PUGs - the good, the bad, the not so pretty

hoo boy, it's been a long time since I pugged. In fact, it took me awhile to even begin pugging. when i started playing in tyria (about a month after gw was first released) i had two or three friends who played, the most experienced with less than that month under his belt. btw, that was also my first guild. when they weren't on, i henched b/c until about divinity coast, you could.

anyway, i don't know if i really have a best pug experience. my favorites are where i learn something. i remember learning that it was necessary to have two monks for an 8-man team, and i played the echo nuker til i was given an almost full SF build by a very nice ele in DoA (and i still echo in raisu palace and on shiro, cuz celestial storm just works better twice). i'll prbly play SF til it is extinct, too. but overall, my favorite pugs are those that take u on vent or teamspeak (well, not so much ts anymore). those rides can be a real trip. my favorite quote has come from one of these: "i'm in the navy, you don't curse like a sailor, you curse like a pirate."

bad pugs are any where you have a majority of people ignoring the most experienced player in the area (a mistake i try to avoid). i think the worst pug i've been in lately has been at vizunah square when myself and the guildie i was taking thru the mish were teamed w/ a lvl 12 i wanna say (i'm fairly sure he gained a lvl before we finished). we finished, but only because we dragged his sorry butt through it.

Best PUG: The time I got tired of GLF Monk/Tank/Ele. I started a group (as my Mesmer) for THK, advertising it as "GLFM, no tanks, monks, or eles." I had some necros and rangers join and then leave saying we were dumb to go w/o monks. In the end, it was like 2 mesmers, 4 rangers, a necro and Mehnlo. We didn't exactly own, but we fought smart, never overextended, and ended up completing it.

2nd Best PUG- One of our monks left during destructions depths, before we got to the area with the Norn. The remaining monk was a Protection build. We must have died like 50 times, but no one else left. We got to the disc and died probably another 50 times. The ele handed out +15 energy offhands to the rest of us so we had enough juice to even start the Golems up. Took like 3 hours man, but I was never so thrilled to be with such good people. We added Dunkoro at the CCF and finished the game.

Worst PUG- They were all good in some little fashion.

Best PUG I ever had:

Was playing around with 2 of my m8s just awhile after GW came out and we decided to try FoW for the first time. Luckily we found some finnish ppl gathering group and they had done FoW already and told us what to bring along. We managed very well and we decided to do that some other times also. Like 6 months later we played together with some of the FoW people in Taiwan @ GWWC.

Worst PUG:

Too many times I found ppl doing worse than henchies, since long time I've only played with people I know and/or henchies/heroes.

Haha I did tahnakai temple masters yesterday because I wanted to test a build. So I added my heroes and filled the empty spots with some folks that needed the mission. Awesome teamwork and we finished in 17 minutes, Most fun I had in weeks with a PUG.

Bad PUG's are generally more common, I had my fair share of those in Tomb of the Primeval Kings, usually f*cktards that activate all the popups in the map and get us killed in level 1 already. Urgoz' Warren PUGS are even worse, instead of 8 whining bitches in a team, there's room for 12 in Warren.

Moddok Crevice on my monk.
Apart from Dunkoro, the required hero for that mission, it was an all human group. IIRC an assassin, a ranger, a couple of paragons, a mesmer, and a warrior.

I dunno, perhaps I'd stumbled on an alliance group that just needed another monk or something. We had a team leader (the mesmer) that actually, you know, lead and coordinated the party. And a party that could follow simple instructions from the team leader.
Like say those runners for the bonus.
'Stop here' line on the radar. (Which no one crossed, until given the Go! signal)
Assassin - this is your target, Ranger - this is yours.
Remember, cripple - so they can't run away.
Everyone ready and know what they're doing?
Ok.
3 - 2 - 1- Go!
It was all very painless, very smooth and very coordinated. Never finished that mission so fast, and they even had the time to stop every now and then and crack a joke, a 'gg!'/'Nice work!', or congratulate people when they got a good drop on the party chat. It was a joy monking for that group.

