Pug encounters of the newbie kind?

Last night wasn't the best night to pug with my death knight. As usual I got a group instantly the moment I queued up for a normal random dungeon. I wasn't too pleased when I got the Halls of Stone loading screen, however. I just don't know what it is about that instance; it's not even about skipping bosses... as someone who's never cared that much about titan lore I just find it incredibly boring (and always have).

I sat down to eat and top off my health and someone immediately charged ahead into the first pack of mobs. I didn't interfere but they managed to down it just fine without a tank. As we moved on, it quickly became apparent that pretty much everyone in the group seemed to be of the "gogogo" variety, and no matter how speedily I tried to pull, someone would always run ahead and pull even more "for me". When even the healer joined in eventually, I finally did something that I don't remember ever doing before - I dropped group without a word. I generally prefer to give people at least a chance, ask them to adjust their play, but that night and with the whole party acting like that... I honestly just couldn't be bothered. They probably continued just fine without me anyway. And people wonder why tanking isn't that popular...

Anyway, I got the deserter debuff (and noticed for the first time that the icon for it looks like a dead canary in a cage) and kept myself busy for half an hour until I could try again. Again I got a group instantly, again it was Halls of Stone, but at least the rest of the group seemed decent this time. Except that, the moment we zoned in, the male orc shaman said that his baby had just started crying and he needed to be right back. Not the best way to start a run, but I tend to be pretty laid back about real life interruptions so I figured, whatever. He /followed the healer and we moved on.

We were getting close to Krystallus by the time that I realised that even though the shaman was still following and hadn't done any damage, he was very quick to roll on any loot that dropped and had even needed on several greens. "I thought you were AFK?" He admitted that he was not but that he was feeding the baby. I have to admit I was slightly miffed that he was "AFK enough" to not play but still present enough to gather up the loot. But still, who wants to be a jerk to a parent taking care of their young? We moved on.

Someone asked whether the orc shaman was a mother. He, not she, said yes and that she had two children, which the questioner considered "cool". I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that someone saying that they are taking care of their baby automatically leads to the assumption that the person must be a woman, even if it's a male character, or about people still finding it noteworthy that normal people of both sexes play the game, but I guess it's better than "there are no girls on the internet" or any variations thereof.

The shaman eventually started to participate a little, but really, really little. She didn't do much damage but mostly just knocked any mobs that I pulled away into multiple different directions and then cast earthquake on a single mob somewhere. Yay. It got quite annoying but I bit my tongue.

At the Tribunal of Ages she didn't seem to do anything at all except stand in the fire beams of doom without ever moving. The healer healed her through it and laughed, snarking that she shouldn't teach her children to play WoW because they likely wouldn't turn out to be any good.

The last boss dropped a nice tanking necklace, and I felt that I was finally getting rewarded for my patience (especially as I've had trouble getting any tanking drops from instances). Except... the shaman needed on it too and won. So, why are shamans allowed to roll on tanking gear in pugs again? Argh. I politely told her that this was a tanking item and no good for her and that it would be sensible to let the actual tank have it. She ignored me and dropped from the group.

However! I had noticed that she was actually from my server, so I whispered her again to pursue the issue further. She laughed and invited me to a group, immediately trying to queue us up for another dungeon. When I declined the role check she put us into the raid browser instead - beats me why. I met her in Orgrimmar and again tried to remain calm while still getting my point across. She seemed to be willing to hand over the necklace after all, except that the moment I opened the trade window she asked me whether I would give her some gold for it. I was speechless at this display of unbridled greed. Eventually she said that she was just kidding and handed the item over.

Before I left I asked her whether this was her first character and she said yes, which led me to reiterate that it's not a good idea to roll need on things that aren't appropriate for your role (she seemed to be geared like she knew what she was doing) before we parted.

I'd like to say that I felt glad that I had been so patient with a self-confessed newbie, but in all honesty I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd just been had. Everything seemed to go together way too conveniently for "her" (I'm not even sure I believe that bit anymore) to get all the loot with little to no effort and be excused. I guess the fact that I ended up being from the same server just caught her off guard and she eventually gave in to avoid recriminations. I'm not sure I prefer that kind of charade over people being outright rude - I just hate liars.

