Feral PuGing

I was quite sick at the tail end of the last week, and to keep my mind off of my roiling stomach and seething heartburn and lack of sleep, I spent a very large chunk of time playing feral-Kae. Her gear and rep were bugging me, and I wanted to see if I could just slash around in some pugs to earn badges and some new shinies.

• OS10. Bad run. We had two healers: a disc priest and a holy pally. They are typically MT healers, yes? The both of them? Yeah, sure, I get that. I wanted to smack them both, however, when they both said that they just wanted to target the tanks and only heal them. Hence, dps got NO heals. WTF. I mean... seriously, when you have a raid that has 5+ melee dps and a tank who wants to sit in the flame orbs, you're NOT going to get trash down, even with the little feral druid fleeing to stand behind the healers and BANDAGE HERSELF while the rest of the dps dies horribly, writhing in flames. Not a heal. Not one. We almost wiped to the first drake because of the AoE damage, since the MT again said "hey, don't go in the portal, just burn the drake down." Guess what that does? DAMAGES THE RAID! Now, I can understand it being the dps' fault when some stood in void zones, but dieing to straight environmental aoe that is unavoidable just because the two healers refuse to see anything but the tank's health is ridiculous. Angry kitty. Oh, and the mage didn't know he could remove curses ;)
  

• OS25. Decent run. Typical pug, nothing amazing or notable, though they had me OT the adds. I danced with fire elementals and got badges.
  

• VoA25. Bad run. I tried this several times, but the groups kept falling apart, usually because of bad healing... most of the healer puggers were in blues and self-admitted "bad alts." The tanks just kept dieing, and they easily had the gear to tank the instance. Personally, I have nothing wrong with alts in a raid like that, as long as they know how to play ;)

• VoA 10. Good run. I ran this after a very successful heroic daily run, when our 5-man heroic group decided to grab 4 extra dps and a healer and go kill Emalon with me as the OT. Very smooth run.

• Uld 10. Bad run. I had been sitting in LFG as a tank/dps for this and two other dungeons/raids, but with a comment that I should only OT or just play cat in Ulduar, because I know my gear is comparatively bad and I didn't have a separate kit for bear with the proper stam enchants. After a few mis-invites and fail-to-start groups where people didn't bother reading my comment about not having a MT-capable tank set, I took myself off the "tank" portion of LFG and just left it as "can tank anything below Ulduar" comment, as a pure dps lfg. I got a whispered invite to a U10 run after that, and since I'd been in the LFG as a dps, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal. They'd already downed flame leviathan, but that's 1 boss out of 14, right? They need a dps, sure, let's do this. Turns out, they wanted me as an MT. When I balked, they said I had the gear to do it... and I balked more. Then I inspected them. Indeed, my gear was the best among them, aside a resto druid who had more T7.5 than I did. Alright, I decided, I may as well see what happens, they seem to have confidence, in spite of their scattering of blues in scary item slots (chests, pants, helms, weapons...). So, I MT'd XT-002 and Razorscale for them, and we put a couple attempts in on Kologarn. They did pretty well for as undergeared as we all were, though many of the players really just didn't get the boss mechanics (eye beams? If I move two steps and stop, I'll be okay, right?) or even really their own class mechanics (wild growth? rejuv? why should I cast those?). I wish I could've helped them to down more bosses, but between replacing players and keeping those we had inside the instance (they kept hearthing to Dalaran to repair >.> ), and the relative inexperience at staying out of Bad Stuff™, we had to call it after Razorscale. Speaking of, the debuff was only stacking to 3 on me, so I was able to keep moving when solo-tanking Razorscale when the OT was practically one-shot, albeit very very slowly. This is new, and was a pleasant surprise, since it let us actually down the boss as the taunt-exchange just wasn't gonna happen! I'm glad my patience was able to hold out, because it certainly wasn't the Uld run that I was expecting.
  

• Naxx25. Good run. This was a 60%-or-so guild run by "stone axe clan" and I was one of the pug dps; apparently the guild had lost some members and was determined to complete the instance without them, and I was happy to help in trade for some upgrades to my tanking kit. What shocked me, though, was that I, apparently, really know my kitty dps rotations and can be a beast with them: I was steadily in the top 1, 2, 3 dps through the whole instance, even with a green trinket and 2 pieces of strength/armor tanking gear in my kitty kit, and even when the dps warriors left and I had to apply mangle myself! Wut?! Yeah, I didn't get it, I was outdpsing people in Ulduar gear. Kitties can be scary-good when they can keep their bleeds, shreds, and buffs in order... I know this well, as I regularly raid with a feral druid. By the end of the night, when we needed another tank for KT, the raid leaders refused to let me go bear because they didn't want to loose my dps. I was flattered, in spite of knowing that my own tank set was/is still pretty pathetic. They invited me to their Uld25 run for the next night; I was tempted to go, even though they said they were only looking at 4 bosses, but ended up going out of town instead (hubby wanted to pick up his new knife set! Shun classic, folded steel, he's quite proud of them.)
  

Around all of the raids, I was running heroics with various groups, some better than others; I hit exalted with the Ebon Blade and am working my way through revered with Sons of Hodir (I circled the Hodir valleys for hours picking up Everfrost chips). My friends list grew triple in size as I made note of those to contact for groups/raids, or who I generally thought were cool people. I'm also turning in my Nobles deck at the darkmoon faire today; I purchased the cards individually, and the whole of the deck cost me less than 3500g :)

So, overall, it was an interesting experience with high points as well as bad, and I have at least a semi-decent tanking kit now, particularly once I pick up my Greatness trinket :)