ScaryToenails

My Warrior finally hit 60 a couple days ago and right now I'm off enjoying classic level-cap content. There's actually a really nice Community Raiding organization on my server that runs pretty much every raid in-game, so I was able to tag along with a group of people who are way overqualified for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. I managed to grab myself some T1 and T2 armor, which is fantastic but weird - running around with the Helm of Wrath, Pauldrons of Might and a green level 42 belt makes me look rather foolish.

Speaking of which, these two runs were my first ever for either raid. Yes, I've been playing WoW (with one break from WotLK release to Nov 2009) since patch 1.3 and I never made it past Lucifron. Sure, it's not quite as epic as fighting my way through the instance until I could finally spend 15 minutes fighting Ragnaros, but dammit, it was still pretty awesome. I'd never even seen the interior of Blackwing Lair, so that was quite a treat.

I'm still running a full Protection spec, having picked up Shockwave when I hit 60, and I'm having a blast tanking instances. I do decent enough damage, but my weapon and shield are in desperate need of an upgrade. (Why oh why didn't you drop, Elementium Reinforced Bulwark?!) Still, I have no problems tanking classic instances, and even made it to the Beast in an UBRS run at 59 with only 5 people. Of course, much of that has to do with my awesome pocket healer.

And that brings me to the title of this post and the story behind it: There are a whole lot of really terrible players out there. I mean, I realize that some people have never run this content before and are genuinely trying. This is never a problem, and I'm always happy to explain encounters. I even have a macro set up with my two all-important rules for being a PUG tank:

If you want a smooth PUG run: 1. Give me a couple seconds to build aggro - I don't need more than 3-5 seconds, (in other words, do not AOE right when I pull) 2. If I do a line-of-sight (LOS) pull, don't attack them until they come to me.

I have yet to receive a complaint - though I'm sure it's caused a few eyes to roll - and in fact I receive more comments on how it's sad that something like that has to be pointed out to people. It is, isn't it?

But in recent runs even my two rules aren't enough. People will wander around, completely oblivious to the mobs in the room, aggroing multiple packs willy-nilly without any indication at all that they realize what they're doing. How many times must we point out that the green cloud that does 350 damage per second is not, in fact, a happy pixie-dust haze of wonderful? Stop standing there!

And I don't think I need to get into the douchebags who are never satisfied with your pull speed (and start taking it upon themselves to do so), or the idiot Warlocks who Life Tap down to 1% health and cry for a heal, or the Death Knights who DPS in Frost Presence, or the flavor of the month Ret Paladins who rolled just because they heard it was OP.

The point is: Blizzard increased the limit to players' ignore lists, and I don't think I'll have a problem hitting that ceiling anytime soon given the caliber of DPSers I've encountered so far with the Dungeon Finder. So there ends Yet Another Blogger Dungeon Finder Rant.