Played Lately: World of Warcraft

• On Christmas night, I joined one of the most horrifically bad groups I've ever played with to take on Ragefire Chasm, and we somehow still beat the dungeon. (I would put a "/sigh" here, but I'd feel like a complete tool doing it.)


• I started a new character the other day, Nymeriah, a blood elf paladin, solely for the purpose of leveling a paladin again. I would have made a warrior if they were available to blood elves, but this is the closest to the sword swinging type I wanted to play.


• I was happily chasing down quests in the Ghostlands when someone asked if I wanted to take a shot at RFC. In the spirit of charity, I figured "what the heck" and said I'd join. Soon enough I was grouped with two warlocks, a druid, and a hunter. "Uh oh," I thought. "Looks like I'm the healer here." As I said, I rolled a paladin to whack beasties with big swords so I've been investing in the Retribution talents. That's not the most conducive to healing, but since Ragefire is the newbiest of newbie instances, I figured things couldn't be so bad. How wrong I was.


• I don't have anything bad to say about our druid. He certainly gave it a shot, trying to tank in his bear form. Sadly the rest of the group didn't cooperate much with that plan.


• One of the warlocks in the group pulled aggro so often I spent more time healing him instead of the one trying to tank. The other warlock spent the whole time demanding I heal his pet, even though I had four actual characters to keep alive.


• The worst was a low level hunter, that often ran ahead of the group to pull more bad guys before we were ready. And when she (the character was female, at least) did pull, she started with a full shot rotation without waiting for her pet to drag aggro first. She'd attack and then fall back through the group, dragging enemies with her. A couple of times I just let her die to see if she'd stop doing it. Never seemed to faze her.


• A little way in, we had a full group wipe that saw the first warlock leave in frustration. I don't blame him, but it was still bad form. Luckily for us, he was replaced by another paladin, this one at level 21 who needed to complete a quest I didn't even know existed. Since he outleveled the party and the dungeon, it made the rest go smoother. At least, there were no more wipes which is all I could ask of this group.


• My poor wife has to listen to me cursing at the computer for the hour I was in there. I did complete a few quests and I got a nice set of bracers so the night wasn't a total waste. But it sure was an eye opener seeing players perform so poorly.