Sunday (5 Sep) - So You Want to be in a PUG

Sunday (5 Sep) - So You Want to be in a PUG

Wild had some time on his hands Saturday and wanted to get in some raiding. The MM guild has a standing 3pm ICC25 raid scheduled for saturdays, although attendance is iffy and getting a full 25 raiders together involves both bringing in PUGs and waiting around as much as two hours to get started. Wild has only two items that he really needs from ICC25 - a BOE (bind on equip) ring called [Marrowgar's Frigid Ring] and a bis (best in slot) trinket called [Althor's Abacus]. The ring is a random drop and the trinket is a drop from the Gunship battle. The MM raid leader spent 45 minutes trying get a raid together. We had at most 10-12 guildies available, and the raid leader did not feel like trying to PUG it with so few guildies, so he called off the raid.

While Wild was waiting to see if the guild would get an ICC25 going, I told the raid leader I would be trying to get into a VoA25 raid. VoA is a short, usually two boss raid that can be done in 15-20 minutes once the raid gets started. VoA drops a token for the Tier 10 gloves. The Tier 10 set is supposed to be the top of the line gear for raiders, but for druid healers the set stats are so poor that druids with the 4-piece T9 set would rather keep that than get the T10. Wild doesn't have the T9, but does have the 2-piece T10. The 2-piece set bonus is nice enough to keep, but it wasn't worth the effort to try to get any more since Wild could get (and has) better gear.

Wild still has a problem, though. Wild wants more +haste to speed up his spell casting. Wild is already at what is called the "soft cap." This is the point where Wild's instant spells have the shortest possible cooldown. The "hard cap" is when Wild's non-instant spells will have the fastest cast time. Wild only needs 50-60 more haste to get to the hard cap. So, one of Wild's T10 pieces, the shoulders, doesn't have any haste stats. However, the T10 gloves do have haste. If Wild could get the T10 gloves, he could then replace the T10 shoulders with gear that has haste and wa-la! Wild could reach the hard cap and still have the 2-piece T10 set bonus.

Wild found himself a VoA25 raid and got an invite. The trash mobs in VoA are trivial and we plowed through them to get to the main boss we were after, Toravon. We only had four healers, but that was more than enough for this fight. We engaged, and while it took a bit longer than it should have, we brought Toravon down. The T10 druid gloves token did not drop, unfortunately. Wild didn't need anything from the second boss, but was prepared to stay and help out and pick up an extra badge. We cleared trash to the next boss while loot was being distributed. Then, with the whole raid standing in front of the next boss, ready to go - the raid leader left the raid. He was also the master looter, so we wouldn't be able to loot the next boss, and that effectively ended the raid. That made it two short circuits to Wild's raiding.

Not long after that, Wild asked to join a PUG ICC25 raid that was forming up. Might as well, Wild thought, there won't be a guild ICC25 run this week apparently. The raid was nearly full when Wild joined. The group of raiders were dominated by two guilds, plus a number of other raiders like Wild. The main tank looked pretty good and we had five healers, so I was pretty comfortable with the makeup of the raid. If the raid leader was using vent he didn't offer it to the raid, so there was an expectation that everyone knew the fights.

Wild was further encouraged when we started on the trash mobs. They went down fast and everyone seemed to know what they were doing. Matter of fact, mobs died faster than Wild usually sees in his own guild. We had some high powered DPS here. While clearing, one of the raiders named Van stated in vent that he was "reserving the bloods, just so everyone knows that." The "bloods" are a drop off of two bosses used as part of a powerful quest chain. Loot rules hadn't been discussed yet so there was immediate grumbling from other raiders who hoped to win bloods. The raid leader stepped in and said, "No, the bloods are not being reserved." Good for him.

We cleared two packs of mobs and a boe bow dropped. This bow is a really, really nice entry level i264 bow and coveted by hunters and other classes that use bows. As a boe, it means that even someone who doesn't use a bow could take it and give it to someone else or sell it. The general rule for boe's is that to roll on it you had to be able to use it, and if you won it you had to equip it on the spot to prove that you needed it and weren't going to just sell it. Several raiders immediately rolled on it. The raid leader then announced: "This is a guild run and all boe's are reserved for the guild." That started a small storm of protests. Wild was now concerned as well. After all, one of the two things Wild was after was a boe ring that Wild was now excluded from rolling on if it dropped.

