This past weekend I decided that I wanted to go to Blackfathom Deeps on my hunter. After keeping my eyes peeled on both general chat and the LFG channel while questing in Ashenvale for a while, I eventually managed to join a group.
It was a pretty pleasant and uneventful run up until we got to the area with the Twilight cultists. First our tauren warrior tank asked if we minded taking a smoke break for him. It's one of those rather awkward questions to ask in a pug, because realistically most of us were probably thinking something along the lines of: "Ugh no, this is taking long enough as it is, and you want to make us sit around for another ten minutes just so you can smoke a cigarette?"
On the other hand though, you also want to keep everyone in the group sweet and the last thing you need is the tank getting grumpy due to nicotine withdrawal. So we all agreed that he could go while the rest of us tried to use the break in other constructive ways (getting drinks, going to the toilet, that sort of thing).
He came back and we cleared the way to the temple, but we hadn't been underwater yet, to pick up the quest item from there and kill the thrasher boss. The troll shaman and I kept urging people to come over and get into the water, but the tank and feral druid seemed oddly reluctant.
Suddenly the druid sat down, said that he had to go and logged off. We were a little taken aback by the suddenness of this, but it's not like BFD is cutting edge content - I figured we'd be able to continue just fine with a dps down.
However, then the tank suddenly said that he also had to go. "Really?" asked one of my remaining group mates, somewhat incredulously, to which the tank replied that his mum was in the hospital and logged off.
It was one of those awkward moments where you don't quite know what to think, because the timing sure made it seem like a lie concocted on the spot to ward off any criticism or damage to one's reputation for leaving people hanging like that, but on the other hand it's the sort of thing that makes you hesitant to call someone out because if it's true they are of course completely right and deserve nothing but sympathy.
Either way, the troll shaman, undead priest and I were left at a loss. Getting a replacement of any kind this close to the end of a dungeon is rarely feasible.
Still, not wanting to give up I suggested that we should press on with the three of us to see how it'd go with my pet tanking. Unfortunately poor Snowclaw didn't stand a chance at keeping aggro off my level 29 group mates, being only 25 himself, but the shaman didn't seem to do much worse at tanking anyway, so he equipped the dagger that dropped off Old Serra'kis, strapped on a shield and we continued like that.
The temple is probably one of the toughest part of the instance, with all the trash requiring careful pulling and some of the mob waves spawned by the brazier doing quite brutal damage. However, our shaman bravely did as much kite-tanking as he could, running enemies in circles around his earthbind totem, and the priest gave it his all, contributing damage with his wand after he ran out of mana to heal.
Slowly but surely we managed to whittle down the remanining enemies that way until only Aku'mai herself remained. She was tough, especially since I could contribute only relatively little damage, what with being three levels lower than her. Again, we all ran ourselves out of mana by the end, but the boss eventually collapsed at the same time as my pet and with our shaman only having a smidgeon of health left as well. Victory!
Also interesting: The next day I ran BFD with my husband on my druid, and there we also had a dps quit in the run-up to the temple. To be fair he'd pretty much said that he was only there for the one quest item, so I guess it wasn't entirely surprising that he closed the game shortly afterwards.
Still, when you're already this close to the end and everything's going smoothly, why not just finish the run and have a shot at loot from the last two bosses? I get that real life can always interfere, but three out of seven pugs quitting at around the same point in the dungeon sure felt odd. Am I missing something here?
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