I was going to respond but **Jas09 **beat me to it. But I do have a question, if you remember–what was the DK’s name? I would love to look him up and see what kind of lovely choices he made for gear/gems/enchants/reforges. 
PuG douchebaggery is legendary. But others have offered good practical advice, so I won’t address that.
Now, the DK in question… while some of his technical criticism may have been accurate, his attitude was pure douche. That pretty much eliminates the “constructive” in “constructive criticism”. :mad:
Now, I just started pugging heroics. Period. I have avoided them, even on my main, just because of the douchebag factor, and also because I know that I’m pretty terribad. And of course, heroics have enough interesting mechanics nowadays that if you don’t know the fight well (i.e., first outing), you will be terribad at certain encounters no matter how “basically skilled” you are at your role.
So, I jump on my shadow priest and get into a heroic Stonecore. Ow. Ozruk is an awful fight for an spriest who hasn’t gotten enough spell haste to fit in his big blasts into the miniscule moments Oz doesn’t have his reflect shield up. We wiped, although it appears I wasn’t the only one who had inexperience trouble with the fight. The frost DPS DK actually died to a Shatter even though he wasn’t Paralyzed; evidently he didn’t know about it.
My problem was just not knowing the attack tempo for a caster with lots of 1-2 second casts. My rotation was just not going to cut it, and I wound up dotting and wanding the second time around. The DK bought it again, but no wipe and we won.
The healer was a raid-geared druid who was pretty cutting, and not very constructive, but at least shut up after a couple of pointed comments, so it wasn’t so bad. I didn’t use the “Hey, this is my first run” excuse, because that gets no slack and may provoke a kick.
The next heroic was Heroic Throne of Tides. This is where I learned something I had never thought of: Mind Control is an expected form of crowd control.
I didn’t even have the damn thing on an action bar. I was mortified, and rightly accused of being bad. Maybe somewhat over-loudly and over-insistently accused, as in “Yeah, I’m bad, but your typing extended dissertations in party chat about how bad I am isn’t helping your performance much either.”
I left that party quickly after that to fix my actionbars, study up on spriest CC strategy, and get away from the haters. Like I said, without “constructive”, criticism is less useful.
I got back into H ToT after I fixed up and re-RDF’d. This worked brilliantly, and (no false modesty here) I think I CC’d better than the shaman in that run. (Hex is nice, but he kept forgetting that it wears off.)
It’s kind of cool, grabbing one of the overpowered healer nagas and out-healing the group healer with it.
It went almost in well with the third heroic that night, Heroic Vortex Pinnacle. Again, MC’ing the healer mobs worked well. Frankly, in heroic, it’s almost impossible to dps down both healers in those two-healer packs of Tol’Vir (Temple Adepts). With these, I DPS’ed the other mobs in the group, bacause the druid healer was doing a good job healing, but we should have communicated CC order better (more than once I wound up CCing the same Adept as the other CC’er. I forget what they were using, but it just meant I wasted my MC cast.)
Anyway. To make a long story short (“too late!”), even douchebag criticism can be useful (like, use Mind Control when practical), but that doesn’t make it less douchebag.
Next time, instead of dropping from the group (why should you have to drop?), tell the group that the DK is being a douche and you’re not moving forward any further until the group kicks either him or you. Then initiate a /kick.
Worst case, they kick you, and you can immediately get another group. But chances are they’ll kick the DK, especially if he’s not pulling 10k.
(I delurked during my beach vacation to post this!)
Just drop the group. Don’t be a drama bomb.
Well, Skammer’s suggestion has one pragmatic advantage: there’s a real chance you won’t have to wait out another LFG queue.
For DPS, anyway, that’s a serious consideration. It appears that prime-time weekday LFG queue times for DPS are running 8-12 minutes on my server. While there are lots of things I can start in 8-12 minutes, there’s not much I can finish, and having bags cluttered with quest items and unsold VT might crimp the ability to loot quickly in instance. (It’s not like anyone waits around any more. God forbid if I loot extra cloth as a tailor, or skin the mob as a skinner, and wind up 50 yards behind the party.)
For a tank, the queue time probably isn’t a real consideration, but winning the kick vote has another upside in that case: the douchebag DPS will have to wait out an LFG queue. “You losing is as good as me winning.” 
It’s possible (nay, probable) that some of my enchants are sub-optimal. In my defense, that’s because the optimal enchants are selling for 2-3K on the auction house. I don’t have that kind of gold.
From what I understand, the choice of meta between the block and the armor is a little more dependent on your tanking capabilities. But I don’t have a pally tank so I could very well be wrong. But yeah, stam stacking is Wrath era pretty much. (Conversely, I think top end hardcore progression raiders might be stacking stam to some degree)
That said, yeah, you need a pretty thick skin to deal with the window-lickers in the RDF. (With bonus pithy comebacks involving gnomes. 
)
Recently I dusted my holy priest off after several months and hopped into ZA. The tank was a raid-geared DK who tried to three-pull the first hill plus eagles like I was a godly holydin without bothering with more than maybe one or two tanking cds. We inevitably wiped despite my healing my tits off. When we got to the second boss, he targeted me and told me, “Healer, you make me sad.” I dropped group without a word before he could finish. Steamed for a while, then took another gander at my gear and reforges and changed things around.
**Guns **-- very belated thanks by the way for the GTFO suggestion. I may have to hook that up and see. However, I did take a closer look to see why I had the damage differential in my head, and battle stance gives 5% damage taken reduction, which would explain it. My rotation is settling into something that favors stance dancing so I’ll give it another whirl eventually. Just not in pugs.
I was in a Heroic Grim Batol pug earlier this week. It seemed to be a guild run - tank and other 2 DPS.
