Last night I tried the new LFG tool for the first time. I wanted to get some ebon roses for the Love is in the Air event, pity a fool or two, and also hit the dungeon elders for the Lunar Festival.
(Well, first I tried to solo Utgarde Keep for the roses, but after death #6 I gave up. Death #4 was so close! But it went downhill from there.)
By the end of the night, I had run:
- Utgarde Pinnacle
- Gundrak
- Drak’Tharon Keep
- The Culling of Stratholme
I’d also been in groups for Utgarde Keep and Ahn’kahet: The Old Kingdom, but both of those fell apart in nasty ways.
(And note that all of these were the basic dungeons, not the heroics.)
I was surprised at how smoothly a good run could go — the tank who guided us through the Culling of Stratholme was especially good at her job, and also very patient with the three(!) of us who had never been there before.
I was also very surprised at how many people hadn’t done these dungeons before. Usually the first thing I’d say when I joined a group was, “I’ve never done this before, so please tell me if there is something you need me to do. And if you’d prefer someone more experienced, I understand — just let me know and I’ll find a different group.”
Almost every group had someone else who spoke up at that point to say, “Me too!” And almost every group reassured us that we were welcome. The one weird comment I got about this was in Ahn’kahet when someone responded, “Dude, you’re 80!” Well, yes. That’s why I was careful to point out my failings.
I also had one guy in Drak’Tharon Keep whisper me halfway through, “Are you even trying to DPS?!” I ignored that, but later when the healer flounced out and we were waiting for a new one, we got talking. I let them know that, yes, I’m an awful hunter and that’s okay with me. And then that same guy became quite nice. He gave me a few pointers, made sure I was remembering my Kill Shot, suggested that I might want to look at a guide on shot rotations … but all of this was in the sense of gentle suggestions, not criticism. And he told me that my gear was surprisingly good for being an awful hunter (so thank you all who helped me choose the gear!) and he admired my slime.
Yes, I ran dungeons with my Tenacity slime. What? He’s my favorite pet.
So except for the name-calling in the Utgarde Keep group that dissolved, and the disappointment at the end of the night when the Ahn’kahet group dissolved, things weren’t half bad. And yet … I do not think I will be doing a lot of this. Ever.
Thing is, it was exhausting. I had to pay attention and try to keep up. One mage asked me in astonishment about my slime, but I couldn’t answer because I can’t type and fight at the same time. (Sorry, unnamed mage!) Another time the tank yelled, “Volley!” — presumably at me — but I didn’t notice it until two fights later (at which time I apologized).
And there was no time to assess loot so I just hit Disenchant if I could and Greed if I couldn’t, on the assumption that at least then I wouldn’t be taking someone else’s stuff. (Of course that got me in trouble with the Utgarde Keep group, who knew I was there for the roses, because apparently I was supposed to Need those. Who knew?)
Of course, I never would have done this at all if not for the new LFG tool. The only time I am at all willing to find a group is when it involves hanging around outside the event dungeon du jour and occasionally announcing, “80 hunter w/summon LFG”. Anything more complicated than that is right out. So the LFG tool at least opens the possibility of dungeons to me.
But I can’t really say that I will ever enjoy them the way some people do. And that’s okay with me.
Don’t let the randoms get you down. I’m a casual hunter still in quest greens, BM spec, and I’ve been literally yelled at, swearing and all, for having green gear as an 80 (um, freshly dinged maybe? still gaining rep maybe?! I DON:T CARE ABOUT YOU HARDCORE DPS maybe?!)
Still, it’s always interesting to run with those rare good groups. (my main’s a priest, my hunter is the fun alt I farm and RP with)
The awesome thing about this game is, as you so eloquently put: “..and that’s OK with me.” Do what you enjoy, and you win.
I often feel very similar. Most of the free time that I spend playing WoW is when I’m waiting for something to happen in real life. (a call from a friend, X amount of time before I have to go to Y event, dinner time, etc.) I would love to experience the dungeon-running aspect of the game. But I just can’t seem to find the time to say, “Okay, I’ve got enough time to run something.” As such, I have very little experience with the dungeons outside of vanilla WoW and I get horribly nervous that I’m going to cause a wipe because of inexperience.