Fortunately today's random restored my faith in newbies somewhat, as I ended up in a Violet Hold with a healer who was running the instance for the first time but was perfectly nice and polite, played well (he even had DBM installed already and was gushing about how useful it was), and seemed genuinely interested in the game. I was more than happy to answer his questions about what "all these elites" behind the force fields were all about, who the Kirin Tor were and why the blue dragonflight was suddenly evil. I almost squeed when he said that the blue dragon he met in Magister's Terrace had been nice... someone actually paying attention to the story? Be still, my heart. <3

Scary statistics

After following a link somewhere else and then browsing another blog's archives I stumbled upon this post at Bubblespec today, in which the writer talks about how she thinks that she ran way too many dungeons this expansion. To illustrate her point, she included a screenshot of an armoury statistics page that shows that two of her characters combined killed Cyanigosa an impressive sixty-nine times.

"Oh, that's neat," I thought, "I never thought of looking at all of my level eighties like that. I wonder how many instances I've run in WOTLK." So I looked at my statistics page. And, um. I almost wish I hadn't, because it was slightly scary.

Now, I know for a fact that a lot of the numbers on the statistics page are wonky at best. For example it claims that my paladin never killed the Black Knight on normal mode, even though she wore the Black Heart for a long time, or that my night elf priest has acquired less emblems of triumph than she already spent on gear. I still think that they have at least some basis in reality though; I guess at worst some of them need a little rounding up. Which is not really good thing when you have huge numbers to begin with, but there you go.

So, according to my armoury statistics page, I've entered 1456 WOTLK five-mans across my seven level eighties (yikes), but only completed 885 of them. Now, this is another number that I have a lot of trouble believing, because no way did I abandon 571 instance runs halfway through. Maybe it counts twice if you leave and re-enter an instance in progress while alive. I don't know. Still, close to nine hundred full dungeon runs is still a pretty damn impressive number. A lot of them were pugs too.

Curious as I was, I wasn't satisfied with those numbers however, and wanted to know which instances I did the most often. Somewhat to my surprise, the clear winner turned out to be Drak'tharon Keep, with a whopping 197 Prophet Tharon'ja kills (151 of them on heroic). To be fair, it does seem to come up as a random dungeon fairly often for me, and I also remember intentionally running it every day for a while early in the expansion, because it was considered one of the easiest heroics; and coming fresh from the Burning Crusade, we didn't dare to jump into something as scary as, say, heroic Utgarde Pinnacle right away.

In second place but already very far behind is Azjol-Nerub with 106 Anub'arak kills (seventy-three on heroic). Again I was slightly surprised at first, but then realised that this matched my habit of running this instance on multiple characters a day if it came up as the daily heroic pre dungeon finder.

My third most-visited dungeon of this expansion turned out to be the Violet Hold with one hundred Cyanigosa kills (eighty on heroic). I don't remember ever making a point of running this one more frequently, but it does seem to come up as my random reasonabily often.

Fourth place goes to the Culling of Stratholme and Mal'Ganis, whose butt I helped kick eighty-five times (seventy-five on heroic). I remember running this instance a lot early in the expansion while we were trying to make it to the Infinite Curroptor in time. (Yes, kids, once upon a time that was actually a difficult feat to achieve.) I never really got tired of it either, and stubbornly stuck it out even when pug members dropped group right at the start because they couldn't stand all the talking (before you could skip the dialogue, obviously).

Fifth place goes to the Black Knight, which, again, I found somewhat surprising considering that Trial of the Champion was released fairly late in the expansion. I didn't assist that many people with Black Heart farming either. I did run the instance on normal mode a lot with those of my characters that hit eighty after its release though, as it's a great way of getting geared up quickly. My paladin spent a lot of time in heroic mode as well, farming for the Peacekeeper Blade for a fairly long time.

Now, I'm not going to continue listing the numbers for every single boss. Let it just be said that the average for most of them seems to be around seventy.

The ones that I visited the least often are also interesting, however. For example I only escaped the Lich King in Halls of Reflection thirty-nine times (thirty-one on heroic). I suppose this is in part because the instance is one of the newest ones, in part because it has a high gear requirement on the dungeon finder, and in part because the few times that I went there intentionally for a gear drop, I got it almost immediately.

The other Icecrown five-mans are well within the normal average, presumably because even though they were released late, I ran them a stupid amount of times for gear drops for my alts.

My second least-visited dungeon is, not entirely unsurprisingly, the Oculus with forty-two completions (thirty-seven on heroic). I may have overcome my dislike for it now, but the fact that I avoided it like the plague for the first half of the expansion left a visible mark on the numbers.

