PuGs: Raid Role at a Glance

Patch 3.2

One thing that drives me NUTS when I'm sitting in a pug raid as it forms is those raid leaders who have no idea what they have in the raid. You know, those RLs that keep spamming "press 1 if ur heals," and they invite "healers" who are actually dps, or invite a dps and then forget that they're a dps and assume that they're healers just because of the color of their name? Quite often when a bunch of the healers have tabbed out or AFKed or just aren't paying attention because it's taking so long to start, and thus aren't even going to respond to the query on how many healers are in the raid?

I've pugged too much. It may drive me insane, some day, but I've met some cool people through it, too, so it's balanced out so far. But, I digress.

First of all, if you're going to lead a pug raid, please have raid frames for the raid on your screen. Trust me, it will make things easier. You can remove them later when the raid gets going, if you don't want them cluttering your screen (though it's very helpful as a raid leader to have them up at all times, so you can tell how many dead/debuffed you have). What the raid frames will give you is a targetable interface through which to take a look at people, nevermind will it prevent you from having to tab back and forth between the LFG tool and the raid social tab.

Second, if you have a bad memory on who in your group were healers... write down a list. Even if you don't do that, though, for laziness or lack of paper, you can still actually LOOK at the players in your raid and tell usually, at a targeted glance, whether they're a healer or not.

When you target someone, these things will normally come up:

• Health Pool
• Mana Pool
• Spec-specific auras

Health Pool:
Someone with over 30k health (unbuffed) is likely a tank. Someone with over 40k health is most certainly a tank. Generally, if they have much higher HP than the rest of the raid, they're in some kind of tank spec or tank gear. If this is someone you didn't expect to tank, question them; they may not have gone to their second (dps or healer) spec yet, or they might be confused, or they might just be a better-geared tank than your currently selected MT!

• A ret pally will have less health than a prot pally.
• A DPS warrior will have less health than a prot warrior.
• A feral kitty druid will have less health than a feral bear druid (and, often, a yellow energy bar rather than a near-or-empty rage bar). Yes, cat and bear require different specs to optimize.
  
• A DPS DK will have less health than a tanking DK.
• ...the rest of the casters all tend to be pretty squishy in health pools, though you can use health pools compared to members of their own class to compare their relative gear levels, stamina being a stat mostly unavoidable on all gear upgrades. Be sure to account for any buffs that individuals may have on them already when doing such a comparison: kings, fort, mark, and blood pact.
  

Mana Pool:
This is one of the easiest ways to tell apart druid and paladin healers from the crowd.

• Druids: if they are significantly low mana, or if there's a complete absence of a mana bar, they're feral (in most cases; even travel forms have mana bars, though sometimes a waiting caster-druid may be goofing off in cat or bear). Otherwise, they are either healers or moonkin. Move on to auras from here.
  
• Paladins: if they are significantly low on mana, they are either prot or ret. Look at their health to decide from there. The only pallies who have high mana pools are healers.
  

Auras:
This is your final at-a-glance indicator of talent spec. Many specs will have passive auras that are specific to their spec alone, and are an easy way to further delineate specs.

• Tree druids have a leaf-shaped "Tree of Life Form" aura; turkeys have a bird-faced "Moonkin Form" aura. If they are out of shapeshift form, you will have to whisper them or armory them. For the tree aura, make sure you are looking for the *form* aura, rather than the party buff aura.
  
• Shadow Priests have a dark "Shadow Form" aura, when shifted. They will often be in this form as the raid is forming, cuz it looks cool and they probably want to intentionally use it to announce "hey, I'm not a healer!!"
• Other classes have spec-specific auras as well, though all of their specs may be the same raid-role (dps), such as BM Hunters' Spirit Bond vs Marksman Hunters' Trueshot Aura.

Shaman are the one class that I find I need to inspect in order to tell them apart from dps. If when you're looking at their model (standing next to you) and they're dual-wielding weapons (often maces or fist weapons), however, you've got an enhancement shaman: enhancement shammies may well have enough mana to confuse you into thinking they're a caster! Elemental and resto shaman wear shields, however, so as far as I've been able to tell, picking restos out from elementals requires either a talent inspection, the presence of Totem of Wrath (ele's), or a good old-fashioned whispered query :)

When you've figured out your healers and tanks, remember who they are. Stick them in a party together, if that helps you remember them: spreading out healers to each party is a thing of the past and is no longer "required" for raiding. That way, if they drop the raid before you start, you'll know what you're missing, and you'll save time and the raid's sanity by not having to re-count your healers every 30 seconds!

