Sunday night pug musings

Last night I took my death knight out to pug a few instances, to balance the large amount of solo-play that I've been doing lately. Since I gave her a tank spec I've found grouping with her much more enjoyable - I just think that melee dps is kind of annoying and boring. In fact, I've generally started to warm up to her a little.

I've complained in the past that I didn't like death knights because they felt too much like pre-made characters to me and getting all those abilities right from the start just confused me. However, after (very, very, slowly, over the course of nearly two years) gaining sixteen levels since her creation, my death knight is finally starting to feel a bit more like she's truly "mine", and I also couldn't help learning at least a little bit about the class's abilities after two years of playing with other death knights - I suppose you could call that mental osmosis. So things aren't quite as bad now.

But to get to the pugs. They were actually all pretty pleasant, and I don't think we had a single death, but that's not to say that nothing interesting happened. I started the night by queuing for a couple of specific Outland instances, since the dungeon finder won't let me do random normal modes anymore at my current level.

I expected a bit of a queue even as a tank, since healers tend to be the bigger problem in that level bracket, but I actually got a group very quickly. My first run took me to the Arcatraz. I don't know what it is about that instance, but I swear every time I run it these days it elicits cries of joy from at least one member of the group. People love the bickering demons, laugh at Millhouse Manastorm and gasp at Harbinger Skyriss. In this case our priest was particularly fond of them all. It's really weird in a way, because I remember that instance not being one of the most popular ones back in BC, especially on heroic mode, since it had a lot of absolutely murderous trash pulls, and Zereketh the Unbound was without a doubt one of the worst heroic bosses of that expansion (even if he could be skipped). It's funny how our perceptions of what's fun can change.

I also noticed that our healer had to drink a lot, which is perfectly fine and I was happy to wait of course, but I realised for the first time that this is another one of the things that I miss about crowd control - it gives the non-casters something to do while the mana users drink. I mean, I stood there in front of the next trash pull, trying to be patient but admittedly being a bit bored, and found myself thinking that I never had that problem back in BC because back then, while the healer was drinking, the tank and dps were marking up the next pull and discussing strategy. I do think this is why nerfing mana regen and requiring more crowd control have to go hand in hand in Cataclysm - because just forcing the healer to drink after every pull while everyone else taps their feet and waits to be able to do more AoE wouldn't really cut it I dare say.

Anyway, my next run took me to the Old Hillsbrad Foothills. I had run that one before, but went again because I had forgot to complete the Nice Hat quest. Two other people in the group had it too and everyone was perfectly happy to take a quick detour to get it done. I miss that kind of co-operation in many runs these days.

I was also really hoping that I could get people to continue to the Black Morass right afterwards but had no such luck. I've said in the past that Escape from Durnholde is hard to get a group for these days because it requires you to do a boring attunement quest that nobody tells you about, in a zone that's way out of the way when you're in the right level range, but after careful consideration I've come to the conclusion that Durnholde isn't so bad. Black Morass is much worse, for the simple reason that it requires you to do all the things you have to do to unlock Old Hillsbrad, and you have to complete the Escape from Durnholde quest, and you then have to be at least level sixty-eight to enter BM, by which point most people are already off to Northrend.

My last Outland instance for the night turned out to be the Mechanar. Again we had a pretty smooth run, though one thing pissed me off: When the other death knight in the group, level sixty-seven and dps, looted the crystal from Gatewatcher Iron-Hand, I told him to hold on to it because we'd need it later. Then, after we killed Capacitus, that same death knight suddenly announced that he would leave because he felt that he was too low-level for the instance and couldn't hit anything, and anyway, we should get a replacement quickly. I thought this was a slightly strange, but not entirely unreasonable complaint, but quickly typed out "wait" in chat because I wanted that crystal first. Too late, he had taken off already, taking our key to the loot chest with him. Grrr! Damn you, cross-server pugs and the way you allow people to just vanish into the nether!

