Let’s try this theory on for size.
Aegidius the pugging prot warrior is now level 85. (See the previous post!) This means he gets to run Lost City, Halls of Origination, and Grim Batol until his brain dribbles out his ears. I intend to run normals until I have managed to get his Therazane rep up. Right now that requires questing through Deepholm. This is the downside of leveling by instance-running. Fortunately he’s got a nice pile of Justice badgers waiting to be spent when patch 4.2 hits. He’ll be able to snag a tier piece or two immediately.
My goal is to get the full 7 runs in before Tuesday so he has as many badges as he can for the patch. I have only done 1 run all week, however, because I’ve been busy.
Instance: LCOT normal
Gear upgrades: 2
Blood pressure spikes: 0
Good players: 0
Space cases: 0
Jackasses: 0
Group: arcane mage, frost DK, demonology warlock, resto druid
A nice competent group. No wipes, no mess-ups, good aggro management. This is what I hope for when I pug. Maybe it’s pure bias on my part, but I’m always happiest when a druid is healing me. Nice steady health fluctuations, no panic moments. For some reason I spent most of the instance thinking the DK was a rogue. A strange, unstealthed rogue. Don’t even ask! I do note that so far I haven’t had a single nasty pugging experience.
The 2 dungeon quests gave me the Ramkahen Front boots, which are nice starter tanking boots. I also got normal-mode Heart of Solace. It’s a meh trinket for Aegidius’s dps set, but it’s a sight better than the Egg-Lift Talisman it replaces.
Three pure pugging experiences documented for Project PUG Tank. This project aims to find out how long it’ll take for me to lose my temper, lose my sanity, or lose my will to live because of running instances with strangers. The tank is a blood elf warrior, level 84.
Aegidius the Project PUG Tank ran five randoms last night. He met two space cases and his first genuine jackass causing loot drama. He also had his first blood pressure spike. He’s now level 84, so my next required goal for him is to open up the Dragonmaw faction far enough to get a tabard.
I secretly have RP-style characterizations built up in my head for all of my Wow characters. I tend not to play a character much if I don’t have a handle on who he or she is. This is true even though I don’t have much patience for in-game roleplay. (I’d be more likely to write a story about them, though I’ve never done that, either.) Aegidius is a fussy perfectionist. He cleans the blood off everything immediately after every battle. Mess with his pull plan and he’ll get snarky. (Contrast with Praetorian, who is a noble idiot who’ll try to rescue any situation.)
Aegidius got snarky last night.
Instance reports within!
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
Three more runs for the afternoon. All three of these runs completed with the same roster they started with.
Aegidius the blood elf warrior is level 82 now. He’s most of the way through Hyjal questing, has done enough of Vash’jir to get his seahorse, and has opened up Deepholm. My plan with him is to finish Hyjal, finish Deepholm, and do enough of Twilight Highlands to unlock the Horde dailies there. (Even though I disapprove of the Dragonmaw and am definitely on the side of the Wildhammer on the beer drinking vs beer destruction issue.)
I’m pondering getting him to 85, maxing out engineering, then dumping mining for jewelcrafting. Engineering has turned out to be a bust for tanks in Cataclysm, alas. I might not be feeling all that masochistic, however.
My other plan for him is to tank PUGs. Early, often, constantly, and until he’s geared to run troll heroics. Perhaps he will even pug-tank the trolls. I certainly know the instances. Getting a group of irritable strangers to cooperate will be the challenge. When he is geared, I will give Praetorian a rest. Paladin tanking in Cataclysm isn’t doing it for me. I’ll wait until I’m in the mood for it or until Blizzard has changed it up again.
I started this project off right this morning by mining until I had mats for full sets of crafted tank gear and dps gear. The Redsteel pieces are well-itemized enough to replace a few of the hardened obsidium pieces in his tank set. Mastery is just too useful for shield tanks.
Aegidius equipped all his new splendor, posed with it, then queued up. Let the pug tales begin!
First result: a BRC run in progress, midway between Rom’ogg and Corla. Didn’t get to do the Finkle questline. Well, maybe next time. The run was otherwise notable only for a hunter who refused to kite the adds for the final boss and a mage who pretended to be clueless about Corla’s beams. Oh, wait, the shaman healer was the one who kited the adds on the final boss, yes, the healer. And he/she did a fine job of keeping me up.
Second result: a Throne of Tides run in progress, with Uthok engaged and in the middle of eating the party. I couldn’t pull it out, so we wiped. The run was otherwise notable for a shaman who stood in front of Erunak (even though I’d turned the boss’s back to the party) and died from flame breath & not moving out of earth spikes. The shaman also face-pulled some trash. Just generally a doofus.
Gear upgrades: 0
Blood pressure spikes: 0
Good players: 1
Space cases: 1
Jackasses: 0
Healers: shaman, holy priest
The Bossy Pally on social contracts in WOW and the times when they’re absent. The assumed rules of behavior when you’re in a pug are quite different from the assumed rules when you’re with your guildmates.
