5001

That’s one of the trickier heroics, although it’s also one of the shortest if you get a group that knows what it’s doing. Most other heroics are more forgiving of mistakes. With certain exceptions, of course. (I’m looking at you, Vanessa of Deadmines)

5002

That’s good to hear, since this was a lot more forgiving than I had expected it to be. Certainly, it was hard. We wiped two or three times at the last boss (nowhere in the “ways in which this is unlike normal” explanations was “don’t let the fucking blight beasts hit you” mentioned, dammit), once to some goblins, once to a pair of elementals at the end of the gauntlet, but it was nowhere near as difficult as I feared it would be.

It also helped that it was a pure guild run and everyone was very understanding of Baby’s First Heroic.

5003

ToT is weird in that the trash can be much harder than the bosses.

I finally completed hc Grim Batol today and broke 2500 spirit. Throngus’s fire shield AoE is still the most brutal healing experience the game has thrown my way, even harder than Ashbury or Springvale.

5004

Tides trash is worse than the bosses in most situations. Namely the short hallways before the last two bosses on the lower level. Effing elementals. If your dps/heals/tanks suck, it will all suck but those two trash sections can wipe even competent groups.

Sadly, it won’t get any better with LFD until tier 12 stuff is out and tier 11 is easily obtained.

5005

TheJare: Fire shield shouldn’t do much damage if you’re doing it right. Have everyone group around the boss and run through him when he changes facing. At most, 2-3 people should be taking 2-3 ticks of the shield.

That said, it can still totally suck if he goes into a shield phase with an inconveniently placed rockfall.

5006

And don’t forget the arrows fired at everyone during the fireshield phase! Those suck.

5007

Heroic Grim Batol is my least favorite. Sure, Stonecore sucks because Ozruk is a beast, but all the other bosses are easy. Every single boss in GB is a PUG killer.

5008

Thats easily the worst part of the whole boss, especially if you’re floating a lot of clothies.

5009

Most PuGs cant make it past Coroboros.

“Dont stand in that”
combined with
“Kill those adds”
tends to equal
“OMG all the DPS/the healer is dead”

5010

Actually, most of my wipes at Coroboros have been to the tank getting hit by the underground rumbly charge. :(

5011

All the pugs I’ve been with either don’t try to do it that way, or scatter like headless chickens at the first sight of the AoE. As soon as one person takes 2 consecutive shots, or I get impaled, or a rockfall appears at the wrong place, healing falls behind and it’s a mad rush to catch up.

I didn’t look at my recount, but I must have done over 12k hps during most of that fight. We went on to one-shot everything else and get the last boss’ achievement (I barely even had to heal), so all things considered, it was a pretty good pug.

5012

My wife got a turtle this weekend fishing in Twilight Highlands. Should I mention her skill wasn’t even 525 at the time? Should I mention the crabby pet she got from doing the SW fishing daily last week?

Should I mention the fucking red whelping she got in Vanilla and that – to this fucking day – NONE of my characters have gotten a whelpling of any color?

Not that I’m jealous or anything. I’ma just take my Fox Kit and go home.

5013

Fishing is silly. I do it from to time when I’m killing time, so I’m at about 200 fishing. My wife, on the other hand, will log in, spend 20m fishing over in redridge, for instance, and then sell everything she catches. She makes about 20-50gp from that 20m usually.

Almost every fish you catch at the specific pools sells at the AH for good money. Heck, I’ve found fishing vendors where I can buy fish for 10s and sell them at the AH for 1g. They don’t sell particularly fast, but many fish sell pretty easily and fast.

So it may be a boring thing to me, but my wife loves just being able to hop in, get some quick rewards when she’s got a few minutes and then put her loot up at the AH. Makes damn fine money at it too.

Side note, best gather skill in the game is Skinning. Why? Because I am already doing the dumb ass collect X of Y, might as well skin the beasts I find while doing that too. One extra right click, each is worth about a gold.

5014

Yeah the cooked results from fishing all sell fairly decently still, even the ones from BC era.

5015

So that’s what happens to most of the fish that go up at the AH…

5016

Hehe compared to all the pains and ninjalooting arguments that people go through to get a few extra points in some stat, cooking buffs are awesome and painless.