Slightly above it with fifty-four kills is Sjonnir the Ironshaper from Halls of Stone (forty on heroic). Just goes to show that even though it feels like I get that instance all the time on some days, I really don't.

That's a crazy number of dungeon runs either way. Unlike Enlynn from Bubblespec I don't really regret them though. I mean, there is of course a vague sense of having wasted a lot of time on WoW, but as far as activities within WoW go, instance-running is still one of my favourites so there aren't many things that I'd prefer to have done instead anyway.

The Violet Hold pug of fail

I suppose I had it coming: After all the smooth and pleasant heroic pugs I've had lately, I was bound to come across a doozy sooner or later. I just didn't expect it to be Violet Hold: it's probably one of the most-pugged instances on my server due to how easy it is - and yet we ended up wiping three times before the group disbanded because we just couldn't stand the thought of having to clear all the way to the second boss yet again (VH is really cruel that way).

I was on my hunter by the way. As soon as we got started I noticed that both our tank's gear and our overall dps was definitely on the low end of what's acceptable, but I still figured it should be fine for what we aimed to do. Our first boss ended up being Erekem, and he took forever to die because people were randomly dpsing the adds instead of the boss, but fortunately our healer didn't run out of mana and we made it in the end.

The run continued relatively smoothly until it became apparent that our second boss would turn out to be Xevozz. There's a reason I described this guy as having a "medium to high" wipe factor. As soon as the Azure Saboteur ran towards Xevozz's cell, our healer started to spam party chat with "KITE" in all caps, only occasionally interrupting it with attempts to be a bit clearer like "you've got to kite him". Our tank just stood there. And took damage. And we wiped. (Though I survived through a cunning alteration of kiting and using deterrence until feign death was off cooldown again.) When asked whether he had done this fight before while people did the collective corpse run, our tank replied with "no".

And... he really couldn't have mentioned that beforehand? I realise that Violet Hold isn't an instance that lends itself to stopping and sitting down for a calm discussion of boss strategies, but he could have reacted to our healer's attempts to tell him what to do in some way. "Kite him? Where? I haven't done this before!" Or anything. I know if I'm new to an instance I want to know how things work and will ask about it. Our tank however just quietly stood in the same spot until he died. Have people become so used to easy tank and spank fights that the mere idea of having to do something else is beyond them? It's a depressing thought.

Anyway, everybody decided to be gracious and accept that even tanks need to learn somehow, so we decided to give it another go. The healer made a point of repeating again that the boss needed to be kited, visually illustrating this by running up and down the supposed kite path. I helpfully added that it was important to avoid the purple spheres... seeing how they are the whole reason for the kiting tactic after all.

We cleared up to the second boss yet again at our tediously slow low-dps speed. Spheres were summoned, the tank started to kite. Things seemed to go alright until one of the orbs got a teleport spell off. Confused by the sudden and unexpected change of location our tank just stood there and died. Wipe number two.

Our healer rolled his eyes and left, but through some miracle we managed to find a replacement right away. Our tank seemed genuinely confused about what had just happened to him, so I explained, emphasising yet again that staying away from those spheres was vital, and to be ready to run if they should get a teleport off.

We gave it yet another go. After another twelve portals we got ready to face Xevozz for the third time. The tank kites. No teleports, good. The tank kites some more. Where is he going anyway, we're getting quite far away from those spheres? Oh no, they are going to cut us off... I wish I could have shouted "nooo" or something, but pugs don't generally use voice chat, so I just had to watch in quiet horror (though I typed out some frantic warnings in party chat which were of course ignored) as our tank continued to "kite" the boss in a wide circle right into the two spheres, and we wiped for the third and last time. Then one of the other dpsers got bored and left, the tank resigned and the healer expressed frustration about having been saved to a heroic run that was just a waste of time and left.

Usually I try to stick it out to the bitter end, especially on my hunter (as I had only actually died on one of the three wipes), but having to re-clear all that trash every time had worn even my spirit down by then. Plus I was starting to get a little frustrated by the tank's repeated failures as well, though I also couldn't help feeling sorry for him as he was clearly making an effort. I left with the impression that the first healer's emphasis on kiting without actually explaining why had led to some miscommunication, which was why that last attempt ended with the tank running the boss in merry circles, completely oblivious of the orbs he was supposed to be running from.

Does this kind of experience leave me wary of pugging? Not really, but it does leave me wary of people who can't communicate, both the knowledgeable and the ignorant ones.