Exactly, the OP this tangent stemmed from was a case where the RL said "tank this ok?" and the guy went "umm.. ok i'll try". It is remiss of any good RL not to then ask "you do know the fight, right?". If the other guy goes "yeah, I do" then stuffs up it's his fault, but if RL doesn't even check to make sure that nervous guy has half a clue then it's the RL's fault also.

Expecting people to know the fight is all well and good, but it takes 2 seconds to make sure that assumption is well founded, and much less time to provide the information/get someone else to do it that it does to redo the encounter after a wipe.

It is a mistake for someone to accept responsibility if they are unsure what it entails or are not confident with it, but it is also a mistake to delegate responsibility to people who demonstrate signs of being one of the former.

Everything else you said is largely irrelevent; most of the people on this board can "8 man Kara faster than most full PUGs". No need to try and prove anything.

The most amazing part is that he actually had the belt crafted.

If I'm not absolutely sure of something, I say "Hang on a sec, exactly what do you want me to do and when?" The raid leader has 24 other people to manage, they can't be expected to read people's minds as to whether sounding uncertain is first time nerves, natural modesty or pure ignorance of what they're supposed to do.

I've always understood the "take 2 seconds to make sure that assumption is well founded" is performing a ready check. If you click yes on the ready check, you're saying "I know what I have to do and am here to do it". In fact I've heard multiple raid leaders explicitly say "Don't click ready unless you're in position and know what you're doing", so I know I'm not the only one who is under that impression.

If you're not quinn why are you telling us what happened in this specific instance? Just how culpable (no one is denying the guy who stuffed up isn't also culpable) the RL is is the question at hand. Merely assuming that the RL isn't is question begging.

The abstract point stands regardless of examples that this wasn't an instance of it. And this instance remains in question unless someone who was, you know... there, actualy replies.

So, my guild is trying to scout some more talent from our more casual guildies and the people who want to step it up with our more progress-oriented side, so we held a SSC run. Not much, just targetting Lurker to see how numbers are going and who has raid awareness, so that we can put our hooks into them and get them into Hyjal. Obviously, since I'm posting here, things did not go completely peachy. There were 12 people in the group who were new to SSC, and part of the requirements to come was that you read over the Lurker's strat before you come in. After getting the coordination worked out following a rocky opening pull, the RL gave a short (for him) explanation, and we started up the fight.

Remember those old days when RLs would bring people to Ony runs to see how raid-aware they were? Well, Lurker's first Deep Breath acted much like Ony's, in that it instantly killed 8 people. One of the other new people, a troll healy priest, died to Whirl damage 3 times(yeah, you heard me). We ended up beating Lurker that attempt, but it was an 18-minute slugfest that ended with one person on each platform, 4 healers, the tanks, and a couple of assorted melee chipping away at the last 5% of its health.

For the 46th time. I daresay you see a lot of Stupid Things.

(I also think this qualifies for the thread's intended use.)

Note to self: When pulling, please ensure your healer is still connected before doing your Captain America act. My healer disconnected at the beginning of a fight, and I couldn't figure out how I died. That was embarrassing.

Also, when pulling Akil'zon in ZA, remember two things: 1) He will lock people out of his platform if they're not standing high up enough, and 2) if the trash respawns, it DOES pull if you engage him. We found both of those out tonight when we went up to him after our first Nalorakk kill.

In ZA last night: Heading through Lynx trash after making the third timer by less than a second, we come to the first ambush pack of Amani Lynx. Our hunter accidentally Tab-targets one of the crocs halfway though, and an autoshot pulles the 3 of them. Thinking fast, she immediately Feigns Death, and the crocs reset as we're still fighting the Lynx pack.

The stupid part? She left the croc targeted and didn't turn off auto attack. She stands back up, and immediately another arrow whizzes over to tag the same croc again, this time resulting in a raid wipe.

After getting each bear we have a tradition to screenshot our "Bear cavalry" near the Halazzi's building and bad part of this tradtion is that almost each new happy bear owner pulls the hut packs (where the quest/repair guy standing) after exiting backdoor from lynx.

It might be worth mentioning that TAB-targeting the trash to the Dragonhawk boss in ZA is not exactly clever sometimes and you might end up with a 2nd pack of mobs. Yes, I am guilty of that wipe. But on the bright side, seeing my fireball go a totally wrong direction was one of my best "oh shit!" moments in WoW thus far.

Our feral tank got a new nifty bear>caster>pop [Nightmare Seed]>bear macro.

Then he decided to use it while Brutallus was punching him in the face. Sadly he didn't make it between the consecutive blows...

Today while levelling my warrior in Silithus, I came back to town flagged from turning in some dust, and a level 56 Warlock decided it would be a brilliant idea to DoT me up. In a neutral town. Predictably, he got one cast off and got instagibbed by the town guards. Well, he decided that it had been bad luck, because he tried it again.

8 more times.

