Tuesday, January 15

Worse then a PUG

You likely have all experienced PUG's, Pick Up Groups.... a group of individuals who ain't used to play together and have a big chance to mess things up. Often groups like this contain at least one person who doesn't play his class well, is a jerk, "needs" all loot, has an AFK habit, has no people skills or any negative side effect which will once again confirm your negative view on PUG's.
Good pugs excist but those are more rare, likely as any reasonable skilled player has dito friends or a dito guild and rather teams up with those then take his chances with some random people.

Yesterday we formed an all guild alt party to go do Auchinai Crypts. We all logged on to Teamspeak which makes tactics easier and also adds some fun chatter. But when i logged on i heared our tank had had some premature fun already, he had quite one too many.
I was worried a bit but someone else in the party assured me this was nothing yet... he could get alot worse then this.
Well it started out reasonable, we had multiple mobs at once and he tanked one while we did our best at CC'ing the others or just nuking them down.
Sure as a Shaman i wasn't meant to be an offtank but our healer could keep up quite well, when i didn't have aggro i would throw in a couple of heals aswell to try and save our more squishy members if the healer itsself got too much healing aggro.
It was quite funny in some way actually, the tanks stood somewhat away from the rest of the group and tanked the one target with a skill on it while we killed the rest of the group.. and somewhere in that period of time the tank's target would die followed by an "I win!" announcement on Teamspeak.
I'm guessing he would celebrate at this point with another drink as he would stand still for a bit then not bothered by any other possible mob still sheeped or beating on the healer.
At this point i figured a bad guildrun could be worse then a pug: i can't just auto-run into a wall here, shout "Laaaaaggg" and then ALT F4.

Some trashpacks later he would position himself in such an akward way that he would pull an extra patrol which would be our first demise.
While i started rezzing the tank told us on TS he would be right back for a drink, we were in doubt if a drink was actually what he needed... perhaps a strong pot of coffee. So we waited for him to come back... and waited... and he went offline... i started to think he was getting that drink at the local liquor store by then. Quite a while later he did come back blaming it on the router, not the most likely thing but it could be i suppose.
Five trashpulls and a wipe later the last thing we hear on TS is another "I Win!". We kill the last remaining mob ourselves while our tank seems to celebrate his uberness again and don't get any reaction from him again.
We call out on TS for him, spam the chat but there is no response. After waiting for 15minutes again we decide to boot him so he gets ported out.
Another alt tank is summoned in and we can finally move on. Sure we still wiped now and then but we were slightly below the required level, slightly demotivated and got our ass handed to us by our own overconfidence or bad tactics but we got there in the end.

This instance actually took us 3 hours to complete with no quest for extra xp completed or any great loot for any of us, somewhere i do feel like it was an evening wasted but at least i learned a valuable lesson: a Drunk tank is a bad tank! (probably works for any class btw)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"At this point i figured a bad guildrun could we worse then a pug: i can't just auto-run into a wall here, shout "Laaaaaggg" and then ALT F4."

You know, I always wondered how people faked a disconnect... :-)

Exanimo said...

Didn't use this myself yet but i found it damn funny when a guildy suggested it when i was once again complaining in Guildchat about todays bad pug. :)

Anonymous said...

Yeah i hate when it happens in heroics with noob who don't know how to play. Most don't even know how to cc!

Pretty depressing and now after a while of dying and not going forward, i just leave the group