Some days you should have just stayed in Dalaran

Two epic fail pugs in four days? I must be on a roll. Unlike the Gundrak fail on Monday I saw today's pug through until the bitter end, but not without a lot of exclamations of "oh my god" and "you won't believe what just happened" directed at my boyfriend (who was luckily busy doing something else).

I had queued for my daily random heroic with my paladin, and immediately got a bad feeling when I saw the Old Kingdom loading screen. Now, personally I don't mind Old Kingdom, even if it's a bit on the long side, but it's one of those instances that seems to bring out the prima donna in many tanks. Or, to put it more bluntly, whenever I get ported into Old Kingdom I can immediately start a countdown and the tank will have dropped from the group before it reaches zero, guaranteed. Occasionally I'll be surprised to find that we still have a tank after ten seconds, but then I realise that it's only because said tank is me.

Now, since I didn't fancy tanking that evening I had queued up as a healer, so the tank wasn't me, and as expected he left the party just as I had finished buffing up.

Tank chickening out as soon as the randomiser gives him an instance he doesn't like? Fail.

We queued up for a new tank, but after a few minutes I got fed up, switched to my tank spec and gear and re-queued us to find a new healer instead. As was to be expected that worked wonders instantly, and with me wearing my heavy plate and what looked like a friendly tree covering my back, we went on our way.

We made it to the first boss without problems, but as we fought said boss the healer started to complain. "Omg," he typed out repeatedly, "stop slacking!" After the fight he posted the damage metres, which showed me on top and all the dpsers doing between 1200 and 1600 dps - not great, but sufficient. He then declared that we'd have to find a new healer because he wouldn't run with people who couldn't outdamage the tank, then quit.

Healer throwing a fit and quitting because the dps isn't leet enough for him? Fail.

We got a shaman healer replacement and continued to Prince Taldaram. On one of the platforms we had our first death as the rogue managed to focus on the mob on which I had the least threat, pulled aggro and died. At least he didn't complain about it though, so we resed him and moved on.

As we approached Taldaram, I saw that the hunter was still standing on the platform where we had killed the last group of trash mobs. She had mentioned having lag before, so I decided to wait a bit to give her a chance to catch up. At which point the shaman healer decided to take things into his own hands and pulled.

Healer deciding that the tank is too slow and pulling in her stead? Fail.

Now, I remembered reading before that Taldaram had the ability to teleport anywhere in the instance, so I was not surprised when his second blood draining session took him to the hunter in the far back. "This is why I wanted to wait," I explained not without a certain amount of exasperation, as we helplessly watched the hunter die too far away from us to save her.

I waited for Taldaram to clumsily sprint back (seeing how his magical teleportation powers only seem to work one way), and suddenly both of the remaining dpsers were dead. I checked the combat log afterwards and they had to died to nothing but flame sphere damage and not getting any heals. I'm not sure how much the healer was to blame though, since his weird teleport might have bugged things out a bit.

Anyway, at this point the healer and I were the only ones left. I popped my pally wings to do a bit more damage, at which point the boss decided that he'd like to suck my blood next, and I found myself pinned to the floor, unable to bubble out of it. And the healer... just stood there and watched. He didn't even try to help me.

Healer being overzealous to pull but unable to actually do anything useful? Fail.

Fortunately Taldaram's health drain turned out to be one of the few abilities of this type that are not based on health percentage, and as it happened my tanking health pool was large enough to survive the full duration anyway. I then finished him off, but not without feeling slightly peeved.

I gave the rogue a res and he instantly quit the group. The hunter had DCed completely in the meantime, so we removed her as well while we were at it and got two new dpsers.

We ran down the tunnel to the next section of the instance, and immediately the healer urged me to pull again. I wanted to wait for our new dpsers, but afraid of more healer-pulling disasters I eventually gave in. I also asked people if they wanted to do a full clear or just the last boss, saying that I preferred the full clear but wouldn't mind skipping things either if that was what everyone else wanted. Most simply didn't give a response at all, but at least one spoke up in favour of doing all the bosses, so we went down to Amanitar and killed him.

When we came back up again the healer asked if we could do the last boss first because he'd have a raid soon. "And then you'll leave?" the dps death knight asked. "No," the shaman claimed innocently. Oh, well, if you're going to stay with us for the whole run anyway, then it shouldn't matter which boss we do first, right?

Lying in a thinly veiled attempt to get your frost emblems as quickly as possible so you can then dump the group? Fail.

We continued up to Jedoga and I ran in to AoE down the little initiates in front of her. However, as soon as they were dead, something strange happened. I had read about this bug in a comment somewhere, but since I hadn't heard about it anywhere else I figured that it probably wasn't that big a deal... until I got to witness it myself today. What happened? Instead of summoning her little Twilight Volunteers as usual, Jedoga summoned a whole group of Twilight Worshippers on one side of the platform - and no, it wasn't just that someone aggroed an extra group, we had cleared everything and I saw the mobs' nameplates. We drowned in a sea of flamestrikes and confused "wtf"s.

Wiping to really cruel and unexpected bugs? Fail.

The healer and one of the dps instantly dropped from the group, and once again we had to get replacements. However, this time we decided not to go near Jedoga again, just in case. At least our new healer found our story very amusing. We then proceeded to kill Herald Volajz without any further problems and I was glad to finally be done, but that run certainly didn't do anything to increase anyone's love of Old Kingdom I'm afraid.

Oh, and since we wiped, nobody got to complete All Things in Good Time, which I always have in my quest log just in case this instance pops up.

Missing out on a nice chunk of extra gold due to a bug that wasn't anyone's fault? Fail.

Some days you really wish you hadn't bothered at all.