On PuG Raids and Gear

I spend a fair amount of time on my alts in pug raids. My alliance feral is all by herself in a one-person guild (Dreambound!), so anything I can't solo has to be done in a pug; my rogue is guilded with my horde main, but being in a small guild, anything beyond a heroic needs to be pugged, too.

So, I see a lot of pugs. I dislike leading them, as I know I am not a good raid leader; I have difficulty focusing on what the overall group is doing over what I need to be doing, myself. I'm also too nice to lead raids: I take too long considering options, I like to avoid conflict, and even my ML'ing can take ages as it gets sorted out to the "best" person with as few hard feelings as possible. I know my failings, so I don't raid lead. But, I also can see them in others, and know great raid leaders when I see them: I have a few on my friends list flagged as "good raid leader" so that I can catch up with them again.

Nefernet posted some excellent tips yesterday about pug raiding.

I have immense respect for anyone who has the patience and ability to lead a good pug through an instance that most puggers would just be carried through, and let's face it: most puggers for raids are puggers because they are either

• a) alts who may or may not know how to play their class, or
  
• b) mains who aren't in a strong raiding guild and may or may not know how to play their class.

You don't see well-geared, strong mains who know what they're doing in a pug unless they missed out on their guild run for some reason, or their guild is no longer running that instance and they are feeling nostalgic. In rare cases, a pugger main is in a ten-man guild, so they are pugging VoA25/Ony25 until they are able to solo it as a guild (if possible, like Archivon and Sarth25 can be 10-manned).

This brings me to a rant: gear score, related gear-ranking mods and websites, and how the vast majority of the time, these are abused and taken to mean that gear is the end-all/be-all.

I have not yet been in a pug that requires a specific gear score or wow-heroes score, though my alliance druid did pass a gear inspection for a toc-10 normal that didn't make it off the ground for lack of healers. Frankly, I avoid pugs that require a gear score, even on my main. Ranking someone's ability to play based off of their gear is asinine.

• Well-geared players can have purchased gear using badges "earned" while being carried through a raid as baggage; they may've been dead in a corner somewhere and still be able to loot. Gear does not equal skill.
• Under-geared players may be alts or unguilded/non-raiding-guilded players who DO know their class, may've done the research and taken the time to know wtf they're doing. I have seen under-geared players in greens or blues out-perform players in 226/232 epics. I have DONE it, myself, on both my alts. Gear does not equal skill.
• Gear-checks that are really strict may only serve to guarantee that your puggers will have enough HP to maybe survive being dumb.
  
• Gear-checks that kick out half your healers, however, may be shooting yourself in the foot, because finding healers who are willing to pug is difficult, particularly if you're kicking some for wearing one or two i200 blues for an Ulduar or basic Sarth run. I can understand removing someone if they are a healer wearing strength gear, but really... don't mess with the healers if you want to actually get anywhere without the raid crumbling from sitting around waiting to fill healer spots.
  
• There are a good number of "raid leaders" who gear-check their invited puggers on standards that they themselves would not pass, apparently expecting to form a raid of "super players" who can carry their tail through a raid; if they seriously wished to pull the "gear is not skill" card in their own defense, then they have no excuse to be gear-checking everyone else they invite.
  

I have been in some awesome pugs, and I have been in some terrible pugs. The best pugs I've ever been in didn't require a strict "gear check" or even announced that they were checking gear... because the raid leader valued skill over gear. Key roles were filled with players who responded intelligently to their questions; these were players who knew the limitations of their own gear anyway, for roles such as tanking or basic survival, and probably wouldn't offer themselves to a pug unless they knew they could handle it. These were players who, if they didn't know what to do, would ask, rather than stubbornly do it wrong and wipe the raid for it. Skilled players don't need a crutch of gear to survive or do their job, and can outshine a geared player who is just expecting to be carried.

There are always limits, of course: one should not be wearing greens for the current cutting edge (currently ToC, later to be Icecrown Citadel) content unless the rest of the group is confident that they can make up for the slack in raw stats (which is difficult, but possible, in a pug). Seeing such things doesn't require a gearscore, though, just a cursory glance at the player's gear, even by staring at the models or questioning someone's rather low HP for their class (unbuffed stamina being a pretty steady indicator of relative gear level, taking cow-racials into account) , which can be done without grand gear-checking announcements.

I think a better pug-checking system would be a mod that queries interested puggers with a raiding-related question and rates their answer for keywords, or lets the raid-leader decide who to invite based upon answers to the questions. I'd be interested to see a mod made that can assist in sending out whispers and collecting replies, like an entry exam for the instance. Even if the puggers can google the answers, it at least means they took the time to do so. It'd have to rotate the questions through a series so that people don't share answers and ruin it for the leader... but it could be done.

