Epic Gundrak fail

For all the dungeoneering I've been doing in the past months it's been quite a while since I had an epic fail pug. Sometimes I'd get a tank who was unnecessarily rude, or a dps who was quiet but utterly clueless, but nothing to write home blog about. Until today, that is!

The scene: heroic Gundrak, apparently my priest's daily random dungeon.

I zone in, float down the ramp, and before I've even finished buffing, the elemental shaman has pulled. I manage to save him, then the mage gets aggro, the death knight tank tries to taunt something but apparently not the right something... but in the end the mobs die and we're alive. Not the smoothest start for a daily random, but nobody died and I wasn't even particularly stressed out. We continue to clear the rest of the snakes including Slad'ran the same way, with the tank, the shaman and the mage playing some kind of aggro pong.

While we do so the shaman expresses a desire to "zerg Less-Rabi", proudly informing us that he can even interrupt once. Wow, you go, shaman! I remember getting that achievement on my own shaman's very first Gundrak run, while she was healing and doing most of the interrupting to boot. I don't actually say that though, because it's one thing to have self-righteous thoughts on occasion and another thing to say them out loud (or type them out, as it might be). I find myself wondering whether the mention of the word "zerg" implies that he'll expect me to go dps, and how he'll react if I have to tell him that I'm dual-specced for healing and... more healing. While the shaman and the mage agree that they want to try, the tank wants to know what they are talking about, and I decide that my spec is probably going to be the least of our worries.

As soon as Slad'ran's body hits the floor everyone gets ready to enter the next room, except for the tank, who has jumped into the water and is swimming across the middle section of the instance, with half a dozen Drakkari Frenzies chewing on his legs. He tells us to follow him. For a moment the rest of the party just stands there, probably going through the same internal argument as me:

"1. I'm pretty certain that whatever he's going for isn't possible. After over a year of running this instance over and over and over again, I'm quite sure that I'd have heard about such an easy way to skip all the trash to the Drakkari Colossus. This can't end well.

2. He seems pretty confident and after all, he's the tank. You go where the tank goes, damn it!"

After a few seconds of hesitation everyone jumped down. While I'm getting disoriented for a moment and trying to survive the onslaught of unfriendly fish, the rest of the party gets ahead of me and up to the next boss. The tank asks if everyone's ready. One of the dpsers says yes; I say no, what with still treading water under the bridge. They pull anyway. What's the point of asking if you're just going to ignore the response anyway?

I hurry to catch up and save the day, only to be greeted by the unpleasant fact that trying to pull the boss from the "wrong" side in an attempt to skip all the trash results in getting the boss and all the trash in his room at once. I don't know, maybe a better party might have been able to come through, but as it was, trying to play aggro pong with four colossi and who knows how many elementals at once doesn't really work well. So we wiped.

I don't recall the tank's exact words afterwards, but I think it was something along the lines of "that didn't work so well lol". The dpsers were less than pleased.

Finding myself at the graveyard, I started to run back towards the little "your dead body is here" symbol on the minimap, entered, floated down the ramp again... and right into a pack of mobs. Damn you, Gundrak and your two instance entrances, and specifically the fact that the "wrong" one is actually closer to the graveyard! Somewhat embarrassed and not wanting to die again, I managed to leg it up the ramp and out of the instance in time to save myself. Momentarily I ended up a bit confused to find myself back in Dalaran instead of in the midst of the snows of Zul'Drak, but then I remembered how the dungeon finder works in such cases, teleported back in using the little minimap icon and found myself at the right entrance this time.

Except, the rest of my party was not there. They had all run for the "wrong" entrance and two of them were already dead again. I was briefly overcome by guilt and worry that my hasty escape had trained the mobs that saw me onto them instead, but as it turned out that was not the case. Instead the death knight had hit path of frost as soon as he had jumped down, and the dps who decided to jump straight after him at half health went splat. They were very outraged about this and threatened to kick the tank "if he messed up again", but I have to admit I was amused more than anything. Usually failpugs tend to make me feel bad as well, with that nagging voice at the back of my mind wondering whether I'm not contributing to the fail myself, but for once I felt blissfully zen, innocent, and above all the anger.

So there I was, standing alone where we had killed Slad'ran. "Priest?" someone asks eventually. I tell them that I'm at the entrance, and that they should and could easily join me by porting out of the instance and back in. "No, we're here now. And there's a boss here." So... what exactly did they expect me to do then? Unlike them, I didn't have the option to magically port to the other side. I usually hate it when people drop group without warning, but at that moment I was just drawing a blank. All I knew was that this party was certainly not worth the hassle, so I just left.

As usual, the right words came to me about a minute too late, when I found myself back in Dalaran after the fact. I thought about how the group should get a replacement healer pretty much instantly anyway, and wondered how they would do...

... when I suddenly realised that their new healer would also get ported in at the "right" instance entrance, and if they still insisted on staying where they were, they'd have to convince said new healer to either a) kill himself and then corpse-run to the other entrance, or b) leave the instance and manually fly all the way to Gundrak to enter the dungeon on the other side. Just to save the rest of them two teleports.

And then I grinned.