After these three runs I decided to finish the night by giving Utgarde Keep a go. Even though I was level seventy-one by then, and keep in mind that I'm the kind of death knight who actually bothers to collect defense gear before starting to tank, my health went up and down like a yo-yo throughout the entire run. In the previous instances I had sometimes chastised myself mentally for not using my survival cooldowns enough, but in that UK run I was spamming them like there was no tomorrow. Being so squishy was just scary. It's really ironic how the normal Northrend instances are so much tougher at level now than the average heroic run of the same place. I have to give massive kudos to our priest healer, who never let anyone die even when the going got tough and who pulled through even though our dps was rather low.

That was the other interesting thing about that run - why was our dps so low? Right after we entered, I noticed that our "dps" paladin was sporting a sword and board combo. I inspected him and sure enough, he was protection spec and not changing. I asked him why he was dpsing if he was geared and specced to be a tank and he said that he just hadn't felt like tanking when he signed up. Now okay, I get that a tank might not always feel like tanking, but maybe he should make sure to also gather some dps gear then? The really daft thing was that it turned out that he was actually dual-specced prot/holy. Why in the world would you queue as the one role out of three for which you have neither gear or spec?!

I do have to admit that this annoyed me and I kind of wanted to get rid of him, but at the same time I felt that I should at least give him a chance. And to be fair, he did behave himself - he didn't use righteous fury or tried to pull aggro off me, he just attemped to do damage. Unfortunately he was still very much dead weight, as he only did about two hundred dps, which was about a third of what I was doing while tanking very amateurishly. On Prince Keleseth we must have gone through about ten frost tombs, that's how slowly he died. I couldn't hold it against the healer that he bickered at the paladin to pick it up, but the latter assured us very earnestly that he was trying. We did complete the instance despite of the paladin's rubbish performance, but I felt bad about the healer basically having to make up for the other guy's fail pretty much the entire time. Going into group content with strangers while intentionally gimping yourself is just wrong.

The Mechanar Reloaded

I decided to revive yet another one of my Alliance characters, namely my night elf druid who has been hovering around the late Outland levels for ages. She had no talents when I first logged on, but gear for several different roles was packed in her bags so I specced her feral and decided to do some randoms as a tank.

After tanking Sethekk Halls for the third time in a row (not on the same day, I'm not that insane), I ended up with three people staying in the party and asking me if I wanted to do another run. Since I did fancy it and had actually had a pretty long queue beforehand (as a tank, what is the world coming to) - an experience I wasn't too keen on repeating - I agreed. After some discussion we decided to queue for one of the old level seventy instances at random. We ended up in the Mechanar.

I knew that it would be challenging because we were all one to three levels below seventy, but I also felt a pleasant wave of nostalgia wash over me immediately. I had run the Mechanar so many times back in the day, first for Sha'tar rep, then for people wanting Sun Eaters, then again for badges of justice. I knew every pull, I knew every patrol, I knew which mobs had to die first, I knew which special abilities to watch out for - and it was good because I don't think anyone else did, and they appreciated me confidently taking the lead and explaining things.

My healer was a night elf priest who said that it was first time doing this instance and who had no visible heirlooms, but from the way he played I got the impression that he wasn't really new to the game either. He apologised all the time when people died, even if it wasn't his fault at all, which made me very sympathetic towards him. I don't think healers should beat themselves up too much over people dying (regardless of whose fault is is actually), but I have this theory that all really good healers at least go through a phase where they feel that they should be able to save everyone, all the time, and feel bad if they can't pull it off. Be grateful when you get a healer like that; you know their heart's really in it.

Our mage was in the same guild as the priest and didn't talk much, but I found him likeable for the simple quality of being what I'd consider an "old-school mage", meaning that he had about half as much health as everyone else and ended up hugging the floor a lot, while being completely stoic about it and never saying a bad word. I love me a mage who knows his place. (/joke)

Then there was the dps warrior, who was a bit of a numpty to be honest - needing on everything he could use in any way, always dpsing the mobs from the front or body-pulling things by accident... but we couldn't really hold it against him, because he was also friendly, patient, and genuinely enthusiastic about kicking boss butt.

Lastly we had a hunter from my server, who was also clearly a bit inexperienced, as it turned out when she wanted to know how to display statistics about damage done and so on and I struggled to explain the concept of addons to her. She was clearly still learning and her pet wasn't always attacking what it should, but overall she was very well-behaved and did her job.