How do I keep up? I dont. I cant get into groups for instances because I play for fun. What i mean by that is my talents arent for dps or anything specific, just neat BM talents (things that increase speed, exotic pets, gimicky stuff) I get armor that looks good/cool/was from a memorable fun event, if its got good stats thats a bonus. I dont have a hard time doing dailys or killing monsters outside of an instance at 80 so i dont bother upgrading. Ive gotten some whispers about my gear when standing in Dal but i try not to let it bother me.
The thing that stopped me from doing instances again was this one time i joined a group for the vault thing in wintergrasp because my friend was in the group and said they were desperate for people to join and he really wanted a gear piece and i was in the area, so i joined to help out. after killing about 2 things a million comments flooded into the chatbox “omg look at Jessickas dps lol” “wtf gear is that” “whats wrong with you” “obviously a noob” “dude kick her” “EBAY ACCOUNT” and so on, only about a couple people didnt say anything, one said “sorry about them :( nice slime” and then my friend just kept quiet. I tried to explain that i was only there for help and a lil dps is better than none but i was kicked pretty fast. My friend stayed and said later that they never did find anyone to replace me =/ but he got his gear peice so i suppose it was ok.
I dont think i’m a bad hunter, i can solo group quests and some old azeroth dungeons, and i do dailys with ease. Only thing i catch myself doing is forgetting hunters mark usually because i find i dont need it. I just dont care about raiding or pvp enough to get a proper spec and proper gear. I dont mind that i dont do instances though, it would be nice to get some of the mounts and minipets that are instance exclusive, but i can do without :)
Sorry for the wall of text :S guess i havent really vented about that situation yet
Here are some useful macros I (BM spec) use for dungeons/general questing:
Shot rotation – assign this to a key, and just keep tapping it, holding ‘shift’ when kill shot procs:
#showtooltip/startattack
/castrandom [nomod] Arcane Shot,
/castsequence [nomod]reset=6 Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, Steady Shot,
/cast [modifier:shift] Kill Shot
“Balls to the wall” DPS:
#showtooltip/cast Bestial Wrath
/cast Kill Command
/cast Call of the Wild
/cast Rapid Fire
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
Remember to switch between Aspect of the Dragonhawk and Aspect of the Viper as you run out of / regain mana, and keep your pet’s growl turned off and with the proper gear you should do fine.
Run enough random dungeons and you should have enough Emblems of Triumph to buy some pretty good purple gear ( http://www.wowwiki.com/Conqueror%27s_Windrunner%27s_Pursuit ) from some vendors at the Argent Tournament Grounds.
Not that you necessarily care about any of this, and certainly not that you need it to have fun with the game :)
As long as you stick with regulars then you should just ignore the people being rude to you. Regs don’t require any specific amount of DPS and you really should expect a lower level of play ability any way since you don’t have to be 80 to run regs. Where I get a bit cranky is when I am HToC and the other dps is barely breaking 1k. If you can’t get the Black Night down fast you are dead and 1k dps does not even come close to cutting it.
ok im not the best hunter i was MM/sur before last week i only did like 1.6k dps im sure i do much more now im full Mm But i only use the lfg for gold and farming H UP for the mount. I find that most of the people i end up with are very nice I dunno that could just be the facted im in an aussie/new zelanad server or whathave you.maybe yank palyers are ruder? most wow horrow stories i have heard come from them :S
Now you will get better the more you do lfg ( i know i sure did) if you do H northrend lfg with 100 randoms you get the cute perky pug pet :D i like him but then again i have both 100 plus mini pets and mounts lol. I do get some slack from people asking why i use a crab and tallstrider but hey i dont care and you shouldn listern to the rude people. Oh and if it help you can group up with some mates and join the LFG with them so that you would least know somepeople in your random. oh and the badges are good.
Mania? The need on the roses? That’s a point of contention amongst many people. My guild over on Wyrmrest is completely flabbergasted on that. If its for an achievement, in our way of thinking, you don’t NEED it (in terms of gear upgrades or even RP bits-which you always clarify on asking for)and therefore a greed roll is acceptable and even prefered by my standards.
