So there I was, last night, home from work and looking to bang out a quick random and get my Emblem of Frost fix before I went out for the night. I queued up and of course the “Your dungeon is ready” dialogue popped immediately (the joys of tanking). I went in and was happy to see the loading screen for Gundrak. One of the quicker ones, and five emblems to boot. In fact, Cold-Comfort calculated the place to have the shortest time-to-emblem ratio.

Anyway, I had high hopes for the place. We all zone in and I look at my grid to see one of the squares was colored green which denoted that person was in a vehicle. A Kor’kron Suppression Turret, apparently, which means he was doing the Assault by Air daily. “I’ll be there in a bit” he says.

Rather than wait for this considerate person, Flipmattic of Nazjatar, I just pulled the first pack and was off to the races. Thankfully, Flipmattic was able to join us in time to roll need on the wand that dropped off the first boss. When someone pointed out that he had a 219 epic wand, he replied “sorry auto-need lol”. Whatever that means.

At this point all signs were strongly pointing to the guy being a ninja, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt that it was an accident and kept going. Second boss down and he didn’t roll need, which at the time reassured me that the previous incident was an accident. It occurs to me in hindsight, though, that he probably couldn’t roll need on whatever the item was, or else he would have.

Third boss down and some cloth items drops and you know that he needed it. At this point the obvious had manifested itself. Everyone just said “lol” in party chat and I scrolled up to Flipmattic’s earlier “auto-need” defense so I could right click on his name and ignore him (and thus never deal with him again). The 15 minutes had yet to elapse, so we couldn’t kick him.

Eck drops and so does his loot. But it was nothing he could ninja, so it went to DE.

Once we got to the last boss and downed him, Flipmattic quickly needed the orb and the other item he could grab, won both, and immediately dropped group.

Indeed.

So, here’s to you, Flipmattic of Nazjatar. With your 2.2k dps in 5/5 232, unenchanted, ungemmed tier 9. Congrats at mastering the art of being a parasite.

Let’s do something about it

With the advent of cross-server instances and the eventual Battle.net upgrades, Blizzard should look into instituting a system like Xbox’s Reputation system. Every WoW player would have five stars and at the end of the instance you could go to a tab on the Dungeon Finder tool and grade the people you just ran with on a scale of 1-5 stars.

There’d be safeguards in place (like if someone was constantly rating people one star and only one star, their contributions would be excluded from the averages) to prevent griefing.

Then when queueing up for a dungeon, the system would first try to match you with people that had the same reputation with you. Considerate, five star folks would only be matched with other five stars (if none available then they get four star people in their group). Contrawise, all the one star ninjaing, gogogo-ing, dropping-during-a-wave-of-mobs-ing jerks would be stuck with others of their ilk.

Sounds like utopia. It’d probably never work.

In the end, it was just a heroic

And I don’t feel that aggrieved over the loss of two dream shards and an orb. I don’t care about the loot; I just care that this little punk is going to keep queueing up and keep pulling this crap on other dungeons. It’s be nice if there was some form of redress against such blatant douchebaggery.

In the meantime, if you’re in the Shadowburn group and get in a random with this guy, just drop group (since we can’t kick right off the bat). Don’t give Flipmattic the satisfaction of carrying him to the end.

One of my huge gear goals recently has been to pick up my Valorous set gloves. The reason being two fold: (1) it was the last iLevel 200 item I needed to replace (best in slot to boot!) and (2) I really wanted that Epic achievement. I’m an achievement junkie, I know.

So because the guild hasn’t been running any 25mans aside from VOA and Naxx as of late, I queued in the LFG menu for a pug. Usually this is a recipe for disaster, and I girded myself for the worst in advance. I was fully prepared to wipe about 15 times, have the Bag of Spoils ninjaed, and then get jumped on the way out by a rabid pack of Alliance. Murphy’s Law was not catching this Pally by surprise. No sir.

Mercifully Ildara and Cendra (the super resto druid/surv hunter duo that I oft adventure with) said they’d come along and joined the pug as well. At least I’d have someone to gripe to when all went to hell!

As I was hightailing it over there, the raid chat was abuzz with the normal pre-raid stuff that pugs struggle to sort out. People were asking who the tanks were (I was refusing to volunteer myself initially, I didn’t want to step on any toes), how many healers we had or needed, and if we were leaving any drakes up.

It was decided to leave one drake up (gulp), and if that didn’t go well, we’d kill it and finish the encounter normally.

The MT and the OT get sorted out and I finally peep up “oh I can OT too, I’m prot.” No one said anything, so I shrugged, getting ready to do some sweet shield slam deeps. Zoning in though, someone caught sight of my gear and said “holy crap look at Rhidach… he should MT!”

Er, no thanks. (How embarassing).

Everything gets settled and immediately I must have been pissing off the tanks because I’m ripping aggro off of them left and right with Hammer and ShoR and Consecrate. I honestly felt bad, I wasn’t trying to show off.

In any case, someone asks which drake we’re leaving up and another says Shadron (terrible idea!) and I volunteer that the one in the back should stay up. It’s the easiest to deal with. That was also a bad idea, because the raid leader then asks me to explain how to do +1d before we engage Sarth.

Whatever. We clean up the trash and the two north-south drakes and line up in front of Sarth so I can give my little pep talk. I tell them the usual, drake lands in back, tank up front, etc. I thought it was pretty thorough but we then careened into a spectacular wipe on the first try.

The DK main tank turns Sarth incorrectly and the raid’s getting tail swiped left and right. I pick up the drake and the little whelps, which was a mistake. Lava wall takes out a bunch of people. It was chaos.

However, surprisingly, everyone was resolute. RL asked me what went wrong, and I pointed out the obvious issue with tail swipes and that the warrior OT should grab the drake and I’ll focus on whelps and the fire elementals. So instructions are given out, the DK has a better idea of positioning and we re-engage.

This time we as a raid were successful, but ironically, this attempt was about thirty times more chaotic. We got the drake down in short order, and a stray whelp didn’t eat anyone, so the warrior and I did out jobs. We then moved to controlling elementals and I watching Sarth with anticipation as his health moved down.

At around 50% it started getting nuts. Flame walls took out a few people and for some reason the DK compensated by beginning to pull Sarth eastwards across the lava. Wut.

He’s yelled at to bring Sarth back, but the DK’s having a merry time out there in the slop. Eventually stuff gets under control, and after what felt like the absolute longest Sarth engagement ever–20%-0% must have been 3 minutes long, I swear, with elementals EVERYWHERE–the dragon finally goes down.

I eagerly skip over to inspect the corpus for what loot had dropped… and to my immediate joy there were two “of the Conqueror” gloves! Ok, among the 8 of us that could use those (yes I inspected everyone’s gear) that gave me 2/8 (25%) odds. Not too shabby.

Gloves are called for rolling and yellowed numbers flying across my screen.

Suddenly, someone rolls a hundred! Aw dammit, one glove gone. My odds drop to 1/7 (14%).

Hearkening back to my post on chance I repeated to myself “there’s no such thing as luck” and typed in /roll.

And I rolled a 100 as well… amazing!

For someone who doesn’t believe in her, Lady Luck sure likes to smile on me.