Lipstick on a Pig

I still remember my first time with a Looking for Group automated tool.

Maybe because my anxiety at meeting other people was so high that it was burned into my head, but I remember it well. It was an Ajol'Nerub run, a 15-20 minute affair, and I'd recently switched from Holy to Retribution on my Paladin, Quintalan.

Ajol'Nerub is a pretty straightforward instance, and by far the biggest issue with the instance is figuring out where to go because the graphics kind of make it hard to figure out. 

"You just follow the webs and...." I was told once when I couldn't make heads or tails of the graphics on screen. 

Surely I must be nuts because there was no obvious path. "...and what? It can be hard as hell to distinguish differences in the webs."

"Well, just follow everybody else."

I rolled my eyes back then, but going in solo? You don't want to project "noob-ness"; you want to be seen as cool, calm, and collected. In short, anything but a noob.

For a brief foray into Heroic Wrath of the Lich King LFG queues, it was pretty much a non-event, but mentally it was like my first time venturing into Orgrimmar, only without the random person coming up to me and asking for a guild signature.

Ever since, I've had the same stomach flip-flops whenever I grouped up for any PUG, whether it be using the automated tool or not. 

You can dress them up as much as you
want, but they're still Pugs.
(From The Spruce Pets.)

Being in WoW Classic --and avoiding the automated queues of more "modern" MMOs-- has helped to an extent, because bad behavior in PUGs will earn you black marks among people. While I know that among a couple of thousand players on a server an individual is hard to remember, it's far easier to remember the asshat than the person who did a good job. 

Having the perspective of over a dozen years playing MMOs, I'm all the more impressed by my old friend Vidyala and her pugging experiment, as chronicled in her (now retired) blog, Pugging Pally. It did make fodder for plenty of posts, but I doubt I would have had the mental fortitude to do what she did and PUG her way to L80.* From that viewpoint, I understand why people prefer to run instances within the confines of a guild. They're people you know (minimally, at least), and they're people you can trust.

***

That being said, I had a conversation with some people in Classic about Wrath Classic which is on the horizon. It was kind of funny in that people were talking about how hard killing Arthas was, and the breakups of guilds over ICC raids, but there was nary a mention about the automated LFG tool. I found that conversation somewhat odd, given the poor reputation the LFG tool has, but I kept quiet about it. 

But the LFG tool is out there, lurking, and while I'd prefer that the tool never make an appearance in Wrath Classic I do believe that it will show up eventually.

In a bizarre way, I'm watching the rollout of Classic --and it's associated reactions-- as a repeat of what happened in the original WoW rollouts, only the timeline has shrunk a bit.** I remember the blogger debates over the LFG tool rollout, and how it was largely greeted as a positive development, and I hear the arguments now about how hard it is to get a PUG run together and think that people will --by and large-- have a positive reception of the Classic version of the LFG tool. Which seems silly to me, given the long term effects of the tool on the in-game community, but I guess I've played WoW long enough to see history repeat itself.

But still, I do believe that the problems created by the Meta in TBC Classic will also carry over to Wrath Classic, turning Wrath Classic into a weird reflection of both Classic and Retail at once. For me, having been on the short end of the stick in TBC Classic, I am leaning toward taking a hard pass on progression raiding in Wrath Classic. I'm not planning on sprinting to L80, maxing out reputations, and other bullshit that the Meta foisted on people just so they could min-max their way through progression raids. I did not have anything resembling fun in the first half of the TBC Classic Phase 1 experience, and I'm not intending to repeat that at all. 

I guess that's not a big surprise, but I'm putting it out here now before I forget and/or get talked into progression raiding after all. And I'm not making this decision while I'm in a bubble, either: of the Leveling Shamans, both the Leftovers and those that managed to sprint quickly enough to L60 so as to not get left behind when the Dark Portal opened, there's only 3 of us left. The others are gone, having burned out on the game and either left it behind entirely or stopped progression raiding and are on other toons doing anything other than Shaman work. And to be fair, once you get to progression raiding, parsing well as a TBC Classic Enhancement Shaman is hard, so the pressure doesn't really let up once you get to progression raiding. As much as I like Briganaa personally, the Enhancement rotation, coupled with totem twisting and shock twisting and swing timers, really really sucks. It's twice as difficult as the Rogue and Mage rotations in Classic, as the sheer number of irons in the fire you have to maintain are nuts.

There will be another post on my foibles getting the Shaman rotation down --or rather NOT down, as it were-- but I will say that rotations for raiding are a totally different animal than anywhere else. Just setting up your rotation in a lot of non-boss scenarios takes enough time that the fight is over once you're "ready", a problem I found in a lot of nerfed raid trash as well. While other players' DPS may go down over time, an Enhancement Shaman's DPS may actually go up because that initial burst that a Mage or Rogue might have doesn't exist for an Enhancement Shaman. There's reasons, of course, but that'll come later. I promise. 

But yes, there are times when I miss Card for her relatively high output and uncomplicated rotation. At least when I got into PUGs with her, there wasn't any extra anxiety over trying to maximize my DPS; that pig didn't require more makeup than some lipstick.

 

*We were on different servers --and on different factions back then-- or I'd have helped her out from time to time. Well, I'd like to think so, but I also believe I would have been too shy to ask her if she needed an assist because... Well, that's how I am: not exactly a pillar of confidence. (And before anybody gets in their head "Just how on earth did Red ever meet his future wife if he's so damn shy?" the answer is that she made the move first.)

**Or at least it feels that way.