I’ve mostly stopped running random dungeons with Namthe now, except once daily to get my emblems of Frost. On the druid, however, I’ve got plenty of gearing up still to do. And there have been a couple of abusive idiots.

The first, a Moonkin (from my own server, no less, though it makes no real difference) didn’t know what he was doing against Forgemaster Garfrost. Standing out in the AoE, he got killed in fairly short order and then unleashed a slew of curses at me for failing in my duty to keep him up (I should note as well that the tank was relatively undergeared – around 30k HP).

My respose? “You wouldn’t have needed so much healing if you’d LoSed the AoE even once”. The tank backed me up and the guy immediately quit the group. Score One for common sense.

Second fun group member was very shortly afterward. Zone into Halls of Lightning. Buff up. And the hunter immediately lays into our pallytank.

“What the f*** do you paladins think you’re doing, always give me wisdom? Stop being such a f***ing idiot and give me Kings, you c***!”

Charming. And it carried on in that vein for a while. At that point I decided that I’d like to kick the guy. Unfortunately the dungeon timer was still up so we were stuck. So I did the next best thing. I deliberately didn’t heal him. To his credit he lasted a while, but when he finally bit the dust, our warlock asked:

“Res the hunter?”

“Nah,” both the annoyed tank and I replied in unison. A few minutes after that, we kicked him. Good riddance.

Moral of the story? Don’t swear at the people playing your support classes. You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.

Here endeth the lesson.

The big thing I miss is the whole travelling across the world to get to a destination. Even if it’s just being summoned, it feels a lot more epic than being unceremoniously whisked away from wherever you were, and whisked back when you finish.

Of the negative experiences,  there have been two. The first one was entirely not the group’s fault. It turns out that if your world server crashes in a certain way, you’ll disconnect from a shared instance server too. Given at the time I’d just pulled a boss and when I managed to get back online ten minutes later, I could see that there had been a wipe, it wasn’t surprising I’d been kicked by the group.

The second one was caused by Oculus, Destroyer of Pugs. On zoning in, two people immediately left the group. Of those remaining, one hadn’t done it before, and admitted as much. I asked him to listen to my instructions so that we’d get through the last boss fine. The replacement players were happy to do occulus, and had done it before multiple times.

So, after downing the first boss in relatively short order we moved onto the drakes. This was where things began to fall apart. It turns out that the last member of our party also had never been here before, had kept quiet, and was now demonstrating the most Epic of Fails I’ve seen in a long time. He had no vehicle bar. He claimed he’d never used a vehicle before, and couldn’t get off the dragon once he was on it.All the while others were pulling the random flying dragons from all directions. I’ve no idea how they were managing it.

The excuse? “I don’t PvP”. Obviosuly you don’t raid or level, either, matey, given the huge numbers of vehicle quests out there.

Anyway, in the 10 minutes it took us to clear the trash, he’d “discovered” how to unmount. Suspicious. The second boss was a nightmare – I ended up soloing it after everyone else failed to get out of the AoE. Third boss was OK, but not great, idiots with the time bomb debuff running toward the group rather than away from it.

And the fourth… after people ignored my requests to actually get a green drake (I was on red, everyone else on yellow) and ran into the boss without actually checking who was near for a second time, I said a single word. “Bye”. And I ninjaquit the instance.

I’m not proud, but Occulus has a reputation for being difficult and now I see why. It’s not that it’s hard (it isn’t). It’s just that two people unwilling to listen even for a second if they’ve never been there before make things impossible.

I tank to enjoy myself. Hell, most situations I can salvage, like pulling many packs at once in a conventional dungeon (my record so far is five, and I did that knowing full well that everyone was well geared and would cope). But having to sit back and watch as someone who’s never been there costs me 14G every time I die because they know better? No thanks.

Perhaps I’m being overly negative. There have been far, far more good experiences than bad. It’s unfortunate that the bad ones overshadow the good.

