Posts Tagged ‘pug’
A Tale Of Two Pugs
This is for Gnomeaggedon.
Late was the hour in which Jools the priest choose to alleviate the Lovely Charm grind and once again get out in the world and meet new people while at the same time help defeat evil in the world, thus being ultra-efficient. She queued up in the LFG tool as dps and lo and behold, mere minutes later she was invited to join a party of bold adventurers.
They ended up in the Pit of Saron. Jools normally don’t particularly fancy that place, but since she had of late turned to the shadowy way of doing things she was not overly concerned…
The tank was a DK and his first words were:
hi all
first time tank
The group leader, a shaman, asked the DK if he knew the tactics for the boss and the DK said:
no
sorry I’ll leave
The shaman stopped him from leaving and then asked him not to pull so he could briefly explain a few things.
Our healer, a paladin, piped up saying he didn’t really want to waste time in this pit, but the shaman said let’s just try and the paladin stayed, saying he was gonna see how things turned out.
With the shaman’s encouraging words of
as long as you keep aggro you should be fine
we set out through the quarry.
First group speed bump passed! Nobody left although we had an unexperienced tank in our midst!
After the first mob was killed the paladin had inspected the DK and wondered why he was signing up to tank when he was in full dps gear, without even a slightest hint of defense. The shaman suggested that the DK go put Stoneskin Gargoyle on his weapon instead of whatever rune he had on, and the DK obeyed, promptly put up a Death Gate and returned within a minute or two, and we all waited patiently. Nobody dropped group!
The paladin was working himself up, wondering why the DK didn’t queue as dps when he apparently had no tank gear at all and initiated a vote to kick the DK.
The vote was not passed, the DK stayed and so did everyone else!
The shaman politely asked the paladin to not drama, that a DK in Frost presence and with the Gargoyle on was not that bad, if he knew how to play.
In the paladins defense, I must say he did a very good job healing the DK, snatching him back from the clutches of certain death a few times, and it can’t have been an easy job, especially since the DK did not have the best of tank skills.
At the first boss, I got aggro from the adds and since I for some reason had thought it a good idea to have Dispel Magic on my usal Fade hotkey I took a bad beating and died. The others managed to get the boss down though, probably mostly thanks to the healing skills of the paladin who kept the DK and everyone else alive.
Tank plate loot dropped and the DK won it, thus getting his first piece in his tank set.
The paladin said something about the difficulty of healing the DK and the DK started mouthing back to him, but the shaman told them both to calm down and they did! None of them left!
Another vote to kick the DK was initiated and not passed this time either, and still noone left! We were all still grouped together!
The ambush and the rock-dragging mobs were cleared without problems, and then we faced the second boss, the one with the bombs and the pursuit and the poisons. The tank in his one-piece tank set tanked it, the paladin healed him through it, and the rest of us dps’d the boss down!
We had one casualty, the 4+ k dps mage kicked the bucket at the end of the fight, but by then the boss was so far gone the rest of us could easy kick him over the edge and down him.
And then we faced what many people think is the hardest part of the instance – the multi mob packs on the slope up to the tunnel.
There on that slope we wiped, and there on that slope our group fractioned.
The mage who so far had said nothing dropped group without a word, and a few seconds later the paladin was gone too. We had faced two bosses down in a fairly ok pace and with no wipes, but on this first wipe they chose to drop out.
No hard feelings though, the paladin had done a great job healing in what must have been hard circumstances and smiled when complimented on it.
The shaman re-queued us and we waited for a few minutes for replacements. I was starting to wonder what took so long, we had a tank of sorts in our group after all, when I saw that the DK had checked dps and not tank. I commented on it, and the shaman was just about to requeue when two more players joined us, a druid healer and another DK tank.
The new DK tank had only a few k more hp than the old one, but he had a tank set and the slope was swiftly cleared. We even had time to squeeze in a few jokes!
We wiped two times in the tunnel but there were no expletives, no ffs!, and noone dropped group! We all corpse ran back and rode the way to the tunnel together, stopping outside it to buff up and get ready.
The druid said he hoped the pretty cloth boots would drop from the end boss but was a bit sad the he could not need on them due to Blizzard’s loot rules. I said I didn’t need them so I would pass and not greed or DE if the dropped, and the shaman said he would do the same.
We cleared the tunnel and engaged the Scourgelord. He took a while to get down, we did not have the most uber dps in the world, but he went down eventually. The boots did not drop for the druid, but he got the staff as an offspec.
And then we all said thanks for the run and went our separate ways.
So this is the tale of two pugs – the one that did happen and the one that did not, the one where the group fell apart on any of the numerous occasions it could have, on any of the vote kicks, or the wipes, or the inspecting of players, or the waiting around, where it could have broken up but it didn’t.
So, shaman of awesome from Eonar, I really hope I will meet more people like you, patient, kind and helpful. You kept this group together through the rough start, you calmed the ruffled feathers and you saw it through to the end.
Thank you.