You say goodbye and I say hello

This blog's focus was meant to be on instances right from the beginning since they are one of my favourite activities in the game, but since the introduction of the new dungeon finder I just can't stop writing about them. The amount of amusing and confusing pug experiences just never ends.

Today I got to experience first-hand just how ridiculously easy it is to swap people in and out with the new system - over and over again. It's both good and bad: I mean, obviously it's nice when someone just disconnected, you queue up to get a replacement and it appears instantly. On the other hand people's patience with mistakes or accidents of any kind has clearly reached an all-time low. It's a sad irony that the ones with the "The Patient" title are usually the worst offenders. Then again, if you get a new title that requires you to pug with fifty different people only a few days after it beomes available, you're very obviously everything but patient. But I digress.

After being without internet for nearly two weeks and thereby missing the 3.3 launch, my boyfriend was very keen on finally trying out some of the new content. He said that he wanted to see the new heroics on his rogue first, so I invited him to a party with my hunter and introduced him to the awesomeness that is the new LFG tool. After about fifteen minutes of waiting we got a group for heroic Forge of Souls, which isn't too bad as far as wait time for double dps goes I guess.

FoS being the easiest of the new heroics, we made it through that one without any trouble. About the worst thing that happened was that the warlock complained about people not having dpsed the corrupted soul fragments on Bronjahm fast enough (after the fact of course, until then not a single word about strategy - or anything at all - had been said). We finished quickly, thanked each other for a smooth run, and the group disbanded except for my boyfriend and me.

We continued through the portal into the Pit of Saron, queued up to fill our little party again for the next instance and had a full group within a minute. Things were going well enough up until Krick and Ick, then the healing priest told us to hurry up because he'd have a raid soon, so the death knight tank quickly pulled the next trash pack (you know the ones, the nasty ones with the fireballs and ewww). We wiped, the priest left the group. Surprise, surprise.

While we were corpse-running I put us into the queue for a healer replacement. The next instant the shaman who had healed us through Forge of Souls earlier joins the party.

"Hello again! :)" I greet him.

Shaman has left the group.

Rrright. Either I'm a lot scarier than I ever thought, or seeing dead people was simply way too terrifying for the shaman. Maybe he thought being dead was contagious or something. We had just got back into the instance when a holy paladin joined us to fill the once again vacated healer slot. We had another wipe on the annoying trash, after which point the tank instructed me to always pull with a freezing arrow and keep one of the casters trapped. I swear I haven't felt this useful since Burning Crusade; it was bittersweet. After that we cleared the rest of the instance without problems.

Several people in the party wanted to continue and it would have been nice for sure, but my hunter was already saved for heroic Halls of Reflection, so my boyfriend and I said our goodbyes, I logged on my druid to heal and we tried to form a new party for the instance instead.

After another ten-minute wait we were good to go with a paladin tank, a death knight and a warlock. The paladin's gear was pretty good and we downed the first boss without any wipes, which was encouraging. During one of the early waves preceding the second boss however, I end up standing too close to a footman, get shield-bashed while casting a regrowth and we wipe because I'm locked out of all my resto spells.

I explain this to the group as we run back and someone "lol"s, which I guess is better than expressing anger and frustration, so we get ready to try again. We start the event again, but the warlock just stands there in the middle of the room instead of joining the rest of the group. The tank makes an effort to save him but as it turns out he's been disconnected. We fight valiantly but eventually get overwhelmed due to lack of dps.

We boot the warlock and get a mage instead. We try again, but this time the paladin simply fails completely at picking up the mobs during one of the later waves, they all pile on me and I die instantly. She then leaves the group without another word - why, cause it's our fault when I get mugged by untanked mobs?

We get in line for another tank and get joined by a death knight of the silent variety who doesn't respond to our greetings. Still, he gets into position to start tanking the event so all seems good. The first wave of trash spawns and shiiit, what is this, why is my screen freezing up... "You have been disconnected from the server." I log back in right away but already the tank and the mage have dropped from the group. "Stupid DCs," I mutter. "We noticed :D," responds the death knight.

We use the dungeon finder to once again find a new tank and one more dps. A hunter joins as well as a tauren warrior called "Aggrobot". My boyfriend and I barely have time to consider the originality of that name (just between the two of us, not in chat or anything) when Aggrobot leaves again. Why? Who knows? This time it's not like we even had time to say or do anything at all to scare him off, and we were all alive.

The next tank follows soon afterwards, another tauren warrior with a less ridiculous name. He, too, is of the silent variety and decides to completely ignore our greetings. As it turns out he tanks reasonably well though, and while we end up facing Marwyn with one dps down, we finally do get to face him and I'm already sighing a sigh of relief when suddenly, the tank goes splat before I can even blink. What the hell? According to the log he got debuffed with corrupted flesh, which I was pretty sure wasn't supposed to go on the tank like, ever, and then got two-shotted. Good times. Unsurprisingly the warrior leaves the party, still without having said a single word.

We queue up for a new tank yet again. This time nothing happens for several minutes, except that we get spammed with messages informing us that someone has declined the group invite and we're being returned to the front of the queue. Is our bad reputation spreading already? My boyfriend suggested that they kept offering the slot to the same tank, who didn't want to join a run where the first boss had already been downed. The death knight started to giggle insanely, and the hunter expressed a burning determination to finish no matter what. "I didn't get saved to this for nothing!"

Finally... an undead warrior joins us. He, too, is of the completely silent variety who doesn't even return greetings. However, he turns out to be one hell of a tank, picks up all the mobs with ease and then keeps them, and we manage to down Marwyn without anyone dying. Orca Hunter's Harpoon drops, much to the delight of the hunter. At this point I was glad that someone got something out of this run, as I was starting to feel increasingly embarrassed about the whole affair, as if it was all my fault.

I was hoping that we'd be able to one-shot the escape from the Lich King after all that, but ended up wiping on the fourth wall (Is anyone else ever overcome by an urge to make jokes about breaking the fourth wall whenever that comes up?) because the dps overlooked a caster at the back and was wondering why the wall didn't come down.

I fully expected the tank to drop out at that point, but he stayed and actually spoke, telling the dps to ramp it up a bit! Oh. My. Gawd. Let's just say that we finished smoothly after that and it felt exhilarating.

Thank you, undead warrior tank, for being the guy who made it happen in the end.

Thank you, dps death knight, for being the one guy who stuck with us throughout this whole adventure and for shrugging off all the wipes with a sense of humour.

Thank you, hunter, for also being determined to stay until the end.

Throughout these three runs we ended up being grouped with no less than sixteen different people, seven of which were tanks. That's nearly a third towards "The Patient" as it is, though I think it only counts the people with whom you actually finish the instance for the achievement. Anyway, screw you people who have "The Patient" after two days and drop out of any party as soon as the slightest thing goes wrong. You clearly have no idea what patience is anyway.

Disclaimer: I might have missed a wipe or two somewhere and I'm not entirely sure I got the order of tanks completely right either. Apologies in either case, after the fifth tank it all got a bit fuzzy.