Puggers really are worse than retarded.

So, I wanted to do a slave pens run on my warlock, and I couldn’t find a guildie group. I found a partial group in the LFG listing. It had a druid tank and a shaman already in it. According to the druid, they had been waiting a while. Several people had joined and left because they could not find a healer. As it was just normal slave pens, I simply asked if the Shaman might be willing to try it. He very forcefully said he only DPSed, acting as if I had threatened him. After backing off a bit (I didn’t think I had been particularly insulting), I figured that was okay. I will admit slight annoyance, but I fully support hybrid rights to play the role they want to.

I then went to Shattrath and proceeded to help the Druid advertise for more (he was advertising in the LFG channel and /whoing people, but he wasn’t in a large city).

I got a response after about 5 minutes. A paladin offered to come heal the group as long as his friend came along. His friend was a mage. Great! Full group!

So, it was Druid tank, Pally healer, myself(warlock), shaman melee, and a mage.


Unfortunately, things started to go badly right at the beginning.

Our shaman decided to pull before everyone was done buffing because apparently letting our Paladin drink was holding up the group. We managed to pull it off, barely. At one vital point in the fight, the Paladin decided to spam heal the tank instead of the Shaman (shocker there), so the Shaman then screamed that the Paladin sucked at healing.

This continued throughout the instance. How dare we attempt to drink, top off wounded players, or wait for quick afks. No, if there was a pull to be made and no fighting was currently occurring, our Shaman was sure to make that pull.

This clashed greatly with our Paladin, who seemed to want to very carefully go over everything, esp. his mage friend’s role in each fight. I will admit, even I thought his level of detail was sometimes a bit silly, but he was a good healer. For example, he would very carefully tell the mage exactly when to run and when to stop if we were skipping mobs. On unsheepable mobs, he would always remind the mage that he was to just attack the skull and not worry about sheeping anything that fight (which was a bit bizarre because everyone else would think it was fairly obvious that if you are fighting unsheepable mobs that you obviously aren’t going to be hitting the sheep button).

I would have said we had a decent group if it wasn’t for the Shaman. The tank knew how to hold threat from everyone but the Shaman (who seemed to be purposely trying to take it away), the healer kept everyone up most of the time, and our mage did his DPS and CC job quite nicely (if after sometimes unusual prompts from the Paladin).

Our shaman, on the other hand, liked to use windfury in attempts to burst down mobs that were not the skull, usually the CCed mobs were his favorite. He apparently also thought he was an off-tank, and his earthshock ability was a foreign concept to him. Once, he pulled an entire other camp. Our Paladin wisely chose not to heal him (doing so would have pulled agro onto everyone else and probably wiped us). This event, of course, meant more yelling about how “sucky” our Paladin was.

Eventually, half way through the instance, our tank got fed up and kicked the Shaman.

We proceeded to 4-man the rest of the instance. No wipes.

After it was over, the tank made the comment “Yeah, that shaman had downs.” The paladin then said, “Please don’t use that term that way, it is insulting to those who actually have it.”

He then told us that our mage actually DID have Downs Syndrome.

Wow. After a bit of awkward silence, everyone commented that our mage had done a very good job.

Our mage never said anything cruel to anyone in the group. He gave water when asked. He always sheeped the moon at the start of the fight, and promptly resheeped it if anyone broke it prematurely. He even counted to 10, and every ten seconds he resheeped his sheep (as requested by his Paladin friend). And, most of all, he always counted to 5 before opening and he always attacked the skull first. He didn’t pull agro once. Best pug mage I’ve ever played with.