I’m pretty damn demoralized by pugs lately. And why? Because people won’t fucking talk to each other. Here’s how it usually goes:
Me: Hi, blah blah intro how are you blah. Something about how familiar I am with the instance.
Them: Silence
We pull trash. There are symbols put up, but since nobody is talking to each other, not even the briefest mention in chat, nobody has a clue which ones to cc, and so no cc is done. I end up blowing all my cooldowns on trash. Funsies. But I manage.
Sometimes I comment on the lack of CC and how it’s tough for me to heal through that. No response. Sometimes I don’t bother since I’ll end up with silence.
OK, now we hit the boss. We wipe. This is because someone was supposed to be assigned to do JOB X (interrupt, kite, click the something), but since we did not even have the briefest discussion beforehand, that didn’t happen. We discover this on the run back, and ONLY AFTER we’ve wiped, do they deign to talk to each other. (However, until I say something like “what did we do wrong?” they don’t take the initiative to break the silence to discuss what happened.)
At this point, the tank usually says something totally out of line to ME, and fed up, I drop group.
The problem is not that we wiped. Wiping is fine. We learn. We get up, we move on. The problem is that the wipe is caused by the absolute refusal of ANYONE in the group to coordinate. Also, the tank using the healer as the scapegoat honestly baffles me, since I’m not the one who is supposed to be doing the crowd control, interrupting, or other assorted things that are causing wipes.
Sometimes, it seems that I am the one who is the object of the tank’s ire because I actually speak. What the hell, right? As a latest example, the tank criticized one of the dps who said absolutely nothing back, and the criticism faded. However, the tank was QUITE irate with me, and just would not quit. I ended up dropping due to the tank, after apologizing to the DPS for the wait time.
I’d like to be able to PUG when guildies are not online or not available, since I do need the VP (Firelands has no spirit gear except tier pieces), but I don’t think I can put myself through the misery of the silent passive-aggressive pug.
I think I live in an alternate world. I usually say “hello” when I zone in with an RDF group and get responses of various sorts, I usually get responses when I ask if everyone’s cleared, etc.
You do live in an alternate universe! I’m shocked and impressed.
I find that the PUG atmosphere has become less and less friendly, so I no longer feel any obligation beyond doing my best while I’m there. I’ll now drop the moment I no longer feel I’m having fun, whereas in the past, I felt I owed sticking around as long as the others did.
Wipes aren’t what spoil my fun, precisely. It’s people not even attempting the mechanics and getting no feedback when trying to ascertain whether they know what they should be doing.
Groups that seem to be doing their best and are friendly or communicative I’ll stick with through wipes.
No, you’re the one who’s supposed to heal the morons through their idiocy and never run out of mana. Clearly you are a fail healer.
Honestly, I swear some tanks treat healers like NPCs.
Exactly. It’s like we didn’t get the memo that you’re still supposed to AoE spamheal heroics and just tank everything, because doing anything else is fail. And if you’re not able to do that, then you shouldn’t be running heroics.
Early on, I might feel self-doubt that I’m undergeared or less than awesome with my spec. But after I’ve done most of a tier of raid content competently, I have to believe that I’m not the reason why people are dropping like flies.
I’m not actively raiding any more and am not likely to any time soon. But when it’s not my first time through the instance, and there are definitely tanks where I don’t have issues keeping them up but this tank is dropping like stone? Clearly there is an issue, and when I can cruise through an instance, even a troll heroic with minimum issues and a different tank of similar gear level, I’m fairly certain it’s not me.
Case in point; the other night I’m healing ZA. Tank is regularly taking hits bigger than I can heal through. Nobody is CCing anything(despite having a hunter, a warlock and a shaman in the group), and he’s just taking it in the face. I get to the point where I have no idea of what else to do, and have been ignoring everyone else just to try and keep the tank up, and I make the comment ‘You’re taking hits like BC crushing blows, and there’s nothing left I can do here”. I swap to DPS and the hunter brings in a resto druid, and we struggle along through the rest of the instance, and the druid/hunter blames me at the end. Never mind that I’ve healed prot pallys and bear druids through ZA perfectly fine and in lesser gear than I was wearing for that run. Bleh.
First one to speak after a wipe, loses, apparently. As the tank I’d usually get it both barrels from the healer when the same thing happened.
Aha, the “he who smelt it dealt it” principle in action.
One of the reasons I like my Shaman for 5 mans is I can do the interrupting, I can do the CCing, and most of the time I have to because no one else even thinks to try to.
People do not like to talk in pugs over all and blizzard made a mistake making heroics where sometimes talking is required. It would be better if talking was not required and they where all just super easy even with people that do not know what to do.
Personally I don’t talk much in pugs unless I am the healer. The reason being is that 90% of the time anything you say in a pug, even just hello, will be taken wrong and then it becomes a run of name calling and insults. I am not in the 3rd grade, I do not want to hear this stuff, heck, I did not even want to hear it in the 3rd grade. There is no place in the civilized world for those types of people.
I would rather run a pug in complete silence then have to deal with those idiots that think everyone sucks at everything and of course wants to tell everyone they suck and how great they are every chance they get, even in the middle of a battle.
One thing that I find helpful in pugs is RobBossMods to spam out a very abbreviated boss strat before bosses that really need coordination. Sometimes met with silence, sometimes with “cool, where did you get that”.
Oooh, I might use that myself. I forget boss strats a lot! And clearly nobody is going to help remind me.
So, why are you still playing? I bailed five months ago and haven’t regretted it one second.
I don’t want to deprive the server of my good looks and charm.
Because PuGs are not all there is to WoW. I enjoy runs with guildmates, I enjoy tooling around with alts, I enjoy a lot that the game has to offer. There are just certain individuals who are all about laying blame on other people and are seemingly incapable of having any consideration for anyone but themselves.
Maybe it’s just the difference of being DPS rather than heals but I very rarely have the horror stories that you, Rhii and alot of the rest of the guild talk about in PUGs. Are they run mostly in silence? Yes. When there is the need for CC or some special mechanic do I usually volunteer to handle it before the pull? Yes. If I can’t handle it I’ll usually ask who is going to do it pre-pull. Like BRC, I’m not that good at kiting so when we get to the last boss I usually say that up front and inevitably someone else gets the “honor” of kiting the adds and I never get crap.
I dunno, but being quiet, competent and proactive seems to work well for me in PUGs. Maybe try running some in shadow? The DPS queue has only been around 10 minutes the last couple weeks…
As we saw last night, my DPS is abysmal.
I feel your pain, too bad we can’t put each other on our friends lists and pug together.
Dear Blizzard: You let us put people from other servers on our ignore list. How about letting us put people on our “group with these people first” list. Thanks! Eden
Aren’t they going to allow real-ID friends to group cross-server… for a fee? Think of it as the no-asshole tax.
(p.s. I don’t use Real ID, but that’s another story)
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Might be worth it.