Although a group I did Riverside Provice with my ranger does deserve a mention. It was the most uncoordinated, hapless, group you can imagine. No-one really knew what they were doing and wouldn't listen to assurances that: yeah, it says sneak past the white mantle and avoid detection. But... the bonus is pretty much kill 'em all so we can kill the guys in the towers. Trust me! it don't count as detection and you won't fail the mission if you just stay here and let me pull them out a few at the time.
But they were just so cheerful about partywipes and restarting the mission over and over again and had so much fun in the chat talking about allsorts.

The worst however.
Sanctum Cay on the same ranger. This was when NF had just been released.
There was this one dervish. Who kept talking about how much damage he could do, how big numbers of damage when he gets his 12345678 combination off! On a one-on-one he could beat anything.
I guess that should have been a warning sign. But NF was new and I don't think anyone else in the group had gotten it yet or knew much about the dervish.

So we start the mission. First real mob - not just the scattered fire imps. The drakes on the beach. He rushes in and dies in 2 seconds flat.
That kind of stops his 'oh I can do so much damage' talk for a while. Figured he kind of realised that he was in a mission and perhaps it would be better to concentrate on what he was doing, than bragging about his big numbers.
Fight quickly over, it wasn't a big, tough mob, monk ressurect him and we continue.

Second mob spot, the ones by the bridge. Dervish rushes in before anyone else, aggros two mobs - dies even quicker than with the drakes.
This time it takes a little bit longer. As we're waiting for the mobs to scatter etc. etc. So after about 10 seconds the REZ PLZ! REZ PLZ!REZ PLZ!REZ PLZ! REZ PLZ! REZ PLZ! starts raining. Everyone ignores him until the fight is over.

Then he actually manages to stay alive for a little while, if there's just the occational scattered foes he manages to stay alive. Until the next big mob. Where the same pattern is repeated. He leeeroys and dies. He don't even have to over aggro to be squished like a little bug.

Now he starts on the 'ZOMG the go red engine go monk is useless! go red engine go NOOB monk won't heal me!' the monk abuse gets progressivly worse and worse from there. He spends more time swearing at the monk, drawing genitalia on the radar with 'that's the noob monk' comments etc. etc. Than he does alive.
Until I snap and tell him to shut the red engine up, and don't rez him the next time he dies. Unfortunably the cut scene does.

So he's quiet for a little while. Until the next time he dies... When the monk abuse starts up again. The monk is a noobsauce because she's not sticking enchantements on him and he needs enchantements for his l33t build to work. It's all the monk's fault. etc. etc. etc. (Only not put that coherently and with every second word an insult or swearing at the monk. It is pretty clear by now that he has a skill bar with 8 scythe attacks and nothing else. None of those nice little dervish skills that boost their armor or gives them extra health and regen. No vital boon, no mystic regen, no nothing of what it is dervishes use to make up for their lower armor and to fuel their enchantement needs. Still he's claiming that he's a better tank than any warrior could ever be. :S)
Thouroughly few up with him by now, I suggest we resign, kick the dervish, and start over. Apart from the monk, the others aren't keen on this idea, since we're soo close to the end.

Now he decides that he's not going to help us any more. If we're going to be like that he'll just sit there and do nothing.
Fine, it's not like he's actually provided anything to the party. I mean if we had a MM at least he'd be of use as a portable corpse. So we just continue after a little pause to put him on ignore.
When he catches up on the everyone is just ignoring him and we don't need him. He tries to sabotage the mission instead. Unfortunably for him, his little diapered arse isn't protecting him long enough so he can run and aggro more groups to pull into where we are. They just kill him as soon as he enters the aggro circle.

I guess it's about by now two others have gotten fed up. One quits, the other goes awol.

The rest of us. The five remaining - we just complete the mission, regardless.

I really enjoy pugging. I get some good ones and some bad ones but overall it's much more entertaining than boring heroes and henchies.

