Category: facepalm

Yet another fail "tank".

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, general, lfg, paladins, ramblings, tanks

My brother and I queued for the heroic random together, today. I was on my paladin. He was on his hunter. I was healing. He was DPSing.

We get a group, zone into Halls of Stone and I see the tank is a paladin who immediately starts buffing kings. Okay, I buff wisdom and might, even though I have crap might. The tank gives us Sanctuary. I give us kings. It’s all good.

’till the second pull.

The tank takes a crapton of damage.

Like, a CRAPTON.

I’m actually having to use Holy Light.

In general, I’m okay with this. He “only” has 36k health, buffed. That’s fine. He’s using the badge shield. That’s fine. I figure that he’s undergeared and I didn’t feel like taking the deserter debuff. He was prot, at least, using Sanctuary, had Righteous Fury up. It appeared like he was putting in the effort.

My brother says to me, over vent, after a couple more pulls “MAN, this tank sucks! How can he suck so bad?”

“Well, he’s got to be a new tank. Look at his health.”

“He’s got a 5400 gear score.”

“What? Not possible.” I don’t have the GS mod enabled on my paladin (too much lag with it on) so I figured my brother was looking at the DK.

“I’m telling you, 5400 GS.”

“On the TANK? The paladin? The paladin who’s not me?”

“Yes. The tank. The paladin.”

“Not poss…i…ble. Hang on.”

I inspect him.

Sure enough, he’s got good gear. Great gear. But it’s ret gear and arena gear. He has precisely two pieces of gear on him with defense/parry/dodge/block and those are his weapons; the tanking axe out of H HoR and the badge tanking shield.

“Why are you wearing ret gear and arena gear?” I ask in party, as I spam the paladin with Holy Light against one of the big guys.

“Who me?” asks the DK.

“No. The tank.”

“Oh,” says the DK.

“its all i have rite now” says the paladin.

“Then you shouldn’t queue up as a tank,” I reply. Then my brother and I left the group in the middle of the pull.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done it, but I have HAD it with idiots who don’t even make the slightest effort to be a decent tank. Had it! I am DONE with it. This guy, upon examining his armory, was specced thusly: 0/71/0. I wasn’t even aware that there WERE that many points you could spend in the prot paladin tree. His glyphs were crap. His spec is obviously crap (although he got all the good prot talents, he got nothing from ret to help with avoidance, like Parry, nor did he get Seal of Command to help with threat) and his gear was almost entirely DPS gear.

I shouldn’t have left. He was immune to critical strikes by virtue of resilience alone. And I had figured that would probably be the case. And I still left.

Why did I leave? I could have kept him up. Could have been a quick run.

I left because I don’t want to encourage people who don’t put any effort into their roles. I am exceedingly careful to NOT be a drag on any group I’m in, regardless of the role. Kurn was hit-capped before setting foot into a raid. Madrana upgraded her gear ASAP and was still holding on to some Tier 6/BT/Hyjal stuff until better stuff dropped. Lotana’s hit-capped. Katarah can heal just fine with her 4.8k GS and can even pull average DPS when she needs to as enhancement. Cayllan tanks and heals just fine, though it took a little practice and some extra gear at first (when I could NOT keep aggro from a geared, whirlwinding warrior or divine storming ret pally).

To top all that off, I use consumables to bump up my contribution to the group. Tanking on either Madrana or Cayllan? Yeah, I’ll be using Mighty Fortitude and Guru’s Elixirs, plus appropriate buff food (40 agi for the bear, 40 hit for the paladin whose hit rating is somewhat lacking). DPSing on Kurn? Agi/Guru and Mighty Thoughts Elixirs, plus agi food. DPSing on Lotana? Spellpower and Mighty Thoughts Elixirs, plus spellpower food. Healing on Cayllan? Spirit and spellpower elixirs, plus spellpower food. Healing on Madrana? At least a Guru’s Elixir or my Flask of the North, even for random dungeons.

Basically, I work at making sure I’m doing my best, regardless of the group into which I’m placed.

Other people just don’t do that.

And yet, I’m forced to play with them if I want to jump through the hoops Blizzard has so carefully designed for us. I run my daily on Madrana every day. I’ve missed THREE days, total, since the Dungeon Finder came out and we started getting Emblems of Frost for doing the first random dungeon of the day. That is a LOT of pugging.

I don’t expect people to do as much work on their toons as I do. I don’t expect others to be as considerate of the group as I usually tend to be. But I do expect others to make a half-decent effort. 0/71/0 is not a good tanking spec. Two pieces of gear with defense on it is not good tanking gear. That isn’t even putting in the effort to look up a halfway decent spec, you know?

What I expect of people is this:

– appropriate gear for the instance level. That means a tank who is crit immune via 535+ defense or Survival of the Fittest, NOT via 100% resilience.

– appropriate spec(s) for the role(s) they have selected. That means one that, even if slightly unorthodox, helps you do your job to the best of your ability. And it means that you tank in your tank spec, heal in your heal spec and DPS in your DPS spec. Tanking in a DPS spec, healing in a DPS spec and DPSing in a tank or healing spec will make me want to throttle you.

