PUG Dungeon Guide

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Hello!
I don’t know about you guys, but one of my favorite aspects of Vanilla was Pugging Dungeons. Each group was different, and you needed to take advantages of those differences in order to make it work, you could never ‘have it all’ as the group was only 5 people. It also was fun to have my limits tested with groups that where weaker.

When classic launches, we’re going to have a lot of players coming in that have never done a classic dungeon trying for the first time. Thus It seems prudent to try to prepare for said event with a guide to help inform said players.

General

  • If uncertain, ask questions. There are no stupid questions. If someone thinks you’re an idiot for whatever question you have asked, they are the idiot, not you.
  • Slow and Steady wins the race.
    • Use crowd Control abilities to have less things attacking you (such as polymorth, and sap)
    • Mark targets to attack, and CC. Having a plan will give you much better results than not.
    • Set a kill order on what targets to kill first second, etc (use the lucky charms)
  • Watch out for your healer. Most healers can’t handle getting attacked, due to suffering spell pushback (holy paladins are the exception to this). Try to keep thing off of them. It’s ok, and may save the group to pull mobs from the healer by attacking them.
  • Watch for patrols, they can sneak up on and destroy an unsuspecting group. (generally referred to as PATs)
  • Be respectful of your fellow players, or it will bite you in the long run:
    • Chests containing loot (other than boss chests) are /roll
    • Only need on gear that is an upgrade for the role you’re playing. If you want gear for a different spec, you need declare this intention as the thing you will rolling on instead of your current role or ask your group.
    • Be polite
    • Share quests
  • Set aside enough time to do the dungeon (have an idea on how long it should be)
  • Keep your fellow group members buffed.

DPS

  • Manage your threat. If mobs are coming off of the tank to attack you, you need to not attack it as hard. Often this means, wait a bit before attacking for the tank to get more threat.
  • If mobs are attacking you, run to the tank.
  • There should be a dps target, try to attack it and only it
  • Be careful not to break crowd controlled targets. They generally are no longer controlled when attacked.

Tanks

  • Always try to pull as few mobs as possible to reduce stress on the group.
  • Generally prefer to pull things to you as opposed to going to them(use LOS). This keeps them safely away from others so you don’t pull them.
  • Ensure your healer has full mana before pulling more. An OOM healer with a fresh group of enemies often means a dead group.

Healers

  • Your job is to keep the group alive, not to keep everyone’s health bars topped.
  • Be aware of your threat. You may need to wait a bit before healing the tank to avoid getting aggro on multi mob pulls.
  • Learn to manage your mana. An oom healer generally means a dead group. (Lookup the 5 second rule for non paladins)
  • If you have mobs attacking you, run to the tank.

Building a group

  • First thing to figure out is the compositions of the packs of mobs you will be fighting. Knowing this you can determine what CC you will need (based on what it effects). You generally want to have all but 1 mob cced, this number will vary a bit based on the strength of the mobs you are fighting:
    • Core: Most effective crowd control methods
      • Mage - polymorth (Humanoid/beast)
      • Priest - Shackle (Undead)
      • Warlock - Banish (Deamon/Elementals)
      • Druid: Hibernate (Beast Dragonkin)
    • Weak: Works, but has some disadvantage
      • Rogue: Sap (Humanoid, generally only works on one application)
      • Hunter: Trap (Works on anything, but requires an intelligent hunter to keep it in that state)
      • Warlock - Seduce (Humanoids, wasn’t easily reapplyable)
      • Hunter/Mage/Warlock: Kiting (Works on most things, cost is kiting is a full time job for that player, so they can do nothing else)
      • Warrior/Paladin/Druid/Hunter(pet)/warlock(pet) - offtank (Everything, but likely requires more healing from the healer)
    • High Risk: Don’t use unless you have no other choice
      • Priest/Warlock/Warrier: Fear (Humanoid/Beast/Deamon/Elemental)
      • Hunter: Fear (Beast)
      • Paladin: Fear (Undead/Deamon)
  • You need 1 tank. Warriors, druids, and paladins can all tank. Ensure warriors/paladins actually do have a sword/shield, otherwise they’ll be hell to keep alive. Does not need to be specced for tanking, but it does help.
  • You need 1 healer. Druids, priests, paladins, and shamens. Healing specced one are not required for all but the endgame dungeons, but having one will help your group more.
  • You may be able to skimp on something, if your group is strong (such as having a healing specced healer). This is a bit of an art and not an exact science, as it’s hard to gauge a PUG group’s strength.
  • Establish loot rules early on (if there are any)

Those are my main thoughts. What are yours?. Though keep in mind this is geared toward newer players; keep it simple.

edit: Added suggestions from posts below. Thank you!

