Pug-a-rama

“Even my best friends, even my best friends they don’t know
That my job is turning lead into gold.”
Philosopher’s Stone (Van Morrison)

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Pug-a-rama

It is story time.

Last night, our Raid Leader and main tank could not make it. He was sick and let us know by posting a message in Discord earlier in the day.

It is summer time and we had only seven players but, why not, lets go raiding. We moved players around until we had two tanks, two heals and three dps; an attractive core group (we hoped) for getting some puggers to fill out our roster so that we could play.

I’ve used the pug interface when putting together mythic dungeons for the weekly quest, so I knew how to fill in the slots. It is fairly minimal; normal, ToS, Discord with a description of Fresh.

It was slow to fill but that is expected. When we got close to 13 players, a lot more people wanted to join because it looked good, like we had a team. I got several people who said, “sorry, I didn’t realize that it was Fresh.” I was mystified and amused until one of our guys figured it out — the night before I raided up to KJ, so if you mouse over the listing then it will show all of the other bosses dead. So … I was the wrong guy to be posting on the Pug Lister!

Then I messed up again. We had about 13 players and I said, “Lets go to war.” And, everyone was at the landing for KJ … We got two people to summon us out and change to Raid Leader duties to someone else and Reset All Instances and finally we got to go do our fights.

I was the leader by some kind of understood default. I’m more vocal, I am an officer in our guild and shit floats; so I rose to the top and was making the little decisions like when to start or calling out tornados.

My attitude was fun and casual. We downed five bosses (one shot) with a constant stream of gathering puggers and watching them leave after a kill. That decision is hard, when to refill your group, because it takes time to get people and then get them to our team. I think it is time for more than the Warlock class to have a summoning portal; let a mage have something or an engineer.

I decided that as players left and we’d drop from 15 to 14 to 13 to 12 that we’d go until we hit an enrage timer. Then we’d know we didn’t have enough DPS. It worked and we kept going for a few bosses before needing a refill. We were successful and got more players when we wanted a five minute break, only a couple of times.

When I was running the Pug List, starting the evening, I accepted an 877 ilevel player. The rest were all 900 or more. I knew the DPS would be low and rolled the dice.

After a while, it turned out that Mr. 877 was a kid, maybe 13 years old (I have no idea, a super young voice on Discord). He was not very good. He’d die and with such a small team, losing even one player can be crucial.

I got whispers from my guildies asking if he should be kicked and I said no. The kid was totally excited to be raiding. He was trying. He’d die and then look up the boss (and actually read the strat to us). I wanted him to have a good time and if I had the choice, that was going to happen.

So, for me, my story of last night was not another night of raiding and running down well-worn paths and anticipated mechanics but about letting this kid have a lot of fun. People got behind it and helped him out and they were … nice.

All in all, a good night for raiding with my guild.

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