Run with the pet you love. Let the rest go to Fel. Aparently (this is what I’ve been told, mind you) best DPS pet out there at the moment is a wolf/worg. Furious Howl buffs your shots, raises your dps, and therefore = best. I run with a wolf on average, but I have had Helki forever, so she’s a favorite for me. But, as my Bloodriver Guild Mates know, if its a new instance, my purple tiger Ruka comes in first. She does ALL new content, dps be damned first. Its traditional. ^_^
I’m betting my gear is “better” than what you are using (blame my guild, they drag me through everything) and I’m consistantly pulling out a distracted 2.2k dps on average runs. A bit better maybe 2.5-2.7k if I actually pay attention to Dragonhawk/Viper swaps.
Your experience with that guy in DTK is actually (I hope) typical of the true raider-types in WoW. Once they get past the question of whether or not a player is truly trying, they either help out with pointers or write off the player as the type who won’t take advice, so attempting to help them is pointless. For as many assholes as there are out there, there’s a great many people who like to help.
I’m glad your gear impressed him. xD Go team Arcania!
The silly lowbies in the other instances should have been grateful to have an 80 along. That said, if you do get the urge to try random instances again, queuing into the regular level 80 dungeons (Culling, Oculus, and Utgarde Pinnacle) is generally going to net you more players who have never done the instance before, or at least not on those characters. You’ll also see a few players who have been 80 for a little while, but need the extra triumph badges from the regular dungeon daily. These players may already have some higher tier gear (yay welfare tier 9) and will be happy to carry the group, just so they can grab the extra badges. Another perk to running with people who may not know the instances as well or at all is that they’ll tend to go more slowly. Which works. :)
Generally speaking, people won’t complain about hunters using non-wolf pets, especially if they have an “OOH SHINY!” quality, like the slime. I make a point of complimenting cool hunter pets in heroics, just because it’s…just heroics. We did this stuff in pre-80 gear back in early LK. A hunter not bringing a wolf isn’t going to wipe a group.
That reminds me. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH CATS. They just aren’t as optimal for raiding as wolves are. That’s all. They’re still quite high in the pet rankings. Grr.
One of the things to keep in mind Mania is that a lot of the people you’ll be running these dungeons with (even the non-heroics) will be regular raiders on alts.
For example, if I want to practice tanking or healing on my druid and there isn’t a guild run in the offing (and I don’t decide to do something else), I’ll generally sign up for a random normal run, since I can handle that pretty easily, but heroics would likely give me a bit more trouble. However, being on an alt doesn’t change the fact that I’ve run most of these dungeons dozens of times on the hunter, so I know where to go and generally what to do (although I find out lots of extra boss and mob abilities as a tank that I never knew existed while running as ranged DPS!).
However, the early runs where I learned how all the dungeons worked were taken at a much slower pace since we didn’t have the gear to line them up and knock them down the way we do now. I still wouldn’t call it a relaxing experience – lots of fun, but also fairly demanding of concentration (since we couldn’t rely on high DPS to blast our way through things).
As a dungeon spec, BM is actually a pretty good option for doing reasonable damage without having to stress about it too much.
Point the first: remember Aspect of the Dragonhawk and Hunter’s Mark (that’s 800 AP right there)
Point the second: don’t underestimate how far you can get just spamming Steady Shot every global cooldown. It isn’t optimal, but it beats the hell out of auto-shot/AFK.
Point the third: Glyph of Serpent Sting is an awesome quality of life improving tool for the laid back DPSer. With the glyph you can lob a serpent sting at a boss and not have to worry about it for over 20 seconds while you keep firing Steady Shot. Add in Glyph of Steady Shot and your Steady Shot benefits as well. Don’t waste too much time refreshing the sting when it is already up though – for cruisy DPS, better to wait until you notice it has fallen off the target.
Point the fourth: If you notice that Kill Shot is available, hit it. Ditto for Arcane Shot.
Point the fifth: hit Bestial Wrath whenever it is off cooldown (macroing in other abilities like Kill Command, Call of the Wild and Rapid Fire as suggested above works well)
If you do any more dungeons, I suggest starting with Steady Shot spam and then adding in the other elements up to a level you feel comfortable with.
Points to note about LFG;
There will always be jerks.
There will always be ninjas.
There will always be a tank who thinks he/she can pull a whole dungeon, and then it’s the healers fault if he/she dies.
