This is not a New concept but now with cross faction I’ve noticed more and more guilds are heavily relying on pugs to carry them through progression. Many may not even realize it.
I figured I would kill one more heroic boss on one of my alts to try to get another vault spot cuz I need trinkets for my offspec. I queue up and actually fought the boss in my offspec and this Guild is progressing on heroic Pantheon. Most of them were 265+, a few in the 270s and a tank at 258. We were 2/4/14, 1 healer and 6 DPS were pugs.
I want to say it took us seven or eight pulls before we got it and I looked at the logs at the end I realized that the six pug DPS did more than 3 times the amount of damage as their eight Guild members. The one pug healer did as much healing as their 3 healers combined. I’d I recall my alt did 15k DPS and I was 3rd, the lowest pug did 13k DPS and their highest DPS did 7k.
They are going to come back next week and think oh this boss is ez and either proceed to wipe for hours or need to get more pugs to kill it. I feel bad they seemed sooo happy, I hope they have a good raid night next week though, they seemed nice!
The 3-4 raids I have friends in only have a problem with players bored, not showing up, etc etc … no one is PLANNING to pick up “great players” as pugs.
I wouldn’t deny some groups do this. But I think largely (95% or more) raids do their best to field a team in-guild and when things don’t work out, you pug.
There are SOOOOOOO many advantages to having a raid be 100% in-guild, it’s just another reason it’s hard to believe people are doing it on purpose.
To say nothing of the fact your example has all these baller pugs who wrecked shop … when I think MOST pugs are terrible. MOST of the time it’s people with high iLevel, that have NO IDEA what they’re doing. They just think iLevel is going to allow them to push past mechanics.
OP,
Our raid team rarely pugs, the leaders prefer 100% guild, but sometimes people don’t show up so we have to pug. The one thing our raid leader never takes for granted is the fact that we had an easy time when having to pug (or for other reasons as well). He treats every run as a potential difficult run and that keeps the rest of the team grounded.
How can we rely on pugs when in the 15 years we’ve been raiding we have not pugged once.
perhaps, OP, you shouldn’t write ridiculous sentences as statements of fact.
in this specific case, Pantheon drops a trinket people want. so they’re probably getting people who far surpass them in gear/exp in to this one specific boss for a shot at the trinket.
shocking, someone brings in a 6/11 mythic raider he’s going to outperform many on a 4/11 heroic team. quick better go make an inflammatory forum post about it!
I don’t know. Pugging was always a gamble; you could get those 6 dps who are outperforming your guildies or they could also be rogues who somehow got the game to reinvent spirit enchants to put on their rings.
It’s funny because I’ve made more friends in WoW pugs over the years vs the endless wave of nameless faces I get PFing Savage on FFXIV. I even had a guild that was made entirely of people who kept finding each other in pugs, and they decided to transfer to the same server.
Everyone knows everyone at endgame on ESO, though.
If they’re having fun, and the people joining from LFG know where they stand…what’s the issue? There are plenty of people out there for whom even just getting AotC by the end of the tier is a worthwhile accomplishment, just as there are plenty out there who are willing to join their groups to help them out. Seems fine to me.
I like pugging and I wish our raid team would do it more. But, our 10 is almost always pretty good and we are happy. Some of our raiders are, indeed, from puggers who joined us and liked our vibe.
The issue that I think you are talking about, OP, is that there is one boss with the desired goods and that boss can see a flood of wanting and hungry players who are only in it for the kill and will trash the group of they are (fill in the blank).
A pug is a pug. I would say just don’t join pugs if you don’t like them. In my experience, even a mediocre guild of 6 people is usually better than a random pug because at least the players are progressing and have been working on the bosses together. You can also always start your own pug and decide who you want to pug with.
Honestly, I’ve seen guilds fall apart thanks to pugs.
Our guild doesn’t really pug. Our raid team is pretty full and occasionally we have friends of other players in the raid who join us, so I’m not talking about the guild I’m in now, but one of the original guilds I had been in back in Legion literally fell apart because once the guild leaders realized they could just pug Over powered people, they started doing that, THEN started realizing they could pug themselves.
I don’t know. I have mixed opinions on pugs, I suppose.
Pugging is how I met some really cool people, but I’ve become so weary of them these days in general.
Guilds who fill in the raid team with pugs are going to choose the best players they can. That said, I’ve seen some really bad pugs as well as ones who helped carry the raid.
They used to be… It was how I found my very first raiding guild was by attending one of their ‘fun nights’ that they had to scope out potential peeps that they’d head hunt. Still friends with most of them to this day, although none still play this game.