After a few too many “close, but no cigar” moments on the 25-man heroic Northrend Beasts encounter, it’s been suggested a couple weeks’ more gearing up is needed. I can’t honestly find a reason to disagree with that decision, given the number of times things have happened that could be avoided with just a little more practice. And how are we practicing? In 10-man heroic mode, of course.

It’s worked rather well – we breezed through the first four bosses in our first twenty-five attempts or so. None of the held us up for too long. However – then, along came a spider, in the shape of Aub’Arak.

70 attempts, and several changes of strategy later, things are getting… somewhere. We can get to phase three much of the time, and then things just fall apart. And there’s the gist of the problem. Raid makeup.

And I don’t mean the classes we’re bringing along. I mean the players.

Raiders are generally one of four archetypes:

• Excellent at doing their jobs, but impatient with others who aren’t so excellent
• Excellent at doing their jobs, patient with others
• Reasonable at doing their jobs, but able to improve
• Bleeding awful.

Now, fortunately, we don’t have many of the latter (and they don’t generally get invited to raids). Most people are somewhere around the second, and unfortunately we have some people who fit into the first category. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem as progress can be good enough to keep them satisfied. Unfortunately, sometimes, things don’t go the right way fast enough. It just takes a few words. In this case, the words were:

“Guys, I don’t think this is working. I want to give up”

Of course, no-one paid much attention to this. After all, the hardcore player expressing doubt is something that most of us have come across at one time and another, and we try not to pay it much mind. Unfortunately the subconscious isn’t so easily fooled. The next attempt, our DPS was down a full 15%. Not so much as to stop us getting to phase 3, but enough that phase 3 was now more of a problem.

It didn’t get better. After a few more goes, the raid was (not unexpectedly) called. The few negative comments made (not directed at any one person) had been enough that on some level raid performance was predestined to fail.

Next time, I hope we will have a different raid makeup, one where everyone is at about the same level of improvement, or able to be patient enough with the others.

Bosses aren’t the hardest thing a raid has to face. No, that honour goes to the raid’s own members and their expectations of each other.

On Namthe, as mentioned before, I’ve had:

• Many, many players with sub-1k DPS output
• Healers who couldn’t keep me up and blamed it on me
• People who didn’t see a problem that the tank was doing more damage than anyone else

On Dru, I’ve had:

• Countless heroic, and pugged, runs where *nobody died at all*
• A fast, relaxed and effortless Naxx-10 pug (that regrettably I had to leave early)
• An Obsidian Sanctum pug that went equally smoothly (and got me a title)
• invitations to several raids on the back of healing a heroic 5-man

Funny how things turn out, every pug I heal seems to be fantastic, and every pug I tank turns to pain. Given my tanking gear is likely to be at the top end of pug tanks (Some I’ve healed in the last week have had less than 25k HP), and my healing gear is at best average, I do wonder why this is. I do know that I’m not about to declare healing my calling in raids – tanking’s still my main love – but I do wonder about why things always seem to go so much better when healing compared to tanking.

Let’s be clear here, I have had many, many good results from pugging 5-mans, in every instance and on both my level 80 characters. Trial of the Champion, however, may as well be called the Trial of the eejit. I’ve had many decent runs of the place, both normal and heroic, but there’s been a few terribad ones too – mostly through DPS players  doing sub-800 DPS, as well as one where the healer, a holy paladin, was far too undergeared. I’ll let the paladin off, though, because after the run, I had a conversation with him about his gear choices – he knew he needed to improve, and wanted to do so.

What took the biscuit, though, was my first trip there on Heroic mode . I’d briefly read up on each boss, but I’ve always stood by the fact that reading up is no substitute for experience, and in general, I’m right. Once I’ve seen a boss, I understand it. Before, I jut have hints of what’s going to happen.