5017

Over on our guild forums, we have a thread called “Tales of Random Heroics” where we share stories of the goofy stuff than happens on dungeon runs. It’s been dormant since Cata started, but I think it’s time to kick it off again, as I’ll share some anecdotes from pugs of the past week:

Blackrock Caverns: We zone in and we’re sitting at the entrance for a minute, doing nothing. One of the group mentions how he hates druid tanks. Our tank (a druid) finally speaks up, and apologizes for his terrible connection. He asks for another minute. We have 2 shammys in the group, and one takes that as a cue to run ahead and start pulling. Group begins to wipe, disbands. Successful pulls: 0.

Stonecore: We have a group that can viably cc 3 mobs on most pulls. Tank marks everything and then charges in without bothering to mention who should do what. He’s also marked the center mob, who’s a boss and can’t be cc’d, to be ice trapped. Naturally, nothing gets CCd and the group wipes. Tank goes nuts, calls healer fail, hunter fail, etc. Group points out that he marked stuff wrong and shouldn’t have charged in. Group disbands. Successful pulls: 0.

Lost City: I zone into a dungeon in progress, at the first boss. The group is pleading with the tank to clear adds on the far side, tank ignores and pulls the boss. Within a minute, the tank’s goal appears to be to stand in as many mines as possible, making it hard to DPS. Someone gets thrown into the adds on the far side and the group wipes. Someone asks WTF the tank is doing, and he says “kiting him like you’re supposed to,” which blows my mind, and then he proceeds to bitch about everyone’s DPS, which actually wasn’t too bad considering the horrible job he’d done of positioning the boss. Group disbands. Successful pulls: 0.

Halls of Origination: Opening 4-pull. I’m on my hunter, so I can trap one. I do so and the tank runs straight to the mob in the rear, completely ignoring the other two mobs, who run amok and maul the rest of the group. Group disbands. Successful pulls: 0.

Grim Batol: I zone into a dungeon in progress, at the next-to-last boss. Tank pulls, add spawns, DPS warrior Heroic Leaps to the add and promptly explodes when it dies, which I find hilarious. Group wipes. I explain that the adds have to be killed at range, that they have to be kited away from the group and you can’t be standing anywhere near them when they die. On the next attempt, warrior runs right back up to the add and explodes. On the next add, our other DPS doesn’t move while marked, lets the mob walk right up to him and the tank, kills both of them. Group disbands. Successful pulls: 0.

Shadowfang Keep: Group zones in and the tank picks one elite to tank while everything else runs free and mauls the rest of the group. People die, zone back in and get mauled again while the tank parties with his one mob, oblivious to the death around him. We have 4-5 deaths before we even get to the boss. Of course, we wipe on Godfrey 3x, sometimes with a few bonus deaths because he didn’t reset while people were zoning back in. Bosses killed: 0.

Deadmines: I’ve only run this twice. Both were succesful, including a pug who’d mostly never done it and yet blew through it in under an hour. Go figure.

You look over this stuff and you realize: most failpugs aren’t because people have lousy gear or because they lack an encyclopedic knowledge of their character or the dungeon. It’s usually because someone is just plain old dumb.

5018

Which is why, even though I have been playing WoW again since just before this expansion, I have not played in even one PuG. They are what makes WoW unfun.

Which gets me back to WoW ignoring estalbishing a real social aspect to the game, but that is for another time…

5019

You’re missing out on a lot of fun, then. God, the stories you get. Plus you develop the ability to know exactly what level of failpug is required to leave the group.

My pet theory about why most players are so bad is that they just don’t read, anything, ever, especially in-dungeon chat about how to Not Die. Unless one of their real-life friends tells them how to do something they’re not going to learn.

5020

At the moment, I’d say out of any four heroic pugs, one is an outright failure of dumbassery, two will have varying levels of messiness, and maybe 1/4 will actually go smoothly. That number will obviously improve over time as gear gets better and people learn the fights (although that 1/4 will still fail, because there’s no cure for stupid).

But in defense of pugs, they’re a good way to expose you to new strats you’d otherwise not be aware of. In the successful BRC pugs I’ve done so far, every tank has done a great job of dipping the boss in and out of the center so we never see a single add, but in a recent guild run, our own tank wasn’t even sure that was possible. Even if you believe you’re better than 90% of the playerbase, accept that there’s something you can learn from that other 10% and pass on to your guild to make them better players.

IMO, there’s nothing wrong with bailing on an obvious failpug, but playing in a vacuum can be detrimental to your own play.