I started off this Wow Journey as a Prot warrior. That is what
my guild needed. And this was before Dual Speccing, so everytime
you had to respec, 50g out of the pocket (if you had to respec to
often).
So I never really worried that much about getting dps gear. My farming
was mostly done on my hunter, and I just used those mats to level up
my warriors main talents (Bsmithing and Leatherworking).
But with dual Speccing available, and many of the uldaur fights being
1 tank only needed. I started to concentrate on getting some of my dps
gear in order.
My current guild has a fury warrior, so I decided to go with the Arms tree
to balance out some buffs, and arms can do some decent dps as they go.
All this builds up to what occured this weekend. On the Shandris servers
there ends up being maybe one or two advertised pugs on the weekend.
Saturday's tend to be the best spot to pick these up. Especially 25 man
Naxx pugs. Most of my gear is Naxx 10 man dps gear with a few pieces
of Reputation gear thrown in there. So I'm capable in 25 man Naxx.
Lately there seems to be this habit of advertising for 3.5 dps naxx runs,
something that tends to bug me at times. Arms warriors unless they are
uldaur geared or have no ping time to speak of have difficulties reaching the
3.0k dps even raid buffed. Especially in fights where there is a lot of movement.
Slam, which ends up being the big rotation hit other than specials
(overpower and suddent death and bleed effects) resets with movement
or even if you sneeze wrong. miss a slam, your dps goes to the 4 corners
of the earth and doesn't show up on the mob.
So in naxx, I generally average about 2.3-2.4, some bosses like heigan it's
just going to suck a lot because of the movement that's inherent in the fight.
What a Arms warrior does bring to the table is a massive amount of buffs for
bleed effects, improved Demo Shout, etc. something that ends up adding
between 5 and 10% to the raid as a whole. The bleed effects become very
important because raiding as feral druids right now other than bear
just don't exist that often.
So that brings me to my raiding gone bad story. I ended up with a pug
group that came together. Originally I had signed up for a group on our
boards, but through either a mistake or ignorance it was ignored and I never
got the invite. So I picked up another pug group, this one just felt bad from
the start. But I believe in finishing a raid if it's at all possible.
Somehow on the 5th face pull in the slime room I should have realized that
it wasn't going to happen. But I stuck it out for over 7 hours. 7 hours that
I will never get back and probably could have run any number of instances,
or made money or went and petted my cat.
Why did it fail? Mostly cause people were either undergeared, trying to
get easy gear or had just kicked into "I'm going to get drunk and raid" mode.
Being a fan of the occasional brew, I can truly say I've never raided Drunk,
and don't have any intentions to raid completely
smashed. buzzed, well sometimes that's the only way to make it through
some raids, but I try to at least be able to spam buttons.
What should have sealed the deal is that somehow we were able to down
plague wing. And the raid leader won the tier set. Instead of waiting til after
the raid, keep the momentum and going forward. He called for a break, went
back to dalaran and we ended up waiting 20 minutes for him to buy his tier
shoulders, get them enchanted, get them gemmed up and come
back. This pretty well killed any chance of getting farther. After a few more
wipes on gluth (somehow we knocked out Patchwerk and was able to squeak
buy grobby. We couldn't kill gluth. For those in the know, YOU DO NOT WIPE
ON GLUTH unless your on the failboat express. Which obviously we were at
that time.
So where was the fault? Probably in the idea that I didn't cut and run
after the 3rd hour and the facepulls of slimes. If people aren't paying attention,
and they do it again and again then it's time to get into their face, or tell them
to leave or encourage them to leave.
My rules of Raiding and a successful raid has been pretty easy.
1. Set a level that's achieveable without being lazy.
3.5 dps is people wanting an easy run. 2.5 is doable by just about any
class that has taken the time to get geared up and running.
2. Keep Momentum going. 5-10 minute breaks are great when you've
cleared 2 wings in naxx, or done 4-5 bosses (depending on wipes etc).
3. For the love of heaven no, you cannot go and turn in your token to get this
item or this item. it's going to take you longer to get it gemmed and enchanted
and it isn't going to improve you that much.
4. Set the loot rules from the start.
This is an important part of things to me. Many of the pugs that I go on
end up having 3-4 items on reserve. Mostly because it's a majority of a guild
that's hosting the pug run. This is fair as long as it's from the start known and
not just dropped when they get to that item. Where it's a privlidge to go on a pug,
it's also a privlidge for a PUG host to have people to fill in that run. Both must
coexist to be successful.
I have been on one pug run that started off with being open roll and 1 tier
piece per need. After arriving at Saph the run leader had to leave and put
someone else in charge. There were some changes in the pug roster and
ended up with some more of the host pug guilds people. The people who
joined the run decided that they didn't want to see anyone but Guild people
rolling on anything. This is close to just offering scraps to everyone because
they were honored to get to go with an uber group. After this was decided
by people leaving and saying that they could go jump on a pogo stick, the same
loot rules were applied as we continued. The funny thing is that during the last
parts of the run insults from the new pug members were thrown about how
they had to carry the pug players and that all pug players should be shot. Yet
when the dps and survivablity and healing meters came out,they were far below the expectations presented by the puggers. I won't mention any names, and I'm
going to show my defiance about that :-)
5. Keep an eye on the weakest links.
If people are continually going afk, or lagging behind, or seemingly to be
on autoshot or raising a ruckus by rolling on everything, main spec,
off spec and things that they couldn't even equip. Politely tell them to
knock it off, if they continue boot them. one bad apple can ruin an entire
pug quickly. That doesn't mean accidents don't happen and people have to
go afk for emergencies. But it does mean that if their not doing their best, you
have to prioritize yourself for the other 24 members of the run and not the
25th. Even if they are a guildmate.
6. Be ready to know your strats and what to do. and stick to what works.
Everyone has an opinion, everyone has seen this boss, or this boss or this
boss and their guild does it this way. suggestions are great. But in the long
run, decide what strat to use and do it that way. It makes things easier to
not have a 10 minute discussion on how to kill thaddius, do it the way that
you know, and be done and move to the next boss. A thinking raid leader
is a good raider leader.
Hope to see you all pugging soon.
Mo
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