LFR

Well, for once us pugging tanks are in the same seat as pugging dps. The queue for LFR is a nightmare. Half an hour is perfectly normal, and you can't count on seeing the first bosses.

At least the content looks faceroll enough to make the five man trolls seem like a hulking obstacle when they were released.

My guess is that we'll see queue times lower as the raiding tanks collect their 4PC bonus and leave LFR never to return. Finding healers, however, will remain troublesome.

The other, maybe minor, issue with LFR for the pugadin is that we really don't need that much of the gear there. While the 4PC bonus is a huge boost for a raiding guild, a pugadin simply won't run into situations al that often where the difference between raidwalling every second or every third minute matters at all.

One could argue that the bonus is good in the LFR, but to be honest, we're roflstomping all over it the same week it's released. Sure, we're pugging with proper raiders, but gear inflation will be absurd between 378 five man drops and a very generous pool of 397 VP gear. Add the occasional 384 LFR drops bound to find their way to pugging raiders and we should expect to see 25k+ dps from even the more, erhum, unskilled dps a month or so from now. Healers are likely to see a similar increase in output.

I fully expect tanks gearing for expertise and hit-rating to handle both the new five mans and LFR within a couple of months. Partially because an average ilevel 390:ish allows us to do so, but also because there's a lot of threat slapped onto out VP gear.

Nerf to the ground

As you might have noticed we got ourselves another BH earlier this week. Now I'm situated on an all but dead realm, but you really ought to get out there and start pugging FL if you haven't done so before.

By shredding the bosses you ought to be able to take them on rather than being satisfied with a trash pugging run. Semi-abyssmal dps ought to be enough to take out 4/7 bosses.

With decently competent healers and tanks Belth and Shan should be quick work. Dps still needs to be able to steer Ryl, and obviosuly everyone has to be able to rotate shards on Bal.

Still, give it a shot.

4.3, gearing and pugging

The announced 4.3 content patch presents us pugadins with an interesting question.

What will drop from the three new five-mans?

If the scaling runs as it has done, then the new normal mode raids will drop ilevel 397 gear. The five-mans, therefore ought to drop either ilevel 391 or 372 gear, given that the trolls drop 353.

I'd personally expect them to drop 372 gear as the instances are likely to explode in the face of puggers jogging around in an average ilevel 365 or so set.

The problem with five-mans dropping 372 gear is obviously that raiders hitting them in 375 or better gear have nothing to gain but their Valor Points from the very start. We won't even talk about hard mode raiders.

Later on that problem would become even more accentuated with raiders geared in 390+ gear running together with puggers in 370- gear. The difference in ability to handle the content should be astounding given a 20+ ilevel discrepancy in gear between a semi-decently geared raider and a pugger who has gained just about everything there is to get from pugging.

Of course a new quest hub, similar to the one in Hyjal, could rectify the problem somewhat. But Blizzard has only announced a new raid, and prior to Firelands they were pretty loudly sending the message about a brand new quest hub with lore, individually changing landscapes and new vendors with upgrades.

Obviously the Firelands raid would see some rather heavy nerfs hitting it to open it up for puggers. The announced Looking For Raid would tie in well with making more players get inside raids, which in reality means more players getting inside nerfed raids. That way 378 gear is theoretically within the grasp of puggers as well.

If this is indeed the scenario, then the hysterical buff to tanking threat makes more sense. While a 365 geared tank should be able to survive a five man with 372 drops, the same tank wouldn't beeven  remotely able to keep threat from a competent 30 ilevels better geared dps.

The true joys of tanking pugs

There are moments, few and far between, when pugging is the best there is.

I hit Zul'Aman by means of the LFD. Queue is, as usual, immediate, but so is the player response. This usually means I'll end up in the middle of the instance, and quite often in an ongoing fight.

I brace myself.

15 minutes to rescue prisoners. The instance is virgin. As the stupid gong session is done, and the doors open, my healer opens us on party chat: "Kakad, I want a fast run."

