Project PUG Tank: grounding field edition.
An odd little Vortex Pinnacle run yesterday afternoon. The shaman healer seemed completely out of it. My health would drop to 50% immediately on every pull, sometimes dip way lower. I died once to trash. It became an exercise in cooldown chaining for me, counting Shockwave as a damage reduction cooldown. The shaman had, as is typical, the only CC that could be used through the air elemental section of VP. He used Bind Elemental willingly enough, but it was more a nuisance than a help. The bind would inevitably break about 10 seconds into combat and the thing would of course beeline to him.
It got a little better in the second half of the instance, where I asked the rogue and mage to CC a mob each per pull.
I had serious aggro problems. I couldn’t hold anything against the frost DK, who was AOEing on the pulls. I’d taunt off him then lose the skull to the dutiful dps who’d been attacking it as they should. Gah. Since I didn’t have this problem in previous runs, I’ll just blame stupid DPS who don’t know to hold off on front-loaded damage.
The other thing that happened was that I was, as before, utterly unable to get the group to do the grounding triangle pulls properly. Nobody seems to understand that they are safe from all magical damage if they get inside the triangles. Nobody seems to understand that this is also true of the mobs. Nobody follows instructions to CC when the patrolling group is at its far point. Nobody can wait 3 seconds to engage the mobs on line of sight pulls, or those grounding triangle pulls where the mobs need to move out first.
I am spoiled by my raiding guild and my friends and family guild, both of which execute those pulls perfectly.
Gear upgrades: 0
Blood pressure spikes: 0
Good players: 0
Space cases: 1
Jackasses: 0
Healer: shaman
