Strangers with candy

It is safe to say that I've gotten over my abject fear of pugs. At this point I am willing and able to run pretty much any heroic instance as either a DPS or a healer with my druid. I still don't tank, because to date I have only tanked one instance and I'm just not confident in the role, but I expect that will come in time as well.

The change from deathly afraid of pugs to willing participant is a combination of two things, neccessity and utility.

On the one hand, I simply had to pug in order to gear my alt. After swapping servers and going into an environment where I knew almost no one and where the people I did know were not running dungeons together in number sufficient to fill my immediate needs, the decision was reduced to a simple question, did I want to get gear or did I want to avoid strangers. Ambition, for once, won.

But role also had a big impact in my progress out of awkwardness. Being a healer means not worrying about whether or not the healer is going to fail you, assuming you're confident in yourself, which I eventually had no choice but accept as the case. After healing regular ToC run after regular ToC run, and only ever having to abandon the role once, and then only at the earliest stages of my gearing when I shouldn't have been doing it in the first place, I have come to the point where I know that while ther might be deaths, even wipes, we'll get over, and when things are bad, it's not because of me. Confidence is a good thing to have, and it makes the risks of random people easier to bear.

That's not to say I'll run anything, anywhere. I'm still pretty careful about what I agree to run - regular ToC, the easier end of the heroic dungeon spectrum, or harder content with a group I know is very strong are all I'll agree to heal, with more added to that list with every new bit of gear and every added level of confidence. Sure, I'll DPS anything in the 5-man catalog, though.

And next week, we'll have the new dungeon grouping system to play with, which should get us groups faster and more efficiently.

But can this continue, and can this be the shape of my WoW play indefinitely? There's no certainty that my tiny little guild will be running 10-man stuff anytime soon, and while I am pretty far from the gear cap available to me in 5-man pugs, there is a ceiling there, and what will I do when I get there?

Can I pug raids?

Pugging dungeons is a part of the game, pugging raids is both an admission of failure and an invitation for frustration. Pugging a raid means you don't have 9 friends, and people without friends are probably going to be trouble. They might just be antisocial, they might be jerks, they might be just fine but in tiny little guilds. The problem is, you just don't know, and you can probably assume the worst.

Wrath has been more accessible than any other phase of WoW's evolution to me. I've seen almost all of Ulduar, I've seen all but one fight in ToC, and I've cleared Naxx. Compared to my utter shutout on vanilla raiding and failure to jump from 10 to 25-man content in BC this is a huge achievement, but I don't expect that a pug-based future will allow me to progress any further in the progression chain, or to see the Cataclysm raids.

So pugging is not as bad as it used to be, and will potentially be getting better, but it is not a way to experience the game in its entirety. It's an interesting reversal - I used to have a big group of friends and guildies to do large-format content with, but was blocked by fear of strangers from doing small-group content only to now find myself in a situation where I am empowered to run small-group content but will be forced to establish new social contacts to do large-format runs.

Sometimes, virtual life is strange.