Even on my priest, who is now 50, I have not signed up as “damage” for any dungeon thus far because I am not shadow! I do not have a dual spec on that toon and am 41 points into disc. Thus, I do not queue as shadow!

Similarly, neither of my druid’s specs are damage specs, thus I never queue up as DPS.

Hell, same for Madrana, she NEVER queues as DPS because she doesn’t have the appropriate spec OR gear.

Is it really too difficult to ask people to put in the base amount of effort? Am I really expecting too much from people who play this game? I’m not asking for tanks with 60k health to heal through my random dungeons every day. I’m asking for a tank who knows the basics of tanking.

It makes me want to get on the druid and tank the living crap out of a bunch of heroics tonight just so that people don’t lose hope in the myth of “good tanks”.

OMG.

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, ramblings

These days, I’m pugging a lot less, so I have less stories of fail, BUT…

Today. Violet Hold Heroic.

The “tank”:

Hashbrowniee from Ner’zhul.

Put him on ignore. 506 defense. No gems. NO relic (!). Didn’t even have Righteous Fury on until I told him to put it on three times.

Just a pitiful excuse for a player. I told him to respec ret and not inflict himself on others in an important role and he’s like “naw i like the instant queues”.

UGH. He got crit in the face a bunch. Good thing at least *I* knew what I was doing so I could keep his sorry ass alive.

And 25m heroic modes continue!

Kurn / / facepalm, general, healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings, world events

Hope everyone had a good Easter or a good Sunday, whichever applies to you. ;)

For myself, brunch with the family, followed by some horrible 3v3 arenas, followed by a nap, followed by a raid. We had cancelled on Thursday — people were sick, unable to make it, I had something come up… so we cancelled and reconvened tonight.

Heroic Blood Prince Council down.

Heroic Blood Queen Lana’thel down.

Heroic Festergut still wiped the floor with us.

Princes was actually pretty easy. “Don’t move,” is basically the key to the fight, although moving when necessary is also important. ;) Lana’thel was intense. We just clipped enrage, she killed both tanks and then we won. Princes only took two tries and BQL took three.

I don’t understand the issues behind Fester. It’s just all kinds of bad. The malleable goo is beaning people, the tanks are dying, the range are dying and basically, no one is living past two minutes or so. Time to go through the logs and make notes about healers, goo, assignments and the like. Hooray death logs?

And in other news, my brother, on his level 47 (?) paladin is about 8 bunny ears from being the Noble. This involved me running around the damn world with him, while on my mage, to port him from place to place and usually to save his fool ass from mobs trying to rip him apart. Screw Noblegarden; I did it once on Kurn and that was more than enough for me. And my brother is similarly unimpressed with the amount of farming of chocolates he had to do.

Anyways. Logs!

ETA: Oh God, the logs make me want to cry. :( People not casting, ranged not getting any heals, people ignoring Vile Gas entirely… GAH.

Just as an FYI…

Kurn / / blogging, facepalm, ramblings

Yes, I know tomorrow is April Fool’s.

No, I will not be writing any kind of jokey post. And no, I promise, this post is not an April Fool’s post, either.

No, I will not comment on the silly people who believe whatever it is Blizzard will put up this year (although, let me tell you, I totally bought into the BT attunement for a good five minutes, until I finished reading it all, by which point I was doubled over in laughter).

Basically, this post is to let you know that there’s going to be a LOT of misinformation across the board popping up, starting today and probably going through ’till Hawaii goes through the last hour of April 1. Don’t believe anything you read, from people quitting blogging or guilds merging or anything of the sort.

So, if it’s okay with you, I’ll just go sit over here and shake my head at all the gullible people believing stuff over the next day or so and stay out of the fray of insanity. Instead, I’ll just freak out about the fact that we’re going to be doing ICC25 hard modes and wondering what I ever did to Blizzard that deserves me getting to deal with Malleable Goo on Festergut and Vile Gas on Rotface in heroic modes.

Ignis, Trial of the Champion and failure of all kinds.

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, ulduar, weekly raids

Ladies and gentlemen, the weekly quest this week on Proudmoore is for Ignis the Furnace Master. You know, one of the three bosses available after Flame Leviathan in Ulduar. Pretty easy mechanics, not a terribly difficult fight.

My buddy Majik (a DK frost tank) and my brother (on his hunter… who is now Officially Better Geared Than Kurn!) wanted to go do the weekly. Well, why not? It’s not like it’s Marrowgar.

So, on my druid, I started up a group, inviting them, then converting to raid. “LFM,” I bellowed in Trade, “Ignis the Furnace Master Must Die!” I was, of course, overwhelmed with whispers.

I got two shammy healers (the only healers who whispered, of course) and asked them if they could 2-heal it. “Yeah, sure,” they said. So I said that Majik and myself would be tanking.

One of the healers, who had whispered me previously to say they could heal and tank, whispers me to invite a friend of theirs. So I invite their friend, a warrior.

Who here sees where this is going?

