Casual Huntering

Posts Tagged ‘pugs’

I want to know how many of you have ever ran an instance with one of your kids on your lap. I admit, I don’t do it, but when our son was a baby my wife use to. There’s a certain age where you can get away with it. My kids are past that age. My younger daughter hangs on my mouse arm, making my pointing accuracy the equivalent to one who was raging drunk. My little two year old boy won’t be happy unless he’s pounding the keyboard. Long gone are the days where they would be content making me jump a lot.

So, no I don’t play with my kids on my lap. Not anymore. They most insist I get on different ponies and prance about. (I think my main reason for getting vanity pets is because they entertain my children).

So, I’m playing in a random dungeon when all of a sudden we pull way to many things and we wipe. Who was the culprit? The boomkin druid. He then proceeded to explain himself.

I was very amused. How could you get mad at this point? Well, I guess you could get mad if you are a heartless big fat @sshat (hmm, there are plenty of those out there I suppose). He was completely forgiven of his trespasses and we went on to finish the dungeon.

So, maybe I should get my kids to play with me more often…. maybe not.

BC Priest Clown outfit. Where are the big read shoes and the big nose???

Apparently many of us hunters have a small little side project that we like to affectionately call priests. Why we rolled them we were never quite sure to begin with. Maybe it’s because we wanted to use Mend Pet on our other friends. Maybe we got so loyal to trying to protect them from nasty mobs we started to feel a kinship to them. Whatever it may be, many of us rolled priests alts. Mine was for the longest time just a bank alt. With a name like “Aoirbank” how could he have been anything else?

See, see I'm not such a bad priest, really!

At any rate, I used the time I had with RAF to level my bank alt to a whopping level 60. Now he’s level 63. I honestly didn’t do hardly any healing till level 60. Before hand we had a hunter/shadow priest combo which was pretty fun, but I always wanted to get my try at healing (I once did heal Dead mines, and I thought it was fun). I wanted to be useful to a raid, not just another hunter (we seem to have a lot of hunters in our guild lately). So, I did a little homework, decided to go discipline (thanks to my brother), set up heal bot, got on my hot keys and clicks ready to go and went into fray.

I can’t believe, I actually did pretty well. Nobody died, group was great. We ran a couple of dungeons together before we parted. I was feeling pretty good about myself. The next couple of days I tried again with the same results. I had a few times where I got scared because everybody’s health was going down at the same time, but we pulled through. I even got a “Great Healz”. I was surprised that I was doing so well seeing how I was brand spanking new to the role of healer. Of course it couldn’t last, right?

So, on Sunday morning I get into a group with an overzealous tank. You know, the ones who pull too much and tell you how awesome they are because they can pull 2 rooms of mobs? Yeah, that kind of tank. Well, I was barely keeping up with the healing, and of course there was never a time where I could sit down and get some mana, I just tried to fly by the seat of my pants.

Well, nevermind, I guess I am a noob priest.

I admit, I’m still learning how to play a disc priest. I may have speced a little too much down the holy side (I thought some healing bonuses would be helpful), so I didn’t have penance or some of the other bottom tree disc stuff. And I haven’t been wonderful with healing when the whole party goes down. I panic a little (now keep in mind I’ve only been trying to do this for the last week or so). So, when we start fighting bosses in the Underbog, I had some difficulty. Yes, I forgot to heal myself, but no one else died in the fight and I had a nice pally willing to throw me a rez. Well, by the time we got to the next boss fight the pally was gone (probably sick of an @ss hat of a tank), replaced by a rogue. Well, I died again, but they managed to pull it off and still kill the boss.

I then read in party chat from the rogue “Go, run back from the grave you NOOB.” And the tank adds in “All we’re saying is that you’re not awesome”. Okay I get that. I’m not awesome at healing. I’ve only been trying my hand at it for 4 days with only one or two instances a day. Yes, I am a healing noob, I admit it, but that guy was an @ss hole.

Here's me being a noob again.

Why should I have any loyalty to a group of jerks when I’m just playing to have fun? It’s one thing if you ask someone what went wrong and maybe even tell them maybe they could do this or that. Advice (as long as it’s not condescending) is welcome as far as I’m concerned. So, without trying to explain anything to a couple of jerks, I decide my time would be better spent doing something else. I was out of rest xp anyway. I left the group. And since then I’ve started trying to learn more about my class so I can something like that won’t happen again. I’m going to tweek my spec and figure out what other disc priests are doing and what’s effective.

Was I wrong to leave the group? Should I have stuck it out? Part of me hoped they wouldn’t be able to find another healer for at least 20 minutes. How awful of me! I guess I’m not as the nice guy my mother thought I was.

The golden rule is a terrific tool to find out what you ought to do, but it is greatly neglected online.

Why is that? Well, there is nothing holding back inhibitions when you are with people you don’t know in real life, especially in PUGs. It happens also on twitter, facebook, and other forms of social media.

They must be thinking “I’m never going to see this person again, why should I care what they think about me.”

In World of Warcraft, courtesy is generally the same, but with a twist. The general “do not be an @sshat” still applies, but also what you do with loot is important. What you do during PUGs, raids, tradechat (/shivers), etc. But there are several other “rules” that don’t apply to other forms of social media.

I asked twitter what they thought some “duh” common courtesy rules were:

Arrens: State loot rules and find out if there’s someone that can DE trash beforehand. And kill orders.

Dechion: don’t loot in combat. Don’t expect a summons, after a wipe don’t sit and let the healer run back and rez you.. run back. don’t go afk without saying something, don’t pull before mana, generally don’t be an asshat.

Elfennau: If there’s a quest in the dungeon, even when doing it on heroic find out if someone needs the quest done.

Stoppableforce: Everything @dechion just said, plus: agree on loot distribution method beforehand so there’s not long discussions or ninjas

I was playing on an alt (yes I do that from time to time) with my cousin @applebiscuit and his friend. Well, his friend took on this attitude of self-entitlement and ninjaed everything, rolled need and all drops and ran and took all mines. I was furious, not that I needed the stuff, but of the pompous attitude. He ended up joining out guild, but he was confused as to why he got on my ignore list.

Now it is possible that you might run into these people that you PUG with again somewhere because you are on the same server, but with that being said, Blizzard is making the “Looking For Group” option be cross-server for 5 man instances. In the future they may do it for 10 man and 25 man as well. We’ve been doing this with battlegrounds in our battlegroup for quite some time. Ever try reading BG chat?

Blacklisting won’t work anymore (not that it really has in a while).  We very well may have to deal with this kind of behavior more in the future. What’s the best way to deal with it?

According to twitter folk:

Arrens: Warn. If they apologize, cool. If no apology (or if they do it again after an apology), /kick.

Naissasrage: Smash them on the head with a rubber penguin.

.

SeriouslyCasual: Imho, give a single warning and then have a hair trigger on /kick. Avoiding pugs is the first rule tho.

Nibuca: Whisper viciously about them and threaten to never group with them again (assuming you remember their name)

Dechion: warn then kick, or simply leave myself. threatening to leave when I am on the priest usually calms things down.

So, please, when we get Puging with others across servers. Remember that the gold rule is a terrific tool. You’ll make more friends, you’ll have a more enjoyable experience overall. How would you like to be treated in a pug? Think about it. Course, remember too, that some people might not realize the rules and might not be doing things on purpose. Maybe in their guild ninjaing is common place, probably not, but giving people (at first) the benefit of the doubt doesn’t hurt. If I made a big mistake and didn’t realize it I sure would like a warning before I got the boot. Anyway, if you plan on puging when the “looking for groups” starts to be for your entire battle group, then here are some things to think about.