Good pug story - My ele was in Sifhalla. Kinda bored and looking for something to do. A pug was in town advertising "GLF monk to go. Frostmaw 7/8". They were continually spamming this while I merched and basically got my inventory straightened out. After about 20 min they switched to "GLF 1 more for Frostmaw's dungeon". I joined and saw they had a Dervish leader, 2 warriors, 1 paragon, 2 Ele's (including me), a monk and a Ranger.

Immediately a fight broke out. Several were complaining that they needed a second monk. Others were tired of waiting and just wanted to go. Some asked the leader to kick me. The leader said he'd do whatever the majority wanted. I mentioned that I usually go with 4 Eles for the raw fire damage and some agreed that the team was melee heavy. At this point, the monk ragequit saying we were all a bunch of idiots. The leader decided to put Dunky on the team and we headed out.

Our dervish did an excellent job getting us to the dungeon. We didn't encounter any enemies and smoothly zoned into Frostmaw's lair. About 5 seconds later we were all dead and we resigned and headed back to town.

Remember, I said this was the good pug story. Our leader then said this really wasn't possible without 2 monks. He deleted his Dunky and asked for volunteers to leave the group. Nobody really wanted to leave, so the leader said he would. One of the warriors added Dunky and Tah and pinged their bars. He said they were really good and should be just fine to complete the dungeon. I had my doubts about this group, but we headed out anyways.

Again we warped into the dungeon and the difference was absolutely amazing. We finished the dungeon an hour later with no deaths!! I only wish I had paid more attention to those monk bars.


Bad Pug story - Because there is more to a good pug than skill. I joined a fow pug one Saturday afternoon. The pug was made up mainly of teens and we started the mission. They were good players, but extremely unpleasant to play with. The entire time they were griping about their parents. Comments like "my dad is so F%#^&ing retarded. i hope he dies in a car crash!" were common. I asked them to tone it down only to be told off. I eventually left the group.

I think I've had the luck to be grouped with both the worst and best PUG of all time.

Here's how it's the worst: Aight, so it's in Nundu's Bay. My friend Donny invites someone, thinking we're going to PUG. So I think "Okay I'm bored" and decide to put together a group.

There are no monks available (when are there?), so we have to improvise. Instead of bring along a monk hero, the Mesmer pick up says "i'll bring zhed and give him healing skills he is good at it" so I lol quietly to myself and say "okay." The Mesmer also offered to bring along half of his skills as healing, as did the Paragon.

So in short, our party build up was:
Me, War
Donny, War
Two Paragons
Mesmer Guy with half of his skills healing
His Zhed hero, set to heal
Dervish,
and Melonni (level 10)

What makes this pug the best pug ever? Masters, one death, and it wasn't Melonni.

Hmmm so long since i was in a PvE PUG,

Worst case: Mission in Prophicies - Bloodstone Fen, Pre Factions Release-
Objective - Complete the Bonus Mission,
After two attempts of this with henchmen i decided that i would have to take a PUG, my first attempt at one as well,

first attempt at PUG, joined a bonus mision PUG, proceeded to the Bonus, player attacks and kills the Jungle Guardian, bonus failed,
second attempt - ensuring that i joined a team that knew not to attack and kill Jungle guardians - two players attack and kill the first one they see
third attempt - I decide to form the group, I ensure that everyone only wants the bonus mission, I ask if everyone knows how to get the bonus, and when a few say they dont explain to the whole team that if a Jungle guardian is killed then we fail the bonus. Once we get to the bonus mission a couple of the players run in and kill the first guardain they see. Totally livid by this time I give up on the bonus and don;t attempt it for another 4 moths with a guild i joined to ensure that it is done proprerly

Best case: Mission -Gayla Hatchery- Post nightfall,

After attempting this mission 20 times with heroes/henchmen I asked guidl to help, nobody in the guild had got to this point so I resorted to atempt a PUG, something that i had given up on about 5 months previously. Amazingly the leader knew how to beat it, told everyone how to we all followed them, and got masters in a matter of 30 mins. Best ever PUG i was in because it did what it was meant to

Best line(s) so far

Good: Was playing monk in AB with 2 sins and a necro. Pretty tore through everything and getting straight wins.