There will always be an aoe dps who doesn’t know how to manage aggro, and blames the tank.
There will always be someone from your own server, saying “hey, we’re on the same server, can I have some money?” (ok, maybe that’s mostly in levelling dungeons…)
But;
Once in a while, you meet nice people with a sense of humour, and maybe even patience! Once in a while, you actually get that warm fuzzy feeling of having fun and sharing the experience, even (yes, it truly can happen) one can come to regret not being on the same server as these newfound friends. I suggest giving it a try.
Oh, and believe it or not, going into heroics with low dps will more often give you groups that are ok with it, since, on average, they are more capable than the alts in the non-heroics and can make up for it.
One think I’d like to clarify: for the most part, people were quite nice. I did a few more dungeons last night (and got my roses — w00t!) and every group was a good one. I even did a few randoms with one group because we were having fun together.
What surprised me the most — and what will continue to be true no matter how nice people are, I think — is how exhausting it all was for me. Even on the easy stuff. :>
I wouldn’t feel too bad about the talk you heard in VOA. Even last night a group of 15 of us were doing Black Temple… I only knew one person in the group (from the guild)… but most of the conversation wasn’t about the instance itself… it was folks badmouthing the tank and/or healz. Point is… they were just kidding around. Guessing it is some odd sort of way to get comfy and egg folks on. Also guessing they knew eachother.
For the most part you will find it easyer to do them the more you do it basicly. it all just takes time and screw people who say hunters should have wolfs/cats i have had a crab and a buzzard and tallsrtider since i was lvl 10 hasnt done me any harm.
Oh yeah, if there’s 4+ mobs, you can just spam volley. It’s not horribly interesting, but that’s how AoE is. xD
Running instances can be quite tiring, regardless of the pace, just because there’s the pressure to keep going, as opposed to soloing, where you can mount up and afk whenever you need for as long as you want. :)
I can sympathise, Mania. I’m having a few computer issues at the moment but I’m actually glad I can hide behind that as an excuse so I don’t get dragged to instances (it doesn’t always work). They can be fun with people you know but I always feel they could find someone better.
I still have a few Lunar dungeons to get through and I am NOT looking forward to it. I need to improve my gear, my spec, my rotations but mainly my concentration and nerves. I forget instructions so quickly and worry so much that I’ll mess up in front of other people because I tend to not know what I’m doing. I avoid instances as much as possible.
I find it amazing that I used to raid Zul’Gurub at 60 and Karazhan at 70. At lot happened in the 10 levels since. :(
It was pretty overwhelming when I first got back into it. You have a lot of learning to do, and it can make you very tired. Just try to relax and ease yourself into it. You do not need to do amazing. You do not have to be the best. Just have fun with it.
Three mobs and up, start off with a mark, a serpent sting, then a multi-shot, arcane your main target, then volley the lot of them. I suggest hot keying both volley and beastial wrath for this. Beastial wrath if you are more then two pulls away from a boss. If you are close to a boss, don’t BW. Save it. Whenever you BW, kill command, and consider using your trinket. Multi-shot after your current volley ends if the cooldown is up, if not then volley again until you are down to two targets. At two targets, focus on the one that still has mark up, IF mark is still up. If it isn’t, mark the target with the least/most health, depending on personal preference. I personally tend to aim for the one with more. Serpent sting, aimed/multi-shot, then arcane shot. Steady shot until arcane is offcooldown, then arcane, do the same for aimed/multi a little later. Lather, rinse, repeat. For bosses, pull out all the stops, inluding rapid fire. If you ever feel comfortable enough, run up and drop an explosive trap, disengage out of range, and fire off arcane shot in mid-air. Lots of fun.
As a side note, pet choice is a factor, but it isn’t a huge one. I did some experiments using a bear recently, and found that he was doing just fine. His single target obviously wasn’t matching my ferocity pets, but he was doing a ton more damage on large numbers, which is most of what heroics are, so it was a trade off. The point is, take what you want, and have fun. Consider doing some minor pet respecs so that they focus more on damage, but don’t feel like you have to.