A Pugger's Guide to VoA25: Emalon

The vast majority of PuGs (Pick-up Groups) I have been in or seen guildies in for VoA25 fall apart on Emalon. It doesn't matter if they wiped a few times on Koralon, or if they one-shot Koralon: Emalon tears PuG groups apart. Some Puggers will even drop group immediately after killing Koralon, making thin excuses about needing to go to some other raid, or take out the trash, or go hammer nails in their eyes, all to avoid the "inevitable" wipe(s) to Emalon.

What is it about Emalon that is so much more difficult than Koralon?

• DPS has to swap targets.

...I think that's pretty much it. If your dps doesn't swap targets to kill the Overcharged, hugely enlarged and difficult to ignore add, it will immediately wipe the raid, or at least one-shot enough of the raid in its explosion that you have no prayer of continuing. Oddly, most Puggers forget or don't know about it (or would rather not swap targets out of wanting to e-peen on the meters), in spite of the fact that Emalon was farmed successfully by PuGs for many months before Koralon was released.

So, in the hopes that others will learn how to actually fight Emalon and make my life pugging VoA25 less of an axe through my sanity, I am posting this strat. I will add illustrations tomorrow. I may even break down and do a full comic version, for those puggers that can't seem to read >.>

---

The Pull:
Your best tank should be on the adds, and your OT should be on the boss. The add-tank will run in and gain initial aggro; the OT will follow and single-taunt Emalon himself off of the MT. In the meantime, all ranged dps and healers need to be spreading out: some can remain on the stairs, while others need to run through to the back of the room, because you do not want to be clustered together or else chain lightening will eat you alive.

As a note, most PuGs will tank the adds on one side of the room, and Emalon on the other; this is not necessary as long as your healers are capable of keeping both tanks up through the Lightening Nova. You can successfully have all of the adds and Emalon tanked on the same side of the room, or close together, which can make it easier to pick up new add spawns and provide less distance for your melee to traverse to reach the Overcharged add. This is the method my guild prefers to do our own VoA10 runs, though I have never seen a PuG group do it that way.

Rogues/Hunters: use misdirects and tricks of the trade to ensure all 4 of the adds are on the MT, or else those adds are going to run off and eat your best healers. If your OT has threat problems, have someone give them a threat boost on Emalon during the pull, as well.

The Fight:
Stay spread out as much as possible. DPS will begin on Emalon. If you have Deadly Boss Mods or Bigwigs (and I highly recommend you have one or the other installed), you will see timers for a couple important things: next Overcharge, and Lightening Nova.

• Overcharge is what can and will wipe your raid, if your DPS is not paying attention. Overcharge will enlarge an add, and 20 seconds after it starts, the add will explode and pretty much wipe the raid. ALL DPS MUST SWITCH TARGETS and kill this overcharged add! It is easy to pick out since it will be enormous compared to the others. KILL IT. If you don't see an enlarged add in the pile when Overcharge is cast, check near the boss: the OT may be tanking it on the far side of Emalon instead.
  

• Lightening Nova is an AoE off of Emalon that does more damage the closer you are to the boss. If you aren't a tank, you need to move away from Emalon when he begins to cast this, or you will be killed. It is possible to pop survival instincts/shield wall/Cloak of Shadows/etc to survive it, but in a pug, it's better to be safe than sorry. Get out of it.
  

About 4 seconds after an Overcharged add is destroyed, a new one will spawn in front of Emalon. It will usually start running after a healer, if it's not picked up in the OT's cleaves or AoE. The MT/add-tank's job involves picking up this newly spawned add before it kills anyone.

• Do not use AoE on the adds unless you're tanking them (or using a misdirect ability to put them on the tank).
• Do not try to kill any add that is not overcharged: he will just spawn a new one in its place and make your tank have to re-establish threat.
• Do not stand in Lightening Nova unless you know you can survive it with your current HP.
  
• Do not ignore the Overcharged add, even if you're melee.
• Do not cluster together too closely or chain lightening will fry you.
• Do not pull aggro.

Just rinse and repeat. DPS on Emalon, get out of Lightening Nova, and kill the Overcharged add whenever you get one, picking up the new add that spawns before it kills a healer. Just remember: all dps MUST swap to the overcharged add and kill it before it explodes!



~~This is a public service announcement brought to you by Dreambound and Vortex.~~