Posts with tag PuG

The Azeroth Ethicist: Cheating (or not cheating) the roll system

by Allison Robert May 17th 2012 at 4:00PM

I was healing a Well of Eternity PUG a few days ago when I got a whisper from the group's warrior tank.

Warrior: Could you help me out with something?

Me: Sure, what do you need?

Warrior: If Varo'then's Brooch drops at the end, would you roll on it for me?

Me: Um ...

I'd been off in my own little world watching health bars and thinking about next week's Shifting Perspectives column and hadn't paid any attention to the group's composition. It turns out the DPSers were a mage, a hunter, and -- oh, there we go -- a frost death knight. So in the event that the strength trinket dropped, the warrior tank wanted me to roll on it and, if I won, give it to him over the DK. He probably asked the mage and the priest to do the same thing, but the group was quiet in party chat, so I have no way of knowing.

We had a small and, to his credit, civil conversation over it, and there are a few issues here on which I'd like to get readers' opinions.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Breakfast Topic: Your evil, animatronic late-night pugging is back

by Matthew Rossi Apr 9th 2012 at 8:00AM

Why hello, insomnia. Fancy seeing you around here again. It's been what, a week? I guess that's enough sleep. As is my wont, I tend to log onto WoW and do ridiculous things when I'm tired, like run Dungeon Finder groups over and over again. I don't need the points, as I usually cap valor just by raiding, and I don't need the gear. Sometimes I tank, sometimes I DPS. (I have yet to figure out how to queue my warrior as a healer.) I've figured out, to some extent, why I do this.

I test out build ideas in PuGs. That prot spec with all the threat talents, or the other one that cherry picks for Second Wind and Blood Craze. (Yeah, I tanked with that one. It worked OK, but man, I missed Blood and Thunder.) My fury spec that has both SMF and TG for no good reason aside from switching between Gurthalak and Souldrinker every few minutes. (Gurth's way better, in case you were wondering.)
I like killing things in video games. No real surprise there.
I indulge my transmog jones. There's something about running Well of Eternity in tier 2, then going back and transmogging into level 40 greens and running it again. It amuses me.
I get to feel like a superhero. Seriously, a lot of the time I get dropped into a run halfway through that's struggling on Azshara or Murozond, and I can just kind of go completely and utterly bonkers on said boss. Yes, one of the reasons we collect all this gear is so we can feel powerful. I don't go around posting meters or bragging; I often say very little aside from an occasional joke.

Number 4 up there is the easiest one to be obnoxious about, so I try never to be that guy going on about how awesome his DPS is or pulling threat because he couldn't wait for the tank. Yeah, I could probably do more if I opened up sooner, but I don't feel like it's necessary. I'm there because it feels good to show up and help lift a group over obstacles, not to become an obstacle. I did enjoy the one group where everyone was very encouraging to see exactly what I could do, though. It was fun to just cut loose on Dawnslayer for once.

How about y'all? Ever up at ungodly hours? If so, and you see that guy above, he might be me. (I change looks by the hour.)

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has destroyed Azeroth as we know it; nothing is the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from leveling up a new goblin or worgen to breaking news and strategies on endgame play.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast Topics

Breakfast Topic: Is silence golden in PUGs?

by Olivia Grace Feb 9th 2012 at 8:00AM

PUGs. We've all done them. In my guild, puggers are some of the most complained-about people in the game. Much as they are probably perfectly reasonable, lovely people, something about being put into a group of randomly selected strangers to perform a cooperative task doesn't always bring out the best in players.

5-man Dungeon Finder PUGs follow a predictable pattern through patches. At the beginning of the patch, when the content is fresh and new and (in some cases) difficult, puggers are talkative, helpful and generally more friendly. You just wiped to Queen Azshara? "Hey," a DPSer might say, "we should kill the Hand of Azshara as priority." "Ah, I see," the tank replies. "I didn't know -- sorry, I'll put a skull on it."

Now, that may well be either my being lucky with a PUG I was healing or my memory distorting past events. However, it seems that as patches progress, talking in PUGs becomes ever rarer and ever less kind. At this point, you're lucky to get a "hi" at the start of your PuG, and if anyone does talk about the Hand of Azshara, it's most likely just someone spammming a macro that yells "HAND." I think the same behavior holds true in the Raid Finder, too.

