A Shortage of Dwarves

With respect to WoW recently I am really time poor. I can grab an hour here, half an hour there, at odd intervals, and so raiding is entirely out of the question (as I watch the guild pull away from me again), and I really don’t want to waste any time.

Which is why the state of Cataclysm Heroics and PUGs is really annoying, but I will keep the rant to a minimum.
I’m only trying to run heroics on Belmann, as a healer, at the moment. I don’t have time to waste sitting in a DPS queue for 40 minutes to run a 40 minute instance. So my queue times as a healer are ok, at most 5 or 10 minutes. But the instance runs themselves are proving horrible, and I’ve not actually finished an instance in weeks. Monday was a good example of the pattern.

I queued up and popped into the Stone Core. The DK tank immediately shouted “f* this”, spawned his Army, and quit the group. Wait. Wait. Wait. Another tank showed up,  said “this is an instance I don’t need” and quit. The melee DPS Paladin requeued as tank (this doesn’t look good) and we picked up another DPS. Off we went, with the tank apparently in DPS gear, or at the very least wearing cardboard armour. He could barely hold aggro, and I had to keep spamming Greater Heal to keep him up. The other DPS were dropping like flies on trash as I could not spare them heals, and they kept pulling mobs off him. We replaced three DPS before we got to the first boss, and two more between that boss and the dragon boss. Did I mention that he was chain pulling all the way, not giving me an opportunity to regain mana, and complaining we weren’t going fast enough?

Now I’ve found the dragon boss in that instance to be really difficult to heal as holy. It’s not just that I have to keep moving to keep out of the fire, which makes for really inefficient healing, the line of sight issues are horrid. At least twice I began to cast Greater Heal to keep the cardboard tank up, and a sodding pillar dropped in front of me just as the cast was ending, and a fire spot bubbled up between my feet. Move, cast again. No time at all for the DPS. We wiped twice (and lost another DPS), and got him down. As I ran back to the instance, since I died just at the end of the boss with a heroic saving ghost heal, I mentioned that it was an annoying fight and said something like “I’m sure Blizzard have rigged the fire to pop under the healer :-)”. His response? “L2 Move Noob”

The next part of the instance after the dragon boss is a little bit tricky, and all the advice I’ve ever seen is to be careful of how many mobs you pull. Off he went with a huge chain pull, had something like 20 mobs on him, and of course we wipied again because the DPS pulled mobs off him, died, and I ran out of mana. So he rage quit.

There’s a little over an hour of game play, consisting entirely of dealing with bad manners and lousy understanding of how to play. If we’d slowed down, been careful with the pulls, marked up the mobs, and actually thought about what we were doing we’d have gotten through it, and gotten through it faster than we did with the constant wipes.

Ok, rant over.

Because I’m so time poor, what am I doing instead of the PUG hell? At the moment I’m rolling a dice. I’ve currently got 9 toons, at different levels of progression. Two 85s, and my DK is about to pop 85. The hunter and warrior are in the low 60’s, the ‘lock is racing up the ladder and is in the ’40s. So I can pop onto virtually any of the toons other than Belmann and progress something. Even Belmann I can progress, by chasing profession levelling and small achievements – hence a lot of fishing lately. And somehow or other I’ve wound up with three toons who pick flowers, and two miners, so there’s a bit of money starting to roll in as well.

So part of my preparation to play, other than pouring a glass of wine of making coffee, is to roll dice.
You heard that right. Random heroes. Heroically random. Nine toons, and a D10. If I roll a 10, or Giladris-the-70-bank-alt, I roll again. It might be silly, but it’s a way that I can have fun in the game while time poor, as long as I don’t have to deal with what seems to be a preponderance of kunckle-dragging mouth-breathing examples of why cousins shouldn’t marry.