re·pug·nant

(from m-w.com)
1. incompatible, inconsistent
2. archaic: hostile
3. exciting distaste or aversion

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I decided to spend some time leveling my li'l priesty this weekend in an effort to catch up with my husband's warrior toon, which is in the early 30s. I think she was 24ish on Friday night when I logged on. I decided to knock off a couple Stonetalon quests, hassle the Venture Company, and collect cloth to level up my tailoring.

Within an hour, I had a random invite to Shadowfang Keep. I decided to take advantage of it, since it seems like whenever I have time to run an instance, I can't find a group. (And then when I don't have time, I get a million invites.) I joined the group and seeing that there was only one person even on the same continent as the instance, I started making my way there so that I could help summon folks.

The group was composed of a warrior (tank), a mage, a druid, and a shaman. (Note, some classes have been changed to protect the innocent.) The mage was the first at the summoning stone, and she (alone) was trying to summon all of us. We explained several times that she would need to wait for one of us to come help her, that it required two to summon. Then, moments later, she'd say, "it not working." Yes, yes, so we'd explain again. Moments later: "im cliking." (Where is that goddamned zeppelin.)

During all this, the druid kept saying, "u want me go get shaman?" Uh, no. Druid is fine. "i have shaman." Ok, thanks, for the info. At this point, the mage started to doubt herself, I guess, and asked if we really needed a mage. I told her that there were some nasty curses laid down in SFK, so it would be very handy to have a mage to remove them. "me get shaman?" At this point, I noted that if you just imagined the chatspeak with a Cookie Monster voice, it wasn't so painful to read. Made it funny, in fact. Anyway, I guess he must have been lured away by some cookies, because he left the group before I made it to the summoning stone. No great loss, I think. A paladin took his place.

I finally got to the stone and we got everybody summoned. At this point, there was some kind of scuffle/duel with someone else by the stone. I wasn't really paying much attention, as I was trying to get everybody buffed. The tank's personality started coming out in full force at this point. Apparently he'd dueled the guy and talked some smack, and there were a lot of censored %^&! types of things coming up on my screen. I tried to ignore the situation and focus on getting ready to go in. I asked the mage if she could conjure some water for me and the other mana users. She said not until the tank apologized to her friend, the one the tank had just dueled. Uh, ok. So, we waited. "Dude," was all the tank said. I waited a moment and again, politely, asked for some water. The mage just stood there. The tank ran ahead into the instance. Oh-kay. Mana conservation mode.

We entered SFK, and the paladin let us know that he might not be able to stay for the whole thing, and asked if this was ok. We all said fine. The tank asked what we all thought of him drawing all the aggro and killing everything for us. Well, have at it.

Things actually went pretty smoothly for the first part of the instance. Aside from a few "line of sight" issues, I was able to keep everyone healed, no problem, and even toss out some shadow words. I don't think the tank liked what the mage was doing, because he kept telling me not to heal her. Whatever. I wasn't having to heal her at the expense of anyone else in the party, so I ignored him. He also yelled at the paladin to stop doing some particular attack (I can't remember what it was). The paladin asked why, and the tank said, "it draws aggro." The paladin pointed out that the tank was still drawing way, way more aggro and not having trouble holding it. "i know lol," said the tank. Gah. He then whispered to me with a lot of winking emoticons and asked if he was "easy to heal," and was I enjoying myself. Well, at least we were moving along pretty well.

At one point, the mage said she needed to leave for about 20 minutes, so we left her behind, and had surprisingly little problem killing stuff. Then, the paladin had to leave, so I suggested the three of us wait for the mage for few minutes, buff up, and so forth. As soon as I got everybody buffed and sat down to drink some melon juice, all hell broke loose. We got jumped by a patrol and someone must have drawn a few mobs around the corner from where we were standing, because suddenly there were four mobs attacking the party. It was at this point that the mage rejoined us, and I can only imagine the chaos she saw when she walked in the door. With no mana to protect myself or anyone else we all got totally smushed within about a minute. Wipe #1. This was actually the first wipe during an instance on my watch as healer, and I didn't take it as hard as I thought I might. We did get jumped, I didn't have mana, we didn't have the full party... I'm not sure there's anything I could have done differently. Folks seemed to take it pretty well, too. I still apologized, and people kind of chuckled over it. Whew!

