This weekend I played with a lot of alts. Friday and Saturday were raid nights of course; we did two hours of attempts on Al’Akir, then killed everything that wasn’t an end boss for a total of 9 bosses down. Had some trouble with Chimaeron but overall not a bad weekend. And Logarithm came back Saturday night so we had two tanks Saturday which is always a plus.
In between I assessed alts. Divergent the paladin is now raiding with the third guild raid and her healing gear is acceptable for that task. Several holes to fill but that’s how things work. She can keep tanks up. Invariant, my mage, gets to do archeology and collect pets, mostly. Her gear is barely acceptable for raiding, she can do 10k on boss fights but she needs work if I want her to be able to come in. And Elucidate the priest…. had been ignored for weeks. But since I’ve got both my other healers committed to raids, I wanted to get her tuned up for emergencies.
So I got her out and looked her over. One purple, the alchemist trinket. Two 333 blues and some low level trinkets. Ok for heroics, maybe. If I could remember how to disc priest. Then again, prices on crafted epics had to have gone down, right? I tossed 8k at her and let her go shopping.
Turns out people set the bid price of epics below what my tailor could craft them for. Elucidate bid on pants and belt, bought a pair of gloves that must be from a troll dungeon outright, and put in a request for Analogue to send her a pair of boots sometime. Then I got to work, found a few gems and stuck them in sockets, and queued up with Rev’s warrior tank.
Well…. so…. one thing I’d forgotten about disc priests is how many spells they have. As a resto druid, I use four hots, one of which is an AOE and one can only go on one person most of the time. I’ve got two direct long-cast heals and in raids I basically ignore one in favor of the other. I’ve got Swiftmend, and my two cooldowns, Tranquility and Tree of Life. That’s basically it.
The priest has a shield, a hot, three different Heals, then there’s Binding Heal, Prayer of Mending, Prayer of Healing, Holy Nova if you wanted it, Power Word: Barrier, Divine Hymn, and I realized last night I hadn’t even been using Penance. It’s like if you took every spell my druid has, added all the paladin spells, and said here, here’s your toolkit. Honestly it’s a bit overwhelming.
I flailed along and did the best I could and then next instance I switched to shadow. Partly because I wanted to see if I liked it, partly in the hopes that we’d get a better set up healer and the runs would be faster. That kind of worked. It took me about three runs to get any good at shadow but I started putting out some numbers eventually.
Last night, Reversion was helping the other raid out with tanking so I decided to queue up. After all, it was healer call to arms. I could have queued for a troll dungeon but the priest isn’t stupid so she queued for a normal random heroic. And got Deadmines, one boss in. The rest of the group was a guild group. We took out the trash and killed the bombs boss. I noticed the fight was taking a very very long time and my mana was not happy. Then I got the “kill rats during this fight” achievement and figured ok, they were doing that, it’ll speed up now.
Not so much. Somehow I finished the fight, even with no mana, and I noticed the boomkin was doing 2k dps. Curious how that could even be I inspected him. His gear wasn’t that bad… but he had a trinket with a melee strength proc. Um… Nobody else was doing well either.
We went on and wiped on trash because their dps was so bad they couldn’t kill things. Came back. “Sorry we can’t do this, not enough gear”, the tank announced abruptly and bang, there I was back in Stormwind. Oh well. I queued again, got Throne of Tides. Again, the healer had left after a wipe to the first boss.
I came in, we started. I saw why they were wiping. Nobody interrupted stuff, nobody did anything about the adds. I made suggestions. We changed things a bit. We wiped. We lost a dps. We came back, wiped. Lost the tank. Came back, wiped. This time I spelled out exactly what we had to do – trap the one guy, mind control one, kill the other, then kill the cc’d adds. They did what I said and the boss died. Sigh.
We then blew through the rest of the place with little issue. I didn’t get my satchel though. I guess having to requeu when people dropped broke it? Oh well.
I got out and switched to Divergent, who queued for healing a troll dungeon. She got ZG. First bad sign. The tank was a dk with funny characters. Second bad sign. He ran off and I followed as best I could. They went clockwise; all the other times I’ve been there we’ve gone counterclockwise.
