A tale of two pugs

It is no surprise I'm sure that I am still running heroics like crazy trying to gear up. Like all of you I've experienced absolutely terrible players and incredibly skilled players. Then there are simply the uninformed.

What I present to you today is the tale of a dungeon experience I had while on my druid Artorin. The last few days I've been trying to queue atleast once for the dungeon daily on my now 78 druid. The 2 emblems of triumph and 33k xp is nothing to sneeze at when you are working your way to 80. Artorin is still very well geared from Burning Crusade and going as a tree I find I have a lot of time to sit and observe what other players are doing.

In this case we had Ezili and Vaeled (names changed slightly since). Ezili was from another server and was our protection paladin tank. She used blessing of wisdom and seal of wisdom, as well as having 70 points in the protection tree. Vaeled was of course... a death knight from my very own server. He was an unholy speced DK who put 15 points into blood instead of shadow, skipped out of necrosis and didn't have gargolye talented. He also had 3 unspent talent points and never once summoned his ghoul.

I first mentioned something to the DK who was actively using death and decay before the mobs got to the tank in addition to not using pestilience... at all (except I saw him use it once on a single target pull). I asked him if he realized he had 3 unspent talent points. His response was "yeh lol I lvled so fast i didn't have time"....

You didn't have time to push a button 3 times to alocate 3 talent points??? Seriously? Oh yes... he was serious. He also linked the damage meter after nearly every pull when I commented that the tank was beating all of them in dps. He also took more damage during the brann bronzebeard fight then the tank did by standing in the fire whenever humanly possible. Which of course he said was because it was normal and that I would heal him...

On the flip side of this terribad DK was our tank the protection paladin. Before one of the pulls I mentioned to her that she should try blessing of sanctuary and seal of vengeance, then use divine plea before pulls to keep up her mana. What happened next? She listened! She had to dig through her spell book a bit to find the abilities I mentioned but find them she did. Before the end of the instance she was doing 400 more dps, totally destroying all the rest of the group, and had no mana issues while having 10% more str, stam, and 3% damage reduction.

After we killed the last boss she thanked me for giving her advice. She told me that it was another group that pointed out that she should be using seal and blessing of wisdom... probably because she was drinking between pulls and slowing them down. After about 30 mins of talking I told her that she queue for another dungeon and I would go a long so that we could continue talking. She queued us up... and we got halls of stone again... this time though she never had any mana issues or threat issues. She was also a little easier to heal, which isn't saying much because she was damn easy to heal in the first place. I never dipped below 80% mana on any of the trash pulls and proudly refused some mana biscuits from the mage.

During this second run she hit 80 and we began talking about gear options and getting ready for heroics. All in all we spent about 3 hours doing dungeon runs and talking. I gave her my e-mail address so that she could ask questions since we were on different servers. I really hope she doesn't get discouraged while gearing up for heroics because despite her lack of knowledge she was a very skilled player. I gave her the link to maintankadin and I hope she takes a look or at least keeps in contact with me.

It is truly rare these days to find someone willing to listen to advice and learn. I'm proud to have been able to help someone. But the real pride lies on the person who is able to listen and take advice instead of wallowing in self ignorance.