Never Roll on a Low Pop Server

I'm feeling some major frustration for rolling on a low population server. At first it seemed quaint. I'll pick a low pop server and have less run-ins with idiots and gankers and everything will be bliss. That sounds like a great notion but in truth my server is horrible. Anub'arak seems overrun by Horde and they're geared to the teeth. There is obviously enough horde on this server to get stuff done. It's killing me though to drop into the LFG queue, spend three hours in queue and then result in no instance run. Yeah I know "go make your own party", right? Sounds easy enough but come roll on Anub'arak and give it a try. With no one else LFG you continually end up with a party consisting of any three of the following: hunter, lock, rogue, ret pally that can't really heal or tank, Shadow Priest that refuses to re'spec Holy, or even cast a heal for that matter, despite the fact they've reached 70, Feral Druid that can't heal and doesn't want to tank cuz they won't get to drool over their kitty burst damage, and people of negligible intelligence. And there you sit in your party of three DPS'ers typing "/4 LF2M tank and healer for any frickin thing". Last night's endeavour, however yielded an ok party. We had a Holy Pally, Prot or Arms Warrior, Ret Pally (can we sign petitions to force them to re'spec Holy or Prot? are 'DPS' Pallies even any good?), another BM hunter and myself. Now the invention of The Armory was a wonderous thing. First off it lets you know what spec people are without asking them, not a truly important thing except for BM hunters. I always hope to be paired with a Marksman Hunter to see how I compare on the boards. Especially one of those "I'm MM b/c MM>>>>>BM for DPS." type of MM hunters. So I see a hunter in the party and I immediately pop over to the Armory to check their spec. The hunter that we got last night was listed as Beast Master but to my horror, on closer examination I could easily make out that this was one of those all-to-common Huntards. /gasp His talent tree looked as though it were chosen by dart throws. He had points in all sorts of random spots. Touting a crossbow with 44 DPS, and a Ranged attack power of just under 700, I knew this guy was going to be low man on the damage charts. Even below the tank. There's no helping people like this either. I reached out with "Hey there a nice gun you can get from the Nesingwary chains in Nagrand. How close are you to completing those?"
"I think I have them done. Since it's a gun I'm pretty sure I sold it", comes his reply.
/cast Aimed Shot Huntard
/cast Aimed Shot Huntard
/cast Aimed Shot Huntard
O come on Blizz, just let me shoot him once, PLEASE!!!! That gun is 11 DPS higher than his crossbow and has better stats. How can someone be so nonchalant about a DPS increase? I'm stoked with an increase of .4 DPS or more.
No worries, let's just get to Shattered Halls and run the instance. Second hurdle of the night (first being just get a party): Horde are camping the summoning stone. This mystifies me. If you have all the gear you need, all the rep you need and are so bored that you're griefing people that want to do an instance, then go reroll. Try out priest. That will keep you busy for a long time. Granted it's a PvP server but do you have to be dicks about it? Well, after one wipe on the way in, because SH has that damn door, we get inside and start. This was my first time running Shattered Halls and it's a bitch. Give me three good crowd controllers (a nice mix would be rogue, mage and hunter), a qualified tank, and an adept healer and this will be a synch. After the first few pulls I realize what we in fact have is a well geared, well qualified Warrior paired with a truly competent healer, a ret Pally that is putting out DPS just below me (I was at 33% total party damage and he was at 30%. I guess he proved the "are Ret Pallies decent DPS'ers" question. This one is clearly the exception and not the rule) the huntard who is at least beating the healer for DPS and myself. The hunter was not a capable chain trapper so we are in essence crowd controlling one mob. On 5 and 6 mob pulls down the long hallway, our pulls are chaotic and result in at least one death a pull. We make it down the hall, which I'm told is the most difficult part of the instance, and there it is. The glaring red lightning bolt next to the healer's name. D/C'd. A minute or so later she's back and explains laptop had come unplugged and wore battery down but all is well now... except for sudden lag issues. She tells us she's running at 5-6 frames per second, but says she can work through it. Next pull is at the end of the hall and has three or four elites and three normal mobs. She D/C's again during that fight which became a wipe although mine was a fake death. She comes back. Mana and HP up and it's back in the fray. I can only guess one of these mobs has a new lightning bolt of doom debuff because there goes the healer again. /cry We gave up.
I hearthstoned outta there and stewed since it's so impossible to get any 5-mans together. I really need to join a guild with a focus on such things. My dead guild is yielding me no benefits.
It's Eye of the Storm this week so I thought to go give it a shot. It's always a decent amount of honor if I hang out in the middle and kill people. At the start we get our two caps quickly and we're about tied up to 200-200. At about that time we lost BOTH of our caps. The horde controlled all four towers and they were running flags on us!!! New changes to EotS make flags worth more if they have more towers. Final score approx. 250-2000.
/disgusted
/deletechars
/rerollhorde
BElf Chicks FTW, anyone?