I had two interesting experiences with the LFD tool last night that I think are worth sharing.
In the first, there was a discussion in /g about getting a group together for a random dungeon. Three guildies joined, so we needed two PUG members. We didn’t have a tank online at the time, but we did have a feral (cat) druid who was putting together a set of bear gear. He was concerned that he might not be ready for tanking heroics yet, so we discussed running a non-heroic random first to test how easy (or hard) he would be to heal. I went afk for a few minutes, and when I returned to my computer, we queued up and got Halls of Origination.
Everything was going smoothly until we got to the first boss (with the levers below). We wiped three times because the snakes in the pit kept killing the people assigned to pull the levers. After the third wipe, I remarked on vent, “What’s happening? We’ve never had trouble with this boss before.” We then killed him on the next attempt.
Fast-forward about forty minutes and we’re now at the second-last boss. Up until that point, all the bosses had dropped gear that wasn’t for my class/spec, so I only gave the items a quick cursory glance before rolling disenchant. This time, the boss dropped an item that was an obvious upgrade for me, so I rolled need. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it was an ilvl 346 blue marked “Heroic”. Apparently we’d been doing the dungeon on heroic the whole time and I hadn’t even realized it! I guess when I was afk they decided to just run a heroic instead of doing a normal dungeon first. Did I ever feel stupid!
A few hours later, three guildies and I (rogue, hunter, ret paladin, holy priest) queued up for a random heroic. We needed a tank, so we waited for nearly 30 minutes before our dungeon (heroic SFK) launched. After the loading screen, the first words said by our PUG tank were, “hurray, my first heroic!”. This did not instill the rest of the group with a sense of confidence.
It was apparent that our tank had plenty of experience with WotLK heroics but none in Cata, because he did every pull the “Wrath way”, running up to the group and using his AoE threat abilities, CC be damned. He ignored us when we told him that we needed to shackle and trap targets instead of AoE facerolling the trash packs. He was also being a jerkoff in party chat, constantly asking which bosses drop tank loot and complaining whenever a BoE green dropped that wasn’t tanking plate. We discussed kicking him on vent, but we didn’t want to wait again for another tank, so we decided to stick it out.
Somehow, miraculously, we made it through the entire run without any party member dying. We even earned the “To the Ground!” achievement on Commander Springvale, a boss we skipped after several wipes the previous time we ran H-SFK with a full-guild group. Unfortunately, I think we may have taught this PUG tank some bad habits because his AoE facerolling strategy actually worked (although at the cost of our healer having to drink after every pull). He’ll probably be less inclined to use CC in future heroics because he didn’t need to with our group.
So maybe the lesson here is that heroics aren’t as hard as we all thought at first, and a week’s worth of gear upgrades makes a huge difference?
