With Elionene, I usually do the random heroic for the frost emblems, and I usually do it with guild members. Occasionally we'll need to fill one or two spots in the group, and it's almost always been a not unpleasant time. It helps when your wife plays a healer and can pretty much carry a group through any instance, regardless of their gear, or when you have tank friends with a Heroic Block set of armor that pretty much prevents them from ever taking damage. Of course, there was the one PuG tank who ran in and aggroed ten mobs at the beginning of Utgarde Keep and died. Nothing Lal can do about a stupid tank, just the under-geared ones.
So Elio is farming the frost emblems. She picked up the Recovered Scarlet Onslaught Cape last week as her first piece of frost emblem loot which finally replaces her cape from Ulduar. Some might question my choice of getting a cape first in stead of tier pieces or higher item value loot, but I was really tired of having a cape that was two tiers of loot behind. And there are lots of tier equivalent stuff to drop from early Icecrown bosses to hold me over until I get the emblems to by Tier 10 things. I'll get there.
I've run the random heroic and the new Icecrown heroics with both Salthier and Khristin a few times for emblems and for gear drops. I've gotten to heal with my Shaman quite a bit more than I had been, and I'm still enjoying it. I put her in Veritas so that I wouldn't have to make an excuse to want to bring her as a healer to guild runs. Salthier is pretty much exclusively for tanking now, and Khristin for healing, even though they both have off specs. Again, most of the time we're just filling a spot or two with PuG Members.
Lal has been running randoms like crazy. She's got multiple toons she's trying to gear up as well, and she's a little more intent on getting lots of badges than I am. There was a time not too long ago when she would make a face and "ewwww!" noises at the mere mention of a PuG. And now she's doing them daily with random folks from all over the place. She wants the pet, but she also wants the gear, so that's what's driving her. She's had her number of bad pugs too, with some pretty rude people in them. Still, she powers on.
Probably the most interesting time I've had with the Dungeon Finder has been on my Tauren Death Knight. He's only level 72 now, but around level 70 I started doing the random normal daily as a tank. You not only get experience and gold for doing it, but two emblems of triumph to jump start your level 80 set when you get there. Not too shabby. Him being on another server though means I have to go with four strangers, and I'm still learning how to tank. I've had multiple groups fall apart because something happened that someone didn't like. Before I got some defense gear, I made a couple healers mad. But I guess my overall experience has been pleasant, unlike some of the horror stories you hear out there. I guess I've been lucky.
But it's like I've been telling other people, when they opened up PuGs to the battlegroup, and not just the server, you now have an easier time finding groups from the people wanting to run dungeons. You're not only pulling from a larger group of people, you now have a larger pool of idiots and jerks to pull from too. You win some, you lose some, and hopefully you win more than you lose.
For now, I think I enjoy the ease of finding a PuG more than I dislike the chance of getting some rude people in my group. I'm still waiting to see if a couple bad PuGs don't change my mind.
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