The jousting wasn’t too painful. After countless runs, I still hate it though – there’s just too much going on in the transition to foot battle, especially if the bosses are spread out. It seems like dumb luck as to whether anyone else will get killed before I can round them up successfully, but they’re not too bad once you’ve established themselves.

Then we came to Argent Confessor Paletress. After the DPS went all-out before I had a chance to grab aggro from the Memory of Van Cleef, and dying. Then we wiped, allegedly because “Namthe’s taking 10k melee hits”. Uh, what? Recount didn’t agree, and I said as much. After a second wipe much the same as the first (DPS dying to the damage reflection), our first healer left, and our retri paladin went holy, grabbing another DPS from somewhere. That just about got us through.

And then came the Black Knight. On top of his Frost Fever and Blood Plague, the healer couldn’t keep up, trying to heal through rather than cleanse the diesases. I was also told that I was obviously doing something wrong. I can’t see what that was (and having run it sucessfully since, both as healer and tank, I still can’t.)

The rest of the group, trusting their healer more than me, booted me. To be more precise, they all broke group and reformed, because I was the leader. What they hadn’t reckoned on was:

1. I was utterly, utterly incensed by the abuse directed at me for allegedly repeatedly wiping the raid
2. I was part of the original instance group, and still in the instance

Hell, if I was going to have a wasted instance ID because of asshattery, so were they. While I sat in the instance, they couldn’t enter for more than 59 seconds at a time. They asked for me to leave. I declined. Repeatedly and always politely. I told them that the instance ID was as much mine as theirs, and given that they had elected to leave the group, would they please go away?

The standoff lasted an hour or so before I decided I’d rather do something rather more productive. But hey, if you’re going to piss me off, set me back 80G in repair bills and then just dump me, I’m more than happy to return the favour.

Guild sites should show: Where they’re at in progression, raid times, loot system, and an app link somewhere visible.

Sounds mostly sensible enough

• How far you’re progressed? Definitely makes sense for a prospective applicant to know if they’re horrendously undergeared for your content.
  
• Raid Times? Yep, makes no sense to apply to a guild if you’re never going to match their raiding schedule
• Application link? Make it easy to apply, of course. If you don’t you’ll lose out on applicants who can’t find your application form.

But the other one? Loot system? I completely fail to see why that should ever be something that needs advertising. In my experience, there are two types of applicant. There are those who are interested in raiding for its own sake, seeing the gear obtained as a means to an end (seeing more content, beating more difficult encounters). And then there are the people who want to get the gear so they can stand around in Dalaran and /flex at lesser-geared passers-by.

I’ve written extensively on the subject of loot systems before. There are some good, some bad, they’re all capable of being gamed in different ways (and if you meet someone who says their system is perfect, they’re a liar). But when someone asks the question “What DKP system do you use?”, in my experience what they really mean is one of two questions:

“How soon can I get to looking hardcore in Dalaran?”

or:

“How long will I have to put up with this crummy guild before I’m geared enough to find a better one?”

Players in well-progressed raiding guilds are almost inevitably there to experience the journey, not the destination. By asking the DKP question up-front, a prospective member is showing that they are thinking of their reward in terms of the pixels they can decorate their character with, rather than the satisfaction of having beaten a tough encounter.

If you’re interested in progression for progression’s sake then so long as it’s fair (and let’s be honest here any progression-oriented guild has to have a fair loot system or they’ll implode into a black hole of drama) it shouldn’t matter exactly what that system is. Almost all the players who would want to join your guild should be there for the teamwork, not the high-ilevel purples.

Progress should be its own reward. So long as the loot is distributed afterward in such a way as to make further progress as easy as possible (however you choose to define that), it shouldn’t matter too much how it is distributed.

“hey m8, wanna run Naxx 10?”

As a matter of fact, I don’t. One of Namthe’s rules for a stress-free life at the moment is:

• Namthe does not run Naxxramas. At all.