Now, I'm just about as far from a proponent of the 'gogo' mentality as is possible, but if it's the healer who wants to give us a headache, then I'll give him hell. So I ride down the stairs, turn left, body-aggro the untauntable sentinel and pull from horse back.

One of the two mobs is ripped from me. I taunt back and watch my primary target getting ripped from me as well. It's dead before it reaches the offending dps.

This part of the instance is like a mini gauntlet, and I'm getting outaggroed left and right.

Now, get me right. I'm not a fantastic tank by any means, but I'm fairly competent. If stuff get ripped away from me, then someone is doing something seriously wrong -- or something extremely seriously right. Scanning my surroundings I notice that anything dangerous I lost aggro from is sheeped. Nobody is taking any damage, and things die at a speed I've never seen before. RF is on, I'm doing close to 20k dps, and things are lost all over the place, and die.

When we ride up to the boss I have time to watch recount for the first time. Two mages are solidly placed at above 40k dps, and one shammy is lagging behind at a lowly 30k.

I don't even ask if anyone is ready and pull the boss from horse back. He never even gets to the first storm cloud before going down, and I have to taunt him back twice at the start.

While this ought to make me happy, it actually makes me quite irritated. I decide to show the healer that things can be pulled even faster and more recklessly than he thought was possible. It doesn't matter. Things die at a staggering pace, and in a last attempt to test their mettle I just bomb the trash before boss number two without any communication.

Two targets sheeped and the remaining bears peeled to me as if we had been planning the CC a minute in advance.

Needless to say things die, as does the boss, and we continue the barrage. Nothing stops the maniac mages from out aggroing me, but they simply refuse to take any damage. I'm frantically using everything available in my arsenal, but they're simply too fast for me. I can't even make a mess of the last pull before the hatchling boss. Casters are sheeped immediately and the group falls over and dies.

The boss-fight, however, is a mess. Both adds are immediately killed, and the boss takes damage at an alarming rate. Before the second spawn everything is hatched. I flunk and forget to bubble my healer who dies immediately. Flipping all my cooldowns in short time, including a full self-heal I stay up long enough to see most adds vanish in a maddening cloud of AoE, and then there are three dps alone with a boss. Two of them manage to stay alive for over twenty seconds, and to my enormous surprise the boss keels over.

For the first time the healer complains, and rightfully so.

We burn our way to boss number four. This is a part of the fight I do in my sleep, so I concentrate on generating max dps. Still, close to 25k dps as tank isn't enough to hold aggro, but by now I just don't care. The group is superb, we hit the boss, it dies and I get some kind of funny achievement.

When I'm ready to pull the trash prior to the last two bosses I notice that two of my dps are absent. They stay absent. One of them continue to stay absent. Then a loot-message for some kind of mount pops on my screen. Realising I've forgotten to look at the cashe for speed-running the instance I decide to greed rather than need. All four pass and just throw me a 'congrats'. Now, that takes style. They could just have sped away together with me, but for some reason they decided to prolong the run by digging up a mount none of them were interested in.

The last part of the dungeon gets eradicated in the same style and I thank the group for the best pug I've seen in my life. The response is something along: "Yep, good run, decent tank."

That's about when it slowly dawns on me it wasn't really a pug. All four of them come from the same server.

What was the best run for me ever would likely have turned out to be a first class nightmare for a more green tank.

It made me realise you have to watch for what you wish for -- it might come true.

The joys of tanking pugs.

Trashing Firelands

Sporeggar EU is a convalecent backwater realm. Hence it should work as an example of how hard it is to get together proper pugs.

After doing my daily crap yesterday I saw a call for a Firelands trash run on /trade, I sent a whisper and got invited. Half of us, me included, had never seen the place as we zoned in.

There were some ugly wipes, the expected QQ, and then we started learning both trash and each other quickly. I'm pretty certain we botched quite a few of the mechanics during the run, but even so we didn't even bother with getting a new dps after one had to call it a day.

