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Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Morons abound in low level dungeons

I don't know what's up with these low level dungeons but I haven't had the misfortune of grouping up with so many morons since... never. I've been doing a lot of heroics since the Dungeon Finder Tool hit, a few dozen in total. About 1 in 10 heroic runs turns out bad and usually the situation is fixed by getting rid of the offending member and replacing him with someone normal.

Low level dungeons however... man am I pissed! On my Priest I've been running a lot of dungeons lately, as I'm leveling. Currently I'm 47 and I've been in most instances from Deadmines to Maraudon. Unfortunately only a small number of them have been successful. It seems to me that as wonderful as the Dungeon Tool is, it has also attracted a whole lot of idiots who think they can jerk their way through to level 80.

I highly doubt that all these people are new players. I'm sure most of them have at least one high level character and most of them have surely grouped up before. In spite of this, I continue to be amazed by how much stupidity I encounter in these dungeons. Here are some of the types of asshats I've run into:

- melee hunters. Jeez what's up with these idiots? Why didn't they roll a rogue or something instead?
- retribution paladin tanks.
- paladin who insists to tank even though he's not the designated tank and everyone in the group tells him so.
- afk players.
- the dumbass who "needs" everything that drops. And doesn't communicate.
- tanks who pull whole rooms of elites and then bitch about the healer when the group wipes.
- tanks who keep on pulling regardless of the healer's mana.

I will lie if I say that none of these runs has been a success. I had the good fortune of running with a good team a couple of times. Just a few nights ago I joined a group for the first section of Maraudon (oh how I hate this instance). Myself as the healer, a pally tank, warrior dps, mage dps and rogue.

It became evident from the start that it was a good group. The tank had a proper Prot spec and she knew what the was doing. The dps were doing their jobs well, no one was jerking around or afk-ing. The tank was considerate to wait for myself and the mage to drink after fights and pulled only the minimum number of mobs. We downed the first boss quickly in that section and since we all felt we had a good thing going, decided that we would keep pressing onward.

Shortly after, the rogue left. He probably had other things to do which is fine and he did a good job anyway. We kept pushing forward, just the 4 of us. About an hour into the dungeon, we reached Princess. So we killed her.

So what's the big deal about this story? Well, for starters it goes to prove that skill is paramount and doing your job right goes a long way towards succeeding. Furthermore, a group of only 4 people managed to kill Princess and it's no easy feat considering she's about the toughest boss up to this level. Not only that, but she's level 48, with lots of HP, a nasty AoE attack and we were all under her level by a large margin. I was the "oldest" at 47 but the others ranged from 42 to 45 so I'm sure they had to deal with a lot of missed hits.

It may be a small accomplishment but for me, as a healer, I feel that I have gained a whole deal of experience in this small encounter. And it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside at the thought that there are still good players out there. I keep wondering if the quality of groups will improve as I approach 80. I certainly hope so.

14 comments:

Shannara said...

Yep I ran across the same aholes, even started a facebook group to list such aholes and what they have done.. if you are on face book check out .. Wow Wall Of Shame group..

We need to get the word out about these scums.

Anonymous said...

been there, doing that, and really only the tanks gets worse and much more rude. wish blizz would give us healers a anti wipe button so we dont die, like fiegn death, then we can rez all the rest minus the tank till last so we can mana up first before he goes changeing ahead again like an idiot.

Celebrandil said...

I really loved the dungeon finder at the beginning, but now I've become somehow slightly fed up with it. I have done more than a hundred heroics on all my characters, most as DPS but also more than 50 as a tank. My main (the hunter) is well geared in ICC and frost emblem equipment, so he is not really needing anything. Besides, the 20 minute waiting queue for DPS is quite a pain and then you'll still never end up with one of the new instances (Forge, Pit, Halls). I found myself dozens of times in Stratholme and I absolutely hate it. I even dropped out a few times despite the debuff you get. New DPS can be found within seconds so I'm not feeling bad when dropping out.

However, my "second best" character is a protection paladin, and I started using the tool to do many dungeons for new gear and emblems. I soon found out that the gear you find in 80% of the heroics didn't help me improve my paladin sufficiently. Same for the triumph gear. Only the frost emblem gear gets you ready for the real challenges, e.g. ICC raids. You can't go in there as a tank and have only around 40k HP. I don't even have that. And I'm not getting any further. It takes way too long to collect the necessary frost emblems (you need more than 200). So right now I'm a bit disillusioned about the whole thing.

Yeah I know there's the weekly which gives you five emblems and occasionally we are holding Wintergrasp and can access the bosses, but I've never been lucky there.

Anonymous said...

i agree, skill is paramount. and while i don't condone it, i have grouped with a few excellent ret pally tanks. one in particular i will mention by name (orton) since i gave him such a hard time when i first noticed his spec. but i grouped with him many times while leveling thru northrend and he did a superb job each time. i even asked him to tank several times in those days before LFD.