Well, we fill the group, head up to Ulduar, I warn people not to talk to anyone and that I would talk to Brann Bronzebeard instead of the Lore Keeper of Norgannon, to ensure we don’t accidentally do 4-tower Flame Leviathan. :P

Surprisingly, the trash to FL goes quickly, as does the FL fight. People (including. but not limited to (!), me) interrupted Flame Jets in the siege engines and we got Shutout without issue. My brother “engineered” FL’s corpse and off we went to Ignis.

The giants caused a bit of havoc, but it wasn’t too bad.

The rest of the trash wasn’t too bad either — except I kept losing aggro.

I noticed, from my Grid, that the only person in range of me was a warrior. There were two warriors in the group, including the one the shammy had me invite. So I assume, as I generally do, that he’s out-threating me, because I KNOW I can’t keep aggro off a well-geared DPS warrior. So I keep taunting off of him.

But he always ends up with the damn mob!

So I mark Majik’s trash targets with the Skull and, when I see the warrior on my mob again, I say in raid “Skull”.

Warrior stays on my target, which keeps switching to the warrior, in an attempt to bash his face in.

And then, I finally, finally notice that the warrior is wearing a shield.

“… is the warrior PROT?!” I ask over Vent, to just Majik and my brother.

“I don’t know,” Maj says, “wait, yes, there’s a shield.”

Sigh. “Switch to DPS please, [warrior name]”

And yet, there he is. On the very next bloody mob I’m trying to tank. Again. I mean, seriously. I’M A FREAKING BEAR. You can’t tell that I’m a tank? Rawr?

Finally, we get the trash cleared out.

“[warrior], do you have a DPS spec?”

“No.”

/facepalm

The shammy says in raid: “that’s why I said I could heal and tank!”

“I thought you meant you had another toon of yours who could tank,” I respond. Majik asks me in Vent if I want him to go DPS, but knowing that his DPS spec is a PVP one, I figure I’ll just go resto.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I very much LIKE having three healers in a 10-man. It’s even helpful on Ignis if a healer gets put in the Slag Pot. But my problem is that I did not do a ton of research on the group, figuring that 2 healers, 2 tanks (one of which being a DK, who not only does more damage than your average prot warrior, but has a ton of cooldowns) and six DPS is going to render the Ignis fight easy.

Take away a DPS, though, and you have a slight problem for the strategy we were going to use.

You see, I’ve done Stokin’ the Furnace. It requires burning the boss hard while the OT holds all the adds. So even with just five DPS, I figured hey, we can do it this way anyways. Everyone should be in at least T9, right? Which is better than most of the junk out of Ulduar. It’s obviously easier to tell everyone to just burn the boss than to expect anyone apart from my brother and the actual well-geared DPS warrior to switch targets to the adds.

Of course, we don’t have a “tank healer”. Which is a bunch of crap, IMHO, since I think that, if circumstances dictate, any class can “tank heal”, but I will admit that were I in there on my paladin, it would have made the fight a ton easier.

We also don’t have a healer with any defensive cooldowns. No Guardian Spirit, no Pain Suppression, no Hand of Sacrifice or Divine Sacrifice.

Still, I don’t think we have a problem.

Until we’re about at the 3 minute mark and I suddenly realize that we are NOT going to be done in four minutes. We’re sitting at about 60%.

“HERO” I type, all in caps, in a raid warning.

Heroism goes up and I start making sure Rejuvenation is on everyone in the raid, in addition to rolling Lifebloom on Maj. I keep Swiftmending either myself or him because the stacks of Strength of the Creator were just getting out of hand. I don’t remember what they were at, because I was busy healing the crap out of Maj, but he was taking TONS of damage and rotating ALL of his cooldowns, sacrificing his ghoul, everything.

Shockingly, 5m13s after we pulled, Ignis died, everyone alive.

Great healing by the shammies, really. And very good off-tanking by the OT, to be honest. I probably couldn’t have stayed up as long as he did with the same number of adds. Although, if I was going to tank, we wouldn’t have had the same number of adds, because we would have had six DPS and killed the sucker earlier. :P

So part of that is my failure for not researching the group well enough. Part of it is the warrior and the shammy’s failures for not realizing I said Maj and I were going to tank. It all just led to extra stress, which no one needs when doing a stupid weekly.

But all that pales in comparison to the priest that healed most of my Heroic Trial of the Champion yesterday. I was tanking.

We get Eadric the Pure, we down him, but the rogue dies. The hunter pointed out to the priest that they still had the Argent Lance equipped.

The following is a paraphrased reconstruction of the conversation that ensued.

Priest: so?

Hunter: So… maybe if you had your healing weapon on, the rogue wouldn’t have died.

Priest: lol no its fine, I can heal with the lance

Hunter: I think you might heal better with your real healing weapon.

Priest: we killed him didn’t we?

Hunter: That’s not the point, the point is that you might have been able to keep the rogue up with your healing weapon equipped.

Me: I’m with [hunter].

Priest: i was chatting with someone when he died

Somewhere in all of this, someone (not me) started the Black Knight event. The rest of this is, honest to God, what happened, as I’m copying from my screenshots.

The Black Knight says: I’ve come to finish my task.