Each time, Siphon Life would land on me, and tick for less than my out-of-combat health regen, and he'd die. He even tried things like walking up to melee range with me, hoping that I had auto-attack on and would get the guards on me... And when he failed, he'd DoT me again. I don't know if he was just messing around because a level 56 cloth repair bill is so low, or if he was just deeply stupid, but I think it definitely qualifies for this thread.

Along those same lines, when starting a Horde-Alliance war on Quel'Danas, don't do it within range of the guards in town. We started one such war late one night, and it quickly devolved into a guard-baiting exercise where each side would take turns lounging around just within range of the guards, waiting for some idiot on the other side to run up and attack us. Inevitably, some total noob would get all excited at the thought of "ZOMG we're all flagged, I've got friends, MURDER KILL DEATH DESTRUCTION" and promptly get smacked down by the guards, usually triggering a chain reaction because several other people joined the fray before realizing what was going on.

Last night we were doing Brutallus as usual, except our off-tank druid was the main tank. First pull, mis-direct is up, he forgets that he is the main tank. As Brutallus is approaching he throws up a moonfire, actually took a melee hit in caster form, switched to kitty form, and promptly fell over. It was amusing, to say the least.

We blamed the healers .

We have somewhat of a shortage of raid-geared tanks in our guild at the moment, so most of the time we have to improvise with "whatever we have on hand". At the same time, we're also going back to running two Karazhan groups, which only aggravates the improvisation problem. Last night's "whatever we have on hand" was a boomkin druid who respecced feral for the night. He has fairly decent tank gear, so we get settled in at the beginning of the run. (I'm on my fiancee's shadow priest alt at the time.) We rock on up to Attumen, the feral starts the pull, I give the tank a decent aggro lead and open a can of dark shadowy whoopass on Midnight, pull aggro in about 20 seconds and die. Okay, maybe I didn't give enough of an aggro lead (I did have Salv), so on the way up to Moroes I turn the DPS knob down. I _still_ pulled aggro twice while clearing trash. About the time I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong, even spamming my Fade button, the tank notices two things: 1) He has Salv on as well, and 2) He's still wearing half of his boomkin gear.

I found that out the hard way...

See I recently started PvPing as I had no interest in it before but a guildie who does Arena convinced me to give it a shot. So I was doing my dailies while still in a PvP spec (33/28 with POM Pyro along the way) and I saw a Gnome Warlock, flagged and at 40% health, walk right by me. Too tempting. Of course I had to chase him down and finish him off as my Pyro did not crit, and I was 2 shotted by a guard. At least I got my fire blast off in time to kill him.

I ran around most of my WoW time with an incredible 1 (yes One) lifetime kill which was actually a mistake that I suppose qualifies for this thread (on his part as well as mine). Tab-targetting while trying to kill Kobolds in the cave in Arathi I found an ally that was low on health and flagged. I ended up helping him for a while - he'd kill one I'd kill the next so I kept going as I was still getting the xp I wanted - but he kept pulling and at some point was dangerously low on health so I thought "oh shit, gotta get up and help him again". Tabbed onto him, hit fireblast and recorded my first ever PvP kill!

So from 30-something to 70 I had that impressive record on my PvP resume. After that, one boring-ass Warsong Gulch was all I added to it until last week when I started grinding honor to join the Arena team.

We were doing Magtheridon the other night with a small raid for gold (and during the Stanley Cup Playoffs) and because I'm lazy I decided I'd handle one of thecube duties. However, the game got pretty exciting for a while and I completely forgot I actually had an important job to do...

In the end, it turns out two members of Deus Vox can still not click cubes (myself and Buc) and we ended up wiping a couple of times to Magtheridon.

Well if theres one thing WoW has taught us, it's that if the fate of the earth ever relies on a group of people touching cubes... were royally screwed.

You did him (the guy in the Arathi cave) a favor by sparing him a repair bill. When I played on PvP servers, I have done something like that when feeling charitable.

On a guild Hosted Naxxramas pug a few weeks ago, I died during Four Horsemen, and was given a battle-rez to speed up the recovery after the wipe. It was about 4 AM at the time, and half my mental power had escaped me, so I accepted the rez, and DI'ed the druid who rezzed me. Not my finest moment, but I still laugh at it.

Last night's raid, chain-pulling the Bog Dudes in FLK's room with the usual Hunter MD rotation. Hunter B puts up MD, runs to pick up a mob, and promptly gets marmalised by a mildly annoyed fungus beastie.

Hunter A: Did it resist MD?
Hunter B: No...
Hunter A: Did MD wear off?
MT: No...
Hunter A: What happened, then?
Hunter B: Sorry guys, I couldn't shoot it ... my bow was red.

When it comes to getting aggro on the MT, MD is not quite as effective when you're body pulling.

Once upon a time in a raid in SW preparing to pull Felmyst, I thought it would be neat to use the Voodoo Gnome Trinket from ZA in this fight by activating it, and switching my real trinket in before I got into combat.

So as the main tank was starting the countdown, I activated the trinket (right as Felmyst flew over my head) and my gnomes proceeded to shoot Felmyst. Boy was the raid pissed :P