Bad Groups

[Sheepherder]

Swipe.  You win, warrior loses.

[Zetor]

Yes, swipe is good for keeping aggro, but not so much in preventing casters from tearing my face off, especially at range. :p

e: I'm not complaining that druids are bad tanks [they aren't], it's just that they're not really optimal for HOR either

[Ingmar]

Take a warrior tank at your peril in HoR. That's coming from a warrior tank.

The place simply isn't designed remotely around our skillset or cooldowns. I can beat it with my friends, but your average Pug? Expect heavy delays.

Then again, a farting pally would probably clean up.

Um, what? We have quite good tools for that dungeon, really. Good snap aggro, a ranged silence to bring in stray casters, shockwave is great on the run-from-LK section, multiple ways to interrupt, a fear break for those stupid priests. I'd tank it 10 times on a warrior before I'd want to try it as a druid.

EDIT: Also between gag order silences and multiple stuns we can stop the mages from ever splitting/teleporting, which is really really good. Oh and spell reflect was absolute gold in there.

[Sjofn]

Yes, swipe is good for keeping aggro, but not so much in preventing casters from tearing my face off, especially at range. :p

e: I'm not complaining that druids are bad tanks [they aren't], it's just that they're not really optimal for HOR either

Yeah, given equal gear, druid would be dead last on my list of tanks to try it with. It's not that druid tanks aren't <3, they just don't have as many "shit, shit, fuck you caster, shit!" tools.

[Selby]

Yeah, given equal gear, druid would be dead last on my list of tanks to try it with. It's not that druid tanks aren't <3, they just don't have as many "shit, shit, fuck you caster, shit!" tools.

It takes a good druid to tank that place.  Our druid tank was pretty good at keeping things under control, but she said the exact same thing you just did: lack of "fuck you caster!" options can really ruin things.

And the first tank I ran it with was a warrior who didn't have gag order...

[Fordel]

Take a warrior tank at your peril in HoR. That's coming from a warrior tank.

The place simply isn't designed remotely around our skillset or cooldowns. I can beat it with my friends, but your average Pug? Expect heavy delays.

Then again, a farting pally would probably clean up.

Um, what? We have quite good tools for that dungeon, really. Good snap aggro, a ranged silence to bring in stray casters, shockwave is great on the run-from-LK section, multiple ways to interrupt, a fear break for those stupid priests. I'd tank it 10 times on a warrior before I'd want to try it as a druid.

EDIT: Also between gag order silences and multiple stuns we can stop the mages from ever splitting/teleporting, which is really really good. Oh and spell reflect was absolute gold in there.

Did you have group reflect tonight, or is that just in your PvP spec?

[Merusk]

We had a druid tank and it went fine for the most part.  (Only one time did a mob get away from him to pwn the healer) Our real difficulty was staying alive because our healer was a little overwhelmed on the mana side and kept going OOM on the last wave.  Our 2nd shammy went resto spec as backup leaving just me and a rogue to DPS and we were golden.  Not a strat I'd recommend for pugs, though, due to the uncertainty of competent dps.

[Ingmar]

Take a warrior tank at your peril in HoR. That's coming from a warrior tank.

The place simply isn't designed remotely around our skillset or cooldowns. I can beat it with my friends, but your average Pug? Expect heavy delays.

Then again, a farting pally would probably clean up.

Um, what? We have quite good tools for that dungeon, really. Good snap aggro, a ranged silence to bring in stray casters, shockwave is great on the run-from-LK section, multiple ways to interrupt, a fear break for those stupid priests. I'd tank it 10 times on a warrior before I'd want to try it as a druid.

EDIT: Also between gag order silences and multiple stuns we can stop the mages from ever splitting/teleporting, which is really really good. Oh and spell reflect was absolute gold in there.

Did you have group reflect tonight, or is that just in your PvP spec?

I didn't, but I sure wished I did.

[Paelos]

Take a warrior tank at your peril in HoR. That's coming from a warrior tank.

The place simply isn't designed remotely around our skillset or cooldowns. I can beat it with my friends, but your average Pug? Expect heavy delays.

Then again, a farting pally would probably clean up.

Um, what? We have quite good tools for that dungeon, really. Good snap aggro, a ranged silence to bring in stray casters, shockwave is great on the run-from-LK section, multiple ways to interrupt, a fear break for those stupid priests. I'd tank it 10 times on a warrior before I'd want to try it as a druid.