Don’t let it get you down. The game is what you make of it, and if you choose to make it a casual, for-fun experience, then that’s what it is. I hope you’re able to keep finding those groups that love you for your casualness and not the numbers you make in their DPS meters. Enough of that, and you may start to enjoy them and relax more, which for me always seemed to make my DPS skyrocket. There seems to be an elitist, holier-than-thou attitude that has cropped up recently among the “end game” crowd. If you can’t pull one billion DPS and aren’t decked out entirely in Icecrown Citadel epics, you fail completely. It isn’t true whatsoever. By the way, DPS meters seem to be bugged/inaccurate in a cross-realm group (from what I understand) so if someone is ragging on you about your DPS, kindly point that out the them. Then have ‘em bend over so you can show them where they can shove their attitude. :)
To be honest, I do the lazy hunter thing. Keep in Viper until combat, switch to Dragonhawk, cast misdirect on the tank, spam volley til everything’s dead, switch back to Viper. Even though I’m a fairly well-geared raider, there’s usually not enough time to do anything else. Obviously it changes for boss fights – but generaly tanks will stop and ask if everybody’s ready before starting to lay into a boss. Everything else is just “meh”.
And frankly, most groups will keep you even if they loathe you becuase it’s quicker to get through a run with someone they don’t like than it is to stop, bicker, kick and find someone else. I just don’t bother responding to any arguments in group chat :)
Meh, I’ve been doing LFG a lot since it came out and I know you can’t help but run around with some actual die-hards that live and breathe WoW 24/7 – some of those are so neurotic about how a group should operate, its unreal…. also, one time I actually ran with a group of farmers… actual GOLD and loot farmers that were Damn AMAZING inside a Heroic dungeon (no deaths, accidental or otherwise – even in OC, which was a pretty hard feat back in the day!)… and I was with them for eight dungeons straight on the same group in one day! They didn’t mind whether I was keeping up or not since they literally mowed each dungeon down to the last mob standing and rinsed and repeated on the next dungeon. They let me keep some of the loot too and everything was either DE or Greeded depending on what they already had and didn’t need.
I guess its a love hate thing…. you’ll hate it when you run in the absolute jerks…
…. “run with”… not run in……. typo at 3 in the morning where I am….
What you’ll grow to LOVE is when some dumb jerk in who hasn’t updated Recount yet tells you to ‘Pick up your DPS.’ Never fails to tick me off when I am at the top of the meter.
Another trick I find useful: Set the group tank as your focus. When your previous target dies and the tank hasn’t marked anything with a skull, use their current target as your new target.
It isn’t a perfect system (since good tanks tab target through mobs to spread threat from single-target abilities around) but it beats firing at mobs randomly.
This can also make Misdirection a lot easier to use (by means of a focus macro).
My hunter has decent gear, considering I hardly ever play her, and my boyfriend, who has played a hunter since the dawn of time and is quite good at it, has given me pointers and instructed me on my shot rotations and such. But for the life of me, I can’t seem to do any amount of DPS appropriate to my gear.
I keep telling him the Survival shot rotation/priority is too complicated for my poor, wee brain, and I’ve been spoiled by the simple spells of an elemental shaman (who has always been my main character). He insists the other specs for hunters are not as forgiving, or that they allow for less DPS, so I just mind my own business and avoid groups on my hunter like the plague. :( I feel your pain, Mania!
Curse you, English language! Where I said “they allow for less DPS”, I should have said “they do not do as much DPS”. Of course, now that I think about it, I believe Marksman is supposed to be the current “highest DPS” spec… What do I know? I just mine and collect pets on my hunter!
It’s marks->surv->BM currently. In raiding. All do fine in heroics.
I don’t like the surv rotation myself and prefer marks. If you’d be more comfortable rolling as BM for heroics, don’t let your bf stop you. You are playing your hunter, he isn’t. He has his own hunter to do what he wants on. I’m sure he doesn’t like the idea of limiting your top-end dps, but it’s completely dumb if you’re not enjoying yourself and don’t like the rotation.
Do what’s right for you. :) And if he gives you crap, tell him an end game raider said it was okay. xD
Sorry for the double post, but forgot to comment on some of the elitist attitudes out there.
Yes, there are jerkwads out there. Feel free to ignore them.
