16/06/2010

Bad pug of the month: Pit of Saron

Looking back at my own posts here it's actually been months since I last had an absolutely awful pug. With things quieting down a bit in the pre-expansion lull I was hoping that the atmosphere in your average run was indeed getting better. You know, people chilling out a bit and not fretting about how every second in which they don't gain badges is "wasted". It was just a pipe dream of course.

This morning my boyfriend woke me by proudly announcing that he had just won a battered hilt - lucky sod that he is - after we had both talked about wanting to get one for our alts the day before. Not wanting to be one-upped like that I grabbed one from the auction house as well and we set off to do the quest chain together. Eventually this involved jumping into heroic Pit of Saron. The characters we were doing this on were my bear druid and his warlock alt.

We got grouped with a mage, another warlock and a priest healer. The other warlock immediately asked if anyone else was going for the Nevermelting Ice Crystal from the last boss, and when my boyfriend answered truthfully that he was after it as well, the guy got annoyed and basically offered to bribe him if he wouldn't roll on it. Someone pointed out that you can't trade gold cross-server anyway, and he went back to just muttering angrily.

We killed a couple of extra trash mobs around Garfrost's platform to gather our quest items, but soon decided that it was probably more prudent to finish the instance first and then go back and look for more, so as to not keep the other players waiting. After the first boss, the other warlock started to question my boyfriend's damage output and demonology spec, going on about how destruction was the way to go for PvE. The priest actually disagreed with him, claiming that his own main was a warlock as well. For the record, my boyfriend was below the mage and the other lock on the meters, doing about 3k dps - probably less than he should be capable of, but the spec was new to him and it was hardly holding us back in any way. At a guess, the other lock was just angry that my boyfriend wanted the trinket as well and thus decided to be as pissy to the competition as possible.

As we progressed through the instance he became more and more obsessed with emphasising how much more "leet" he was, even standing completely still in Krick's explosive mines to squeeze out as much damage as possible and constantly berating my boyfriend's performance as if he wasn't even there. We continued while gnashing our teeth, but still wanted to finish the run.

On the way up the tunnel the rude lock unsurprisingly started to nuke the loose skeletons before we even made it to the middle, got aggro and died. The healer wanted to go back and res him, which led to a lot of milling back and forth until we decided that it was more sensible to finish clearing out the tunnel and worry about the dead lock later. As we did this, said lock - who, which bears repeating, had got himself killed stupidly on the first few mobs and was thus doing exactly zero dps - still kept going on about how my boyfriend's lock was supposedly doing terrible damage, and the healer was so busy discussing this fact with him that he didn't heal me and we wiped just as we made it to the top.

As I was starting to lose my patience by that point I told them to shut up and that nobody cared about the damage meters, at which point they decided to vote-kick my boyfriend... and it went through. Yes, after the other lock had got himself killed and the priest had been so busy discussing warlock specs with him that we wiped, my boyfriend got the boot. Where's the bloody logic in that and why did the mage support it? I left of course, because... DUH.

I have no illusions that they probably got replacements fairly soon and managed to finish. Maybe the warlock even got his trinket - I couldn't check on the armoury because I forgot his name. It's just sad because it really highlights the kind of crap people can get away with these days. Pre-dungeon finder a guy like that would have found himself blacklisted real quick, but nowadays it's all just part of a hard day's pugging. Pfft.

4 comments:

  1. Vote kicks nearly always go through, you just have to be the first to issue one.

    The mage wanted to finish the run successfully and kicking one of the two locks increased the chance of a successful run. He didn't care which lock got kicked as both were sufficient to kill Tyrannus. People don't give a shit about no one and I blame LFD.

    You should have staid afk in the group as you can't kick a second person, afaik, and they were short on a tank. They couldn't even put themself back in the LFD without your agreement. :)

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  2. I'm not nearly devious enough to have thought of something like that, but I'll keep the option in mind for next time something like that happens! :)

    I wonder if Blizzard will fix the "must give a reason for kicking" thing in the next patch and if so, whether it will actually make a difference.

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  3. You were right when you said, "nowadays it's all just part of a hard day's pugging" and that REALLY sucks that it's true. We shouldn't have to deal with shit like that.

    And Kring had a good suggestion, about staying in the group but not doing anything. If they've already wasted a kick on someone, then they can't kick another person for quite some time. I once had a group that was SO horrible to me that I didn't quit the group (oh no) I just ported to Dalaran and fished until the timer ran out. Spiteful? Yes. But sometimes jerks in groups drive you to it.

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  4. Yes, you're right - the truly depressing thing about this already depressing story is that it's kind of par for the course nowadays :(

    I hope that Nevermelting Ice Crystal NEVER drops for him.

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