I never spend more than a few seconds before I get flooded with people wanting to join. I have dual screen with wow-heroes up and typing the names in as I get the pst. It takes 1 minute to filter the best and get the party rolling.

Perhaps I’m just lucky that so many people whisper me. Maybe I’m well known on my server (I doubt this). Maybe my guild has a good reputation (possible). Maybe it’s that so many others feel the same as I do and if I’m willing to advertise a gear check they can assume I’m well geared myself.

Whatever the case may be…when I over-gear an instance/raid/whatever I what to be in-and-out with my gold in hand. Period.

Getting on later than normal this day, I joined our TotC Heroic run, and the daily had already been tanked by an alt. We are 10 man raiders and normally dance through the 5 man runs, we know each other inside out, so 5 man is usually auto pilot with minimal repair bills, going as fast as we can.

I tentatively put myself on LFG at a little after 11pm thinking I’d be in with the dregs for the Nexus daily (because it is an entry heroic I guess!!). To my surprise I ended up with a group of 25 man raiders, all nicely warmed up from Ulduar!! When I joined one of them switched to his ‘main’, making a nice compliment about their PUG tank!! My Paladin is quite well geared!

This group destroyed the place, 4k DPS average, mine was down in the 1.8′s so they didnt give me a chance to get into my stride (I’m usually 2k + in heroics and I know a tank shouldnt worry about this!!), I held the aggro and had fun.

Nexus isn’t exactly a difficult run, and the pulls were over in a flash. We did Split Personality achievement as well as the Anomalous Achievement (something I’d never tried before and the only thing that slowed the run down a bit). This latter achievement is something I’m not sure my guildies would try, and it was amazing seeing the AOE thrashing the group and the DPS hammering in to Anamalous when he was ‘available’!

So PUG’s can sometimes be awesome fun!!

I was healing the daily heroic yesterday, with a good tank, and some of these “less experienced / competent / geared dps” you mentioned. At the end of the run I posted the dps from my damage meter addon, and the tank came in second, having dealt more damage per second than two of the dps players while still holding aggro and tanking perfectly well.

On the other hand, while we did have some death, we *did* succeed in finishing the heroic and the daily heroic quest. So while the two dps were clearly less good than you’d want them to be, they were “good enough” for the run.

Teaching a guildie how to do more dps is hard. If the dps is a shadow priest, at least I’d have an idea what rotation to use etc., but if the dps is a hunter, I can’t teach him anything, because I don’t know myself. And telling somebody “your dps sucks, go to Elitist Jerks to improve” usually isn’t going down very well.

I hope you do get some better luck with PUGs (you could always swap servers you know >;) I’m told Argent Dawn has an unusually good PUG scene in general.)

With Loken, the easiest way to do that encounter is just to sit on top of him and nuke until dead. Ignore the novas. Especially since you play a priest, you can spam prayer of healing to keep the group up. It feels a bit like cheating but it is much easier than trying to get people to run in and back.

Our guild still hasn’t conquered heroic-HOL. Loken still absolutely wipes the floor with us, since we can’t get the balance right between avoiding the nova and not getting mullered by his “this will hurt you more the further away you go” attack. On the other hand, we do mind control the runecasting dwarves, just because we can really, which is the most fun in the world. There’s something really satisfying in careening through the other enemies with a deadly mind controlled dorf.

@Gevlon – its pretty hard to outdps tanks in aoe rich instances on overall data if you are not aoe strong class. Try competing with protection paladin in threat set in CoS. I can reach 6k on some boss fights but on overall data will be around 3k DPS which is about what good paladin tanks pull there.

That was before Earth Living, Riptide and things like the Forethought Trinket.

But yeah as Gev has posted gear is over rated and getting through the instance and having fun is important. Its a intresting point for the Goblins out there. Time/use. As spinks says she and every other serious/semi serious raider out there is over geared and over skilled for Heroics these days. Its a bit like sending a Main Battle Tank to a street riot. Overkill and not really worth the effort (or repair bills). So is there a place in the WoW-food chain for players who are well geared and/or skilled enough to be good enough for badge farming but not up to end-game raid content. Certainly I see a lot of our raiders also running heroics/raids as alts for extra giggles/badges practise as other specs or classes. I like to DPS heroics and lower content raids (Naxx, 10 man Ulduar) so I can better anticipate what those crazy DPSers might do. Walk a mile in the other mans shoes sorta thing…..

We were all newbies once. We all learned from somewhere. No matter how many times you read not to fear in packed places, or to dismiss pet before jumping, or a raft of other things, the only time you truly learn the lesson is when you don’t do what you are meant to do.

But for that, you need to run the instance…

These days, to run the instance you are most likely going to be running with epeening over geared folk…

The game is still about balancing around your group.. bad tank great heals… np… great tank, bad heals… np… uber dps bad tank… slow down

Mand/orS isn’t an innate quality, it’s a lack of relevant education. How does one learn to avoid fires if they never get into runs that involve fires? How does one learn to DPS except by running as DPS? Target dummies don’t teach about fires, and even if they teach DPS, they don’t teach DPS+fires.

I’ve was in a group where some noob feared a mob into five other groups. He learned to not use fear because of that. At other times he learned to use fear carefully, knowing when he could pull a mob back and safely fear it in an empty area. He did not know that innately as a non-M&S, he knew it because he learned it.