Priest: i looked away and talked until he died

Hunter: so that makes it alright?

Priest: he died and i said “oh someone died hang on”

<Deadly Boss Mods> The Black Knight engaged. Good luck and have fun! :)

The Black Knight yells: This farce ends here!

King Varian Wrynn yells: Don’t just stand there; kill him!

Priest: fuck you [racial slur for a person of African descent].

Priest leaves the party.

Okay. The priest didn’t say exactly what I wrote. They ACTUALLY used the n-word. I refuse to use that term, even while quoting someone on my blog.

So, I was tanking, I slammed on the “yes, I would, in fact, like to find a replacement for the healer who just left my group” and popped every single cooldown I had — Survival Instincts, Barkskin, Frenzied Regeneration, Lifeblood, Glyph of the Indomitable.

A pally joins the group and all I can think is “please, dear God, let him see I’m in trouble and heal the crap out of me”. But he was still zoning in. I died. I ran back. Everyone else died, they all ran back.

Everyone was discussing the racist priest and I was like “Uh, didn’t the priest and the warrior in the group know each other? Same server. :P” And then the warrior left the group. We got a mage, the pally apologized for zone lag, it was all good, we all had another shot at the Black Knight and we even got I’ve Had Worse.

FYI, the racist priest is Emisana from Khaz’goroth and the warrior was Obsession (?) from the same server. I highly recommend anyone on Bloodlust just ignore the priest right away. Terrible healer, worse person. :P

Okay, my ranting is done for now.

Note to self…

Kurn / / dungeons, facepalm, lfg, ramblings

The time between about 5am and 7:30am on a Saturday morning is NOT the time for you to attempt to do any kind of random runs whatsoever.

4 (!) attempts at lowbie runs as a healer, 1 attempt at a random heroic as a DPS.

Results, 0 dungeons completed.

1) An SM Armory run where the tank was AFK to begin with for 8 minutes, then ran in, pulled the whole hallway, did NOT hit Consecration, got stunned and as I hit Dispel Magic for the stun, promptly let my face get eaten. Then the died, because I was dead. And they left group. So I did, too.

2) An SM Armory run, in progress, where I zone in and promptly see “healz hurry!” and see that a warrior, who is out of range on my Grid, is at half health. I run into the courtyard and aggro three mobs, because they hadn’t cleared the courtyard, nor informed me of such. Had I not been disc, I would have died instantly. Instead, I drag them to the group on the other side of the courtyard and down two hallways. The warrior promptly laughs at me and says “ur a girl thot ud b smarter then pullin stuff”.

… I respond with “I’m sorry, would you like me to leave?”

“jokin”

Uhuh. I believe you.

Two pulls later, the warlock soulstones the tank. Trying to be somewhat helpful, I mention that if they’re going to SS anyone, they ought to SS the healer.

“but hes runnin in and almost dyin”

“Actually, he’s not, because I’m healing him. And I’m getting aggro from mobs, because he’s not hitting them all and I wear cloth, so it really should be a healer who gets a soulstone.” Note that I’m not ACTUALLY asking for a soulstone. I’m just trying to point out the flaw in the logic.

“lol i where cloth too!!”

I just sigh to myself and we keep going. We get to a hallway and the tank just groups up the melee and starts hitting them, etc. Does he even TOUCH the caster? No. So I sigh again and shield the tank, and then myself, and the caster starts throwing fireballs at me.

“Aggro,” I say.

The tank does nothing.

“I have aggro from that caster,” I say.

Nothing.

“THE CASTER IS HITTING ME,” I say.

Then the tank laughs at me and goes to get it. “lol y did u pull it???” he says.

“I didn’t pull it, you didn’t hit it. Can you please be sure to hit all the mobs in the area?”

“lol i did” comes the reply. “lol ud think the healer wuld b smarter then a grade 3er.”

I’m about to go “PARDON?” when he does this:

“<— thats me!”

… my tank was in Grade 3?

So I let them pull the entire hallway down from us and then I left. Because I’m not going to be insulted by an idiot in Grade 3, who needs to l2tank anyways. My parting words were:

“Yep. I’m smarter than someone in Grade 3. I’m smart enough to leave.”

3) A Razorfen Downs group, my first time in the instance ever, where the tank and a warlock were both ghosts and trying to FIND the instance, for about 7 minutes. The rogue then PUTS ME ON FOLLOW and afks. Seriously. He just stands there, following me. And none of us can kick him because the 15 minutes aren’t up. The tank leaves, I leave. Very weird.

4) Back to SM Armory. At least I’ve hit 35 by virtue of the last several attempted runs. “big pullz btw” says the paladin tank and charges down the hall. It was an exact duplicate of the first attempt at a random run I’d had, except this time, I didn’t touch the tank and let him die. Then the mage tries to “tank” and frost novas everything and blinks away and is like “priest run!!!”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think I’ll leave, instead.”

And so I left, so tired of all the idiocy.

5) I got on my hunter to do my daily random.