The raid leader, trying to weather the storm, called for the tank to pull the next set of mobs. We fought the trash mobs while the complaints continued. The loot rules should have been stated up front, particularly since they were different from the commonly accepted loot rules for a PUG group. Nobody had said before we started that this was a guild run or that boe's would be reserved. The right thing for the raid leader to have done was to allow the bow to be rolled on, and then if he still intended to reserve later boe's then at least everyone would know that. Instead, he ordered another pull, stubbornly restating that it was guild run. Two players left the raid. The tank made a bad pull, and the fight became a crazy mess. Raiders started dying, and some of those raiders started leaving, too. It became a rout - both from the perspective of players leaving and that the mobs soon overwhelmed those of us that remained and we wiped.

Wild, as he was returning to collect his corpse, told the raid leader in raid chat: "Loot rules that are different than the commonly accepted rules should be stated before the raid starts. Had I known that boe's would be reserved I would not have joined the raid. Stating new rules after the fact also makes raiders suspicious about what other rules will suddenly be used to deny us loot. Good luck." Wild then left the raid.

Even after all that the raid leader began calling for more invites to fill in the many, many vacancies in his raid. Upset raiders called him a "ninja" (someone who steals loot) and blasted him in the trade channel. I don't know whether he got his raid going again or not, or if he learned a lesson, but Wild will not raid with him or his guild again.

Sunday - Well, here I go again, trying to get Wild into a functional ICC25 raid. It was about 8:30am and a player had just announced in trade chat that he would be starting an ICC25 raid at 9am. At 8:58am a player I'll call Rav put out a call for invites to a fresh, newly forming ICC25. It wasn't the same player that had put out the earlier call, but raiders already invited to a raid sometimes help out by announcing the raid as well. Wild waited a few minutes to see if the original player would show up, but he didn't show, so Wild went ahead and asked Rav for an invite.

There were only five others in the raid when Wild joined, and getting more took a little time. We got to 15 raiders, with one tank and three healers. In raid chat, the tank posted an ominous concern, "Hey guys, looks like no one is checking gear. There are some really low level geared players in here." After a moment Rav, the raid leader and the one doing the inviting, announced, "hey, doesn't look like any more are signing up, who wants to do ICC10 instead?" What? Then, from the tank again, "I'm outa here, going to start another ICC25, those who want in give me a whisper." The tank left the raid. Wild, who was locked to ICC10 and wasn't interested in ICC10 at any event, also left the raid.

Someone looked up that raid leader's gear after we broke up and discovered that he was wearing mostly i200 gear and should not even have been in ICC, much less leading a raid. Perhaps it was Rav that the tank had been complaining about. Rav argued in trade chat, tried to start an ICC10, and when his gear level came out he tried to form a Naxx10. After getting yelled at for five minutes he logged out. I felt a little sorry for him. I pictured a ten year old wanting to start his own raid, and just trying to do what he'd seen other raid leaders do. But that was yet another failed attempt to raid, Wild's third. Wild was not having much luck.

The tank that left announced that he was forming an ICC25 raid, requiring invitees to have at least a 5k gear score. Wild asked for an invite (Wild's gear score is 6k) and got one immediately. All three of the healers from the broken up raid, including Wild, got invites. The death knight, Van, that tried to reserve bloods also got in the raid. Van was obsessed with getting those blood drops and talked constantly about them in raid chat, asking who else was on the quest chain multiple times and asking a million other questions. We got a full raid together with two tanks and five healers. There was a holy priest, two shaman and two druid healers.

We started on the initial trash, doing well on the first pull. The second pull went very badly, and multiple mob groups descended on us. We put up a good fight, but we ended up wiping. One of the tanks left the group, as did one of the healers and two DPS. Man, these kids are so impatient! There was a lot of trash talk about how such a wipe should never happen, etc. Which is bogus because even guild runs can wipe here if something goes wrong, not just PUGs. It was looking like this raid was going to fail, too. For the fourth time?

But we had a melee paladin in the raid who volunteered to switch to tank spec and be the second tank. We found a paladin to replace the shaman healer that left. DPSers weren't hard to find, and we were soon back in business.