If our pug could nine-man most of the run with half of us neewbs, then there really is no excuse for staying out of these runs if you're a casual tank like me. One run saw me at some 1700 odd reputation, so I'll expect six instance resets to hit just below honoured. That's where easy trash stops giving rep, but I've come to understand that you could push above on a wipe-run on some of the harder trash if bosses are beyond your reach.

Joys of pugging

Having done my dailies, pushed my poor hunter to 75, spent 4k gold on the AH buying every scrap of Savage Leather there was and realising I'm stranded at 510 Leatherworking, I gave up on upgrading my leg enchants.

Sporeggar EU is a backwater realm, so I wasn't too surprised seeing that the AH gaped empty on the upgrade for the second day in a row. The old one would have to serve me for a while longer.

I caved in to the ilevel greed and crafted myself a second Elementium Earthguard, lost a minor amount of CTC as I downgraded my shield from the 353 drop in one of the Zuls. At least I gained some armour and stamina.

I had, as is usually the case early after a content patch, run out of excuses to delay getting on with the VP grinding. It was time for LFD.

Now, I'm sitting on an average ilevel 359 goto raiding set with some 32% avoidance and 60% block. A full tierlevel above the Zuls it means I'm taking a risk when it comes to threat due to Vengeance scaling at glacial speed. At the other hand you never know what cards you will be played concerning the other four people you'll be grouped up with.

I hit Zul'Aman.

I was dealt a silent DK who occasionally managed to break the 10k mark, a healer I never got to measure as I take very little damage, and two people playing the druid class, one who spent most of the time in bear form focussing on something in my tertiary AoE circle and complaining about my tanking.

You see, a paladin tank has a primary target, or circle if you so want. That's the object or objects who receive our single target attacks. We also have a secondary circle consisting of the targets who get hit by our multi target attacks, usually Avenger's Shield, and the occasional direct hit if threat starts running low. Then there is the tertiary circle. Those targets should normally have been the subject of CC during the pull, but if they're not, they only get the attention of our pure AoE damage.

Anyway, as we disgustingly slowly grind our way through the gauntlet to the first boss I find myself both topping the charts an throwing taunts on cooldown. The druids target just about everything in the tertiary circle and then some. I let the worst offender die twice to get a cleaner run. While losing a dps is usually bad, the 6k lost is in effect neglible.

Eventually we hit the boss, and we wipe horribly. I'm aware I'll have problems doing decent damage in my gear, so I'm slightly surprised seeing myself at a steady 10k. That's a pretty good sign the small adds aren't killed fast enough. After the wipe I check my Recount and am stunned. The DK runs 9.5k dps, which places him firmly in the top of the three dps. The druids lumber in at 5.5 and 6.5k respectively.

The 5.5k genious is livid about me not tanking the big eagle carrying away people, and I realise this will be a never ending run unless I get out. I inform the group that boss-fight dps below the tank is unacceptable, and that doing well below 50% of the minimum dps given the gear requirements of the instance is a joke. To my great relief I'm immediately kicked.

The next group is a business minded 13k dps (apart from the berserk 45k AoE hunter who never uttered a word of complaint) and environmentally aware healer. We have a lock who's strangely silent after I expressed my hopes for a better run and referred to the numericals from the previous disaster. After a few trash pulls going slightly slower than I expected one dps reminds me that five players might come in handy at the boss. I'm a bit surprised, but it turns out the lock is AFK, and I never noticed, something I remark upon. My friendly, present, dps links the overall 5k dps delieverd by the lock this far, and he's kicked. Stuff dies, we collect our VP, politely share thanks for a pleasant run and disperse.

I want 280 VP, so a new group it is. It's the usual semi-decent dps never attacking skull and breaking CC gang while complaining about retarded tank. I've grown too old to react on those by now. They usually, and inevitably did, quit halfway through the instance. I got a new set of those as replacement, and they proved that I can't tank two casters and three melee throwing crap under my feet while someone collected reinforcements from the light knows where. They also quit.