EDIT: Also between gag order silences and multiple stuns we can stop the mages from ever splitting/teleporting, which is really really good. Oh and spell reflect was absolute gold in there.

And I'd take a pally or DK 10 times over a warrior. It's not about if you can do it, because it's obvious we can. It's if you can do it without being absolutely eye-bleedingly annoyed by the dungeon, or if the very average warrior tank can handle it when trying to get gear upgrades. My guess on the last part is a whole-hearted no.

I don't see myself going back anytime soon.

[Sjofn]

It takes a good druid to tank that place.  Our druid tank was pretty good at keeping things under control, but she said the exact same thing you just did: lack of "fuck you caster!" options can really ruin things.

Part of the problem is that all the druid caster tricks also make it so the caster doesn't move, so you have a harder time gathering them up and stuff. And I'm used to having it easy with DG and strangulate on the DK, so I am extra uncomfortable with the thought of tanking there with my druid.

I'll fuckin' heal that place all day on my druid, though. I love healing on my druid. 

[Ingmar]

I found it a lot of fun, personally. I don't really think pallies or especially DKs have significantly better tools for it than we do, either.

It is nice, I think, to have a fight where we really get to stretch and use all our abilities to make the difference in the fight. I'm going to treat is as my own personal Danger Room. Getting a little soft, need to sharpen up? Time to hit HHoR.

[Cadaverine]

I had the misfortune of running into Iamcyborg of Velen this afternoon, in UK, thanks to the new lfg tool.  The priest thought they could cover his inadequacies.  At least for about 5 pulls.  Along with his awesome gear choices, he apparently hadn't discovered things like Taunt, and so on.  My boomkin, and the DK tanked most of the fights.  Then we voted to kick him to the curb.

That's my bad group for the week.  

[Selby]

I had the misfortune of running into Iamcyborg of Velen this afternoon, in UK, thanks to the new lfg tool.

Oh geez!  Did he mean to click a pally at character creation and hasn't noticed his mistake yet?

[Merusk]

I started playing my healing priest again, since getting groups is now instant and I don't have to travel.   I expected my x-realms ignore list to be filled with fail DPS, but I'm finding that I'm loading it up with Control Freak, asshole tanks who treat everyone in the group like they're 5, but can't hold aggro for shit themselves.

Ronburgunde is the latest one after I died twice in H. Occ.  Starts off with "I want a fast run, do shit on your own time" and proceeds to RUN down the corridor.  He tosses one concecrate under the whelps, then runs to the dragonkin. He stood at the dragonkin until they were dead, and then ran to the next group.  Everyone's taking aggro, including myself.

I'm running at 5-10% mana by the 3rd group and wind-up dead.  Coming back, he's bitching about the dps and I say "Protip: not all healers are TOC geared, slow down."  So what's he do as I begin drinking/ eating to get my health back up? Runs into the last group, leaving me at 30% mana and 10% health as I spam binding heal to keep both of us alive.  Fucker.

Hit the boss and he fucking stands in the middle as the bombs are going off around us, no movement at all. "Just heal through it" seems to be his strat.  Yes, this little ilevel 200-213 disc priest is going to do just great at that.  We finish with everyone at about 5% health by luck alone. 

Once we're on the drakes, instead of killing the dragons he lands on the first platform and yells at us for killing them.  I finish off the one the 2 dps are on and fly over to the twit, not noticing the 3rd dps apparently didn't catch it.  He pulls a drake on us after we've dismounted, group wipes.  The tank starts getting mouthy again, I leave group and have another ignore list add.

I've added 3 guys with the same combo of low gear + overinflated ego + horrible skills in the last week.  I'm going to need more than 50 slots.

[Selby]

"Just heal through it" seems to be his strat.  Yes, this little ilevel 200-213 disc priest is going to do just great at that.

A druid likely can do that without too much issue.  A shaman or a priest is going to have much more difficulties doing this.

I've added 3 guys with the same combo of low gear + overinflated ego + horrible skills in the last week.  I'm going to need more than 50 slots.