Sneaky change made late in 4.1: if it can, the random dungeon finder will match you with other players from your realm before it looks elsewhere. This is good.
Insightful as always. This time she writes about what happens when BC-level difficulty meets Wrath-era lack of social accountability in the Cataclysm-era instance run.
Theory: The social destruction that the random dungeon finder wreaked upon the game was tolerable as long as instance runs were easy, fun, splatterfests that depended only on one of the tank & healer knowing their job.
Theory: The current shortage of tanks in the random dungeon finder is a long-term effect of that social breakdown. That is, it’s about the abuse.
Theory: The abuse is increased because of the increased stress levels player experience in the Cataclysm dungeons. Success is not guaranteed, yet even failure might occupy most of a person’s play session for a day. Thus the stakes are high and frustration levels rise to match.
Theory: No fix for the tank shortage will work if it fails to address the social problems.
And because I am in an optimistic mood, I now brainstorm some socially-focused fixes.
If the concept of home server matters:
Home-server biases to the queue selection.
A checkbox to restrict the selection to your home server.
Bring back the universal LFG channel.
Get rid of the random dungeon finder entirely because its unsocial nature is toxic to a social game.
If the concept of server does not:
Cross-server friends lists.
Friend-list biases to the queue selection.
The ability to form groups cross-server.
The ability to form raid groups cross-server.
That is, allow social bonds to form cross-server via the dungeon finder.
Really radical:
Unnerf healing.
Unnerf tank AOE threat.
Those two changes would reduce stress levels and increase the run success rate all on their own.
Other things I think would help, by making runs more likely to succeed:
Attunements for heroics. Do it Magister’s Terrace attunement style for the three instances that have level 85 normal versions. Do a long multi-instance quest chain BC-style for the others, unlocking them one at a time.
Counting only equipped gear in the ilvl calculation.
Counting PVP gear as ilvl 1 in the ilvl calculation. (Or more cleverly, calculating its effective ilvl once you subtract the resilience points from its stat budget.)
Yeah, I know, not gonna happen. Just suck it up until we outgear everything by 2 tiers, and try not to roll your eyes at all the people announcing that these instances have always been “ezmode”.
I gave up caffeine this week and I’m in the miserable lingering headache stage now. Also in the stage where I’m feeling every hour of missed sleep. I was yawning my head off by the last hour of our raid. We worked on heroic Maloriak some more, and saw progress in that we drove him into phase 2. Whereupon we promptly wiped at around 20%, but hey, now I can see what the acid nova damage is like.
Our main tank wore enough of his kitty set gear to be hit-capped, and that took care of most of our Arcane Storm interruption woes. We had a couple of great attempts wiped when he let himself get knocked away from the boss at the green phase transition, but mostly it was a non-issue.
Kiting is still where most of our troubles are. I think it’s a difficult situation, because the add tank is not kiting in a vacuum. He’s kiting with the assistance of DPS players throwing down AOE slows, like traps and ring of frost. Their job is complicated by the unusual location our MT chooses to tank the boss, which is to the left of his initial position. Most guilds tank him dead center, right where he stands when you enter the room. In vids like this one, the tank even keeps him pointed away from the raid & flips on the flame breath only. Anyway, the positioning makes it hard for the dps peeps to throw down their traps etc on the right side of the room, when the tank is over there.
I’ll make the suggestion tonight.
Raid tanking has different situational awareness demands than instance tanking, I think. Instance tanking is all about reflexes and instant reactions. Raid tanking is about a slower-motion anticipation. Perfect positioning. Reliable repeatable positioning. Minimizing movement. Providing a stable foundation for the rest of the raid to stand on while they beat the boss into a paste. Tiny things like kiting the adds past the boss so splash damage hits both targets. I find it kind of intimidating.
Our raid leader wanted to go knock out Atramedes after our last Maloriak attempt. This wasn’t such a great idea. We had accidents on every single trash pack on the way over to him. Everybody was tired. And then we pulled Atramedes on heroic because he’d forgotten to swap difficulties, probably because he was tired too. Splatter! And of course swapping difficulties back to normal made the trash reappear, thank you Blizzard bugs. That was it for us. And it was a downer note to end the raid on.
Capped the night off with a half-pugged run through heroic VP with part of my F&F guild, made miserable by an obnoxious mage who had to tell us all how we were doing it wrong. And who kept changing my CC marks. Effing annoying. He messed up at least one pull for me by changing the marks, which changed what CC went out, which I hadn’t planned for. And then my own husband caused chaos on another pull by not noticing that I’d called for a LOS pull and letting rip on a mob halfway on its way to me. I was at the top of some stairs around a corner and I didn’t notice for a while because I was busy rounding up the others. Doh. I was seriously exhausted after those Maloriak wipes and not at my sharpest.
I picked a hell of a week to give up caffeine. Note that any week I gave up caffeine would be hellish.