Heroic Halls of Reflection. I dread that loading screen as much as I do the Oculus, I swear. We do the first waves just fine. Second set of waves was okay. We’re on the second boss. And then I have aggro. WTF? Oh. THE TANK IS DEAD. Why is the tank dead? BECAUSE HE STOOD IN THE WELL OF CORRUPTION and had something like 8 stacks of it on him. Way to be, Mr. Tank. Way to be.

We wipe. I leave the group.

/FACEPALM.

I hereby propose “WoW Role School”. This should be an in-game set of instances designed to help teach tanks, healers and DPS how to play their roles. I’m not talking about micromanaging which spells and abilities are used (except things like Frost Presence, Righteous Fury, Defensive Stance, Bear form) but showing people what their role truly is in a group setting.

You get, say, five of them as you level up through to 60 or so. Here’s an example of what a protection paladin would go through.

1) Level 15 (when you can queue for the LFG tool): Depending on your class/spec, you are shown how to heal, DPS or tank by virtue of a 15 minute mock dungeon run with tips. The instance would start up and you’d be given a quest. For example:

“You appear to be putting your talent points into the Protection tree, young paladin. Would you like to learn how to hold the attention of hostile creatures while your group kills them and you are healed?

– Yes, I would like to learn to tank

– No, I would prefer to learn to heal

– No, I would prefer to learn to do damage”

And then the quest would be accepted. “Hold the attention of 5 separate creatures from your fellow party members.” And they would be NPCs, NOT the morons you get in LFG, so you’d get the group focus firing, etc. Would teach about Righteous Defense.

2) Level 25 – same deal, now teaches the use of Righteous Fury, Hand of Reckoning and Consecration, for example

3) Level 35 – more elaborate pulls, LOS, casters, runners

4) Level 45 – BoSanc, some other class skills, etc

5) Level 55 – Mock up of Strat UD, need to clear down to and kill Anub’Rekhan.

And then, if you queued up for another role, you’d have to do it over again from that role’s perspective, for whatever level range you’re at.

For any veteran player, this would be easy. You could EASILY do these mock-up runs in the span of 10 minutes at most. But the people who aren’t familiar with the game/class/etc, would be required to learn some of the very basics of their class/role.

So why am I bitching about this? Haven’t there always been fail people in groups? Yes. There have been. But the level of ineptitude I have seen recently, this morning even, demonstrates two things to me.

a) It is SUPER easy for people to find groups via the dungeon finder, meaning more people are using it and more people are doing level-appropriate dungeons as they level toons.

b) More than ever before, Blizzard is forcing us to play with others in a group situation where we must rely on these total strangers (usually from other servers within our battlegroups) to perform their roles adequately.

I’m not asking for people to be the best tanks, healers or DPS in the entire world, really. I’m asking for tanks to make sure they hit the mobs so that healers don’t get aggro when casting a shield. I’m asking for healers who know enough to WAIT to cast that shield/heal when the tank is doing anything like a gauntlet or just a big group. I’m asking for DPS who don’t put the healer ON FOLLOW and then AFK!

Is it our choice to use, or not use, the Dungeon Finder tool? Yes. But I believe that since Blizzard has encouraged us to use it in a multitude of ways, from Emblems of Frost and extra Emblems of Triumph to extra experience and Satchels of Helpful Goods, then they’ve got a responsibility to ensure that the tool is populated by people who won’t make you want to throw your computer out the window and cancel your damn subscription.

Just sayin’.

Of egos, numbers and priorities.

Kurn / / facepalm, healers, healing, icecrown citadel, raiding, ramblings

This totally ties in to my upcoming Holy How-To #4: Healing Meters, but I didn’t want to complicate what will be an informative post with my own personal stuff.

My question is this: how can a guild that is practically five years old be run by people who rely on healing meters to determine who the “best healer” is?

My RL friend the resto druid is taking a break from the game due to various RL issues that have cropped up. Which sucks. I mean, obviously I support her decision and I think it’s the best decision for her, given her RL circumstances and all. Apart from anything else, not having to raid from 11pm-2am four nights a week will benefit her in that she’ll get a decent amount of sleep.

The trouble here is that she’s the healing lead. And we’re 11/12, working on getting Sindragosa on farm (most emphatically not on farm!) and getting Lich King down on 25-man, so we can unlock hard modes, etc.

When she went away on business for a couple of days, she posted on the forums that I’d do healing assignments while she was away. (She and I had talked about this, so it wasn’t a surprise, it was fine.)

So naturally, while she’s away from the game, I figured that the whole healing lead thing would fall to me. Just about everyone else who has seniority is gone or not raiding anymore; the other holy paladin ninja-transferred, the disc priest who is awesome stopped raiding a couple of months ago… Honestly, there’s two healers who have been in the guild longer than I have been at this point, and one’s attendence sucks and the other is happier to be on standby.

So I’m thinking to myself that I should write to the officers that I get along with and let them know that I’m happy to help out in the short-term while they find a new healing lead until my RL friend comes back to the game. But that it’s strictly for the short-term, I don’t want any kind of promotion, I don’t want the job, etc.

