A Rose By Any Other Name…

You ever get that sinking feeling when joining a group just from looking at the names of the players involved?  Sure you do.  I’ll bet most of the time you just go ahead with the group, hoping against experience that maybe this time it’ll be different?  It never is, is it?

Rule number 1.  Never join a group with any Deathknight whose name looks like something that could have been signed by Arthas if he were dyslexic.

I joined a normal Halls of Lightning on my priest, Aluriel.  It was a while back, a guildie needed a healer to get the instance done on his alt, I was bored and Aluriel was so overgeared she could heal normal HoL with Renew, so along I went.  On joining the group I saw two level 78 Deathknights.  Turns out one was the tank.  A Deathknight willing to tank is usually a good sign, and this guy was no exception.  He was inexperienced but keen to be as good a tank as he could be, and that goes a long way in my book.  He was happy to listen to advice and did as good a job as could be expected, I’d group with him again in a heartbeat.

The other one was called Aarthas.

Yeah, he was as bad as you’re imagining.  He managed to pull off a very spectacular 600 dps.  Just to put this into perspective, Calli was doing 1900dps on Brutallus at level 70.  Aarthas was managing a third of her dps 8 levels later.  I didn’t know it was even possible for a Deathknight to do such miserable dps.  To make matters worse he wouldn’t listen to advice.  Remember the first boss in HoL does that Whirlwind which carves up melee when he goes into Berseker stance?  Recognising young Aarthas for the smacktard that he was, I advised him to simply run clear and not dps at all whenever the boss went into Beserker stance, as I judged him incapable of being able to know when to run out on his own.  Boy did I ever call that one.  I was wasting my time of course, he stayed in and managed to get his arse killed anyway, despite being pre-shielded and HoT’ed.  He was also impatient, dangerously so, causing two wipes due to his pulling adds that neither I nor the inexperienced tank were ready for.  I later found out that he’d been bugging the Deathknight tank in whispers all through the instance to pass on the Axe from the last boss.  This would be the axe that only drops in Heroic mode, of course.

*sigh*

Rule Number 2.  Similar to Rule 1.  Avoid grouping with any Night Elf hunter whose name is based on any derivative of the name “Legolas”.

As I’m sure the horde have discovered since The Burning Crusade was released, nothing attracts the smacktards like a pretty character avatar.  As the wave of moron fruit elf paladins engulfed Silvermoon City, the Horde got a taste of what the Alliance have had to put up with since Orlando Bloom first put on his pointy ears.  Thankfully, instances of Rule 2 are relatively rare these days, as all the night elf huntards called Lególaas are now having fun playing their Deathknights called Arthaaz.  Hopefully, they all rerolled Fruit Elf too.  No reason why the Alliance should enjoy the monopoly on cretins.

Rule Number 3.  If he’s got his class in his name, he’s almost certainly a inbred smacktard with an IQ slightly lower than his shoe size.

Exceptions to this rule are very, very rare, but they do exist.  The exceptions tend to come from those guys, usually from Eastern Europe, who didn’t speak or write English too well when they bought WoW and struggled to come up with a useful name to use on an English language server.  They’ve usually learned to speak pretty decent English since and are now hideously embarrassed at their choice of name and have either taken advantage of the paid name change facility or no longer play “Killerwarrior” as their main.  That’s okay, I’ll forgive anyone who’s prepared to learn and grow as a person.  On the other hand, “Roguefradk” on Hellscream-EU who forms PuGs for Vault of Archavon, kicks out anyone who isn’t covered in epics, wears greens and blue quest rewards himself, struggles to get over 1000dps and kicks anyone who criticises his own dps… well, he can just die in a fire. 

Rule Number 4.  If he has any of the words “dark”, “night” or “shadow” in his name, fake illness and leave the group immediately.

Again, there are exceptions to this rule, but they are pretty rare.  The exceptions tend to come from the same background as the exceptions to Rule 3.  If in doubt, just run screaming for the hills while pulling the cable from your modem.  You’ll thank me in the end.

Rule Number 5.  Any player whose name contains a combination of any of the above 4 rules should be treated with the same morbid fascination as someone who managed to contract both bubonic plague and yellow fever at the same time.  By all means tell your friends, but don’t touch under any circumstances.

We once had a player in our guild who was called Shadowdruid.  His alts were Shadowhunter and Shadowwarrior.

We no longer speak of him.  Ever.