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This should be required reading before running any dungeon. Sadly none of these old-school CORE tenants and practices are fostered in Retail’s zerg-fest mentality. Well done sir. Keep spreading the good word.

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For Warlock CC:
-In addition to Banish for demons there’s also Enslave which can be handy in certain situations if a group wants the other MoBs to kill something for them.
-Seduction CC on humanoids utilizing the Succubus
-If using Fear, Curse of recklessness can be used to counteract if a Mob starts running the wrong way.

I played with another lock once that was a master at playing Fear/CoR ping pong, personally I was better at Seduction CC.

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At first I thought you were making a really sarcastic joke. :sunglasses:

Agree with everything you said though.

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Hunters:

Get your trap down early, away from the group. When the tank pulls, distracting shot the mob into your trap. Once your mob is trapped, fd and place a new trap between the trapped mob and the healer.

Do not use multishot if it’s possible to break CC or pull adds.

Tanks:

Don’t try to charge every pull. About 80% of the packs you see are actually two packs that can be effortlessly separated with a shot from a gun, or a faerie fire.
About 50% of the packs that are indeed a single pack have a second pack that will chain to you if you charge.

Tanks, keep an eye on healer mana. A caster can sit through a fight to finish drinking, a healer has to stand up and save your [donkey]. Every time you run off 3 seconds after the healer started drinking, he prays for your death.

DPS – The tank’s job is to keep everything off the healer, and put as much threat as possible on the assist target. Agro control is your job, he’s already doing what he can. If you do pull agro. Take the mob back to the tank.

For everyone!

Set a kill order, and follow the kill order.

Establish loot rules beforehand. It doesn’t matter what they are as long as people agree with their eyes open.

Have a good idea of how long a dungeon is going to take. If you aren’t positive you’ll have enough time, don’t go.

If you need on items you aren’t going to use, if you leave after the boss you need dies, if you play poorly or toxicly, if you’re abusive to other people in the group, word will get around. Vanilla wow had communities. If you ninja an item, you’re not just getting blacklisted by 4 other people, it’s up to four other guilds, and that reputation will spread. People might give you a second chance, but they won’t give you a third chance.

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Thank you guys, those are good thoughts.

On the warlock succubus seduction, was there any real disadvantage to that one? Or was it basically a succubus go do this, and that was it? I didn’t play a warlock in vanilla so I don’t know.

I’m going to leave out class specific suggestions, as those are more for class specific guides (We could go on and on about hot to play the different classes in dungeons).

No sarcasm at all :). I’ve honestly been a bit taken aback by the hatred of pugs I’ve seen in these forums. My plan for release is to take a few days off of work and do a lot of dungeons at the beginning to try to help the newer folks learn the vanilla dungeons.

I’m honestly thinking of breaking parts of the OP into macros, to send before starting the instance(if anyone says they are new to vanilla). Though I fear I’ll just make myself look like an elitist jerk.

edit: I will admit though sometimes building the pug did suck due to all the waiting. However, guild runs tended to be a lot more boring.

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I would make the macros. Pugs need all the help they can get. :sunglasses:

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Who are you kidding, 9 out of 10 hunters will be pulling regardless of what the tank intends.

I will likely veer away from pu groups until midgame. There is just too much potential for aneurisms with the shared sub.

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Light read, accurate information, good tips - would read again.

New players and players that joined WoW post BC would do well to remember several of these key points when joining a Classic dungeon group.

Things were a lot different back then.

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Druid CC;

Hibernate (sleep effect 40 sec’s) works on beasts and dragonkin.

Edit: Disregard, added to main-post.