So I do. I talk a bit about how I’m willing to help for the betterment of the raid and because the resto druid is my RL friend and I want to do what I can to lessen her stress/guilt for not raiding, etc. This is all on Thursday night.

Later on Friday, the caster officer PMs me back on the boards and is like “can we talk in-game about something real quick?”

So I log on and we chat and he’s like “I apologize in advance, but do you remember me asking you if [resto druid] was going to log on, Wednesday?”

“Yeah, you asked right before she did log on.”

“Yeah, well the reason I asked was because [MT/de-facto GM] had actually asked me to do healing if she wasn’t around.”

Relief totally flooded my body. Honest to God, I was like “haha, that’s fine!” and I was all relieved and fine. I’ve been in the guild for seven months, which is a drop in the bucket compared to most people, including the caster officer (who used to heal in pre-BC and BC).

But then he said that apparently, some people actually complained that I was doing healing assignments. Complained? What the hell? It’s not like I was doing a bad job or anything. With little to no communication from Mr. MT/officers, I did healing assignments for 10/12, with only 2 wipes. One WAS my bad, but the other was due to disconnections on BQL. I’m sitting there, scratching my head as to why on earth people would complain; I was polite in my requests, I was encouraging of the healers, I allocated resources pretty darn well considering I don’t know the capability of half of these people (there are five healers who have been there less than 5-6 weeks)…

So it blew my mind when the caster officer said why they complained.

“apparently some ppl complained about you doing them because they feel like you’re not the best healer or something”

And it dawns on me. The MT felt that these complaints were justified because I don’t top healing meters.

It’s got absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I can’t manage the healers, nothing to do with the fact that I can’t allocate resources, nothing to do with the fact that I’m polite and courteous. It’s not even that I suck at healing; it’s because I stick to my assignments and do what’s best for the raid, rather than inflate my numbers.

Our last holy paladin, the one who had arrived when the guild was working on Sunwell, was a numbers whore. That’s all he cared about, that and caring about looking as if he was awesome because he knew the details of the game and mechanics — even though he didn’t. (Seriously, he tried to tell me that if MY beacon was up on a tank, that HIS heals would also be mirrored to MY beacon. Which is absolutely false and untrue.)

As a result of his priorities (his numbers instead of the raid), he would often heal off assignment, judge light (instead of wisdom, when there was always a ret pally in the raid, who could more reliably keep a judgement up) and was directly responsible for several wipes in recent memory. Basically, my RL friend was RELIEVED he ninja-transferred so that she didn’t have to deal with his stupid ass for never listening to her. You know how hard it is to type, in healing chat, while running around and healing, the words “[holy pally name] put your beacon on your assigned beacon target and heal your tank please”. She did that frequently and also whispered him a ton to get him to do it.

If I WANTED to, I could give myself the assignments that have me ridiculously high on the meters and I could judge light. But what’s the point in topping meters if people are DYING? What’s the point in wiping the raid all night in order to show off?

I’m sorry, but if we’re on Sindragosa, with a harsh frost aura ticking constantly, there is no WAY I’m going to beat a raid healer AND keep the MT alive. Not a chance. So what’s the more important thing? Healing the MT and keeping him alive so Sindragosa doesn’t turn and one-shot the rest of the raid.

This conversation has been bugging me since Friday and I just realized why. It’s not even that the MT is ignorant enough about healing that he relies on healing meters (haha, does that mean he thinks disc priests are completely worthless?), but it’s that the healers are the ones who complained. My fellow healers, the ones who are supposed to have a deeper understanding of the game and mechanics and healing assignments and the roles of various healers… THEY are the ones who complained to the MT.

So not only is the MT, who is also acting guild leader, ignorant of how healing works in this game, but so are at least some of the healers in the guild.

I could understand it if I weren’t one of the more senior healers in the guild at the moment, if I were this new recruit who, via nepotism, got the healing assignment job just because my RL friend knows me IRL.

I could understand it if I were actually terrible at allocating healer resources.

I could understand it if, instead of going 10/12 the other night, we had gone 6/12 because healing for Putricide had gone to hell or something.

But… I’m not “new”. I’ve been there longer than most anyone else. And I’m not bad at assigning healing. And my assignments proved to be done properly and well as we ruined 10 bosses in 3 hours the other night.

And yet, I don’t top healing, thus I suck?

I am agog at the ignorance that is clearly rampant in my guild. Truly, I am. I don’t understand how any healer who prioritizes the betterment of the raid could give a rat’s ass about the meters.

I’ve been wondering if I’ll leave the guild if my RL friend doesn’t come back soon. If she doesn’t, I think I just plain have to leave. It’s not that I’m hurt by the idea of the complaints, but I’m pissed off that people who should know better just don’t. After this realization that at least SOME of the healers are dumber than I thought they were, I find that I don’t care anymore. This guild is in trouble if it’s recruiting ignorant players and listening to them.

You want to point out where I suck? That’s great. Pull out logs, show me standing in fire or eating Blistering Cold or getting beaned by Malleable Goo. Guess what? I don’t eat BC. I don’t get beaned by MG. Fire and I have an uneasy relationship, this is true, but I have better environmental awareness than most of the healers. Which is SAD.

