Being boosted

In an MMO, "boosting" is when you take a group of well-geared players, and one or two not-so-well-geared players, and run an instance or a raid. The not-geared players would never be able to handle the raid on their own, but if you have a group of much more powerful players, they can make up for what the others lack.

Last night was sort of an example of that. We tried to finish off 10-man Naxxramas. The problem was there were too many people who wanted to be boosted. Take a look at the WoWWebStats report for the run. I am "Lapetus" in that report. "Cumulus" and "Sitta" were the tanks, "Leo" and "Aries" are the healers. "Libra" is a ret pally, and "Ganymede" is a SV Hunter.

We attempted Grobbulus four times, then tried Instructor Razuvious four times. Look at the DPS. On the third attempt, someone taunted Grobbulus so he faced us and did his slime spray, so we got a bunch of slimes that spawned, and that just was a total wipe. So I'm not even going to count that attempt. On the other three "real" attempts, our average DPS was:

BM Hunter (me): 2292
Ret Pally: 1860
SV Hunter: 1835
Mage: 1292
Rogue: 1252
Lock: 1149

See anything wrong with those numbers?

Then we tried to kill Instructor Razuvious four times. One time we had a problem where the mind control crystals were bugged, but that happened partway through the fight, so the DPS numbers were reasonable. Here are the averages:

BM Hunter (me): 2579
SV Hunter: 2212
Rogue: 1933
Mage: 1830
Ret Pally: 1729
Lock: 1560

There just wasn't enough DPS in this raid. The Ret Pally is really well geared, so I don't know what's going on. Maybe his rotation is off. In fact, I checked on Be Imba! for all of these DPSers, and none of them really stand out as poorly geared.

I have no idea why their DPS is so low. Maybe they just weren't motivated?

It's times like these, when I'm always at the top of the pack in DPS (as a BM hunter!) and I see people with really bad DPS, that I question my decision to become the guild raid leader. Last night was a complete waste of everyone's time, including the two pug healers we pulled in. I basically blew away their timers for no good reason.

I can only hope tonight's Heroic Naxxramas run isn't this bad.