My vacation starts today, meaning that I most probably won't be either playing or blogging for at least the next few weeks. At least the first two weeks I will be away from the computer altogether, though I may update my other blog during the time due to the fact that we're travelling to European Championships in Lure Coursing with our dogs. But for this blog... it's going to be a short silence.
This means that your blogroll will be a bit shorter on my behalf, too. As it happens, I'm not the only blogger taking a well deserved summer vacation: more prominent names have already taken their leave.
But before the 'long absence' I'll recap my last night's endeavours. First of all, the initial patch load was pretty quick, but for some reason it lagged my computer even after it had finished: was is just a freak incident or is there a real data leak in the loader, I don't know. But after restarting my machine the performance was quite different.
Secondly, I found out another reason why it's next to impossible for a new player -even in social guild- to get access to the lower instances and learn from them. You see, I travel with LFG tool on all the time. I have the "first time tank, noob warning" in the comments, which in a way works as a warning to the 'fast levelling' level capped know it alls.
Or should work.
In the initial party there were two druids (boomkin and asparagus), DK, mage and Laiskajaakko. Fine, the composition is quite reasonable. The tree-druid was the one who got the party going, and she was excellent: she took into account the fact that I am only learning to tank, gave me time and gave me information which I obviously didn't have due to my inexperience. She also tried to slow down the rest of the group, as the boomkin was one of the impatient know it alls: "sure I have omen, but the tank is slacking" was his comment on stealing aggro. Doesn't matter how hard I try, my TPS remains below 2k, for some reason or another: I don't think it's about the rotation or such, there is now something I just don't get.
Anyhow, we wiped. Partly because I couldn't keep the aggro effectively in the 3 or 4 mob pulls. Partly because the boomkin was doing steady 1500 damage and generating huge amount of aggro, stealing it constantly from me. Even with spamming taunt and devastate I wasn't keeping up to him.
So the bird-man left the group. So did the DK, as they were a couple.
And we got another two to run the rest of the instance. A paladin and another DK.
Who listened to the tree druid, checked their threat and all in all the rest of the instance went flying by. I suppose a big part of it was the fact that I got the time to call the pulls, get the initial aggro and just do my work on my pace. Thanks to the resto druid, I felt I could work within the group.
Still I hate Ingvar: he sucks.
Anyhow, I later heard that the warrior threat generation is a bottleneck in WotLK and that the situation is not unheard of. I tested my rotation later on against some elites for a quest (being healed by Bishopgeorge) and breaking even 1800 TPS seems extremely hard with the gear and talents I have...
And I remembered only as I logged out, that I haven't visited a class trainer since lv70... that's too skill ups ago...
Anyhow, the impatience and intolerance of different skill levels among the PUG's may be a big cause for the discussion about how terrible PUG's are: while the people with extensive raid experience -from vanilla even to the current top content- would like to advance on their own pace, there may be a player without that experience in instances, slowing the progress and trash clearing. I know that my talent build isn't that for clearing trash, and I don't have the Glyph of Cleave in my repertoire: it doesn't serve my levelling. However, this should be in the normal instances as the trash clearing is all about multi-mob tanking.
So, instead of trying to excel in PUG's, people should learn to adapt and wing their playstyle accordingly. This is something that is very hard to do, as the courtesy is a two way street. If you act snobbishly about it, the one feeling inadequate will act aggressively. That's self-preservation for you in short.
I want to thank all of you wonderful and helpful people PUGging day in, day out, helping newcomers and people who are not up to the challenge to overcome their lack of skill. You are the angels and helpers, who really make MMO's worth the grind to any instance, making the newcomer player feel at least a bit helpful on the way.
Thank you.