As you may have noticed, I am a talkative soul and often try to chat in PUGs. I'm generally ignored ... but it hasn't stopped me yet! So would I drive you round the bend? Are you just there to get a job done and don't care for pleasantries or making a connection with strangers you'll likely never encounter again? Or do you long for a bit more conversation? Is silence golden in PUGs?

Also, a personal gripe -- is it so hard to reply "r" when asked "r"?

Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Breakfast Topic: Spill your 5-man PUG stories here

by Allison Robert Jan 26th 2012 at 8:00AM

Bad PUG stories used to be a perennial feature on this site, and I've been missing them lately -- good PUG stories too, I suppose, but the bad stuff is always more fun to talk about, mostly because you get to share a sense of outrage with fellow reasonable players. Spill, folks: What's happened to you in 5-mans lately?

I'll start. I usually tank heroics but decided to heal recently (that was my first mistake), and I landed a group of guildies from another realm in a Well of Eternity PUG. Now, the average Cataclysm heroic isn't all that tough to heal these days as long as you're sensibly geared, but it didn't take me long to realize that this group was blowing through an unusually large percentage of my mana pool. They stood in front of the Dreadlord Defenders' Carrion Swarm, couldn't find an interrupt button with two hands and a guide dog, and seemed to DPS at an unusually slow rate even with the crit buff given by Illidan's Shadow Walk.

It was around the time I noticed most of the group sitting in Peroth'arn's Fel Flames that it occurred to me that either this was the most legitimately incompetent group I've ever had the misfortune of encountering, or they were doing it on purpose. But because they never quite managed to get themselves or myself killed, I let it slide. I left at the end with 50 gold and a Forest Emerald from my Satchel, wishing for a Dungeon Finder system sufficiently advanced to recognize that some groups are definitely worth, say, a pony.

Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Shifting Perspectives: The best and the worst of patch 4.3

by Allison Robert Dec 6th 2011 at 4:00PM

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we chortle our way through 5-man trash.

Oh, patch 4.3. I didn't know what to expect from you after so many bad, ugly, or just plain bizarre PUGs on the public test realm, but you turned out to be pretty cool. I don't have to wear ugly gear anymore, the Dragon Soul raid is live, Vengeance blows up like a grade school volcano science experiment, and Deathwing no longer roasts all my archaeology dig sites with the sadistic glee of an NPC who knows that I will never get the Crawling Claw if I am dead.

On the downside, I have to deal with Echo of Tyrande trash ("Hey, where'd the healer go?"), and Thrall still does not seem to have realized that the rest of the world moved on to epic mounts several years ago.

You win some, you lose some.

Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

Tips for great success in the Raid Finder

by Michael Gray Dec 1st 2011 at 9:00AM

The Raid Finder is now live and active. This tool is probably the single greatest boon to casual and solo players added to WoW since ... well, I'd have to struggle to think of something more exciting. If you can't commit to a raid night or more than one raid night in a single week, the Raid Finder means you can still participate in the raiding game. Sure, your item level may be a few steps behind players involved in traditional 10-man and 25-man raiding. But now with the glorious Raid Finder, you can actually take part in the story.

Of course, for newer players, using the Raid Finder can be intimidating, especially if you've never spent any time in PUG raids before now. Grouping up at random with 24 other players is intimidating. You can't just ignore that; jumping into a raid group that has expectations and demands about you can be a scary thing.

With that in mind, here's a handful of tips to make sure your Raid Finder experience goes as smoothly as possible.

Filed under: WoW Rookie

Previous tier of raid content is meant to be pugged, says Bashiok

by Mathew McCurley Jun 30th 2011 at 7:00PM

After patch 4.2 released, the previous tier of raiding content was hit with a huge swathe of nerfs and changes designed to make the content that much easier for raiders now just able to experience it. With tier 11 valor point gear now purchasable with justice points, Blizzard fully intends for the previous tier of content to be pugged by server populations. Blizzard's Bashiok took to the forums to discuss just that intention.

Bashiok does say that servers will take a bit to gain the momentum and general fluency with the encounters, but that it is entirely able to be pugged. Further, he says that from here on out, Blizzard has adopted the mantra of one cutting-edge tier, with the previous raids nerfed to allow players an easier time to complete them.

Personally, I am a huge fan of this type of content shift, and I think we've reached a pretty good compromise with regards to content accessibility and raid design. Raiders get their challenge while the content is relevant, hard modes are still skill-based encounters that do not get the nerf bat, and the previous tier of normal mode content is much more accessible to more casual raiders. Much as Ulduar drakes still presented a challenge in execution during Wrath even though we outgeared them, hard modes in Cataclysm are the execution challenges that will still prove to be tricky for meta achievements. Count me in.

