Feb 8
A Day of (Mostly) Good PuGs
Posted on February 8, 2009 under My Play | 1 CommentWorld of Warcraft is an ever-changing game. While reading this post, keep the date it was written in mind—changes may have occurred since then!
It’s not secret that I dislike PuGs. My problem is I just don’t like stupid people. (Note that stupidity is different from ignorance–I have much more tolerance for those people if they want to learn.) However, PuGs are a really good way to meet new people, and since I’m relatively new to Nazjatar (my friends list consists of the friend I moved to Nazjatar to play with and his alts), I figured I’d give some a shot.
A guildie of mine wanted to run Azol-Nerub, a nice quick instance with a ring I wanted. So, I toss on my tank gear and off we go! The run goes smoothly. Mobs are killed in order, no one dies, I get my ring, everyone’s happy. So happy, in fact, that the group decides to move on to Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom. This run also goes rather well, save for a couple wipes on Jedoga Shadowseeker. As it turns out, if you’re not standing in her little area when you kill the initial mob of worshippers, they aggro on you as the encounter starts. Not fun. A couple folks had never done the run before, and it’s always fun to see an Old Kingdom noobie’s reaction to the final boss fight!
The run over, we go our separate ways. I have the daily dungeon quest from a couple days ago, so I decide to do Caverns of Time: The Culling of Stratholme if I can. I’m only 78, so I can’t tank it quite yet, but I figure I can do some decent DPS. So, a group gets together, and we head there. Long story short, the run goes horribly. The tank doesn’t hold aggro and everyone kinda does their own thing (in their defense, a few of us mentioned that we hadn’t been there before, but we received little to no instruction on what to do). So the group breaks up after wiping a couple times on the first boss (yeah).
Next up, a different guildie is looking for a run in Utgarde Keep: Utgarde Pinnacle. He’s tanking, another guildie of mine is healing, and we PuG in two rogues. The run goes relatively well until Skadi. I don’t think it was anything anyone did, we just had some bad luck with the casters and the whirlwind Skadi does. After several wipes, folks have to go and we call it.
Finally, I get a whisper for Violet Hold. I really like this instance–nice and short and usually pretty varied due to the random bosses. I’m DPSing as a paladin is tanking. The healer from my prior AN and OK runs is the healer for this instance–she’s after the leggings that drop from Erekem. Well, they drop, but the mage ends up with them. After the run, the tank has to go, but the rest of us are up to do it again. So we do, myself tanking–and Erekem pops out again–and his pants drop again. Our happy healer picks them up. We proceed to do VH two or three more times, since things are going so well.
Many people have commented on the “bond” between a tank and a healer (see here, here, here, and here for a few examples). The healer whispers a compliment about my tanking (it’s always nice to hear that you’re good at what you do), and I reply with one about her healing (it’s rare to find a good healer!).
Later that evening, I get a whisper from her again asking if I want to run AN once more. I accept, and we’re on the way with an 80 paladin friend of hers who, once he respecced prot and put on his tank gear, had just shy of 30k HP. Needless to say the run was pretty smooth. We proceed to have some fun wiping out some allies that attacked us, and doing some PvP dailies in Grizzly Hills.
So, here’s a shout out to my new friends, Alliniana and Aziroth–thanks for making yesterday so awesome! 
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by Celo, on February 8 2009 @ 11:10 pm
I ran The Old Kingdom the other day and found out the hard way about having to stand on the platform or else dying a very quick death. True story.