Bad: can't recount one atm.

The ugly: Was playing Zen Daijun. I disconected (computer problems at the time). Reconnected just in time to get a gold drop. I guess the pug wasn't too happy since they all quit one-by-one

Best PUG in GWs was probably last night. I'm leveling up a new monk in Prophesies right now, but I got a run to Lion's Arch first to get better armor and heroes - so by the time I got back to Ascalon, I was over level of everyone around me. Now I've made it to The Frost Gate and that was last night's PUG. So I was a level 19 M/Me in a party of level 10-13s - which is probably why it went so well from my POV.

Now, I've been in GW since early 1996, and this is actually only my second ever PUG for a mission. Reading so many bad stories in these forums, I stayed away from them in this game for the most part.

But last night went well. We did have one person go AFK right at the start of the mission, claiming she would be right back. But after that we ran through fairly smoothly and only had a small problem when I was running back with the bonus in hand to turn it in to the dwarf engineer when somebody triggered the cutscene with Rurik, porting me back to Rurik's location. ) I had to start that run all over again, but the whole area between the two spots had already been cleared - so it was no major problem. At the end, we had a technical glitch - I'd done all three levers but the cinematic wouldn't start. We ran around for a few minutes trying to do the levers again or find some elusive boss and finally it just kicked in.

But I call it a good PUG because there was no bickering, everyone seemed to carry their weight, and not one character died - even during a few moments of massive aggro.


My best and worst PUGs overall in MMOs have both been in WoW - but that's a topic for their forums. Suffice to say that my best PUG spawned a new guild, and my worst PUG several wasted hours of running around aimlessly.

For GW, if you consider getting a run from A to B, such as a Drok's run, a PUG for purposes of this thread, then I have some bad ones in there. This very same Monk when she got run to Droks had to do it twice because we had a guy go AFK at Snakes on the first run, at the gate, and then the runner bought it inches from a shrine near the other end of Snakes - but couldn't respawn due to the AFKer... Causing the other 7 of us to have to map back to Beacons...

Overall in PUGs in three different MMOs, GW, WoW, and CoH - they've been mostly good for me. Of course as I noted above I have almost never done them in GW. I do them often in WoW because you meet people 'on the road' but not often in CoH because killstealing is so common there (when you meet people 'on the road' in CoH it is usually because they just tried or managed to killsteal from you -9/10 of my random meetings in that game start out tense).

Planning to try more PUGs in GW now.

9.5/10
- That line is sig worthy.

This is true. I remind guild mates of this all the time back in WoW. We often recruit by joining PUGs - and the bad PUGs are better for recruitment than the good ones. In a bad PUG, pay attention to who else notices -why- it is bad, and you can find the people you're most likely to be compatible with.

Almost every bad PUG I've been in over there has been a good group with one to two miscreants - like the time we did one of the popular mid-level instances (known as Scarlet Monastery - Cathedral) and the fellow shaman (hybrid healer / dps / tank class) made it his personal duty to grab up as much aggro as possible and bring it back to us whenever we were already knee deep in aggro. Got a new guildie just by paying attention to who was calling for the PUG leader to kick the guy (in WoW, you can boot them out of the mission in mid mission - wish you could do that in GW - while it can be abused, it almost never is, as most instances there end on killing a final boss and you only want to kick someone who is making that boss harder to kill...).

One bad apple spoiling the orchard is the usual pattern for bad PUGs in WoW, and seems to be the same in many of the stories I read here. I have seen all bad apple PUGs, but they're rarer than all good apple PUGs. At least in WoW. I can only guess that will hold out here as well. A bad player is a bad player regardless of what game they log into.

