did anyone reply that BEING DEAD LOWERS IT EVEN MORE?

No one seems to get that.  Which is why I am the master of backing off in a boss fight.  I rarely ever die too ;-)

[Azaroth]

He continually pulled aggro on Stalagg before Thaddius, wiping the entire raid. When asked why he didn't stop DPS when everyone was asked to, or why he refused to feign death, he replied "FUCK YOU ASSHOLES THAT SHIT WILL LOWER MY DPS".

Did anyone reply that BEING DEAD LOWERS IT EVEN MORE?

Oh, there was quite a long argument in ventrilo. Mainly because it happened like five times before he left.

He repeatedly refused to stop DPS or feign death. Like, he just flat out wouldn't.

Trust me, wiping repeatedly and having a twelve year old scream and swear in ventrilo about how he flat out won't watch his aggro because it might hurt his spot on the chart makes you VERY happy that you're not all playing in the same room. I assume the judge would frown upon a two hundred pound man beating the everliving fuck out of a twelve year old because of a video game.

[Lantyssa]

Find a judge who raids.

[Paelos]

Find a judge who raids.

Get a jury of gamers. I'd let you off in a heartbeat.

[Phred]

A hunter, pulling under 800 DPS???  How the fuck does that even happen?  This is like the easiest fight in the world for you.  This is one of the times, where I say if you have some special snowflake spec or are some fresh off the boat 80 that can't even manage 1.5K DPS being buffed out the wazoo, can you not offer yourself up as DPS? 

My hunter was in this boat when he first hit 80. The main problem, I worked out, was my pet. A ravager is now a completely gimp choice for a dps pet, where in BC it rivaled the cat. My pet, when I started checking with recount, was outdps'd by a gorilla for fucks sake, a tanking pet (why the other hunter brought a tanking pet to a boss fight I have no idea). When you are a BM hunter and recount says your pet accounted for 20% of your dmg you know you have problems.  I dumped the ravager and picked up a cat like every other fucking hunter in the world and my dps soared. This was with the now obsolete readiness build.

Another problem I had was I missed the change to Careful Aim. Prior to WolK this talent was kind of marginal, topping out at .45 of int as atk. Now at 1.0 it's pretty well manditory imo. When I respec'd to put points in this I think my atk power jumped by almost 1k.

[K9]

Just abandoned a hc Oculus group with this guy and his rogue buddy each doing ~700 DPS....

Spellpower and haste is not the way to min-max as a DK

[Oban]

Fast main hand, slow off hand... on a rogue with two points in sword spec...  Aye ya.

[skolor]

Happened this weekend:

Guild leader and his Wife were out of town at a wedding, so one of the officers and I were left to organize our raiding for the weekend. We've been mostly clearing naxx for about 5 weeks now, we got our first Sapph kill 3 weeks ago and our first KT kill the week after (Fucking amazing tanking everything in the room at once), so most of us who have been showing up most weeks have nearly everything we want. We've been talking about getting into 25 mans for a while, and the officer decided "Okay, I've got the day off work. I'm going to go recruit as many people as I can so we can get a 25 man started this weekend". We go in, and since we had 8 of our usual people with us, we figured "Let go do Patchwerk, he got lots of cool loots and will let us find out who sucks ass at their class so we can make sure we can clear this tonight (we do ~6 hours in an evening, and will clear naxx 10 in that)".

We get into the wing (about 1 1/2 hours late, had to pug about 8 people), and make the first pull. Second pull, everything is fine. We're going a little slower than I'd like, but we're getting there. We clear the second room, and while everyone is eating/drinking, the other (well, one of the others. For some reason we had 4 tanks including me) pulls all the slimes. I get in my Pally position, standing in the doorway dropping consecrate. Then, some ass hat mage decides it would be a good idea to blizzard since its an AOE pull (of sorts). That would have been awesome, if he wouldn't have thrown it on the far side of the consecration, with all but 1 slime immediately running at him. I try and recover, but its a no go. The more sensible dps see them pass by me and throw everything at them, and by that time my consecrate isn't doing anything to pick them back up. Complete wipe.

