The things we wish we'd said

Sometimes I wish I wasn't so damn nice and always avoiding confrontation. When I end up in a group with someone who acts like a jerk I tend to just try to ignore it and get on with the instance instead of saying "screw you, jerk, I'm out of here". I always think that I can stand it for just one more boss, that it would be mean to deprive the other people in the party of their tank/healer etc. At the same time it kind of bugs me that I act like that, because I'm sure I could save myself a lot of frustration if I didn't just put up with so much crap.

Today I had a bad pug for heroic Trial of the Champion for example, which was particularly jarring because on average most people on my server are quite skilled and nice, and even the unskilled ones are usually friendly at least. But today I somehow ended up with a resto druid who was nothing but a complete and utter toerag.

I should have known that something was off with him the moment we entered the instance and Mr Tree felt the need to tell the warlock that "your pet's name sucks". I don't even remember what it was, just one of those randomly generated names for imps, nothing special about it. Not to mention that it's not as if warlocks have any kind of say when it comes to their minion's names. So, you know... yay for random rudeness?

Anyway, I was tanking on my druid. I've tanked TotC many times by now, both on normal and heroic. Most of the time that was on my paladin however, and I find paladin tanking incredibly easy compared to druid tanking. Bears just have so few tools... try something like moving a caster just by two inches for example: on my paladin I have avenger's shield and arcane torrent to silence the mobs and force them to move, on my bear I can use my charge to stun and interrupt, but then they'll just stand there for two seconds being stunned and then go back to casting. I also notice that I generally seem to have a much harder time holding aggro on my bear, especially against multiple targets.

With things being as they were, I didn't disagree when the healing druid told us to run out after the jousting even though I'd never done it that way and am used to picking up the mobs after we dismount. When we attacked them again after resetting I made the mistake of charging right in, which caused the other two mobs to run behind me, screwing up my positioning right from the start, and before I could get things under control again, the arms warrior had run off and mauled the healer.

"Great tanking there," Mr Tree commented, sarcasm dripping from every letter.

I had wanted to apologise properly and to explain what went wrong, but feeling both slightly flustered and annoyed I just said "sorry" and we moved on. On the next attempt we got them down, though dps was constantly dying and running back in again. I resisted the urge to say something along the lines of "great healing there".

Next we got the Confessor, and as I pulled the first trash pack, someone else somehow aggroed a second one as well. I hit challenging roar to try and pick them all up, and at first I thought that I had succeeded... though with my bear's big butt and half a dozen aoe abilities filling up my screen it was hard to see anything really. The healer continued to yell at me in caps lock until I noticed that one of the casters had hung back and was flinging spells at him. So I ran over, got aggro on that last mob... and died, resulting in a wipe.

"Have you ever tanked before?" the healer accused me immediately.

I should have said: "No, because clearly nobody who has ever tanked before could ever hit the wrong key or make any kind of mistake ever again after their first tanking experience." In reality I just told him that yes, I had tanked this before.

"Are you tanking with your eyes closed?"

No, but as I said above... but well, it had already become clear that he had no actual interest in figuring things out, only in abusing people. Not much point in arguing, right?

In a feeble attempt to defend myself I said: "Well, someone aggroing an extra pack didn't help." To which he responded with: "Quit the blaming!" Huh. Because I'm the one throwing blame around like a monkey flings poo, right?

I offered to just leave at this point if I was aggravating him so much, to which he didn't respond but one of the dps offered a "lol". I was probably too polite about it. Again, what I should have said would have been something along the lines of: "I think I'll leave, I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding another tank. After all, who doesn't love getting yelled at in all caps every time they hit the wrong key? That's why LFG is always full of tanks!" But once again I bit my tongue (or sat on my fingers I guess, considering that this is about typing).

We then wiped some on the Confessor herself. Dps was dying constantly and running back in, resulting in the memory's health going down really, really slowly and the healer eventually running out of mana. This is where the dps started to get cranky as well, seeing how some of them had died something like five times already. "How about some heals?" - "I'll give you heals when you give me dps!" retorted the druid, spamming damage meters to show his disapproval of everyone else's performance. The funny thing was that he had a point, the dps was quite low, and usually I'd defend the healer under such circumstances... but as it was I just rolled my eyes.

We eventually managed to down the Confessor as the druid somehow succeeded in keeping everyone alive. Then we proceeded to wipe some on the Black Knight. This is where the warlock got fed up and left, after the umpteenth time the druid whined about the dps being made of fail. I couldn't help but admire him, and in hindsight I probably should have followed his lead. As it was though, we replaced him with a retribution paladin and then finally managed to finish the run, at which point the druid proudly declared "that proves that the warlock did retarded dps".

One last time I didn't type out what I thought, which was "better to have retarded dps than to be an idiot in every other way". I just left the group and put the druid on my ignore list, an honour which he only shares with a bunch of spam bots so far.

I'm playing this game to have fun. Being successful is certainly a part of that, but it's also quite possible to have some fun while wiping, messing up and learning. However I simply cannot enjoy myself when someone has to act like a jerk to everyone in the party, no matter how well we're doing. Now if I could only learn to apply that knowledge more consistently in practice, and to stop letting others ruin my fun! Where's that ignore button again?