Recently I mentioned that I had run The Nexus with a frustrating pug. We only cleared two of the initial bosses, barely, before the healer had to leave the group. This experience lead me to start formulating a post on, well, how to not to bring your very finest asshat to your next pug.
Since we only cleared two of the initial bosses I still had the Prisoner of War quest to complete. While I was questing tonight I threw myself in the LFG queue for The Nexus. I figured I could take another swing at the remaining bosses. The more experience I have tanking before Heroics, the better, even if it’s in stinky pugs.
It didn’t take too long to get invited into a group, and boy, the difference between this group and the previous was amazing. “Night and day” would begin to describe it but doesn’t really do it justice. I can now respin that pending cranky post into something satisfyingly positive. Here’s an itemization of this great pug’s awesome sauce. No asshats here.
- We only had one Death Knight! Seriously! We were a lock, warrior, tree, DK, and me the tankadin.
- The DPS DK seemed to understand aggro! They weren’t in Frost Presence. They didn’t pull aggro with Death Grip. (They especially weren’t using a macro that used /say to say something “witty” each time Death Grip is cast. /groan.)
- I didn’t have to say anything about a kill order, not even once. X-Perl showed them all attacking the marks in the right order.
- They even kept up in some nasty unexpected pat adds when I remarked to prioritize the mobs that healed. We marked and dropped the three split versions of Grand Magus Telestra without missing a beat. It was like I had 3 DPS toons on remote control. “Pewpew, that-a-way!” “Sir, yes sir!”
- Our melee members knew their positioning. I’d negotiate the mobs into an arc and our melee would be just behind them. We’d move through the kill order without having to reposition at all. It was beautiful. No parry DPS boost for you, bad-guy melee mobs!
- There are a few pulls that are groups of non-elite trash. The group would hold off on AoE until I got a few ticks of Consecration off, entirely of their own accord.
- The tree healed like a champ. At one point a caster mob wasn’t caught up in Consecration, started burning down the tree, and resisted my Righteous Defense. The tree popped off some HoT (Regrowth? You restos tell me!) and ran into range of the Consecration so that I picked up aggro. Poifect.
- Despite a few folks not having been in The Nexus before, we dropped all the bosses without any deaths. No one was gibbed by Ormorok’s scary spikes. We all danced off Keristrasza’s Intense Cold debuff while I managed to Cleanse the Crystal Chains roots.
I was struck by the effect this run had on my mood. After the crappy pug I wanted to buy a new house with a pool, move, and throw my computer in the pool. After this pug I continued making friendly conversation with the group and seem to have gotten the attention of some guilds.
Yes, it’s true, none of that behaviour is truly earth shattering. It’s only what those of us in guilds would expect from our lovingly capable guildies. But these were random doofs. I was very pleased to find this kind of competent coordination in a random PuG running entry-level Wrath dungeons.
Here’s to hoping that this experience isn’t a wild outlier.