Speaking for myself, I don’t mind carrying casual players through instances when I’m on a toon with gear that’s WAY above the instance’s level. I *do* mind if they are afk in the back and not even trying. But as long as you’re putting forth the effort to be there, I take no issue. There’s no telling whether you’re a new 80 or a casual player. If your gear is pretty decent and you’re not performing up to it, maybe you got carried for it, but at least you put together an intelligent gear set.
TL,DR: It’s a question of effort. If you’re trying, you’ll find a reasonable amount of support.
I felt.. somewhat the same way when I was playing WoW.
On my main, 80 hunter, I never do dungeons. On my alts however (70 hunter, 68 DK, 45 mage, 31 druid and 21 shaman) I do dungeons all the time, both as a dps, healer and tank (granted, DK tanking is faceroll, but still!). I’ve found instancing to be really fun, as long as you’re under lvl 80. Once you’re 80, people get so high expetations about you, and unless you have the best gear and can dish out max dps you’re just a useless n00b.
It bothers me a lot, ’cause running dungeons is actually fun – especially if you manage to get a good/talkative group.
‘scuse my subpar english, It’s not my native language and I’m kinda in a hurry right now.
But yeah, that was my 2 cents.
While /lfg is a great tool to find groups, the real enjoyment of them is when you go with your own guild (or happen to get in on someone else’s guild run). You’re less worried about your personal competency, the group is more forgiving, and you can joke around if things go bad. Personally, I’m known as ‘the floor-hugger’ in my guild. What can I say… We’re in love!
If you ever get around to making an alt on Dentarg, look me up and you’ll see what I mean :)
PS: Yes, I’m still playing, tho I’ve been a VERY lazy blogger.
MD on the tank and use /assist tank macro to hunter-mark the tanks’s target are good habits to have.
if you are not sure about your shot rotations start with keeping serpent sting always on the mob and spaming steady shots (if you are BM as I assume). kill shot when you can.
this should get you comfortable about your actions in a battle and your dps should be average for your gear.
once you get comfortable in what you are doing with your char in the instance you can take the time to look around, enjoy the view, learn tactics, add a new shot type to your rotation etc. take it easy.
I suggest to get a pre-organized group of friends to run with in the random LFG- you can join as group – this will minimize the nastiness some pugs can spew.
with time and practice your feeling and gear will improve and it will become as fun as you hope.
-wit
@Galen: survival is by far the trickiest hunter spec to get optimal DPS out of. MM’s tricksiness lies in the gearing (armour pen all the way), not in the rotation (as I believe you ditch Arcane altogether due to its lack of scaling with armour pen and Chimera takes care of keeping Serpent rolling, so it is just Chimera, Aimed and Steady until the final 20% when you add Kill Shot into the mix).
SV is fun (in my opinion) and it’s nice to bring your own Replenishment to 5 man instances, but if you aren’t getting the most out of Lock & Load procs and the Black Arrow, Noxious Stings and Sniper Training damage bonuses, the DPS just isn’t going to come for you.
BM doesn’t have the oomph at the top end that the other two do, but it also makes it pretty easy to get respectable (albeit not spectacular) DPS. Your pet is doing a big chunk of your damage (so long as you have at least 1 point in GffT to keep the focus flowing) and your own rotation is just Serpent Sting whenever it is about to expire, Arcane when it is off cooldown and otherwise hitting Steady. (You can throw in Multi/Aimed if you feel like it, although people often skip those on a single since they can’t trigger Cobra Strikes).
Hi Mania, Interesting post. I’ve been playing hunter since vanilla and raid regularly with my guild. In order for us to progress I’ve got to try and get as much dps as possible so I’ve got the best gear and am always looking at rotations etc to get every inch of dps :) Was really interesting to see how a more casual hunter would feel doing pugs. I think if you progressed to heroics you’d get a lot more grief. There are some nice players out there but also a lot of nasty ones. I was training up my crab pet, ‘Buster’ for pvp and so he was only level 75 in one group in POS and we were struggling. I was doing about 4.5k dps and the rest of the group rounded on me as the leader stated ‘In your gear you should be doing at least 6k dps in here’. Lol I looked at the meters and the other two dps were doing between 1.5 and 2k!!! I left in anger.
I’ve had pugs complain before we even start that I’ve turned up with a cat rather than the slightly superior dps pet wolf!!!
It is better than the old days though. I remember the awful ‘LF1M DPS scholomance – no hunters’.