Best: A long time ago I was doing Hell's Precipice to complete prophs for the 1st time, it was about one in the morning so i joined the first(and only) PUG that was there. About 10 minutes in somebody left, nobody seemed bothered so we continued. Later on, just after completing bonus one of our monks left. Nobody was happy and there was a discussion about whether to contiue, we decided we would. We played through the rest of the mission as a great team and breezed it upto the Lich.
We ended up having to kill him three times, due to him moving from th centre just as he died, at on point we had to retreat whilst one member of teh group handed out candy canes Never the less, we completed the mission with 6 men and were made up with ourselves

Worst: Probably going to FOW and after half hour one guy left, whilst another decided to just follow us round, not killing anything, staying just outside aggro bubble and picking up his drops. After several attempts to get him killed we just left.

I generally like going in PUG's, i find them a fun experience usually and sometimes make some good friends. There are a lot of idiots out there which may put you off trying to find an all player team, but if you find a good group then it's great

I don't recall any best pugs I had. Yes, I had some, but not any that comes to my mind.


I had my share of bad pugs, like, one I had recently, about a month ago. I was with my rit, and I was about to do the Consulate Docks mission, but the, someone shouted he was running the mission and bonus for 1k.

It was an easy mission, but oh so boring, so I got in his group.

The runner, was a wammo, with his three heros. The others in the group were myself, another wammo, a dervish and a ranger.

Mission starts, he starts doing the mission, the ranger and the dervish follow him while me and the other wammo stay on the boat.

He's doing pretty well (well, they're six afterall), then we get to the first cutscene. Now he starts jumping into the fray, and manage to kill the ele boss.

Now to the worst part... Going for the last bonus part, where a dozen archers stand atop the stairs, he, his heroes, the dervish and the ranger get killed in a matter of seconds.

"Geez" I told myself.

Being kind, and refusing to have lost my time, I get to Flesh of my Flesh all the dead. But they all die again on their second attempt. So I resurect them again, all of them, the wammo continues to rush into the archers without his monk heroes resurected.

So, depleted from almost all my health from using Flesh of my Flesh, I was regenerating for a bit.

The wammo starts yelling "res me, res me, res me".... to the other wammo (gee, he didn't notice I was saving their butts). The other wammo didn't have any resurection spells, in fact, I was the only one with a res spell.

So I told him "Do you expect me to pay you for this run ? I certainly won't".

The others agreed with me. Then the wammo insulted us and raged quit.



Then I rezed everybody one more time, I joined into the fight, got the bonus, and finished the mission with ease.



What a run.

I've gotten bad luck with pugs since HM was released, but I had worse before. I don't recall most of them, and when I do this thread will probably have been deleted x];;.

One my last one was in FoW - I was tempted to pug it for the third time or so (I've basically been running FoW with my guild/alliance mostly. I was in as a monk, and no one had warned me that the other was a bonder despite me asking what were the builds; they went in as soon as I said "ready" anyways.

Turns out the nukers were: fire nuke with Firestorm, Flare, Meteor, Flame Djinn's Haste and Inferno for one, the second had a similar build but with water magic also. They kept rushing in faster than the tank, who was overextending, and using FireStorm on PURPOSE to break aggro. The tank was, as I was saying, overextending and didn't know how to use his build at all. When we reached the part where Rastigan rushes in, the tank was unable to bodyblock, but for some reason we managed to overcome it. Took us a while too.

Once we're done with Rastigan, we take the reward and the group started arguing on where to go next. Forest had been suggested, and most wanted to do it, but most didn't know that the bonder would have lost in bond within a minute or so given he's got -8 degeneration 'cause he's maintaining so many bonds on us (and the bip we had wasn't that good, so yeah...). It took the rit and I around 5-10 minutes to explain this to them.

We finally settled for the usual forge run; wammo overxtending, and the FS nuke STILL using FS despite the rit and I were yelling at him not to use it anymore since we DIDN'T want to break aggro... I found myself d/c'ing after the wammo got a gold chaos axe drop.