I think I zoned in at a bad time, it was Baleflame and we wiped. Tank quit after that, saying he just couldn’t do it any more. I’m kinda thinking it might have had something to do with me doing almost the same amount of damage as them combined. But seriously, I’m mediocre DPS, I can’t carry two people doing 6.5k each. That’s average for a normal dungeon, but a Heroic? Really?
I just don’t want to think about how horrible you have to be that even your own guild won’t run with you…
As jayjay knows, I’m in the hospital with D, my wife who is pretty sick. I was wondering if y’all can recommend an MMPORG online game I wouldn’t have to download. Also, if anyone wants to play my Wolkie or any alts, let me know in a pm, and I’ll give you details.
Thanks for thinking of us. We love youse guys and ladies!
Quasi
[QUOTE=Runestar]
We’re working our way through the last mobs before the third boss when I start getting comments from the death knight - not the healer mind you, but the Death Knight.
[/QUOTE]
It’s always the Death Knight, always, or an Orc Warrior.
Had a lovely DK decide to bash my baby druid nonstop through VH because I lost aggro on ONE mob at the start of a pull. Being an experienced tank I just rolled my eyes and continued to out dps him while singing along with my music. You’re a good tank Kal, don’t let the idiots get you down.
If you need some enchants send a mail with what you need to Prod and I’ll fix you up. My enchanter is overflowing with mats.
So yeah, been leveling a druid up for giggles so I can hopefully grab “the Hallowed” title on him. For no other reason than I think “Darkscar the Hallowed” sounds too cool to pass up. Troll druids really look like they were attacked by a 5 year old with a box of crayons, but the crazy colors are growing on me.
My main’s raid group finally downed Rag and I picked up the head token so now I’m pretty much set as far as gear is concerned. We’re having trouble with finding subs right now so I’m not sure when our next Rag kill will come. Almost had him last night but I was so tired I actually forgot to run out of fire, which was a little embarassing. Next week we’ll get it though… along with H Baleroc and H Domo. At least I can hope so.
Did the Zombies kill y’all?
Q
Okay, Quasi, I’ll tell my weekend PUG story.
Back from vacation, I decided to run a Heroic with my holy pally. Got teamed up with a bear tank and three dps from the same guild: a warlock, a boomkin, and a hunter.
The tank was good, knew the fights, good mitigation and was doing about 9k dps. Which was more than any of the dps, in fact more than #2 and #3 combined. I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it, but the apparently heroic-geared warlock was doing 3.9k dps. The #2 dps was doing about 5.5k and the chicken was around 8.5k.
Trash pulls took forever, but the tank and I were outnumbered 3-2 so we couldn’t kick anyonw and we tried to stick it out. But these guys were terrible. We got past the first boss and then made it to the hall of mirrors. Before the first elemental mini-boss (water) we explain to the dps that when someone gets bubbled, they have to dps the bubble right away. First one bubbled is me, the healer. No one swtiches targets. Finally the tank comes and gets me out. Then the tank is bubbled. No one helps him until finally I start swinging at him with my mace and Excorcism (while a dps dies because he’s standing in the puddle and I’m too busy saving the tank to heal him). So we wipe. Then these three guys just lie there, waiting for me to run back and rez them – which I explain I can’t do anyway because of the trogs respawning. So we kill five minutes waiting for them to release and run back.
Second attempt - more of the same, but we manage to get all the minibosses down. Then we go after that boss in the Hall of Mirrors and… forget it. We wiped three times. The fight goes on forever because there’s no dps. I finally had to apologize to the tank and drop out - it was such a waste of time. I’m extremely patient with newbies in pugs but those guys were useless.
Quasi…you should never do this. Not even for Doper friends. You’ve worked long and hard to get Wolkie to where he is, and anytime you give out login information, there’s a chance of bad things happening. Maybe you give it to a trusted friend, and that friend gets hacked…just don’t take the chance.
Not to mention that nobody else CAN play Wolkie, unless Quasi either sends his authenticator to the person he designates to play W, or takes the authenticator off of the account completely (and I would recommend neither, as well, Quasi).
I don’t necessarily think any of the folks that frequent this thread would clean you out, Quasi, but you don’t really know most of us at all, outside of this board.
Yes, agreed. Even worse, if you give out your information to a friend and the friend gets hacked (or accidentally deletes something you wanted to keep, or whatever) then there’s a chance that you might not be able to get your toons or items restored since it’s strictly against Blizzard’s Terms of Service to share your account info with anyone. The only exception to this is that minor children are permitted to play on their parents’ accounts, but even spouses sharing accounts is forbidden. If Blizz found out that you shared it with someone who wasn’t even a family member, they might (no idea if they would, but they definitely could) say, “Sorry, can’t fix it, and by the way your account is banned for violating the TOS.” And then you’d lose all the work you put into your toons and would have to start over with a new account.
So please, don’t do it. Just focus on getting Dondra better and let Wolkie take a nice rest till you get back to him. 
He’s probably over at the Sentinel Hill Inn boppin’ Heather’s brains out as we speak, anyway.
And yeah, okay. Point taken. I was just thinking that there’s no one I trust more than you guys - even at a distance.
jayjay, I wish we could have gotten jaejae into the guild before all of this happened. That way, she could take up the slack, as it were.
I appreciate y’all looking out for me.
Thanks
Q
Wolkie isn’t the only toon with a fantasy girlfriend. My gnome mage has a thing for Chromie
Oh, dude…be careful…that ain’t no gnome…
I’m partly to blame there, too, since I probably should have gone in when we started talking about it and asked for an invite instead of putting it off.
True…but she’s hot in Gnome form, and generally inclined to goodness and such. I used to make a point of hanging out after the final battle in Heroic Stratholm just so I could /dance with her. Now I look for her anytime I run that Daily where she might show up as one of the npc-helpers.