Ok, so after all the body retrieval and resurrecting, we continued. I noticed that the battles felt a lot tougher with the paladin gone, and I was running out of mana for healing a lot more quickly. I stopped casting anything other than healing spells, just to be safe. I also noticed that we were dealing with a lot more curses from the mobs. Earlier in the instance, when we were all stopped, someone asked the mage to remove a curse, and after several requests (over several minutes), she did it, so I knew she was capable of it. When I ran SFK with my mage, I remember entire battles that I spent removing curses from the group, so I recommended that she just keep an eye on the party icons, looking for the purple halos around our pictures. It was clear this mage was not paying attention because we all walked around with five minute curses on our heads all the way up to the final boss. I thought, well, maybe she's distracted because she's trying to do damage, so I kept an eye on her. No, she was not casting anything at all, it seemed. Hm... so, Arugal was going to be a three man job with a warrior, a shaman, and a priest. Great.

Before we tackled the final boss, I asked the mage several times if she could please remove the curses. Again, she just. Wasn't. Paying. Attention. She did nothing. "Guess not," said the tank, and ran up to kill Arugal. ARGGHHH. We all followed, because we basically had no choice. I ran up behind the group and missed a couple heals due to line of sight problems, and then the shaman got smushed. I kept the tank alive as long as I could, and then tabbed to Arugal to see how much damage we'd done. We hadn't even cut his hit points half way!! That plus the bursts of damage due to the curse, and we were pretty much doomed. Wipe #2.

We tried again, and I was hopeful we'd make more progress since we didn't have the curses on us, but this next attempt on Arugal went pretty much like the first. Shaman got squished and the tank alone simply could not do enough damage to him to kill him. Wipe #3.

"I think we're going to need some help," the shaman said. I agreed, and the tank said he needed to go afk a bit, but would be back when we found a fifth. He promoted me to leader, I kicked the absent paladin and started looking for someone on the LFG channel. I also chatted with the mage a bit. She said she was having trouble getting close enough to Arugal to hit him with her frost spells. I questioned her a bit about this, because it seems like you could shoot a frostbolt at him (I've fired many a frostbolt at him with my own mage in that same little room). "He keeps moving," she said. Oh no. So, did she not know how to select a mob and cast a spell on it? Now I was thoroughly convinced that she had not done any damage to any mob during the entire instance. No wonder we'd had so much trouble. "Every time I get close to him, he moves." Ughhhh.

There was a hunter waiting in the LFG, so I invited him to the group. He was available immediately, so we summoned him, and he joined us. Some of the mobs at the beginning of the instance had respawned, so we killed them while we were waiting for the tank to come back. I promoted the tank to leader again, and off we went. (After the first battle, the tank said, "oh man, my arms are messed up because of all the weights I just lifted." Heh... yeah, sure thing, buddy.) We got to Arugal and completely destroyed him. He dropped the [Robes of Arugal], which, of course, bind on pickup. The tank passed, the shaman passed, the hunter rolled greed (!!!!!), and the mage rolled need. The shaman said to me, "If you would like that item, please roll need." So I did, and I won the roll. Hot damn.

Getting those robes (and knocking off the quests) made the whole thing worth it, but that was one annoying pug. The tank was a bit of a jerk, the mage didn't know how to play her class (or so it seemed to me), and although the shaman seemed to know what he was doing, it just wasn't enough for us to complete the instance.

I'm sure it won't be the last pug I complain about, and it's certainly not the first that's had me yelling at my monitor. (It would be best if I never picked up a mic, I think.) At times, we were incompatible, inconsistent, hostile, and there were definitely moments where I felt aversion to some of my party. Even so, I confess it made for an entertaining evening.

So, my priest is now at 27. She'll soon be caught up to my mage...