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Share quests.
Druids only have battle rez.
Hunters grab ammo.
Hunters/Lock pet can off tank if a pull is getting rough. (on that note, make sure taunt is set to off).
Repair before starting.
Assign who gets SS from Warlock (I’d suggest whoever can rez).
Keep buffs up.
Let the tank be leader so they can mark.

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Seduce was a command on the succubus attack bar. As I recall if seduce was enabled and the lash attack was disabled she would use seduce on whatever she was told to attack.

[As an aside in PVP, turning only Seduce on and setting her on Defensive would cause her to seduce the first player to hit me without having to tell her to do anything. It was handy defense against Rogues.]

By and large Seduce in a Dungeon can be best thought of similarly to sap in that while it was best used on the initial pull, although unlike Sap it would pull when used so it had to be used in conjunction with the pull not ahead of time.

Best method for use that I can remember is that the Seduce MoB would be marked, usually with Moon, and on the pull i’d trigger seduce to hold the MoB in place as the group was pulled back. The biggest issue was that after it wore off the MoB would run to the group where I couldn’t easily be re-applied due to getting hit with AoE. Usually it would hold though until at least one of the MoBs was dealt with.

It can be re-applied however and if I wanted/needed to re-apply I found that Death-coil invaluable as it would fear the MoB for 3 sec which would make the MoB run just far enough to get out of AoE/attacks on the other MoBs but not far enough to pull other groups.

A Fear/Re-Seduce combo was also viable but slightly more chance of long runners, fear to get them away from the group, seduce to keep them from going far.

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I believe seduction didn’t work on undead. And there are a fair amount of undead mobs in vanilla dungeons. She is also very squishy and can be a pain to keep alive. If using Succubus for cc then best to keep stealthed. Also, 99% of the time everyone wants that juicy imp buff.

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LOS pulling with a ranged weapon is usually the best way to do it. In Vanilla mobs with a ranged attack (shoot, spells) won’t come to you if you are in range and attackable.

Shoot the nearest enemy and run back behind a corner.

CC on a pack of mobs running to the tank generally doesn’t aggro them onto the player who used the CC.

Wait for the tank to have the mobs for a few seconds before attacking.

Stuns are great, use them.

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It didn’t, living humanoids only, well none of warlock CC’s really worked on undead, which is one reason I generally stayed away from Strat Deadside.

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Your reputation really and truly mattered in Vanilla, bad news travels fast. But, a good reputation as a PUG, a PvPer, Skilled Craftsman, or just generally good person will spread as well. And you may just see Groups looking for you, instead of you lookong for them.

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Just like 90% of the warlocks/priests will be tab dotting, 90% of the tanks will be charging, 90% of the shamans will be putting down fire totems, etc.

No need to single out hunters here, the game is full of terrible people in pugs.

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Those types of players will quickly find themselves groupless. And, if they are lucky, someone will instruct them, teach them, tell them how they are messing up and maybe, they will learn. Those that can’t/won’t learn will not last long in Classic.

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General:

  • Make sure all buffs are applied on dungeon start as well as on those rezzed throughout the dungeon

Mages:

  • Be sure to offer food and drink and provide accordingly
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I would change that to something like

Only need on gear that is an upgrade for the role you’re playing. If you want gear for a different spec, you need to talk to your group about that before you start

For instance, if you’re a druid who is healing, you’re free to need any healing gear that’s good for you, even if that means you’re rolling against the mage.

But you can ask/tell a group that you want to roll for playstyle you’re not actually doing, so you can heal as a druid, while needing/greeding as if you were playing feral, and rolling for the same leather chestpiece the rogue wants. But you can’t do both. People aren’t going to be happy if you try and tell them you want to roll need for a leather chest for kitty, spell damage staff for moonkin, and cloth robe for healing.

Same deal if you had an arms dps warrior and a tank warrior in the group. Unless someone has made their intention to roll out-of-role known, it is assumed the tank warrior will not challenge a need roll on a 2handed axe, and the arms warrior will not challenge a need roll on some sweet tanking shield from the prot warrior.

Also:

  • chests containing loot (other than boss chests) are /roll
  • locked chests can be /roll between players who can actually open them (rogues who have lockpicking leveled, blacksmiths with keys, engineers with charges)
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