Weekend PUG Report: Three Stooges and a Dwarf

This weekend was one for leveling various alts. I didn’t want to bother farming or raiding on my mage, I wasn’t especially in the mood to kill people (PvP) either for some odd reason, so I just focused on the alts. First up on that list was my little druid, Hotstuffbaby who was initially created as a 19 Twink who I then decided to level as a 29 Twink, and then throwing that idea out the window as well, have decided to level to 80 as my healer on my main server.

Lucky for me there are a few other people in our guild right now that are leveling alts as well, so we had four people ready and willing to group for randoms with a 5th that we were sure would join us once she woke up (sorry Cat, had to mention that part too).

While in a group of four we were missing our tank. Luckily all four of us were able to “tank” in some form or fashion (Warrior, Warlock Pet, Hunter Pet, Druid) if the tank we got sucked, so we queued up anyway. My evaluation of low level dungeons in the new LFG is that generally speaking the healers are usually good though often the most impatient of the bunch, DPS are usually the most annoying with no knowledge of threat management or playing some odd spec that puts them at half the tank’s DPS, and tanks are either unbelievably good or suck about as much as humanly possible.

Tanks are the primary example here in this post, two tanks that absolutely failed followed by a third that had some great threat skills and allowed our DPS to go all out and still have no problem. I am going to list names and servers here because anytime I post someone that failed at something, I took the time to try to help them in game first. If they make some effort to improve, then they get left off of the blog. If they do nothing to correct the situation, then maybe they should have thought about that before being a moron in the presence of a blogger.

Example Time

Kremul, Madoran-US (A)
The first fail tank was a Warrior named “Kremul the Clothy”. I thought I got a screenshot from when I had moused over his chest piece, but I didn’t. So in case you can’t tell from the picture, he was wearing Shimmering Silk Robes. He was also wearing +Intellect rings, grey pants and grey shoulders, but those can be somewhat excused if we assume he just hasn’t had any good drops. The robe though? I can’t get passed that one. He got kicked from the group and then we just 4-manned the dungeon.

Arzoft, Bloodhoof-US (A)
Right after we were done with the fail warrior we got in a group with this druid whose idea of tanking was to cast Starfire on the mob and then attack him in caster form with his staff. After that first pull I said in party, “Arz, you did notice you’re the tank for this run, right?” He then shifted into Cat form, cast Dash, and ran down the hall to agro ever mob and then bring them back to us. I had already had enough fail tanking from Kremul so I told everyone in vent to just hold off and let the stupid cat die and then we finished off the pack. You can look at the chat log in the picture here to see the level of Arz’s intelligence. He typed to us about 20 times in that “language” of his before we managed to vote kick him after his timer was done. I tried to speak his language of random character strings, but I don’t think we made any progress.

Gingerdread, Stormrage-US (A)
We didn’t want to have our Fury Warrior tank SM for us though, so we requeued and found ourselves a Dwarf Warrior. When he joined I took a look at his spec to get an idea of what to expect and I saw a combination of Arms and Prot. My initial reaction was a facepalm, no lie, but I’m willing to give anybody a shot at anything at least once, so on we went. This guy was generating crazy amounts of aggro, allowing all of our DPS to go all out without any worries. If someone did steal threat from him, he used his taunts and got it back. Ginger is easily the best Warrior tank I’ve seen outside of Northrend.

Gotuhunter, Trollbane-US (A)
We’ll break away from tanking now and go back to another example of failure. I hate to leave you on a bad note, but this one is worthy of being mentioned as well. It’s a level 79 Hunter that decided he just had to roll need on a cloak that dropped. It’s a tanking cloak as you might notice from the Armor, Strength, Stamina, and Defense bonuses on it, or from the fact that both plate wearers in the group rolled Need on it (I got picked for DPS in this one, but I’m main spec Frost tank). His reason for rolling need on it was very impressive, “lot bette then the won i got and it still has strenght”.

The cloak wasn’t a huge upgrade, as you can see from my RatingsBuster addon, but did I mention that I’m 3 points away from being Defense capped? Screw you too, Gotuhunter.