Motivation out of the Box

Today I part-pugged VoA again, this time on my balance druid. It was a lot of fun, and a whole new challenge entirely.

My boyfriend (Thrornir) came to tank, and we had a couple of guildies who wanted to come as well. We needed 4 more, so I jumped into LFG, and quickly we had found a second tank, a second healer, and the last 2 dps we needed.

I found myself checking the gear quickly, but then remembered how well it went yesterday, and figured we would be able to do it anyway. We would find a way.

So we went in, killed the first couple of adds, and though I thought we were doing fine, the pug healer obviously didn't agree. She started whispering me that we had to lose the DK and one of our rogues since they were both low on dps.

At the same time she started insulting the DK in raid, so I whispered her and asked if she could please be a bit nicer. She obviously took offense, but I ignored the objections she made, and checked recount. I saw that the DK was doing about 2.2 K dps, and the rogue she was talking about was doing about 1K dps.

Both of these players were guildies and we were in vent at that point. I asked the rogue what was going on, and she started laughing. She had forgotten to retalent, and said that she had now stuck points in, and that it would go better.

So we took down the couple of exploding adds, and they went down easy with only 4 and 5 stacks respectively. I checked the rogue's dps again, she was still at about 1K dps, but I shrugged. We had easily gotten those adds down so we should be fine on the boss.

Once again the pug healer didn't agree, and let me know in whispers. I told her that if she didn't want to stay, that she was free to leave, that we would be ok to find another healer, but she didn't say anything in response...to me.

Instead she was starting to harass the rogue about her dps in whispers. I got the whole story on vent, and my guildies were getting a bit annoyed with the healer, but hey you need two healers so we stuck with her.

We buffed, ate fish (yay fish!) and pulled. About 2 minutes later we were all on the floor, but in a sort of cheerful mood. Most of the people there had not managed to kill this boss before, but we had gotten him down to about half on the first try.

So we ran back in, buffed up and started again. We wiped again, but this time because the tank on Emalon died due to lack of healing, from, guess who, the pug healer. Wiping is part of the whole learning process, and though I know what to do with this boss now, as said most of the group were there for the first time.

So we were running back in for the third time. And all of a sudden one of the pug dps remarks that we wouldn't be able to do this anyway, and left the group.

For a short moment I was a bit confused, but then the pug healer started to announce in raid that we should drop the DK and the rogue, and that we had just lost our second best dps.

I removed her from the raid.

In say I told her that she was about the most negative person I had come across in a looong time in the game, and that she and the group were obviously better off going separate ways. That negativity was about the worst thing that can happen to motivation.

She called us morons, and said we were rude (talk about an oxymoron). Then she started again to me in whispers about how we just had to kick the rogue. Then she said the thing that made my red flag go up. "ooooh, she's in your guild, now I get it."

Yes, the rogue was in my guild, but seriously, with her attitude I would rather take 10 rogues of 1K dps than one mediocre healer with a bad attitude.

I told her once again that it was her negativity that had made me remove her from the raid, but she started about the dps once more. I was pretty amused by now, after all, the second time we wiped because she couldn't keep the tank healed.

What I said however was: "Well, it seemed to me that the dps was doing fine, until the tank died."

It was quiet for a moment.

Then came her reaction: "We only had 2 healers, this is a 3 healer fight, oh I'm so done with you!"

I managed to squeeze in a. "Uhm, this is always done with 2 healers" and then got message that she was now ignoring me.

I burst out laughing in vent and told the story. My guildies thought it was hilarious. and were happy that I had removed her from raid. The pug healer had been harassing dps, but a soft poke of critique on her own job she obviously couldn't appreciate.

And though it was funny, here we were once again with 2 players short. The guildie who played the DK offered to bring his main, a druid healer, to replace her. And we managed to get 2 new pug dps.

We now had a raid with 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 ranged, and 4 melee dps. The first thing one of the newly joined rogues said was that we were very high on melee, and that it would be practically impossible.

I told her we'd be fine, and she luckily didn't say anything further.

We tried a couple of times the normal way (adds to one side, boss to the other), but got blown up and wiped a couple of times. Unfortunately the rogue did have a point, we were rather high on melee. And melee loses a lot of dps when having to run to and from the adds.

So over vent we discussed some ways to see if we could change the tactics a bit. We decided to tank everything on top of eachother and the adds tank would run out for the nova together with the dps.

I announced the strategy to our pugs, and got some scepticism, but they were willing to try.

It worked like a charm, and about 5 minutes later Emalon was dead on the floor.


Lessons to learn from this?

1. Negativity in your raid, whether pug or guild run, makes you fail.

2. Think out of the box, and you can do what a lot of people would see as impossible.

Which brings me to the next topic: Motivation, but that will be for a different post.

(And oh, I'm sorry Mandy, we killed him again without you :( got one unsaved character left though!)