Operation: Rahana’s blues

After this terrible Nexus PUG experience I got yesterday, I made up my mind to actually go and do the experiment I had in mind before. Being sick and tired of carrying people’s asses through content without them at least pretending to be trying (I don’t mind carrying undergeared people who perform up to their gear capabilities), people not bother to gem or enchant, I decided to undergo this undercover operation. Let’s call it for the sake of terminology:

Operation Rahana’s Blues

What is it about? Over the upcoming week, I will gather and gear myself in blue quality gear from end-game normal instances and heroics. If I am lucky enough, I will equip said gear by next weekend, and I mean full blue gear and I will PUG. I am thinking about the sample of 10-15 heroic instances as a healer to not only see if I can still make them in lower quality gear than I am used to and especially, how will people react to such “undergeared scrublol” healing their instances. I will do my part, but I will get carried. Okay. Before we break down the rules, let me share the bloody Nexus heroic I did as a daily yesterday.

Nexus heroic is srz bussiness

It is. So here I am, loading screen of Nexus, thinking to myself what a great place to be, getting some heirloom badges and my daily portion of Frosts. The party looked great too – paladin, warrior, death knight and a hunter. Add my shaman totems to the mix and here we go, faceroll party milling enemies into dust. I couldn’t be more wrong. By the looks of it, the random members were sporting T9 and epics all over which made them slightly less awesome than me flashing my T10 all over the place and well being the cool kid and all. And then the fun started. First off, aggro was all over the place. Which was kinda strange given that highest dps was 2.2K overall done by the warrior with the tank sporting 1.7K dps overall as second on meters. Have you now gotten the general idea of the group? Fine, moving on. Somehow we managed to pull additional group to Commander Kolurg group despite Tremor totem. Which actually happens sometimes and well, it startled me a bit. Pause on healing for 5 seconds and then pushing in macroed Chain Heal and healing like madman. The interesting thing was that the tank had obviously no intention to pick the loose mobs – healing that thing with two rangers darting me is quite some fun, but nothing I’d like to do with PUG. Kudos to the hunter who sent his dinosaur to roflstomp and tank the berserk bashing on me.  Moving on. I must admit, I wasn’t doing my best healing on the next mobs as I was engaged in guild and other chats. However, without any prior notice, the tank run past corner, took the group in front of Grand Mage Telestra and took her for good measure too. Yeah, that’s pretty much how you do it all the time, but well, usually with heads up and not so poorly performing party. She died, I popped trinket and MTT to replenish myself, moving on. We killed the first draconian group on platform, second with the rift too. We are ready to jump down to tickle the wraiths when all of a sudden, this pops in party chat:

[P] [Karno-Shattered Hand]: fucking retarded noobs go fuck urself hahahahah!

A player has left your… Wait what? And yes, this was the tank. I seriously have no idea what made him to call us retarded noobs. No one died, stuff although slowly still died and the party chat was silent. Now, I am absolutely against Naming and Shaming, but this guy deserves all of it. Out of curiosity, I armoried him later. This is his protection build. Reckoning maxed out and no JoJ or Touched by the Light. Go figure. Now before you go bash on me – I don’t mind anyone in wrong spec or gear as long as they can somehow fill their role and don’t act like utter douchebags. Which this paladin did. The douchebag part I mean. Well, so there we were, four players without a tank, four minutes on debuff. The arms warrior was a good sport though and after I told him to “just go ahead and pull” he bladestormed our way through trash. As we were killing last trash before Anomalus, a druid joined us. Sprinted in, buffed us with cheap buffs (d’oh) and started tanking the boss. I had to swallow the urge to ask him why he is in kitty gear (he had 30K bear hp) and went on to heal him. Truth be told, he ate quite some ES charges. And now the fun part – NO ONE, and by that I mean no one in caps and bold, bothered to kill the rifts. Or the spawned adds. Without saying anything or moving, they just proceeded bashing on to Anomalus when he was immune, obviously not paying attention to the amount of damage incoming on the whole party. And they died. I say they, because I managed to save the hunter who took advantage of FD and pet tanked the boss and the little myself. After we killed the boss, I was getting a bit pissed off, really. Come on. If you want to do it achievement style, say so we can work it out. The only thing that made me not to drop the group was that fact that no one dared to bitch about dying. That would probably made me shit nuclear mushroom clouds. Anyways, moving on after another set of small buffs. All went rather fine, although by reaching the ramp to Ormorok the Tree-Shaper I got kinda annoyed that I am tanking the small saplings without anyone bothering to kill them off. The greatest shock came on the last pull of the patrol going around Ormorok. I launched a heal five seconds into the fight. When I did, my screen flashed, the omen sound indicating you are failing your aggro management resonated in the room as two centaurslashtree things happily walking to hug me hoping for the some quality time together. Dino to the rescue, again. I am starting to like the hunter. Well, to close the story, I really stopped healing after Keristarza dropped dead and just watched people going low with the stacked debuff. I was just too tired to be nice. And the hunter needed on the mail boots that were, actually, an upgrade. In retrospective I had to admit the hunter rocked. Only T9 he had were shoulders, rest was blue stuff. He was BM with the big Dinosaur pet and that evil thing was constantly saving my ass gnawing on anything that as much as looked at me. So although he pulled “just” 2K dps in the end, he was one of the better players you meet in PUGs. Completely exhausted, I decided to do this social experiement.

