Tales From the PUG (mild rant warning)

I've been in good PUGs and bad ones. Usually I don't say anything in my blogs about them, except for maybe a passing mention, but the ones from yesterday and today I felt were both worth a bit of blog space.

I've started running heroics with Turron for gear and badges. Haven't done that many yet, but I try to at least do one a day for the frosts. The randoms he gets are usually fairly easy ones, until yesterday. Yesterday, he got Old Kingdom.

I know OK can be a romp-fest if you overgear it like so many players do now, but that wasn't the case this time. He was in a group of fresh level 80s.

It was actually pretty fun. Since we didn't massively overgear the instance, we actually had to think about the pulls before we did them. We had to be careful of aggroing the patrols, manage everyone's aggro, and not simply run through willy-nilly. It was pretty awesome, felt like the old vanilla dungeons. People died, we even wiped once or twice, but everyone kept their cool and we went on.

Today's random put him in Halls of Lightning. For the record, I hate that place even when I do overgear it. But the group I was in decided to make it worse.

First off, Turron is still in mostly quest-reward greens/blues. He does maybe 1600 dps on a good day. And yes, I know that he's not that much help to most groups, but I do try to get stuff dead faster. It hasn't been helping that the RNG seems to be laughing at me- I haven't seen that much caster cloth stuff drop in ages. So gearing his dps set is being painful, as I'm spending the badges he does get on tanking gear.

So back to HoL. We are rolling along, the bear tank with an almost 6k gearscore is doing running pulls through the whole instance. I am running along behind him trying to whack stuff as best as I can, which resulted in my dps being abysmally low, but hey, no one's said a word yet. Then we get to the air elemental boss, whose name escapes me at the moment. Turron dies, but I brush it off, no big deal. Then the tank chimes in.

"Good, make him pay for getting a free ride."

. . . . . .

That is the moment that I realize that the tank and the other 2 dps are all from Burning Legion, probably a preformed group of friends. Only the healer (who was the nicest person in the whole group) and I were from different servers. So I came back with something along the lines of "Well, not everyone gets to level 80 with a 4k GS." Yea, I shouldn't be baiting them, probably should have ignored them, but eh. Elitist attitudes really bug the heck out of me. So then I get a spiel about how he farmed ToC 5-man until he had a 3.5k gearscore before he even set foot (paw?) in a heroic, and that's what I ought to be doing. He and the mage in the group actually went on about it for quite some time.

Me? I didn't say anything else, mostly because I just couldn't think of anything to say. Needless to say, I was rather peeved. And yes, that is what I probably should be doing, but that instance doesn't give badges, and that's what I'm in there for. I did wind up putting the tank and the mage on ignore, and the rest of the run was done in near-silence. We killed Loken with no deaths, and instance over.

He did at least drop a plate dps helm and the axe, so I finally got some upgrades. But yea, I think ToC will be getting a visit in the near future. A visit that will last as long as my guildies can tolerate, because I'm done with PUGs for the time being.

_________

On a brighter note, since we lacked the numbers for our usual ICC raid tonight we did ToC 10 instead, then went and paid Malygos a visit. Maly took some practice, but we got him down easily once everyone clicked. Now Barraccus just needs to finish heroic Occulus for his Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. (How he got as far as he is now without ever running H Occ is beyond me.)

Citadel, Take 2

Our second night in ICC went rather..... uh, wipefully? We spent the night on Professor Putricide, and while we didn't get him down, we were at least learning the fight. So last night, when we went for round 3, we had a better understanding of what we were doing.

The end result? A new boss down! Woohoo!


After that was the expected debate on where to go next, and we decided that trying Dreamwalker would probably be slightly less painful than the Sparkle Princes. So on to the Friendly Internet Dragon (tm) we went.

Raid composition took a while to figure out, but we eventually had 3 healers go portal-hopping, while two others stayed with us dps'ers. When we finally won the fight, it may have startled me a bit when Valithria suddenly hopped up and nuked all the remaining baddies. Maybe. Just a little. >.>

Fun stuff! I think we can probably add Dreamwalker to the list of bosses we can down regularly, too. Putricide..... well, maybe a bit more practice first.

Best part of last night, though? Running VOA before we hit ICC, and having the DK dps gloves drop from Toravon. Barraccus was the only DK in the raid. Now I can save his frost badges for his t10 pants. Score!

Back To The Citadel!

We finally had enough people around to do some raiding last night. First off was TOC for Jaraxxus, because he was the weekly raid and thus needed to be dead. Then after a minor roster shuffle, we were off to ICC.

With a PUG pally offtank, who managed to annoy all of us, I think, in one way or another. But oh well.

It was great to be back doing stuff. I hadn't really realized how much I had missed Barraccus. And hitting things. And seeing shinies (even if it's cloth shinies that I can't use). And, well, you get the point.

Barraccus was a bit of a loot ninja- he got 3 upgrades. Morrowgar dropped a nice tanking neck that I won the offspec roll for, then later after the Lootship fight he picked up some main-spec boots. This was where the pally started getting annoying. Apparently everything that dropped was an upgrade, as he picked up a caster sword with +hit (meh, noone else wanted it), then rolled on the boots, and at some point (I forget which fight it was) he wanted to roll on some cloth bracers that also had +hit. Those went to our mage, but the fact that he wanted them kinda irked me and a couple others.

Pro tip: Pally healers don't need +hit. And that's overlooking the fact that they're cloth, not plate.

Anyway, moving on. We knocked down Saurfang with no trouble, and he dropped the 2-hand axe. Now, I had been waiting for a 2-hander to drop and for me to win it, because I've been wanting to go back to blood or unholy on Barraccus. Since he's been dual-wield frost so far, and it would technically be an offspec roll, I waited for the lootmaster to call OS, then rolled on it then. Thankfully no one wanted it for main-spec. I lost the roll, but our pally main tank won it. A little further into the instance, he handed it over to me.

O.o *cue happy music*

I wound up waiting until after the raid was over before respeccing- Barra's unholy now- and then ran a quick heroic to test it out. I liked the numbers and can't wait to try it in a raid, though he still has his frost dps spec just in case.

Back to the night's raid..... We usually clear the first wing, then flail at Rotface/Festergut for a bit before calling it. This time, we got them both down. BOTH OF THEM DOWN. That was an awesome first for us. Friday night we go back, and we'll get to start off on Putricide first thing. Or maybe Blood Wing, who knows.

Now, I know that the probable main reason we did so well was because the "pity buff" is up to 30%? But still, it's nice to be able to work together and get stuff dead. If we have to be buffed out the wazoo to do it, well, it's fine by me. And that's all I will ever say about the ICC buff. (Maybe. I think.)

So that's about it. Wound up taking an unintentional nap before raid, so I didn't get anything done with anyone else. Today will be Level Alts time, then we go back to ICC Friday. Might have something else interesting to report by then, we'll see.