We started again and cleared our way to Lord Marrowgar. By the way, the raid leader did not have vent, and no one else could offer a vent channel, so all instructions and discussions had to be done through raid chat by typing things out. With this kind of group, though, everyone was assumed to know what they were doing. Against Marrowgar, all we needed to know was whether the boss would be tanked at the door or at the center. It was a center strategy, and we wasted no time getting started. Marrowgar died. We were on our way, and by killing that first boss Wild was now locked to this instance. Wild hoped for the best.

Wild was third in healing with 5921 hps, but was blown away by the shaman (7361 hps) and the holy priest (8574 hps). The other druid was 5th with 4277 hps. That was some awesome healing by the top two. Over the course of the evening Wild almost caught the shaman in total healing, but the priest was out of Wild's league.

We then proceeded to kill Deathwhisper. A ring dropped, but not the one Wild was after.

Next up was the Gunship battle, and the raid leader turned on Heroic mode for this fight. The Gunship is considered the easiest encounter to do in Heroic, although none of them are easy. To even be able to do that, someone in the raid had to have killed the Lich King. Wild has never done a single ICC boss in Heroic mode.

The trickiest part of the fight is always when raiders jump to the other ship. Wild and the priest kept the jumping group alive through several jumps, healing them as we stood on the edge of the railing of our own ship. There is higher damage done, and lots more rockets shot at us, than in normal mode. Several times Wild had to break off healing to run to a safer spot when those rockets came flying over. Perhaps it was inevitable, but one of those times Wild slipped and fell off the boat. I really hate it when that happens. Fortunately you don't die. A miracle occurs and you fall back onto your own ship. Wild likes those miracles, because Wild fell off twice during the fight. We beat the encounter, though, and Wild had his first Heroic victory in ICC. The [Ring of Rapid Ascent] dropped. It wasn't the ring Wild was after - it was better. Since it was a Heroic drop it was an i277 ring instead of the i264 ring Wild was looking for. Too bad, though. Wild lost the roll.

We moved on to Saurfang, and this usually tough fight went very smoothly and down he went. Four bosses down. Saurfang dropped a druid token, a token Wild could use toward getting his T10 gloves. But again, Wild did not win the roll.

We had a trash talking elemental shaman in the raid who tended to boss people around and criticize them. He was mostly ignored but he started to get under the skin of the paladin off tank. By now anyone with sense could see that this "off tank" was the one really doing the main tanking. He and the raid leader tank had apparently reached an agreement that the raid leader would handle moving people along, loot distro, etc, and the other tank would handle the battles. It was working very well. Until that shaman started in.

We had cleared trash and the shaman had died. He complained about the healing. The shaman healer then had some nasty things to say back at him, and commented that he should shut up as he (the shaman healer) and the priest were doing all the healing. Like I said earlier, Wild was doing just as well as the shaman healer by this point, not to mention the contributions of the other two healers. So we had two shaman big mouths.

We picked up the weekly quest, the one that requires that we "trick" both Festergut and Rotface into giving us debuffs that are used to get the quest done. It worked, but apparently there were some problems. The nastiness got more heated, the paladin tank was drawn into the argument as more raiders added their opinions, and when more accusations were tossed around our battle leading tank left the raid. Our raid leader was stunned. "ARE YOU GUYS NUTS!" he hollered in raid chat. "That guy was good!"

We stood around for a bit as most of the raid descended on the elemental shaman that instigated the whole thing. He admitted no wrong, but was thankfully silent when the tank was talked into coming back. I think the shaman was probably told to shut up or we could easily find a DPS to replace him.

I'm not sure why we decided to go after Rotface next, since Festergut would have been a much easier fight. That's what we did, though. We made a strong effort, getting Rotface to 6% before wiping. Wild and the main tank were the last two standing. There was a lot of grousing - PUGs can't STAND to wipe - and want to immediately start blaming each other, with such eloquent verbal attacks such as "YOU FAIL!!!!!" repeated several times in a row with even more exclamation points.

Surprisingly, the raid held together for a second attempt. It was another good attempt, but we went down again with Rotface at 10%.

That ended the raid. Wild thanked the raid leader and the other tank since they did a very good job. The group was talented enough to go much farther than we did, but that wasn't the fault of the raid leader. The personal mechanics of PUGs make perseverance a dirty word.

Wild got a few frost emblems for his effort, and was happy to have been a part of that raid. No new gear, but all Wild wanted was a chance, and he got that.