Operation: Rahana’s blues

As I said, the aim of this operation is to test how are the PUG waters for newbie healers. In order to somehow compensate for my experience, I decided not to take any epic item for the set, limiting myself to original heroic drops maximum. I will however do my gearing properly, which means rare quality gems and solid enchantst, as would anyone who cares about gear but plans on quick replacement. I will hide all my fancy kill titles and make an opening macro line of being new healer and asking people to have patience.

And I can’t wait to see myself fail. I am horrified how I will do – because seriously, there is definitely a difference between the comfort level of my gear as it is to some bluish starter gear. But I hope it will be fun as well, to actually test how I’d do in the hostile world, beating not only mechanics, but the moronic GearScore as well.

If anyone feels like trying this out with me, you are most welcome. Go for it, try it, send me an email how it was. Let’s see if we can cheat the system with low GS!

The gear so far:

[Frozen Forest Kilt]

[Moragg's Chestguard]

I plan to get the trinket from heroic HoS, crafted Saronite shield and the Grizzly Hills PvP totem. If you can save me time looking through loot tables, do you still recall where the starter/blue gear drops? Quests are unfortunately, not an option.

It’s alive!

Yeah yeah, I know I slacked very much, and this was cause by various reasons ranging from leading the guild from officer position and trying to recruit enough people for our own raids (over holidays), being ill (over holidays) and the need to hand out with friends and family despite aforementioned (over holidays). I spent quite some time in the game in my bed too, respecced my paladin to protection for faster queves for Saronite farming, adjusted this and that and well, generally did nothing at all that could somehow be classified as “work”. Including this blog, but hey, I really had no topic to write on.

However, there were some interesting things that happened over that AFK period, be it new ICC wing or some very interesting PuGs I got. As well, I have been finally installed into Guild Master position after the start GM being AFK for over month (I am telling you, dealing with guild from officer position without set ranks, guild bank and other stuff is really not fun task to do). And finally I got myself to write something here too. So, where to start?

The new LFG (yes, again)

So, we have patch 3.3 here for few more days and everything starts to settle down a bit and the euphoria is slowly falling off. Most of us tried all of the features or content at hand and are hungry for more. Most of us is running heroics in our spare time, because we either have nothing better to do, or because we want to gear up and gem our offspecs.

My experiences from LFG on Rahana are wide and range from “professional farming” parties, where no one says a word and you are out of the dungeon in fifteen minutes after first pull to “social” parties that chat a lot and are there rather to enjoy themselves in the instance. I must say I prefer the latter a bit more, as I am a social person and I consider at least “Hi!” and “thxbai” as common courtesy. There were hardly any cocky groups I encountered though, even if it was the “pro party” and there were some undergeared people or something, no one was being rude (well they did not say anything at all) and no one was claiming to be carrying others through. So while I was a bit worried how much this extended anonymity will destroy the community even more (although on various blogs you may find tales of how everything gets needed just because people can, hell, even I ninjaed a tank trinket) from my experience it was not as bad as I was afraid it will be.

First 3.3 impressions

So, I came home yesterday from work, did my chores and sat down to my PC. Started the thing up and clicked the WoW launcher icon. Wee, patching has begun! After patching was complete I spent some time updating all my addons and then, finally, started the game. Gah EULA. Anyways, I spawned in Dalaran and it was obvious this is THE DAY. Shadowsong is quite populated server, but the streets of Dalaran were crowded for the first time. If this game had implemented body collision system, getting to bank from emblem quartermasters would be nearly impossible.

Your mileage may vary – 3.3 around the corner

Since Bouboille posted this on MMO-Champion on Wednesday, the whole community started buzzing and talking, getting back to life (which was greatly described by Larísa). It seems 3.3 is coming. And if not after the weekend, then soon for sure! Although I feel like even today is not soon enough. Anyways, I briefly mentioned the LFG system overhaul that I am looking for, let’s take a closer look on that and on the changes that us restos are anticipating.