Gevlon has a nice piece today outlining the progress of the PuG project, of which I am a member. I haven’t been online much this week, (trying out EvE before Cataclysm hits), but I jumped in on Sunday afternoon as there is a Wintergrasp battle going on then and I like to help out. I was a bit late to help but I got there just in time to grab some honor points, for as soon as I logged in I got the Wintergrasp join countdown, (I had logged out there), so I joined and two seconds later we won the battle. Nice timing methinks.

As soons as the battle finished an AQ20 run began forming. The last time I was in there was quite a few years ago, (man that sand beetle boss was a real pain in the butt), so I joined in as I didn’t think it would take that long. Which it didn’t – we blew through that place so fast we left the columns spinning. I had no idea why we were in there, and nobody was saying, and I didn’t really care anyway, so I just tagged along using Fan of Knives with poison to pretty deadly effect. That is until we got to the boss down near the pool of water. I was behind the dwarf tank who charged right in there and jumped off the high ledge down into the pool. I hadn’t ever thought of doing that before, and I had a ‘that’s cool’ moment, and then I jumped after him, performing a nice night elven double twist backward forwards somersault split thingy into the water.

The dwarf was on a real charge. He was at the boss almost before I had made it out of the pool and as far as I knew there was nobody behind us. I hit Sprint and made it over there in seconds where I immediately pulled aggro from the boss. Which was strange as I hadn’t done that on the run at all. So I hit Vanish and then hit the boss again and then I got aggro again. What the fuck? I didn’t even have time to look around me as now I was saving my life. A 5 point Regneration really helped, (thank you Blizzard so much for giving us rogues a heal), and I kept my head down as I danced around that boss dealing out the mega damage, blowing my cool downs, hitting my heals, and just generally trying to stay alive. When the boss went down I figured that the tank might be a little pissed at me, what with me pulling all that aggro. It wasn’t the tank that was pissed at me though … it was the rest of the raid.

Gevlon whispered me asking me what the hell I was doing. I whispered back that I was killing the boss. He whispered back that the whole point of the raid was to try and get one of the hunters to tame that boss.

Oops. I whispered that I had no idea and that I must have missed all the guild chat about it before I logged on. He responded that he doubted that as I had certainly been online. So with a sinking feeling I slowly scrolled back through the chat and there it was in lovely bright green: don’t kill that boss, this is why, blah blah blah. They had been talking about it while I was jumping off cliffs into water and sprinting to help a certain tank. So an honest mistake, but still a pretty big one. Isn’t Adam the noob?

I got thinking about this after the fact though. I hadn’t seen the messages due to the fact that I had been so caught up in what I thought was saving the tanks butt. I hadn’t even looked at the guild chat as I just didn’t have time. Gevlon refuses to use voice communication in game, (probably because he has a funny squeeky voice and doesn’t want us all to make fun of him), and I respect that. But in situations like this it can be extremely usefull to say on chat, Adam would you mind not killing the fucking boss?

With Cataclysm and the return of Crowd Control, communication will be more important than ever. Gevlon speaks today about how much more difficult it has been to find good DPS, due to the fact that most of the lolling braindead like to play that role. Maybe vent could be a big help here. Granted we won’t be blowing through the new instances and raids quite as fast as the ten of us took AQ20 to pieces, (and maybe that was a big part of the problem), but there is going to be a lot more going on. If it all falls down to the raid leader all the time to type everything out and mark every single mob, I don’t know who will want to lead raids. I mean, would you with DPS like me?