It’s like, all of a sudden, the small healer community that I THOUGHT was getting better in quality, that I THOUGHT was worth my respect and courtesy, doesn’t matter to me at all, because it’s been infected by Stupid™ and that Stupid™ is also present in the ranks of the officers.

In short, without my RL friend there, it’s clear that there’s nothing left for me. I’m going to kill LK, see how my RL friend is doing and then make my decision as to what to do.

I strongly suspect that I’ll be heading back to good old Eldre’Thalas earlier than expected.

Quick update.

Kurn / / druids, facepalm, general, healing, lfg, paladins, raiding, ramblings

First of all, I AM working on my third Holy How-To post. It’s long. There are many screenshots and links. But I am definitely working on it!

Secondly, I’ve seen some serious fail lately. The latest morons:

– An 80 fury warrior, specced with Titan’s Grip… using one 2H weapon. And nothing else in his other hand. Sadly, I’ve forgotten his name.

– Holymeatbag, an 80 holy paladin, specced 68/3/0 and STILL managed to miss out maxing out Holy Power (3/5) and Holy Guidance (1/5). I may be a little squishy yet, but dude wasn’t keeping Beacon on anyone or shielding me or anything of the sort in Heroic TOC. As such, I died on Paletress. And if I hadn’t used my abundance of cooldowns (my trinket for extra dodge, a healthstone, a healing potion, Survival Instincts, Lifeblood, Frenzied Regeneration and Barkskin!), I would have died again after the wipe. I got H TOC again as a random later in the evening and was healed just fine by the resto shammy. Highly recommend you all ignore this guy.

In positive news, for once, my guild got 25-man Blood Queen Lana’thel on Monday night. HIGHLY recommend that the RL get and use the following mod:

BloodQueen at WoWInterface

We also one-shotted Valithria and, although I dropped my stacks once, it was only once! I got a lot better at making sure I got a stack just before the portal phase ended.

In news with my druid/my brother’s hunter/our friend’s DK…

My druid has 2/5 T9 resto but still has better feral gear, haha. My brother’s hunter is practically as well-geared as Kurn is, which depresses me to no end. He’s got 4/5 T9 (232), the Crusader’s Dragonscale Breastplate and Bracers (thanks to me), the True-aim Rifle out of H TOC, the staff from regular FoS, a Darkmoon Card: Greatness (90 agi, obviously) that I made for him, the 245 ilvl badge ring… Seriously. It makes me sad. Especially because tomorrow, he’ll be giving me a primordial saronite and I’ll craft him Rock-Steady Treads. :(

Our DK buddy has 1/5 T9 (shoulders!) and a 245 sigil, which he was very happy to get, haha. His gear is still pretty low, but he’s at 540 defense and 22k health unbuffed. With some consumables and the random dungeon buff, he gets about 30-31k buffed. His dodge and parry are still pretty low, but I imagine that’ll improve as he gets his other tier pieces.

I’m getting a lot of practice on the druid, both healing and tanking. My Swipe is actually holding aggro and my mana pool and regen are sustaining me fairly well, to the point where I rarely need to drink and can even keep innervating my brother’s hunter.

I was thinking about why I like my druid, earlier tonight. I mean, it’s a tree and it’s a bear. I fit the two most sought-after roles in the game and I’m not horrible at them. I think the utility is really what I enjoy about the toon. I can tank and heal on Madrana too, of course, but I think I really enjoy bear tanking as compared to pally tanking. I think I prefer pally healing to druid healing, but there’s a certain elegance to druid healing that’s lacking on the paladin. I can brute force heal darn near anything on my pally. But I actually have to make decisions on my druid while healing that will have repercussions over the next few seconds, as the health builds up slowly.

That’s completely opposed to pally healing, where I strive to keep everyone topped off at all times, rather than letting Wild Growth heal most people up, because I don’t have much in the way of “set-it-and-forget-it” heals on the pally. I guess that druid healing challenges me a bit more than paladin healing in terms of healing intelligently. Pally healing is characterized for me by long periods of casting the same spell, followed by frantic button mashing to get buffs up, then more of the same.

Anyways. I do still have lots to say about pally stuff, so stay tuned for Holy How-To number 3. :)

… and one day, ICC raid strats. :P

I don't know why I'm still surprised…

Kurn / / facepalm, lfg, ramblings

… at the utter insanity of pugs.

I mean, I don’t even have words to express my dismay at the ridiculousness of some people.

In the last, oh, two days, the following things have happened:

– I was tanking a Heroic Violet Hold on my druid and the healer left after the first boss. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT ABOUT?! Oddly, we managed to get to the second boss without a healer (holy crap, do I love being able to heal myself after combat), but then we wiped. But… SERIOUSLY. If you are a healer or a tank and you leave your group in an instance with timed portions, like Violet Hold or Halls of Reflection, YOU HAVE SIGNED A DEATH WARRANT FOR YOUR WHOLE GROUP.