Zone back in, have to rez 5 people who won't walk, and start making sure everyone understands "Don't DPS until all of the slimes are in the consecrate!" Of course not. Not the same thing, but they dps too early, and 5 people die because of it. Ok, no big deal. We go into the next room, and start clearing stuff. A couple of bad pulls later, and we've got another 5 people dead. Two of them release, and it turns out the slimes have respawned again. No warlock, so with have to clear the room again... Three Raid Warnings later, the mage does the same thing and wipes the raid again. We lose 3 people who have "other stuff", and decide to continue (with more pugs). With not too much bad stuff, we clear to patchwerk. Its decided I will take hatefuls, so the other well geared tank pulls. The next couple seconds are a bit of a blur, but as far as I can remember the sequence goes something like this:

Pull.
Throw Shield.
Run into Range to start my crazy high DPS (I hear pally tanks doing 3k on him in 25 man, I want a piece of that).
That's the point things get... Strange.

Patchwerk runs 45 yards away to where one of the other tanks is, and promptly hatefuls the closest dps, instantly killing them. 5 seconds later, the "MT" has control again, and things aren't so bad. But wait, there's only 10 people left! Total wipe, combat lasted a total of 19 seconds.  The tank who ended up pulling said "You shield got missed", although it seems more likely that he thought it would be a better idea to taunt.

At this point, one of the Mages (A new recruit to the guild) decides to start whining about how hard this is, and how we should go do spiders. It takes about 20 minutes to get back in place for a second try. At that point, the mage ups the whining, and we vote on it 14-5 (several abstained) to do patchwerk. We get in place, and 5 people leave (not the spider people...). The raid falls apart.

I spent the rest of the night, and all evening sunday teaching all the new recruits naxx. We were able to do everything but Thadius and 4h, but barely. I was consistantly top 3 in dps, and lost the top place on Patchwerk by around 40 dps (as a side note, I'm confident on the next real 10 man we do I can break 2.5k).

Later that night we take the complaining mage and a few of the regulars to go do OS. We're rocking along, until we go to do sarth (we decided to leave a drake up to give it a try). A DK (one of the new guys) DCed on Shadron, but we just went on without him. We get to sarth, and sit there for a few minutes, when all the sudden we see a flying DK. He jumped onto a vortex, flew across the fire pit, and aggroed Sarth as soon as he got back... After the wipe, we come back, and in the middle of buffing, the mage decides to see what these vortexes are, and does the same thing. We go kill the drake, then sarth, without further events. At this point, the mage says "Oh, cool. Another guild accepted my application. See you guys. /gquit"

The next day, I see him in Dalaran yelling "Geared Mage Looking for VoA H. 2.3k DPS". I go back and look at the couple of parses I had from him. He did 2.3k on the 19 seconds we were engaged against patchwerk, hardly a good representation. On all three drakes and sarth, he did 1.6k. I LoLed, and went back to playing Naxx tour guide for the newbies.

[Paelos]

That's a long story, but tbh even though ppl were sucking, for your first foray with a PUG into Naxx you probably don't want to do Patchwerk first from a leadership standpoint unless you've farmed it before. People just don't get into a rythym for some reason that early.

Also, lesson learned about whiney douchebags. If someone is a shitheel the first time you bring them, they will only be bigger shitheels later.

[K9]

Yeah, patch 25 is nothing like patch 10, for your first forays into 25-man stick to OS, Spider and Plague.

[Dren]

I don't do pugs.  A fraction through most of these stories and I was looking for the quit group option.  I have no time for that noise.

[Morfiend]

We clear the second room, and while everyone is eating/drinking, the other (well, one of the others. For some reason we had 4 tanks including me) pulls all the slimes. I get in my Pally position, standing in the doorway dropping consecrate. Then, some ass hat mage decides it would be a good idea to blizzard since its an AOE pull (of sorts).

Please tell me your not talking about the "ranged only" slime pack that move really slowly and *should* be AE'ed down in the doorway by everyone?

[Ingmar]

Yeah I was a little surprised by that part of the story myself.

