Last Night's PuG

So usually a post starting with this title would be a long rant about some terrible group that I ended up with over the weekend. However, I am pleased that is not the case today. In fact, it is exactly the opposite.

I've decided that groups are notably better in the hours when kids are not home or are not allowed to play on the computer. Groups during the middle of the day 9am-3pm are pretty good. But the exceptional groups are those that occur after 10pm.

After running a few groups with a paladin friend of mine, he decided to run on his mage for some badges. So we cued in the dungeon finder for a tank. We ended up with a paladin named Chunchi on Stormreaver. He had 36k hp unbuffed, which is pretty decent but isn't phenominal or anything. That's totally attainable for paladin tanks who try. However, throw on a few buffs and he was pushing 43k hp. The truth was that this guy just was amazing. He made me stop and wonder about all the other tanks in our battlegroup (Reckoning). All of the other tanks should be ashamed of themselves.

We ran back-to-back instances for about 4 hours. Let me remind you that this was a PuG for the most part. Chunchi was pushing 3.5k dps while tanking. I'm really not sure how that's even possible. The best part was at the beginning of H HoL, I told him, "We have a pretty geared group, let's take this quickly." And he responded, "Ok." Now, I originally thought he'd pull two groups at once, or something of that nature. Instead, he pulls entire hallways. He runs to the very end, and hangs onto every last guy. There were no runners taking out the clothies, no spell-casters trailing behind. Once he got to the end of the hallway, he beat the crap out of them while we all AOE'd. At times, our 3900-gearscore mage was pushing 11k dps, and ended up with an average somewhere around 6k dps.

You'd think with that many guys beating on our fearless paladin, that he'd be taking significant damage. But for some reason he really wasn't. Well, he had 26% dodge, 20% parry, and 15% block. Beyond that, at 27k armor, he's already mitigating 65% of the received damage. That means, that he wasn't even getting hit 61% of the time, and when he did get hit, he only took 35% damage. (0.39 * 0.35 = 13.65% overall damage taken)

Now, there's an exponential principle here. When one person in a group becomes better (better gear or skill or both), the group does not simply increase by that much. (ie: it's not mathematically 'addative') Instead, everyone becomes better. But it's not mathamatically multiplicitive either. It's not that everyone in the group increased by some delta x. Instead, there is exponential increase... let me show you why.

When the tank becomes better, he takes less damage. Thus, the healer does not need to heal as much. Which in turn means that the priest has more mana (which can be turned into DPS if the group is good). Also, an increase in a tank's gear means that he can hold aggro on more mobs because he can sink more overall damage. This means that the DPS can use more AOE and do increased damage to more mobs at once, killing them faster. Hence, dungeons are run faster, more loot is obtained, and more badges are earned. Exponential increase.

I was lucky enough to get to DPS for the last two instances of the night. I popped up shadow spec, and went at it. During H ToC, I peaked at around 7k dps, and averaged about 3.5k dps. That's not too shabby, considering that half of my gear is shared with my holy healing set.

So, when all was said and done, we averaged about one badge every 3 minutes, totally nearly 100 badges when we finished. I had amassed about 230 triumphs, and collected my entire T9 set in one night. I went by the auction house and dropped about 1,500 gold on epic gems, and re-enchanted my gear. If only I got such an awesome group every evening, I'd have another 230 emblems to drop on my shadow set in about 3 days.