Filed under: Raiding, Cataclysm

Addon Spotlight: Better PUGs with RobBossMods

by Mathew McCurley May 12th 2011 at 3:00PM

Each week, WoW Insider brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. This week, RobBossMods helps new players get the dungeon information that they need.

Rob Boss Mods was brought to my attention during a quick PUG run of Zul'Aman that I wanted to get out of the way on then-main, now-alt paladin. I've had notoriously bad luck with items dropping in ZA for my paladin, but with the new changes, healing the place has not been too bad. However, there are still players out there who have not fully completed runs of the place, and I've seen tanks, healers, and even DPSers drop group when someone expresses the simple notion that they might not have been to this particular dungeon before.

Enter RobBossMods. Think of this addon as reporting Recount to your group, except with boss strategies. Hopefully, the proliferation of addons such as RobBossMods will rip the stigma away from being new to instances and facilitate easier grouping. In my opinion, anything that makes players feel more comfortable in the content is a good thing.

Filed under: Add-Ons, AddOn Spotlight

Breakfast Topic: How was your first Cataclysm heroic group?

by Amelia Ramstead Feb 11th 2011 at 8:00AM

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

My grinding had finally paid off: i329, and I was ready. With a trembling hand, I moused over "Random Cataclysm Heroic." I clicked. I had heard the rumors and the tales of woe. Guildies had warned us all of the terrors that lie in the heroic PUG.

I gulped and settled in for my long DPS queue. In the middle of killing some Cultists in Twilight Highlands, the dungeon popped. My heart rate doubled. I zoned in to Blackrock Caverns. I knew right away that we were in trouble. The DPS consisted of two mages and a hunter. We wiped on the first pull. Slowly, we made it to Rom'ogg. We cleared the first part of the room, and the tank pulled Rom'ogg. And the healer pulled the rest of the trash. We wiped. We came back to try it again ... and the other mage's Mirror Image pulled the rest of the trash. The tank dropped group. The next tank joined us, announced, "I hate coming in on a wipe," and then called me a Very, Very Bad Name (not to be confused with your Average Garden Variety Bad Name). I determined that I paid my $15 a month to have fun -- and split.

What was your first Cataclysm heroic experience? Was it a complete disaster, or did you miraculously pull an awesome group?

Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts

The Queue: The one with a bird on it

by Fox Van Allen Feb 2nd 2011 at 11:00AM

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Your host for today is the newly pierced Fox Van Allen.

For those of you who don't know, I live in Somerville, Massachusetts. It's an urban hipster oasis immediately west of Boston. We have stores that specialize in selling cheese. We have a coffee shop where you get served inside an abandoned bank vault. We've converted every inch of abandoned factory space into million-dollar lofts. And yes, we have lots and lots of craft stores where you can buy ridiculous crap with birds on it.

Why birds? Well, according to the above clip from IFC's Portlandia, everything's better (and carries more hipster cred) when you put a bird on it. We'll test out that theory in today's The Queue.

Tee asked:

Is Blizzard planning on doing anything for leveling scribes to address the current situation with Books of Glyph Mastery? Since most people have moved on from Northrend content, the books are in short supply ... there are only a few on the auction house at any given time and they're ridiculously expensive. Is Blizzard really going to make me spend tens of thousands of gold to buy 54 books to get access to those glyphs? I thought I remembered someone saying during a BlizzCon panel that they were going to make those glyphs available in a different way for Cataclysm, but I may have been dreaming that.

Filed under: The Queue

Breakfast Topic: Do you actually enjoy PUGs?

by Josh Rose Jan 30th 2011 at 8:00AM

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages.

We have all heard a friend or a guild member share a PUG horror story. Most of us even have one or two of our own. Prior to Wrath of the Lich King, WoW was not very PUG-friendly. There was no random dungeon tool, trash was not the AoE-fest it was in Wrath, raids didn't have normal and heroic modes, there wasn't a lot of 10-player content -- the list goes on and on. However, unless you have had a truly sheltered existence in WoW, you have joined a PUG. Surprisingly enough, sometimes PUGs can even be fun and rewarding.