[Khaldun]

Fast main hand, slow off hand... on a rogue with two points in sword spec...  Aye ya.

I just saw this in a heroic OS-25 pug last week. Rogue with gear close to equivalent to mine, maybe a little less, same combat build, and he was way below my dps, down around 15th in the group. I was kind of puzzled until I paid attention closely to the fact that he had a slow fist in his off-hand, a fast sword in his main hand. I gently suggested (honestly) that he reverse it (both were one-hand, reversible) and he sent back a /tell, "F*** OFF". Whatever.

[Paelos]

I usually respond to people that don't like critiques with, "You're right. It's gotta be some grand conspiracy that you're being out damaged by the tanks. It couldn't be that you're fundamentally wrong or lazy. Alert the media!" ./boot

If you're the leader, once you question what someone does and they fire back the expletives, you can generally assume they are annoying teenagers and boot them. If they aren't teenagers they are just idiots, and you can also boot them. It's better to get a quick replacement than deal with their crap.

Also, never pug unless you are the leader. 

[skolor]

We clear the second room, and while everyone is eating/drinking, the other (well, one of the others. For some reason we had 4 tanks including me) pulls all the slimes. I get in my Pally position, standing in the doorway dropping consecrate. Then, some ass hat mage decides it would be a good idea to blizzard since its an AOE pull (of sorts).

Please tell me your not talking about the "ranged only" slime pack that move really slowly and *should* be AE'ed down in the doorway by everyone?

Yes, I am talking about that slime pack. To clarify what happened though, the mage was not AoEing in the doorway. He was casting blizzard so that it was entirely in the other room, with himself standing just outside of the doorway into the other room. In other words, it looked something like this:

-------------------
Blizzard----------
-------------------
-------------------
------Door------
-- Pally Tank--
------Door------
-------------------
Mage------------
-------------------
-------------------


The net effect was blizzard got 3 ticks on the slimes, they squirm towards the mage, consecrate gets 2 ticks, mage Frost nova, dies, and then start wailing on the only people in range, the healers (for whatever reason they were standing there...) I'm sure I could have done something better, but with consecrate on an 8 second cooldown and only castable where I am standing, it makes things very difficult to pick up and hold slime when they get split up like that.


On a side note, we made a second try for Naxx25 Tuesday night. With our regular raid leader on, and a few days of "WTF were you thinking" thrown at the stand in from the weekend, we did Spider and Plague wings. Everything went fine until Loatheb. We state before we start how we usually do the fight "Everyone stand on the green circle, and don't touch the spores". As we pull, someone yells out "If you see a spore, kill it!" Throughout the raid we yell at people to stop hitting the spores and stand on the circle, the tank will get them if you do. The idea is that since you have a paladin tank, who is using consecration anyway for dps, if you don't touch the spores they will get into the circle, and everyone will be within the 10 yards range, so by the time 6-7 spores spawn, most people in the raid should have the debuff and get their 50% crit. Instead, we have a ret paladin who is running around outside the circle only using judgements to damage the boss, and then running towards the spores and killing them as soon as they spawn. A mage and 2 hunters join in on this, and people stand outside of the circle. At 75k health we wipe, because 2 of the healers were new and didn't quite understand the healing thing. We go back in, and make a point about the Spore thing. We sit there until everyone says they understand not to touch them, and then pull again. Ret paladin and mage are doing it again, so we yell at them, and the ret paladin stops. The mage isn't listening, so when the second spore spawns right behind the tank, he hits it again. The tank (me) is now sitting at 400k threat, unable to generate more, with everyone except him and a sub-par mage still generating threat. We over it though, by having the warriors generate as much threat as they can, and I taunt off them (since I am block capped I take very little damage for the fight. In this fight I took the 8th most damage, even with the boss on me 99% of the time). That is, until a mage comes out of no where in threat, and pulls off me. He gets crit for 16k and drops. At 100k, we kick the mage and finish off the boss (he kept killing spores the entire fight. The only difference was that by the time another dps got anywhere close in threat, the 130% was a large enough window the warriors were able to get over it.)