The last replacement is decent. 16k or so dps, environmentally unaware and firm in their belief that their paladin tank should use his two interrupts on a six second CD each to handle all incoming spells. I tell them they're sadly misinformed about the paladin tank, but recount shows zero interrupts done by the entire party, which either indiactes a bug or rather awful lag. There's very little QQ in the end. We reform, focus and stuff dies.

So I'm sitting here, firmly reminded why quite a few tanks avoid pugs. To be honest only the first run was an utter disaster, but then I've evolved armour as every true tank does. Being called a retard by players who are unable to do their part doesn't concern me overy much, as long as they produce enough damage to see me further into the instance before they quit.

So, 280 VP and three typical types of pugs. It could be worse.

It's just a pug

I don't have to, because it's just a pug.

Then there's the long list of don't have tos.

I don't have to:

Flask
Pot
Eat
Perform at max capacity
Use my buffing spells
Use my cooldowns
Enchant my gear
Gem my gear
Reforge my gear
Run in an optimal spec
Know the content
Run in a spec that's suitable for my role at all
Disrobe my PvP gear
Wear gear that is suitable for my class, spec or role at all.
Pay attention during fights
Be physically present at my computer during fights

Do you see a trend?

Remove items from the list that are clearly absurd. If you have more than the three top most left for a five man or any at all for a proper raid, you're not casual, you're just bad.

Cheaper enchanting from pugging

If, for some reason, you're short on gold, short on crafting materials and short on time, getting your gear to the level you want might seem a daunting task.

While doing dailies is a requirement for getting reputation gear, and certainly helps with netting you some needed gold, they do very little to mitigate the cost of crafting materials.

This is where pugging five mans come into the picture. The troll heroics should see you set with maelstrom crystals, but they're also generally a gold sink due to repair costs.

So, rather than doing all seven troll heroics per week, you might consider doing four, or even three, and pad out the valor point cap from running four or six old style heroics. Not only will you statistically receive quite a few extra satchels of exotic mysteries, but the old style heroics are likely to be your main source of heavenly shards. As an extra bonus you're unlikely to wipe as often there, and they generally take far less time to complete.

All in all I'd estimate your netting an extra 500 gold weekly on top of getting the occasional crafting material to help you alleviate the cost of enchanting your gear. You'll also receive the occasional blue quality uncut gem.

The strength of a pug

"We haven't done it this way before."

That's at least something you're unlikely to see the entire party fall back on when things don't work as you want.

The true pug, by definition, hasn't done things in any way before. You're recently gathered, and when you run into an obstacle you're left with either following well known tactics or trying something new. While there is, admittedly, usually a preferable way to solve a problem, the pug offers you the option to try a diferent way to handle it.

A new way is more often than not a worse way, but it is also the strength of a pug. It is a new way, and as such it offers a possible insight into how to handle the given problem. It also offers insights into how to handle similar problems, and while the new way is likely to be discarded as the wrong way, from time to time you'll learn something.

Sometimes you even learn the road to a new established way of solving this type of problems.

That is the strength of the pug. It's not set in its ways.

A short piece of advice, pug

Do it, preferably through the LFD.

If you're casually tanking your weekly wipes together with your equally casual guild mates, you need to see how other people are doing things. Other people include the horribly bad as well.

Not only will you gain insight in how things should be done, but you'll also learn the route to disaster. As an added bonus you'll end up a better tank, because having to react to random shenanigans from your fellow randoms teaches you how fight mechanics interact with a number of players (in this case five) just happening to be located in the direct vincinity of mobs doing bad stuff to you.

You'll also see how different combinations of specs work together, or in some cases fail to work together. By failing I'm not referring to bad resources behind the keyboard, but rather to how some combinations simply carry lackluster synergies.

So, get out there and pug.