This is mostly due to the fact that after running it so much pre-ulduar, I don’t want to see it again. In addition, it’s an ugly, ugly dungeon that really feels like more could have been done to it to bring it up to date when it was re-released.

Inevitably I turn to my approacher, and notice that invariably he has me targeted- he’s inspecting me. Nothing wrong with that in itself – I’ve often been known to inspect other players to see what they’re wearing. However, more than that, I’m being vetted.

Most of what I’m wearing these days is i226; I don’t (ordinarily) wear gear with an ilevel below 213. This appears to make me ideal for their purposes, being both (apparently) available and ridiculously outgearing the content they want me to run. Invariably the person approaching me is wearing a mix of i187 and 200 blues and maybe a couple of Heroic epics.

If I’m feeling curious, I’ll reply, along the lines of “I have all the gear I could possibly want from Naxx, plus 350 badges. What could I possibly want from there?” The answer is always “Badges, for gems or frozen orbs,” like they didn’t bother to read the question in the first place.

What I find more surprising is that often these people aren’t even looking in LFG for a tank; they’ve spotted me and real soon now they’ll find another eight people to fill in their dream run. I suppose that what I’m really wondering is this – why do people I’ve never met have this strange idea that I might be willing to run a dungeon that I quite obviously massively outgear for them?

The problem is that no-one believes they are hardcore. In the past, I played a lot more than I do now, for sure. Perhaps I was hardcore then. But if that’s the case, why did I rarely see a 25-man raid, and fail to beat the third boss in Zul’Aman? These days, I have even more time to give to things outside of WoW. I don’t spend every waking hour thinking up new boss stategies, I don’t spend my days poring over spreadsheets trying to work out the best upgrade (well, OK, maybe I’ve been known to do that, but only on my lunch break, and not very often).

A famous man once said:

“Anyone more progressed than you is hardcore, and anyone less is casual or a slacker”.

It’s true, to an extent. But only to an extent. I know hardcore players that haven’t even set foot in Ulduar (and have only seen Naxx a couple of times). There are several people in  The Hidden Circle who come to raids but just aren’t around that much the rest of the time.

To understand my feelings on how Ulduar should feel, I think it’s worth going back in time to the launch of Zul’Aman. I was in a position of having cleared Karazhan multiple times but couldn’t hold on to enough people for Gruul’s Lair (that’s another tale). ZA was hard, and that was with the best players in the guild in a run. It was a logical (but difficult) progression from Karazhan. We walked away from that first week with just a single boss down. And that was on the first instance with a normal and a hard mode (timed bear runs).

This was what I was expecting from Ulduar. We had the power to progress, just much more slowly than zerging everything down in a few weeks.  Instead I’m still seeing ever-increasing nerfs, even to optional bosses (Ignis and Razorscale, for two). The argument that I’m obviously hardcore because I hold a title afforded to one in five people who’ve downed a single 25-man boss (I looked it up) doesn’t sit well with what I see as belonging to that label. Yes, there are hard modes, but I sit in the uncomfortable position of being not hardcore enough for hard mode (we’re nowhere near even getting XT-001′s heart killed) and being too casual for the hard modes (at present).

And there’s the problem. No-one will admit to being hardcore, unless they’re in the top 2%. I think when it comes down to it, hardcore is a state of mind.

From one of my guildmates:

This is where I spend my leisure time, so I want it to be fun. I want it to be the raiding guild it is, which is an inclusive one, where there is space for the ‘characters’ of wow… The nab huntards who pull the entire dungeon, or who let their pets pee up Kirin’s treeform, or who fry Grog’s Brown Rabbit… Where there is space and time to wait for the little Parisian gnome who fall off slippery pipes and tries to find his way back, or dumb shadowpriests who fail at voids…

To me this says “We are not hardcore”. We’re progressed, but not hugely so.

Labels like “Slacker”, “Hardcore” and “Casual” are simply too wide ranging and encompassing to be useful to anyone. There’s far too much stigma, frequently unintended, attached to each for anyone to truly wear such badges with pride.