SirFWALGMan said...

I had a group that complained I was a pally with a shield who was DPSing (I signup as Tank/DPS and do whichever the system picks) and that I was ruining their run. While I agree they had a point that I was not churning out the most dps I could... I checked the recount and I was doing about 2x the DPS of the second best person.

I do not think level 80 runs are necessarily better. You can just faceroll stuff with good gear.

Anonymous said...

My friend and I have been running into al ot of bad groups lately. We are level 57 and as we level the groups get worse. I am pally tank and I will usually wait on healers and other mana users. I hate pulling more than a group of mobs. I have been running into people who pull before I am ready. I will save them once. If they do it a second time, they are on their own.

Edgar said...

I've only been playing since Wrath and I had never met a true to life huntard (no offense to my skilled hunter friends Mr. Solo) until the Dungeon Tool came out. Then I see this hunter Meleeing with no pet out trying to tank things (because he had a few def leather pieces). I tried to help the guy out and he was not having it ( the not taking any advice part is truly where a hunter goes from being a newbie to a huntard).

As for off specs, the early dungeons are doable with off-spec healers and tanks, but they have ot be at the very least decent players. I had a Pally Ret trying to tank that would basically lose like 1/3 of their health every couple hits, and I was going through mana like crazy. I wouldn't have been able to heal him through bosses but luckily he left.

I love the tool, I'll take the good with the bad, but no doubt about it, the idiots abound.

Anonymous said...

I've leveled a resto shaman from 15-38 so far just from dungeon finder. I've seen all kinds of fail players.

Melee huntards need rolling on every +Str and +SP gear. The pally tank who insisted on casting FoL on any party member who took damage, who, of course were taking damage because he was casting FoL instead of tanking. The full-mana warlock wanding because "it doesn't use mana". To top it off, the melee warlock, with the occasional RoF!

Darth Solo said...

I don't use the random feature of the tool at these lower levels. I pick the dungeon manually because I don't care for the rewards.

A tank can definitely do a decent job with, say, a ret spec, provided he knows what the hell he's doing, both in terms of generating sufficient threat and not pulling more mobs than necessary. But when he's an asshat pulling too many mobs at once just because he wears plate and thinks the healer can heal through all that damage, he's mistaken. The dude who pulled this on me and wiped the group twice was left without a rez before I gave him a piece of my mind and quit the group.

@last Anonymous dude, that pally sounds like me in the old days. I really had no idea what I was doing. I was specced prot, sort of, but I DPS-ed, off-tanked and healed, all at the same time. Curiously, people commended me on what a good job I did. But then again, those were guildies, back when I used to be in a real guild.

Elkagorasa said...

Morons about in all dungeons. Not willing to go back and level another alt, I am still running the lvl 80 dungeons. I've had the tank running wild, did Gundrak in 10 minutes once cuz the tank never stopped. Healers that only healed the (guildie) tank and let all the dps die.

As a destro lock, RoF is a requirement in many of the instances. Quick easy damage on a large party. In some places, I've even started spamming SoC, to make the whole place go boom. But that is only as good as the tank can keep aggro.. If I steal the aggro, the NPC better be dying.

Guess with 12 million people playing, having a rough group is bound to happen. As we get closer to Cataclysm, we are going to see some of the serious raiders bored with end-game content and flipping into either alts, or not coming in at all.

Redbeard said...

I'm with Elkagorasa; I've been in high drama in 80-level heroics as well.

The last run I did through Ajol-Nerub was memorable as the Death Knight DPS kept arguing with the Prot Pally tank. Apparently the DK felt we could avoid all these extra trash mobs if we'd let him go and do some stuff himself, and the tank kept telling him -one way or another- to be quiet and let him do his job. Good thing these guys were over geared by a bit because they were spending so much time arguing we finished in spite of them. (I was easily the most under geared as only half Epic.)

I felt like I was watching a pair of 15 year olds argue.

Darth Solo said...

Just tonight I ran Zul'Farrak with a random group and it went awesome. Those guys were real pros. We finished the whole thing, including 4 quests, in 30 minutes. Funny thing is that the LFD tool set me up as DPS, not healer, but it's all good.

Sarah Faith said...

I've run tons of low level dungeons, and haven't finished a lot of them due to bad groups. The problems ranged from one jerk in the group to mass arguments, or just lots of standing around. Fortunately I've had a few opportunities to be part of some excellent groups. Just the other day the dungeon finder put me with three other players from my server. The one DPS from the other server left after the first dungeon, but the rest of us had worked together so well that we went on to do a few more randoms as a group. We all added each other and now we group up whenever we're all online. Of course that was a lucky break, but it's been great.

Darth Solo said...

Good groups should be the norm. Unfortunately I tend to remember the bad experiences more than the good ones. Good groups mean fast runs, without drama and rather forgettable but give me a shitty run and I'll remember it till the day I die!