Tales of Fail #1

I figured I need to get some of my really bad PuG stories down in writing before I forget about them. Both of these are from Baby Druid's leveling experience. When I leveled my hunter, I did a total of 8 5 man dungeons before she hit level 80. So, to get my druid some healing experience, I dungeon leveled her.

Tale the First- BRD
BRD is a looooong complicated and kind of confusing instance that lists the appropriate level range as 49-58. I ran it on Milli 3 different times before I finally got the achievement for it. The first time, we started with a DK tank, me healing, a warlock, a warrior and I think a rogue for DPS. We got through the ring event, of course someone got locked in the room with the boss, and were on the way down to the fire elemental boss. Someone has to go afk for a minute and the rest of us stand around and twiddle our thumbs and play with mini pets and tree dance. Suddenly the person that is afk is getting eaten by one of the giant patrolling iron things. I try to heal them, I get eaten, and we wipe. Person comes back from being afk, and we run back and move on. We get to the boss and the tank and two of the DPS die very quickly, and as far as I remember due to their own stupidity. The warlock and I keep each other going long enough to kill it. At about that point the DK tank had had enough and leaves. We look for a new tank and find a level 49 paladin. She's polite and generally competent even if she is a bit squishy due to being 4 levels lower than the mobs we're fighting. After a few minutes the warrior dps leaves and we get, another warrior! This one is competent and polite and dosen't try to off tank. We make our way to the bar, eventually. At the begining of the run, the warlock and I are getting along great, but by this point, we're going "Rrrr" at each other. We wipe due to pulling the entire bar and the boss all at once, but we run back and eventually get it right. We end up calling it after the next pull when we wipe yet again.

The next time I went, I went with my acquired paladin. I did a ZF run with this paladin who went afk at the bottom of the stairs as we started the stair event... Three wipes later he's been kicked and we proceed to 4 man the rest of the instance with the tank that figured that I wasn't too squishy and he didn't need to get adds off me. But the paladin actually turned out to be okay and kinda nice. I ended up running a lot of instances with him through the later part of old world and Outland. But on this run I get brought in half way through since their previous healer d/c'd. There was a DK dps that had deathgripitis and kept trying to tank. That group disolved rather quickly when the paladin rage quit.

The third and final time I went to BRD, the warlock from the first run, he had a paladin at about the same level. We went in through the back door, took out the bar, the seven and got our achievement very quickly, then went back through the rest of the instance. I then decided I was never ever ever going back to BRD again, at least until next brewfest.

Tale the Second- Slave Pens
Baby Druid was level 67 and getting bored of questing in Outland and really ready to move on to Northrend. So I put her in lfg for healing Underbog and a few other assorted instances. When we get our group together the average level is a little better suited for Slave Pens rather than Underbog so we head over to that instance entrance and we're off. The paladin tank had a familiar looking weapon though. I do a quick inspect and see that it's the same caster mace I have. I also look at his talents and see reassuring points in the protection tree. I brush off the caster mace as a "it was probably an upgrade to a quest green he had in old world and he just hasn't found anything better yet." As we go, I'm finding the healing to be a little bit harder than I would expect it to be, but I'd been healing an overgeared and overleveled tank for the last few instances that I'd been doing, so I figured this was just him being several levels lower than me. We get to the second boss and the tank asks if he would be a good raid tank. I think "I'm not peeling aggro off of him, and squishyness can be fixed." I reply "You're doing okay on this." The mage, who is decked out in heirlooms, also says something to the effect of "You're doing fine enough." The tank then decides that after a smoke break (or tree dance break if you're me) that he's going to go "balls out" for the rest of the run and procedes to say "balls out" as often as possible. While we were stopped, I took the time to really inspect the tank. I look at his gear and every piece of it is spell power plate or spell power weapons and accessories.

Now, I will admit to having caused a wipe or two due to getting distracted by looting things or picking flowers, but that tends to only happen when you have a tired group and nobody is really paying any attention to what the others are doing. We wipe once on that trash that requires the tank to pick up stragglers before they get to the healer (ie all trash). In this group we also have a shaman and a balance druid. I start struggling with the pace the tank is setting, and I notice that the shaman is helping to pick up some of the slack, and healing herself as needed. I manage to get myself into a tight, yet fixable healing spot, because I got silenced or stunned or the tank was squishy and suddenly the balance druid shifts out of moonkin form and pops tranquility. After we're done and I'm getting ready to thank the balance druid, he starts bragging. "Thank goodness I'm here or we wouldn't have survived that!" That's a very good way to make me mad. There's back up healing and then there's that. We start the escort event that leads to the final boss and the balance druid is continuing to heal and jump about in range of the mobs. I stop healing him at that point. He gets rezed and we take out the boss. The tank and the balance druid ask if we'd like to do another dungeon or do this one again. The mage replies "oh I've gotta dash, I have a raid I have to get to." The paladin and druid both ask to go along on the raid. I'm quietly facepalming in the corner.

Baby Druid is scared of heroics

Patch 3.3 introduced the new looking for group interface. I've used it a few (times a day) to find dungeons for Milli. I've mostly been dungeon leveling her, since level 18, and I'm loving the new interface. I don't have to spam a channel and beg guildies and friends to run stuff with me, and then it teleports me straight there and back, and instances are often painless and quick.Well, the ones that aren't are a completely different story.

It does however tend to stick me in the same dungeon over and over and over. The other day I had managed to find a mildly competent paladin tank and we kept grouping since we could both put up with each other. We ran DTK three time in a row. And the system thinks that Gundrak and HoS are the only things I can heal at the moment. There are only so many rhinos a girl can stand.

But she's getting so close to 80, and random heroic groups.

I've also been poking about the WoW blogosphere and have found that a lot of groups tend to react badly when a new 80 is placed in their random heroic group. Tam's example about noobcow over at Rightous Orbs is what I'm afraid is going to happen to me when I get to the point of being able to heal heroics. I think I'm going to get kicked from any group I get into faster than a gnome that got lost in Thunder Bluff. Guess I need to get on my crafted epics shopping list.

In which DoHP makes a post about WoW, also introduction

In an effort to keep all my World of Warcraft stuff off the blog I share with my friends, I'm going to try to put it all here.

So, I've been playing almost a year, and have found a nice server in Wyrmrest Accord.

My healer is on her way to 80, and will always be my baby druid even when she's all grown up and outgears my main.