There is seriously a problem with the tanks I've noticed.  Every DPS has been competent and healing has been good.  But I always get tanks who either (a) don't know the instance and thus do stupid things like pull every mob at once or mobs that are off in the corner that 98% of every heroic group skips or (b) are horribly undergeared and don't use their basic skills (DK's not using D&D EVER or paladins not using Consecrate until all of the mobs are almost dead).  When the tank single target focuses only, it makes life difficult for me as a healer because I WILL get aggro.  On most heroics it is easy to jump into the mobs, toss a consecrate\D&D\stomp and have aggro on all of them for the fight.  These tanks will use a throw weapon or use a single spell to pull one mob, waiting for the melee to come to them and the spellcasters in the back (conveniently outside of any AoE tanking abilities) and then everyone start to freak when the healer gets aggro and gets a caster or two on them while the tank complains about people not playing well.  And these tanks DO NOT take any kind of advice at all.  Tell them to throw AoE down, they either get mad and say "I do that!" (not when it matters you don't...) or they ignore us.

Nice to know my server doesn't have the market cornered on crappy players.

[Merusk]

I'm beginning to wonder if it's DPSers who have caught-on that queuing as a tank gets them in faster. (Often times instantly, where DPS often has a wait.)

 I do it in my DK, but I have actual tanking experience, I worry about aggro instead of dps and my gear is only a tier below my DPS set.  I'm not queuing up as a tank thinking I still need to out dps the rest of the group.. which I've watched many tanks try to do. 

[Fordel]

That's exactly what is happening. There are even people who Queue up as a tank, but then once in the group go "lawl I'm DPS, whose tankin?". 

[Lakov_Sanite]

That's exactly what is happening. There are even people who Queue up as a tank, but then once in the group go "lawl I'm DPS, whose tankin?". 

Ha! I tried signing up for the forge on my ret pally but didn't realize it auto signed me up for ret and prot since prot is my offspec. of course my paladins prot set is lacking so...hilarity ensued.

[Rasix]

I did a HoR reg yesterday with a hunter that didn't break 1K dps. 

[Paelos]

I did a HoR reg yesterday with a hunter that didn't break 1K dps. 

Man, he would have been epic 4 years ago.

[pants]

I did a HoR reg yesterday with a hunter that didn't break 1K dps. 

That gives me something to do tonight - go up to a dummy and see what my autoshot damage is.  Its gotta be close to that...

[Selby]

I did a HoR reg yesterday with a hunter that didn't break 1K dps. 

I did an OK run and my shaman was #1 DPS at 2100.  The next highest was 1100 (DK tank), then 900 (Hunter)... then 500 (druid caster... in Tauren form the entire time.  I think he just Moonfired over and over).  I kept asking what was the deal with everyone (including when I would take aggro from the tank after a stormstrike and earth shock) and everyone got upset with me for being elitist and started blaming everyone else for all the wipes...  And one person said I was "too overgeared for this instance and shouldn't be here."

That group fell apart 2 bosses in, I got into a Nexus group where I was #1 with 3k, and the next highest was 1400 (warrior tank), then a 1200 (DK), and finally a 850 warlock.  This expansion sure has brought out the lack of player in some people.  I know numbers aren't everything and I shouldn't judge too harshly, but dammit even with mostly ilvl 200 purples and blues a DPS class should be able to pull out 1500-2000, or at least beat the tank!  When you sit down below the 1k mark, I just get the feeling you aren't trying.

[Zetor]

I've seen my share of 1200-ish DPSers in epics (and I'm usually in the top 2 as a tank, occasionally #1  ), but the most annoying pugger I've seen so far was a ret pally who did decent damage (~2600 dps), but was using the hand-of-reckoning taunt almost every cooldown for extra damage. Yeah, that made tanking bosses fun. In retrospect I should've let him die, but eh.

[SurfD]

I've seen my share of 1200-ish DPSers in epics (and I'm usually in the top 2 as a tank, occasionally #1  ), but the most annoying pugger I've seen so far was a ret pally who did decent damage (~2600 dps), but was using the hand-of-reckoning taunt almost every cooldown for extra damage. Yeah, that made tanking bosses fun. In retrospect I should've let him die, but eh.

I have seen stupidity from ret paladins trying to use HoR for extra damage at ALL levels of play.  Case in point, a very well geared Paladin Tank who i swear was using HoR as part of his rotation durring ToGC 10 on Goremok.  Needless to say, when they called out for me to pull off him for impale stacks, i usually eneded up going through at least 3 taunts before i could actually pull off him, because the first two almost always came up "immune".

[Nebu]

While I enjoy complaining about the random noob as much as the next, I often try to remind myself of two things:

1) Many MANY of the players in this game are under the age of 15.  They log on for very different reasons than us MMO veterans. 

2) Most people don't understand MMO gaming mechanics as well as the folks here.  Hell, I don't understand the mechanics of WoW as well as most of you and I consider myself a pretty avid reader of elitest jerks. 

