Scarlet Letter Award

Today’s Scarlet Letter of “D” for Deserter goes to an ex-guildie name Valrhona.

With the start of the new year, and having enough people to fill 25 spots, Primogeniture headed back into Gruul’s Lair last night.  A lot of our new recruits hadn’t even seen the inside of Gruul’s Lair, let alone actually down a boss in there.  So, I knew there would be a learning curve.  It seems that no matter how much you explain a fight to other people, it’s not really the same until they’ve seen it once, then everything kind of clicks.  A perfect example of this would be Netherspite.  You can talk about these beams shooting from these portals, but it’s kind of hard to understand until you see it for the first time.

With High King Maulgar, it’s another one of those fights where there are a lot of moving pieces.  Once you get those 5 mobs pulled to the correct position, it’s almost cake, but getting the pull right is usually about 75% of the battle.  So, it took us a few times to get that under control, but once we got the pull down, we downed all 5 of them on that try.  Go us.

Then one of our healers had to leave due to RL things.  Okay… no problem, we’ll just get somebody else in there.  It seemed that everyone was either in the middle of an instance or saved already or something, so it was taking a bit longer, but not more than maybe 10 minutes would be my guess (and I think that’s way over estimating).  Well, another healer, Valrhona, whispers one of my Raid Leaders and tells her that he’s going to go do 5v5 arena because those guys are waiting for him.  He then left raid and hearthed.  She took the time to talk to him to make sure he understood that we weren’t stopping, that we were getting somebody else, and gave him a chance to get his butt back in the instance.  He didn’t understand that it wasn’t okay to leave 24 people (well, 23 at that point) stranded in Gruul’s Lair because 4 people were waiting for him to do 5v5 arena.

It’s not the first time this guy has done some bone-headed things, but it is the first time we’ve kicked him out of the guild.  He left before when the guild split a bit, and then he came back because he wanted to focus on 25-man raids.  Hmm… maybe his focus changed, I don’t know.  But for leaving us in Gruul’s, he gets the Scarlet Letter of “D”.

Oh, we got replacements and proceeded to kill Gruul, so it wasn’t a huge impact, but why oh why would anyone ever leave people like that?  I guess, in my mind, there’s kind of an unspoken priority list if you’re in a raiding guild.  RL > Raids > Instances > Arena > Battlegrounds > Questing/Farming.  Sure, there may be some times when the last 3 or even 4 change priorities, but if you’ve signed up for a raid or instance, you should be there for the duration, or at least a reasonable amount of time.  From start to finish, Gruul’s Lair took us about 2 hours.  I know because my flask ended just before our last attempt that killed Gruul.  Yes, that’s a “longer” time for Gruul, but we basically had to re-learn him.  So for that, it was pretty, darn good, and not unreasonable.