I love your site and forum and like you, I’m a pet addict but just be careful of those nasty puggers Mania :)
I get the feeling that the general behaviour in pugs can vary by battlegroup as well. Maybe I just haven’t done enough random dungeons (only 91/100 for the perky pug), but the typical group that I have encountered as part of Bloodlust seems fairly rational and competent.
the problem with the random player element of the pugs is that they do not suffer the consequences of bad behavior as they would in a more limited community.
in a guild badly behaving players will be kicked out and this would teach them the value of good behavior. in the random pug they can always get a new group because computers do not care about person-to-person reputation and the chances of playing together with the same nasty person are small.
tit-for-tat behavioral tactic fails in groups that are too large and have no policing.
thats why a good way to avoid this snag is to go with a pre-made group of guildies or as many friends as you can gather and fill the blanks with PUG and hope.
There are some interesting new stats Blizz are apparently going to start tracking in 3.3.3. From MMO Champion:
* Kicked in LFG (target) (hidden) – Number of times the player has been kicked by someone in LFG
* Kicked in LFG (initiator) (hidden) – Number of times the player kicked someone in LFG, initiating the kick
* Kicked in LFG (follower) (hidden) – Number of times the player kicked someone in LFG, voting, but not initiating
* Abandoned LFG (hidden) – Number of times the player abandoned an LFG dungeon
* Completed LFG (hidden) – Number of times the player completed an LFG dungeon
I expect they will just track them for a while to see what kinds of pattern emerge, but eventually they should be able to use it as a builtin reputation system.
For some reason my day is totally made by this one line of yours:
“and he admired my slime”
Hee hee! I’m TOTALLY jealous of that slime. A hunter in our guild has one, and I always have to go admire it.
I’m also trying to get my nerve up to try the grouping thing. I’ve only tried it with friends in the past (the random dungeon thing that’s a daily), but I’ve had so many people tell me it’s the way I need to go for gear (“do heroics!”), so I’m trying to get my nerve up. I probably worry too much – but I’d hate to be the one holding back a group because of my dps (I’ve done low dps as a shadowpriest and a hunter, I’m just not epic with the dps). But I do love the way the groupfinder thing is set up, and think it was a great way to organize it.
But I completely understand with you about it being tiring.
I’ll take some one like you who is at least trying over an elitist jerk or some one who is just AFKing anyday, Batgirl. Don’t be afraid, just step up and give it a shot. You’ll encounter good, and you’ll encounter bad. You’ll also get tired of being OOM. *Laughs*
Heroics are not hard anymore.
Between the LFG buff and the easy availability of gear that’s a higher item level than the majority of the heroics, unless you’re walking into a group with pre-Northrend gear, you’re not going to be holding the group back. You might not be pulling as much weight as the other dps, but you wouldn’t be holding the group back. So don’t worry about that.
Some people will complain and be rude, but most people don’t mind. After all, we all had to start somewhere. As long as you’re not afking the whole thing and basically expecting to be carried, then there’s no problem. You won’t get queued into heroics your gear can’t handle.
It’s so annoying that people look down on players who don’t overgear heroics by more than a couple of tiers. Sure, that makes the heroics go faster, but so what? It doesn’t mean that the lower dps group won’t still complete the instance.
Tbh with my experiences, Kalli, I usually look down on the people who overgear me- not all of them, but most. I’ve gotten teased, either in jest or cruely, for doiing heroics in mostly 200 gear when Caim dinged 80. I’ve been bullied, hastled, treated like a meat shield that has no mind or say or opinion. People get impatient and don’t seem to get I’m still getting used to tanking, and it just makes me not want to tank.
Why should I? Healers complain, dps complain, I get heckled, teased, mocked and have had loot stolen from me.
And then just when I figure all people I group with, save for Aria are craphats who want to use me as a personal speedsled to the end boss, I get the rare, wonderful group who don’t mind when I get a brainfart in FoS and take a wrong turn- or putting up with me being overly cautious in Oc, or healers that seem to understand I don’t want to go hurtling like a mad beast on steroids and pulling 5 groups at once.
And Palla where have you beeen get to the forums man *chews*
And yeah afkers.
Hate afkers.
Hate. Or worse. Ninja afkers.