Another one, more recent, was with a 6/8 alliance ToPK HM run. We took a PUG b/p and orders (IIRC). As usual I tell the b/p's to heel their pets by the four dryders by the 2nd area of the 2nd floor, and one ignores it completely. We wipe 5/8. After recovering,the guy still hasn't heeled his pet and I start to get upset, since I KNOW we'll partial wipe again.

And we did.

We recover once again, we finish 2nd floor, and we get on 3rd. Goes rather well until we reach the first wurm - the b/p STILL hasn't heeled his pet and it aggroes both unwanted mobs for an HM group. Let's say, that's what I call a noob (after 2 times he still hasn't learned, and he does it a THIRD time? wow). Out of utter annoyance I call him a noob, and reacts immaturely to it. He starts insulting us, calling us "PvE noobs" because we know how to heel pets (and not him), and he rages.

He PMs me, calling my friends "stupid", and my reply is a "yeah, real mature". His reply?

"Because calling other people noobs is mature".

Now let's see... What did he call us two minutes ago? "PvE noobs".

That line just made my day. I wasn't angry anymore; I was literally laughing my ass off. Idiots amuse me to no end.

best pug.....was before factions was released. was getting my mesmer to end game tyria. was doing hells. 2 warriors, 2 monks, 2 ele's and me and another mesmer. got to the first set of fire imps had an almost party wipe and the 2 ele's rage quit. after regrouping the 6 of us decided to continue on. we ended up getting mission and bonus with 2 warriors, 2 mesmers and 2 monks. actually was probably the easiest ive ever done that mission besides doing it with guildies or hero/henching it.

worst pug......ive had so many over time i havent done a full pug group, besides the deep, FoW or DoA since nightfall came out. if we have a near full guild group or alliance group there has been times we taken the poor person that sits in a town spamming over and over looking for group knowing the 6 or 7 of us could do just fine without but who knows when you will find a diamond in the rough and at the same time maybe even get a new guildie in the process

Yeah, I usually don't bother with spirits unless they're the disenchant ones. Ele with no attunement = no energy management. I don't remember which ones I hit or didn't but I can pretty much spam arcane echo/savanah heat/arcane echo/ etc so it doesn't matter. I wasn't even pissed for me, cause I got my chest drop. I had the +10% bonus so I had over 650 hp, more than enough to run in and get mine. I felt bad for the other ele and maybe that noob monk cause they didn't get theirs.

I agree, it sucks they didn't get thier drops, I just assumed when they saw us run in for it everyone would.

As for what you were aoe'ing I don't know, I just remember at least once an ele used meteor shower.... I wanted to slap them up side the head, must have been the other one. lol

As for your comment about not wanting to pug with me again, dont' worry about it, I dont' pug. It wasn't my idea to pug at that time, I normally run with friends and/or heroes & hench.

Actually, I just remembered the best, sorta, pug I ever had. Way back I didn't have nf yet, and was trying to do the last quest from deldrimor where you have to kill the forge guy and then kill the 3 djinns that spawn. Well I could henchie up till the djinns but couldn't kill more than 1 then I had so much dp on my party there was no point in even trying (had no way to reduce dp) I did that several times then decided to pug. Got in a group with 2 other real people, stayed there for over an hour looking for more people. I think one of the guys was a w/mo and the other was a ranger. I didn't know much about heros but the one guy took his 3 heros and we filled out with henchies. Anyway, we got to the end, then I explained to them about the djinns and they actually listened and we managed to slowly kill them one by one. We racked up a lot of dp (I don't think the heros had stellar skill bars, and were not all even level 20) and it took literally 3 hours or more to do. But none of us left, we all kept going, and eventually got it done. I just got this really cool feeling afterwards like we'd really done something against the odds. Now I kinda laugh and think how stupid it was to do that before I had heros of my own.

A PUG got me through the ring of fire first try in one fell swoop IIRC, with just a few people leaving and joining. Communication FTW (not voip)