So our little group ventured into what used to be endgame in Burning Crusade, while being one to three levels too low for it really. When Gatewatcher Iron-Hand "raised his hammer menacingly" both the warrior and the hunter got mashed into a pulp, leaving just the level sixty-seven mage to slowly whittle away at the mini-boss's health. After a while the healer asked if we should just give up and try again, especially as he was running out of mana, but I managed to throw him an innervate and we successfully pulled through. I was proud.

We had one wipe on Capacitus as the healer ran out of mana and I didn't think of trying to innervate him until it was too late. I promised that I'd do better on the next try, and he said that he'd make an effort to heal with more mana efficiency. In the end he didn't even need that innervate. Everyone complimented him on his healing and he was positively glowing.

We killed Gyro-Kill for the second piece of the legion key - I was worried that we might be in trouble if people from different servers looted the two halves, but fortunately one went to me and the other to the hunter, so we had no problem trading them. Just out of curiosity though, does anyone know if they adjusted this for the cross-server LFG? I know they made adjustments for the item to summon Ironaya in Uldaman, but I don't know if anyone remembered to do this for the Mechanar as well, considering it probably sees less traffic than Uldaman these days.

Nethermancer Sepethrea was as much of a bitch as I remember her being in the old days. Our first attempt was pretty good though, with us getting her to about twenty percent before we wiped. Just as we were about to pull her again, the warrior suddenly needed to go AFK because his girlfriend was on the phone. Now, this is the kind of thing that can easily be annoying for everyone in the group, especially in a pug, but as it was I felt incredibly laid-back and patient. We were all in this together, working together, fighting together, communicating... it's funny how quickly you can become more understanding of people's little quirks and flaws if you're only sufficiently invested in the group itself. Unfortunately invested is exactly what many people aren't in heroic pugs these days, and that's why you get all these rage-quits and demands for kicks as soon as someone does as much as look funny.

Anyway, so our warrior was practically AFK. He was still bouncing around however, which confused our priest, but by the warrior's own admission he was only doing that randomly while holding the phone in his other hand. I couldn't suppress a wry grin at the thought of the kinds of things I tend to do on the PC while talking to my mother on the phone and going "mm-hmm", "yes, Mum" and "really" at irregular intervals - let's just say that I could relate. Eventually the warrior told us to just pull without him. I was getting bored enough to give four-manning it a try, but the warrior doomed us when his random bounces led him into the next tunnel and triggered the first wave of the gauntlet mid-boss fight. Again this could have been massively annoying, but somehow we just laughed it off.

I think we had one more wipe after that, but eventually we got her down and much cheering was heard across the land. Seriously, you'd have thought we downed a raid boss or something. She dropped Stellaris (which the warrior needed of course) and someone commented: "An axe?! How anticlimatic."

We managed to get through the gauntlet reasonably well, until I missed a mob running loose within all the AoE on the last wave, and everyone but me and the hunter died. I tried to res people up quickly but Panthaleon was already coming for us, so we made a run for the elevator to reset him. Just like old times! The actual boss kill was a piece of cake in comparison.

Even though it was a pug that included lots of wipes, that run left me feeling extremely happy and satisfied. It was nice to feel somewhat challenged in an instance again. We didn't go as far as using crowd control, and some abilities being more powerful these days than they were in Burning Crusade was very noticeable (I remember when it was impossible to expect a tank to pick up Panthaleon's adds... nowadays one swipe at the right moment will pretty much do the trick), but it still felt much more engaging than most WOTLK instances do these days. So many abilities to watch out for, so many pulls that require care... sometimes I think my longing for the good old BC days isn't just nostalgia. As far as mechanics go, it seems to me that the instances really were more interesting and challenging a lot of the time, because they still play differently these days, even as you AoE things instead of focus-firing.

And of course, the camaraderie. I had almost forgotten how much fun it could be to actually bond with a bunch of strangers, to chat, laugh and work on a challenge together, as opposed to just being grouped up for what might as well be random mob grinding for how engaging it is.

I think I'll stay in Outland for a little longer.