Ignis is always a tricky one to pug… because everyone expects to just go zerg him and pay no mind to mechanics.
I suffer through those raids… sometimes they listen… sometimes they’re fail. I toughed it out through raids on three alts… including a few wipes on each. And I finally decided to bring my bank alt through.
As I join the raid, which I’m already a bit twitchy about because one of the two healers has 15k mana… and is in mostly blues and greens, I get a whisper from someone claiming to be my old guild master – from way back when I first started in WoW. I figured it couldn’t be too bad… I had no idea he had a bear tank, but it’s well geared…
We make it through Flame Leviathan with a couple deaths in about 15 minutes, then move to head toward Ignis. The following hell took place over a span of 45 minutes – so an hour of my life I’ll never get back.
We wipe. Every. Pull. [Literally]
Someone decides to pull XT Decon to wipe the raid – For fun.
Our dps total was 18k dps… most of the dps under 1k. [compared to the 25-28k of the other raids I pugged into].
The tanks can’t generate any threat… I mean myself and the other lock could barely pull 3k because we were pulling off the tanks.
The rampant sexual jokes make it obvious the raid is filled with 14 year old kids [jokes I wouldn’t tolerate in a late night adult fun run for our guild mind you].
We FINALLY FINALLY get to Ignis… and everyone just stands there. No ready checks, no directions, no buffs… no nothing. Finally a “stand and burn” comment followed by inaction.
Hubby finally told me to just log off, having watched me tear my hair out the past hour. So I did.
Cue harrassment from my old GM for bailing on the group… about how power has gone to my head and I won’t work to overcome challenges or accept anyone with less than perfect gearing. Cue slapping ex-GM on ignore. Ex-GM decides to send me a nastygram in the mail [I put him on ignore for nothing you see]. Copy, mail to hubby so he can read it, delete. [I will say this old GM does have a penchant for drinking… and for being a mean drunk].
I hop over to SAN to vent, after informing our officer corps of the harrassment and I vent… And we sit there pondering what the silver lining could possibly be…
Well… I got a blog post out of it didn’t I?
Or in the words of Firefly [Pilot Episode]:
MAL: I had a good day.
SIMON: You had the law on you, criminals and savages… half the people on the ship have been shot or wounded including yourself, and you’re harboring known fugitives.
MAL: We’re still flying.
SIMON: That’s not much.
MAL: It’s enough.
I love my guild.
I’m still blogging.
And that’s enough 🙂
You Yank It, You Tank it: Blog of a Tanking Death Knight Lady 
That’s always something.. If we end up in a horrible PUG or something, we can thing “I can always blog about it”. That’s definitely something 🙂
I was in a similar PUG recently. The tank decided that moving was over-rated and proceeded to tank Ignis right where he stands, not moving out of the scorched ground. He nearly died loads of times, but the healers were awesome and managed to get him up every time. (I saw him hover at about 5% several times)
Sure, if you’re geared enough I guess you can do it like that.. They also didn’t bother picking up the adds who went rampant throughout the raid. But why not do it properly is what I wonder. What do you gain by making your healers job more difficult and dps having to run away from adds instead of dpsing?
I still don’t quite understand how people can pull below 1k dps at 80. Maybe I guess if you have all greens, but even then.. I don’t know. And if you do pull that little – I’d never dare to set my foot in a raid setting. Maybe that’s my failing though since by waiting until I can at least pull 3k or so I’m gearing up slower than those who jump straight in I guess.
*hugs* That’s something. 🙂
There’s a Count Your Sheep comic from way back when that I NEED to find. It has Katie in bed and grinning like a heyena. When Ship (her imaginary sheep) asks her how her day was, she tells him all the horrible things that happened at school. He asks her why she’s so happy and she throws her fist in the air and says, “Because I survived it!”
Wow, that’s…..wow. I will say, both you and someone else in WaR I was chatting up last night have some nasty former GM’s who don’t know when to leave folks alone. I mean, accepting folks with “less than perfect gearing” is all well and good, but if the thing you came to kill is killing you over and over again….well then something needs to give.
As for the failraid itself, I’m sorry you had to suffer that pain. I’m the kind of person that only in hindsight (usually) do I go, “Wow, I SO should have left awhile ago!” or “I should have said such and such when that PuGger made that rude comment”, so I might have actually stayed to the end (if they even succeeded in bringing down Ignis).
To clarify, this wasn’t a former GM of WaR. This is the first GM Ven and I had back when we joined the game. We’ve kept up with him and considered him a friend.
And no, the raid was not able to down Ignis.
Your a better person than me. I’m not sure I would have stuck it out that far. Sometime around the 3rd or 4th trash wipe and for sure after the “pull XT for fun” bit I would have left.
Don’t take it to heart. The very fact that you attempted the instance with an under-geared group and that you gave them several wipes while under-performing shows that you gave them a fair chance to prove their worth. It’s not your fault that they didn’t make good on the attempts they had. There’s a big difference between being a gear snob and expecting to get things done. It’s not like you sat in Dalaran for 3 hours trying to put together a raid with only people with a 5k+ GS for Ulduar. You just got tired of stupid wipes, which frankly is neither surprising nor unreasonable.
As for the ultra-low DPS I’d bet it’s largely a hit cap issue. The hit cap for heroics is MUCH lower than for raids. Casters need 6% for heroics, but 17% for raids. That many misses will absolutely kill your dps, especially in already-poor gear. Which isn’t to say they’d be rocking the meters in heroics, but between needing to move for fight mechanics and increased spell misses, yeah, I can see the lower-tier of players struggling to put out 1k even if they were putting out as much 1,500 in a heroic. None of which is to excuse that sort of (lack of) dps, just that I can understand how it happened if somebody didn’t do their homework well enough to gear and play their class properly.
Exactly. It speaks to your character that you *did* stay in the group once it’s shortcomings came to light (which didn’t take long, from what I understand). Not instantly QQ’ing about the failDPS and everything else, and the many wipes…I mean, people have left groups for much less. I have a higher tolerance for wipes than some people, but even I have my limits.
Plus, as I told Askevar last night, I do NOT take kindly to people deliberately causing a wipe (or killing my character). Even if it’s a guildie, that’ll cause me to either leave the group or demand compensation. It’s a pet peeve of mine. >.<
I’ve had really bad luck with groups when the weekly raid quest is to Ulduar – I don’t know why but it tends to attract undergeared / under-knowlegeable folks who, I guess, are desperate for frosties and think they have a chance of getting them because it’s not ICC. But they forget that even though it’s an old tier Ulduar is no faceroll … and consequently it’s always a horrible mess.