It’s true that you can’t please all of the player base all of the time, and I think sometimes a lot of the more vocal (and hardcore) players forget that we are in the minority. Not everyone wants to be, or is able to, raid for however many hours it could take to down Kil’Jaeden in TBC. The vast majority of players are in smaller, friendlier guilds who don’t go out and conquer all available raid content in a month and then complain that there’s nothing for them to do.

There were Molten Core guilds and alliances all the way up to the release of the Burning Crusade, and there were Karazhan guilds all the way up to Lich King. Nowadays everyone’s in a Naxx guild, whether they’ve killed two bosses or all fifteen. Sure, some of us are working on or have killed Sartharion with three drakes, or Malygos, but the vast majority of raiding time is spent in Naxx. The other two encounters just don’t take very long to do at all once learned.

Wrath of the Lich King is still selling well, say Blizzard, and I have no cause to disbelieve them. There are many many more players who have progressed less well quickly than I have, and I have no doubt that there are many more who continue to level.

The biggest error was tuning Naxxramas on a too-easy scale; it does seem as if the difficulty that I remember being present in Karazhan is missing, and it’s a shame. On the other hand I also remember having to stack the raid in favour of hunters and priests in our early Kara runs, for the simple reason that we needed all the Crowd Control we could get against Moroes.

Almost nobody saw Sunwell, and it was disappointing that such a tiny number of people got to see the very end of the Burning Crusade.  Now it seems we’ve gone too far the other way. I think Ulduar will go some way to addressing this – it takes time to balance things in favour of the average player instead of the top 2%.

So, for all those people who are complaining that Blizzard haven’t done their job properly in delivering enough content, well, I agree with you. I am, however, in the minority, as are you. The vast majority of the playerbase are still happily working their way through the content.

I want some more content, I really do. I’m just not so arrogant as to assume that every single player of twelve million is in the same position that I am.

The healer and the tank are, in some respects, the most important of the roles in any group, be it five-man or twenty-five. The healer in particular is essential for any content you don’t significantly outgear and level, for the simple reason that without him, nobody would survive five minutes. Similarly, the tank is necessary because only he has the gear which allows him to be repeatedly hit hard and not die.

Note that I am talking about the roles here. Your tank might be a moonkin. Your healer might be an elemental shaman. Neither of these things matters, so long as they can perform the job given to them – tanking, healing, whatever. Without someone performing these support roles, and it doesn’t have to be one of the “traditional” classes, nobody can survive for very long.

And, just as much, without the DPS, no healer or tank would get very far – there would be no mana left to keep the tank up long before there was any chance of the boss or trash pack dying.

The key here is synergy. The tank keeps the attention of the boss, and is healed by the healer, so that the rest of the group can safely lay in with their own attacks.

And occasionally that synergy breaks down. One of the DPS will pull aggro and the healer and the tank will both not be fast enough to land a heal, taunt or intervene. That’s fine. Take it as a lesson in aggro management. But…

Pull aggro several times in an instance all the while doing the same thing and there is most likely one of three things wrong:

• The tank isn’t very good
• The healer isn’t very good
• The DPS player sucks at aggro management

If nobody else is dying, it’s unlikely to be the first option, or the second.

If you pull aggro off me, I’ll save you. Even if you do it a few times. But pull aggro off me consistently and I’ll stop trying to save you. Quite likely (if the healers I know are anything to go by) you’ll stop getting heals too. It’s our way of telling you “l2p” as so many (usually poor) players spout at the first available opportunity.

So, yes, I’m letting you die. Think of it like the birds that push their young out of the nest – you’ll either learn to fly, or die trying. You’ll end up a better player for it. And if you don’t, if you end up cursing the entire group but yourself, because you’re unwilling to change, then I’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll never have to group with you again.

Don’t thank me, or my healer friends, we’re just doing our jobs.