Gogogo indeed

It's been a while since I had a pug that simply made me happy, so when it unexpectedly happened last night, I was left with an urge to share.

Basically, it was gone one a.m. in the UK here, and for some reason I was wide awake, so I decided to log back onto WoW and heal a normal random on my shaman. I was rather surprised that the dungeon finder couldn't even give me an estimated waiting time, and as I saw icons light up and go dark again while the system tried to put a group together, I noticed that we were short on dps of all things. Fancy that. Still, in the end it didn't take longer than a few minutes until a full party had been formed and I found myself zoning into Grim Batol.

I have to admit that I had a good feeling about the run right away when one of the other party members made me crack a smile by responding to my greeting of "evening" with "morning". That's one way to look at it, isn't it?

I made a fool out of myself early on by accidentally aggroing a group of mobs that we didn't have to fight at all, but the death knight tank picked them up with no issues, I apologised and it was all good. As we were making our way towards Throngus, I suddenly noticed one of the damage dealers typing "hurry" in chat. "What are you in a hurry for at this time of night?", I was tempted to ask... but then I scrolled up and saw what had triggered his sudden sense of urgency:

[SERVER] Shutdown in 15:00

Aw, crap! I've been living in the UK for over a year now but I still forget about the one hour time difference to CET sometimes, and it's also been a while since I was actually online just before server maintenance time anyway. Okay, so this was only normal mode, but we had only killed one out of four bosses so far; what were the chances that we could finish in less than fifteen minutes?

It seemed that everyone was willing to take their chances. We skipped what trash we could, though we once got an extra group anyway and our hunter died. I saw him release and was hesitating whether it would be more time efficient to res him or to let him run back, but the warlock saved me from having to make a decision by using his soulstone to combat res the hunter. (They can be used after the person has died now? Awesome!)

Our pulls seemed to get faster, and I dropped mana tide on cooldown to save myself from having to drink. Fortunately people had bombed very efficiently during the dragon flight, so we didn't have a whole lot of trash left to kill anyway. When we got to Drahga, it looked for a moment as if one or two group members were just going to run past him, but the tank pulled the boss anyway.

"Do you think we can make it?" he said as he hit Drahga in the face with his big two-hander. I looked at the timer. Seven minutes to go. "Hell yes!" I replied.

People took care of the adds swiftly and didn't stand in the bad. That's one of the nice things about pugging in the middle of the night, nobody queues up for a run at that time unless they are both confident in what they are doing and actually enjoy running dungeons.

We continued straight on to mow through the trash before the last boss. Four minutes to go. "Gogogogo," said the hunter... and for what I think might have been the first time ever, I actually thought that this was perfectly appropriate. After all, we were in a race, and so it didn't so much sound like a patronising command to the tank as an encouraging battle cry directed at the entire party.

A Faceless Corruptor was still trailing after the tank when he pulled Erudax. I hit bloodlust and I reckon that everyone else mashed their cooldowns like mad as well. When the add came in, I didn't see anyone go for it, with people focusing on a quick burn instead, seeing how the boss was already low. (In any other group I would have assumed that they were simply playing badly, but this party had already convinced me that they knew damn well what they were doing.) I made sure to frost shock the add to keep it slowed and buy us a few more seconds. And then, just before it could finish hatching any eggs... dungeon complete! With about one minute to go until server shutdown as well.

People briefly congratulated each other on a job well done, rolled on the loot and then left. No time left for any idle chatter after all. Still, I logged off happily. Sometimes challenges can arise in the strangest of places and at the strangest of times - but it's great when you've got a group that's willing to tackle them with enthusiasm.