Sometime around the third wipe, second boss, I realize these guys – who have been trashing the poor performing hunter the whole time – are all from the same guild. In fact they’re from my server, from a top progression guild inasmuch as we even have those. I comment on it and they make some embarrassed remark about not really living up to their name, heh.
The run is incredibly painful because the hunter is clueless, the dps warrior stands in bad, and the tank isn’t that good. We wipe multiple times. Finally we get to the end boss. The lock and hunter have a fight about who has to do the adds.
Long story short: I give them six tries. They can’t keep adds off me or burn the chains fast enough. It’s after ten, so I drop and go to bed.
I’m not sure if it’s my bad luck or not that I got two guild groups that were totally useless this weekend, or if it’s just a side effect of Blizz tweaking algorithms but it really screwed me over. There was no way for me to suggest replacing a weak link, no chance that they’d listen to me, and as the easily voted out fifth wheel, my choice was to shut up and keep wiping, or drop.
Guess I get spoiled by bringing my own tank most of the time.
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I seldom queue alone, because I really dislike getting into bad groups. The times I have lately though I think I’ve been lucky – they haven’t been awesome groups, but at least people were trying, and for the most part not standing in bad.
For the most part I try to do dungeons with guild members, and we will get 1-2 randoms in the group – usually a healer. Most of the times the healers are okay, but there are times when they’re really not.
Tanks – same issue. You get some good ones – and you get some horrible ones (and the in-betweens).
They stand on the poison lines on the first boss in ZG, don’t move out of the boss’ abilities.. You name it.
But I shouldn’t complain too much. When having the majority of people from the guild you can usually manage to pull through. But when I queue alone, I am worried every time (and it’s probably why I spend so little time queuing alone).
I never ever queue alone – married to a man with three tanks, why should I? But like I said last night he was helping a guild raid and almost everyone else in guild was raiding, so I figured why not.
I didn’t really mind, it was just sort of silly how much things can suck.
Unless I see a full guild group, I won’t queue for any troll heroics. I don’t need valor or any drops, so it would be purely achievement or gold based. Every group I’ve been in for ZA has wiped so many times that I’ve gone negative on gold due to repairs, so I refuse to do them. People are complete idiots in LFG most of the time.
If I run dungeons, it’s for JP for BOAs and I find it much faster and less stressful to just queue for random normal dungeons. I don’t even waste time with the random heroics. I got into a random normal over the weekend on my rogue with a hunter who was doing the same (both of us just wanting to blow through it, both of us iLvl 360). The tank died in the first 20 seconds of the first boss of Grim Batol and I was able to “tank” for the remainder, so I know the healer wasn’t to blame. He did about the same on 2 more bosses. Some of the people queuing for these normal dungeons are leveling alts and I think to myself, “If they are this bad on an alt and don’t understand the fight, why aren’t they trying to NOT suck on their main?”
I switch to a lowbie alt (resto druid) and get an enh shammy who likes to pull extra groups. I stop healing him and tell him why. I don’t rez him, he begs and apologizes, so I do. He continues to pull, I continue to not heal and don’t rez ever again. LFG drives me nuts when that happens. I leave and re-queue. The next group, we blow through the dungeon without stopping and I am at 80% mana….those are the groups where NO ONE leaves and we ReQ 10 times. After the Enh Shammy, I now know why.
So glad that someone else has had a nightmare with guild groups in LFD. I queue in LFD to PUG (as healer). I like the rather harsh nature of a true pug – if you don’t perform adequately, you get removed and someone else gets a go. In guild groups, the poorly geared and the low dps and the squishy tank all get to stay and the runs are comparatively a nightmare. And, as you said, you can’t kick off about anything cos you are the lonely kickable link.
The other night, we’d run the whole of ZA to the end boss, I wanted my valors and my satchel. It was a 4man guild group and me. One guy, a hunter (shockingly) was afk for 10 minutes. When he came back, there was no sorry, no contrition. I complained about it – not aggressively, I believe I called it “quite rude” – and was told to basically shut up and that it was their run. I could have quit group, but it had been a 90 minute run to that point. I had earned the valors etc.