I have my fair share of PUG horror stories, but I have had a couple of great moments in PUGs. In BC, I joined a PUG Mag's Lair and ended up meeting members of a new raiding guild I got invited to after I saved the raid from wiping. I met numerous friends while tanking dungeons, both in the leveling process and heroics. I even started using the random dungeon tool again since 4.03 so I could get exalted with Gilneas prior to the Cata launch. With some of the AoE tanking nerfs and the tanking changes, I was actually enjoying tanking heroics wearing complete DPS gear. I even did a couple of successful PUG achievement runs to try and finish off a few remaining things, so I could focus entirely on new content. Most importantly, I was having fun while pugging.

Do you have good PUG stories? Do you actually like or even prefer to PUG? Or do you avoid PUGs like the plague?

Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts

Knowledge, newbies, and why kindness pays off

by Michael Sacco Dec 28th 2010 at 4:00PM

I played WoW on dial-up for a while, and during that time, it was close to impossible for me to raid anything but add-light 10-man content. So I did the only thing that seemed doable: leveled alts. A lot of them. While previously I had vowed to only level my rogue (my original main) to max level in any given expansion, I was suddenly the proud owner of six level 80 characters.

Even after I got back on actual broadband internet, Cataclysm's introduction of new races (especially Races That Are Worgen) gave me some more incentive to bring my number of max-level characters up to, well, its maximum level. So I finally listened to Matt Rossi and made a worgen warrior. He's awesome. And he tanks, a first for me. I've been leveling him almost exclusively through the dungeon finder, taking advantage of the instant queues for a dog what wears plate armor.

I'm still pretty new to tanking, but between new talent trees, heirlooms, and questing/dungeon gear with better stat balance, most low-level instances are a breeze. So I move fast. Sometimes a little faster than other people. The same kinds of people who attack from the front as a melee class or hit "need" on spirit weapons as a mage. And I would make snide remarks to those kinds of people.

Then I realized something. I was being kind of a jackass.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Guest Post: Vetting puggers -- beyond GearScore and achievements

by Jim Dalton Jul 17th 2010 at 8:00PM

This article has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

How can you tell a good raider from a bad raider?

GearScore? NO. Often times, people will rely on a numerical gear score, but this is not a good way to judge player quality. Very good players will have low gear scores when starting out, and very bad players who have been persistent or been carried can have very high scores. GearScore is not an indicator of goodness or badness; it's purely an indication of how much time and luck the person has had on that character.
Achievements? NO. Some group leaders request, "Link achievement, please," but this is not a good method, either. All this indicates is that the person was in the raid when the boss died. You don't know if they were No. 1 DPS or died three seconds into the fight, the same as they do during every fight they've ever been in.

So before you can determine how tell a good player from a bad player, you should understand what makes a "good player."

Filed under: Raiding, Guest Posts

Call for Submissions: Best and worst ways to vet puggers

by Lisa Poisso Jul 9th 2010 at 5:00PM

How do you vet potential PUG raiders? Do you require an inflexible GearScore threshold? Do you insist on experienced players who can link the achievement to prove they've completed the encounters? When do you feel comfortable taking on a more lightly geared or inexperienced player? Do you rely on hard and fast numbers, or does conversation with potential raiders factor in?

WoW.com is accepting article submissions on the best and worst ways to vet puggers for your raid group. Your article explains what works, what doesn't work -- and why. Submissions should be between 500 and 1,000 words. We will not accept articles submitted under player names or pen names; please use your real name and email. Artwork is not mandatory, but any you choose to include must be your own work or from creative commons.

Ready to submit? Read up about our guest post program, then sign up for Seed and submit your article here. (You won't see the article page unless you have a Seed account.) Unfortunately, the Seed program currently only allows us to accept submissions from individuals living in the United States. (As part of the Aol family of blogs, WoW.com is committed to the Seed program and has no control over this restriction, which is based on international payment and tax issues. We do hope to be able to accept international submissions in the future.) We'll accept submissions for this assignment until 11:59 p.m. EST on Thurs., July 15. Good luck and good writing!

Filed under: WoW Insider Business, Raiding, Guest Posts

The cynic's guide to World of Warcraft

by Allison Robert May 28th 2010 at 7:00PM

We tend to be very careful while composing articles here at WoW Insider. We're always mindful that not everyone plays the game in the same way, or has the same experience on different servers or factions, but every so often a certain madness seizes us and we feel the urge to ... tell the truth. In that vein, I am pleased (sort of) to present The Cynic's Guide to World of Warcraft.

This article owes a heavy debt to Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. If you want to see a real master at work, read that.

Filed under: Humor

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