sure, blame the tank /rantFollow

PUGged regular SV very, very late last night as i was trying to get something done before server maintenance and the last boss' devilshark cape has been on my list to upgrade my burnoose of the shifting ages. i got invited to a group with a dps warrior, BM hunter, lock and priest. now, if you remember correctly, SV has pulls where there are two or three caster mobs including ones that fear, which makes poly pretty much a necessity but hey, ice trap and seduce have to be good enough options, right?

wrong.

upon being invited to the group, i threw out a quick "only ice trap and seduce for cc? gonna be a great run ^^ " and boy, was it ever.

the first lock d/c'd right before the first boss, so we got another one. dps overall was decent and the first room went by without much of a problem. however, things got pretty ugly when we got to those aforementioned pulls where there are multiple casters.

my options being limited, i was forced to have the hunter trap one caster, the lock seduce another one, mark the third caster (or the healer mob) to be burned down first and used tclap as spacing would allow to keep the melee mob on me. normally i would have had the warrior offtank a caster and interrupt spells, but one look at his gear at the beginning of the run told me it was a bad idea (mostly greens with one or two blues iirc).

i would start the pull with my ranged wep, run far back so as to avoid being feared into the next group of mobs, run back into the group and TC them all, then have my marks peeled off of me for cc. sounds ok in practice, right? well, for whatever reason, the dps warrior was always dpsing the melee mob marked for X, which is usually 2nd to go down but i had specified several times to leave for last, as i could just kite it around with TC and thus prioritize the seduced mob and then the trapped mob. so, to save him from utter doom and the healer some mana, i would waste a taunt to bring the mob back onto me... which i then couldn't use to keep the next mob off one of the casters (which most of the time was the seduced mob. a lot of credit goes out to the lock for trying to CC in destro spec though, he acknowledged that demo would be a much better spec for CC).

in between pulls, i would apologize to the hunter for making him do a lot of work, but he was doing a great job trapping the caster and i let him know it. the healer likewise was healing the party well despite being short a little mana (around 8600). after the dps warrior whaling away on the X mob several times and my telling him "leave X for last" (to which he replied "X is usually 2nd to die and i have to keep it off the healer"), i said in party chat "i thought i specifically said to leave X for last", then the hunter revealed his disgruntledness and said "can we just finish this run, i want the damn shoulders". we oneshotted all the bosses, then upon leaving i get a tell from the hunter "learn to tank and don't tell others how to play". so i explained to him that 1) we had no sheep for the casters, 2) tclap overrides healing aggro as long as dps is focused and 3) i didn't trust the dps warrior to offtank because of his gear. then i got "shadowfudge is ignoring you." ^^ great!



i guess i should have let the dps warrior die and not waste a taunt on him, but then the healer probably would have OOM healing him and killed the rest of the group. other than that, i can't believe how many people don't know how much win imp. TC is and that it's a warrior's bread and butter for multimob tanking. but then again i guess i need to learn to tank T_T

Edited, Oct 30th 2007 10:43am by fromanthebarbarian

>< no, he dropped gauntlets of the bold for the dps warrior and sash of serpentra for the lock. the lock said it was an upgrade for him. sadly the hands were probably also an upgrade for the warrior, i bet he will sock them with +8 str and dps with them QQ

I had an experience very similar to this in SV, but the complaining didn't come until the last boss. We had already made one attempt at him when our lock left for raid. We invited in a hunter and explained to him that you have to concentrate on the tanks when he starts to channel from them. The hunter ignores this, keeps dps'ing the boss and we wipe, 3 times! I wanted the bold hands so I kept pressing everyone to keep going. After our 5th wipe the hunter says in party chat that I need to learn how to keep aggro and goes on a rant how we all suck! Now granted, I didn't have the best gear, mostly greens with a few blues, but aggro was not the issue here, it was lack of common sense and the hunter thinking he knew more than anyone else.

Unfotunately this hasn't been my only experience and more often than not I'm the one who gets blamed even in the face of blatant mistakes by others! /sigh, oh well...guess I need to limit my pug's.

BTW, just picked up devilshark cape last night. Guildies FTW!

feel sorry for you guys, got my cape AND bold shoulders in one run... although I did go back more than a few times to get revered with both places when I hit 70 for my old guilds' requirement. [I think the hourglass took me 2 runs].

Just do heroics for the heroic SBV cape (after the blocker trinket) and for pure mitigation and max effective HP get the cape from illhoof if possible.

Just stop running pugs. Most people that run them are people that their guild doesn't want to do anything with or are people that can't get into a guild that does based on their personality, etc. (unless it' alt of someone, but that's rarely the case)

funny thing is, i tried marking that mob with star the last few pulls. absolutely no difference.

It sucks that when you do run across a Hunter who knows how to CC well, he turns out to have an attitude problem.

As far as your DPS Warrior goes, it sounds like he's someone who only knows how to follow the basic forumla of Skull=1, X=2, etc... and is incapable of making spot decisions based on the situation at hand. I've been in groups where we had marked targets and a set order to take them down in but if the Sap breaks early or the Priest's MC is getting resisted or the Priest's Shackle breaks, those targets suddenly have to be dealt with even if it means taking things down out of order. A good player will be watching for these things and will be able to adapt to the situation. Of course one problem I have with guildies is that more than one of us will jump to take care of a broken CC and end up being counter-productive. :P

Haha, them some high-class worries bro! :) But I hear ya, and you'll rarely find such situational awareness in a pug. Not necessarily b/c the people are bad players (though of course many are), but b/c it also requires an understanding of what your teammates are going to do. Naturally you know how guildies will react better than you do pugs b/c hopefully you've run with them more.

edit: @OP. From your post I see no point at which you told anyone how to play their class. You demanded people follow marks, which is well within a tank's right. You complimented the hunter on his CC, which is above and beyond the call of duty. The only possible conclusion is either the hunter is just an ******* who happens to be good at the game or you're leaving something out...

Edited, Nov 1st 2007 1:50pm by AynLoD