Not trying to be an ass here... just trying to offer a larger view.

[Zetor]

Yeah, that's why I don't really have a problem with people doing bad damage, standing in the fire, or anything like that (or at least not enough of a problem to do anything other than maybe leave the instance if it gets very bad). However, in my case, the dude was very much aware of what he was doing - he was in a raid guild, had high-quality raid gear, 'proper' enchants from what little I know about ret pallies -, he was just being an arse and making everyone's run harder just to inflate his personal 'dee-pee-ess' numbers. That's much worse than lacking class/game knowledge or keyboard turner tanking, imo...

[Shrike]

What's interesting is I've never cared much about dps--to the point of never running meters. I usually know if I'm doing well on damage output. I don't need the specifics. Admittedly, it's interesting, but it's also distracting.

Moreover, there's no need for it in 5mans. Things often die so quickly I never get a chance to get an attack cycle in, or sometimes barely time to hit a target before it dies. I daresay dps is "enough" in that case and epeen waving is pointless and stupid.

I haven't done any of the ICC 5mans yet. Sounds like I have a few things to look forward to...   

[Selby]

Moreover, there's no need for it in 5mans.

I agree.  The only reason I even looked with those two groups is that things were taking an awful long time to die (the 15m random dungeon timer expired before the first boss died) and I was ending up tanking Bonegrinders in OK and even the both bosses we actually managed to down.

[kildorn]

What's interesting is I've never cared much about dps--to the point of never running meters. I usually know if I'm doing well on damage output. I don't need the specifics. Admittedly, it's interesting, but it's also distracting.

Moreover, there's no need for it in 5mans. Things often die so quickly I never get a chance to get an attack cycle in, or sometimes barely time to hit a target before it dies. I daresay dps is "enough" in that case and epeen waving is pointless and stupid.

I haven't done any of the ICC 5mans yet. Sounds like I have a few things to look forward to...   

DPS is only really need to know in the form of "are you even trying" and certain dps race style fights.

Just be aware that lower DPS means the tank and healer have to work harder, since there will be more total incoming damage. Essentially, fast DPS means less healing needed, slow dps means more healing needed.

And your rotation for bosses vs trash should be slightly different on a few classes, due to time to kill versus time to complete a rotation. I don't CoE random trash, because it's not worth the GCD. But for the most part destro lock rotations don't change much, they just restart a lot (more immolates, less incinerates!)

[Morfiend]

So, I got in a Onyxia 25 group yesterday on my Ret pally. I hit 80 with him some time ago, then never bothered to really play him much. So for the last week I have been gearing him up in ToC and now the 3 ICC dungeons. So I have been doing a lot of pugs.

Anyway, I am in pretty much full 219+ epics, and when I went in to this Onyxia kill, wow did I feel pathetic. I finished 16th on the DPS meters with a total of 3600dps. That was a slight blow to my ego. The number one and two spots where both Rogues with the number one guy putting out 9500dps. It seems they might have gone overboard on the new rogue poison buff as 45% of both their damage was Instant Poison.

[Ingmar]

Some of that is probably inflated by mass applying instant poison to giant packs of whelp adds via Fan of Knives.

[Gobbeldygook]

Rogues always did those sorts of numbers on ony.  If they were combat, blade flurry+AR would make the whelps melt.  If they were Ass and had enough crit, they could spam FOK non-stop.

[Selby]

The number one and two spots where both Rogues with the number one guy putting out 9500dps. It seems they might have gone overboard on the new rogue poison buff as 45% of both their damage was Instant Poison.

My mage does that on Ony-25.  It's the AoE from the whelps.  Any other fight and she's 5500-6500.  3600DPS is not poor by any stretch, but it's middle of the road with geared out 258+ raiders in your group.  Especially on a fight like Ony where ranged and AoE shine and melee gets to sit back for 1/3 of the fight and take out guardians.

[Sheepherder]

Ret paladins also lack multiple stacking cooldowns to abuse with AoE for maximum hilarity.

[Shrike]

Onyxia is a bad fight to make any call about damage output. The whelps cheese the meters on any AoE heavy class. Throw in a lot of movement for melee types and it's a hash, dps-wise.

Again, as long as you're not obviously screwing the pooch and she dies in a reasonably efficient manner, it's all good. Blatant slackers and underperformers are always annoying, but as long as the boss goes down without too much drama, I can't say I care all that much. I might make fun of you in /gu, but that's about the extent of it.