– Speaking of Halls of Reflection, I was healing on my druid, with my brother on his hunter, and we queued for regular HoR, to finish off the quest chain. We did the first boss. The tank leaves. Just… leaves. No one had died, there hadn’t been a wipe, I was keeping everyone alive and it was going smoothly! And he just LEFT.

Thinking quickly, I instruct the ret paladin to cast DI on the DPS warrior, tell my brother to feign and I shadowmeld.

Does the paladin cast DI? No. Does he even know what a DI is? My guess is no. So the three of us died (because the Phantom Mage’s Flamestrike broke my shadowmeld). The warrior and paladin left the group after the wipe, leaving my brother and I agog at the stupidity.

– I was tanking a Heroic Halls of Lightning, in the middle of the first boss, when I realize that the priest is almost oom. It was shortly after the first boss went down that I saw the priest was in shadowform. Not a big deal, right? Well, my group consisted of me, two rogues and a hunter. So the priest was ostensibly the healer. Now, I’m not geared. I know I’m not geared. My swipe can’t out-threat a geared DK’s D&D or a geared warrior’s Whirlwind. And I’m a little squishy, to be honest. I don’t have a crapton of health, my dodge rating is kind of low and my armor is only awesome because I bought Glyph of Indomitability. So I was like “uh. Why are you in shadowform?”

“healing is boring, ima dps and heal at the same time”

… so I left. True, he kept us up during the first boss and he COULD have been leet enough to pull it off and keep us all alive, but I really, REALLY didn’t want to find out.

– So I went and queued for a random heroic again, this time with my brother on his hunter and my RL friend on her priest. We got Heroic Violet Hold. First portal opens up.

Warie, of Kil’jaeden, I reason, is either a victim of the stupid dual spec bug, which will not update spell/ability ranks on your inactive spec when you train, or he has not trained. I usually have RankWatch active ever since someone whispered me saying that my shaman was using Chain Heal 4 instead of 6. At which point I realized I had been doing so for about two months. I was ashamed but I was seriously grateful for RankWatch’s notification. So I keep RW on, most of the time. (My 5 channel is a channel for RL friends to chat in, so my RL friend the priest and my brother and I were all in it and chatting.)

I mean, really, train. 19g per spell on a druid is not cheap, let me tell you. But if you’re not trained and using max-rank abilities (there are some exceptions, but I don’t believe DKs have any of them), then you’re being a moron. Or a dick.

So the guy just got his epic flight. Good for him. I’m not sure how he made his money, but certainly it would have been easier for him to grind mobs (if he did that at all) or instances if he was using max rank spells, no? My RL friend wisely puts him on ignore. Apart from anything else, this guy’s English hurts my eyes. “i no”. Gah.

This is what damage looked like after two portals. My brother, who dinged 80 a week ago, is right up there with a fairly geared shadow priest. And I’m almost putting out another 50% of the damage done by the idiot DK. And I’m a scrubby TANK.

So what does my RL friend do? She does exactly what I left the HHoL group for; she swaps to shadow spec to help out on DPS while still healing me, because we were going to be behind on portals. It was actually close for a couple of pulls there. But at least she was doing it because the fail DK wasn’t doing any real damage. My brother was putting out 1k DPS when he was 75. This guy is using abilities from level 67 (Obliterate 2, D&D 2).

– Then today, I got Oculus as my daily random on Madrana. As a tank. Of course. :P I had, bar none, the weirdest person in my group. Ever. His name was Xamot and he was from Sen’jin. How weird? Allow me to pull out the screenshots.

So I left. I put them both on ignore, too. It’s a shame, because I was going to talk about how I’m invested in my character, in my skills, how I’ve practiced to hone those skills and THAT is why I don’t like vehicle fights. Vehicle fights just rob you of your class abilities, they render all knowledge about your class useless, they just mean that you need to know what your vehicle can do and how you should do so most efficiently.

– Then, I saw a VOA going on. Since I’d missed my guild running it on Wednesday, I thought hey, I’ll go. They’re looking for a holy paladin, after all. Now, I do have the GearScore addon. I use it on Kurn and my other toons, but not on Madrana. Madrana raids with the guild, does one daily every day and that’s about it. I don’t care about GS in general, so I don’t care what Madrana’s GS is. So I don’t have it enabled on her.

And I get no response. Nothing. At all. I’m like… seriously? So I think a minute and decide to link the Toravon 25 achievement and then figure that my Plagueworks achievement ought to be enough.

I cannot believe that someone wouldn’t invite me to VOA on my PALADIN, who likely has a better gearscore than 90% of the server, until I linked the Toravon achievement and the Plagueworks achievement. It’s just mind-boggling to me.

– Then, the universe clearly decided to make it up to me, as my mage failed to complete Heroic Halls of Reflection yet again.

Booya.

They’re going for 12.5k on the AH on my server. So I don’t know if I should sell it or give it to Kurn or give it to Madrana or give it to my brother. My mage, shammy and druid do not need such an epic weapon. I should probably sell it, give it to Kurn or to my brother. Madrana will get a better weapon eventually. Kurn likely will not. My brother likely will not. But I could definitely use 10k+ gold to help offset the cost of outfitting my brother and I in non-sucky gear. Decisions, decisions!