Also, all the time, they’re chatting in Danish or whatever and there’s lots of LOLing and ROFLing and I swear I see a word that could be Danish for healer ….
In short, there should be an option in LFD where you can avoid being grouped with a group that has 3+ guild members in it. The magic 3 is the number where they control the group, can act like complete weapons, and get to waste good peoples’ time (me being the good people ofc).
What really stood out to me was that the ZG group was from my server. I pointed out to them that they were from my server. And it didn’t help. So that theory I’ve seen, that the problem with LFG is the cross-server aspect? I don’t buy that.
I like doing complete pugs now and then since it makes me stretch. Nothing forces you to really learn a class you don’t know well like a pug with four strangers.
Oddly enough, I’ve never been randomly queued with someone from my own server that wasn’t a complete idiot. You’re right that it’s not necessarily a cross-server problem. BUT, those people left group after I mentioned that I was from the same server…sorry that you weren’t as lucky. I guess that only works in solo situations and you had a guild group to contend with.
I still won’t queue for the troll dungeons solo, even on Kerick with healer CtA up. Not worth the trouble.
I q’d up on all 3 of my healers. It was really hit or miss for the CtA for ZA/ZG.
But zomg…ana is a disc priest! /highfive.
Who needs to be failangel when you can haz wings without dying!
Holy Nova, very situational. I think I only use it on HoO for the lever guy.
PoM on cooldown all the time, as is Penance, keep those Grace stacks rolling!
heal…is hardly used anymore…smite baby smite!
Binding heal is a god send in Chim, magmaw, Cho’gall p2.
Love disc…best spec ever!
I actually switched out of Smite spec for while I’m learning all the ins and outs. I won’t go Holy. Chakras ain’t me. But it might take me a while to get used to Smite spec.
I have an eventual goal of having one healer of each class, raid geared and raided-on. So far I have the druid, naturally, and the paladin, the priest is almost there and the shaman is stuck at level 48.
i also want a healer of each class as well, but shaman…I just cant get into the class. Not sure why.
Holy is great as a jack of all trades spec. But feels clunky to me. Going from one stance to another. But Lightwell is awesome. Also on fight where people are spread out. Holy’s bread and butter spell, CoH feels wasted.
My priest has wings without dying … they’re just … shadowy.
I sympathize a lot. I have the same goal with tanks as you have with healers, and the LFD system just makes me want to GNAW MY DAMN ARM OFF most of the times I’ve tried queueing up alone. Anything at all go wrong whether it was in the tank’s power to affect or not (like, say, someone’s pet pulling three extra groups?)? Tank FAIL, either leave, get kicked, or accept constant verbal abuse.
The paladin is the guild MT and is geared to the teeth and I NEVER take him anywhere but raids anymore. Warrior is juuust about ready to tank a raid but I’d rather put some more polish on her first. DK is questionably ready for heroics. (As in, she’s well above ready by ilvl but not overgeared enough to satisfy, like, 80% of pugs.) The druid is… stuck at level 49, actually….
I’ve been leveling a resto shammy through the dungeon finder, and it has been insane. I’ve had a few awesome groups, but I swear, the next person who uses “But it doesn’t matter at level 20/30/40/50” as an excuse to be a jerk…
Tanks who need on healer gear, people who ninja the ogre tannin in dire maul (wtf is the thinking behind only having one per run?!), dps pulling extra packs, tanks running laps around a boss room outranging me…
I think the cherry on top though, was the “tank” I got in Scarlet Monastery. I was excited at first, because you just don’t see many bear tanks. Unfortunately, first pull in, he dies in two hits before I can even get a heal off. The next few packs, the entire group has threat because he hits like a wet noodle. Then one of the DPS pipes up with, “Uhh, tank? Do you realize you’re in balance spec?” He refused to answer anyone, and we couldn’t kick him until the DF kick timer ran out (at least 10 minutes later, which is most of the dungeon at that level!).