Deliberate Act of Sabotage

If you have mending and favourable winds in your bar you can counter those spoilers!

But anyway i do agree they can be annoying, but it happens and not much you can do apart from finding their build beforehand.

As if they are not able to change build after pinging it.... But then you know they did it on purpose.

Yep, precisely.

Judas monk. Good times.

Life attunement and the ele crystals skills at 0 spec were also valuable tools in the Judas monk arsenal. UA got nerfed for it though

Drain delusions and aneurysm, each at 0 are similarly strong in PvP.

What do you mean, lately? Newsflash: PUGs have always sucked.

The difference between "suck" and "grief" should be apparent.

As others have pointed out, the problem is lack of enforcement. Since many other games have mechanisms that punish griefers, when someone wants lulz they come here. The combination of serious players and no consequences for the behavior is a magnet for griefers.

Maybe the way they go about it, but a griefer is generally about as useful as a person with a shitty build.

So functionally they're the same; I actually respect a grief more because they're doing it for fun, whereas a shitty player does it because they suck at thinking.

There are people that do deliberately cause problems for laughs. This reminds me of when a guild mate and I was trying to get the last bonus, before the Shiro mission, in Factions to complete Protector of Cantha. We joined a pug, 3rd and 4th on party list. A warrior joined in the 5th slot. Everyone was asked to ping their skills. We started the mission and the warrior was running around with no armor and no weapon. He ran into a mob and died, was ressed, then died again. The aggro wiped the party. Back in the outpost, the leader quit the group as did the monk. We added another player and a hero monk. Started the mission again. Same results. Back in outpost everyone left except, myself, my guild mate and the warrior. I said in team chat, "We really need this bonus." The warrior added his heroes, I added 2 heroes. I restarted the mission, and this time the warrior was "dressed & armed". He led the way and we got the bonus. Afterward, he apologized for being a jerk, that he had been bored and was looking for some entertainment.

Often, it is not a newb that is the problem, but someone that knows better and is just griefing for "entertainment".

People that grief are worse than "bad" players because they should know better. If they're so bored they find that type of behavior entertaining, then they need to get out and away from the computer screen for a time.

You derive your enjoyment from farming ectos, I derive my enjoyment from farming "XXX has left the game."

Your use of quotation marks around entertainment indicates you've never griefed a group yourself.

Otherwise you'd realize how fun and hilarious it is.

This.

I wonder how many people that proudly admit they get off by griefing others also complained that heroes killed pugs. Suprise, jerks, you're the killer.

A clueless nooblet is far less dangerous to a party than a griefer. Ping the builds in town and help him learn what's what. If he runs a crap bar and refuses to adjust it just kick him. If you forgot to check skills and later find him using junk skills, he's still of some use to the party, even it's being a meatshield.
With a griefer, the party's screwed unless it survives the first few mobs of aggro'd monsters and nobody rezzes the Leeroy. Not very promising for a good ending.

If someone ever tried to hold a mission hostage I'd just /sit there. I don't care if it's even just a 100gold ransom; they can kiss my hairy white ass.

Back in Prophecies when monks were scarce, my friend and I would get on our 2 monks and bring the old Unyielding Aura to Thunderhead Keep. He'd run off and die, and then I'd UA him. Then, we'd let as many party members as we could die and he'd res them with UA. When we were almost done, I'd release the bond on my friend and everyone but me would die at once. I would then promptly /dance on their corpses. We only made a full team wipe once, though. Usually only got about half.

More commonly, we'd demand that we be the one who activate the king (and thus the one he follows around) and then stop moving before he opens the gate halfway through the mission. Then, we'd charge everyone to continue the mission. We'd demand they pay the amount equal to the gold drops that they had already received on the way there, usually something like 214 gold. Most refused even though we knew they had the gold, and they were forced to go back to town and wait another half an hour for a monk to show up.

Waaay back when people still did balanced groups of FoW, we'd get about halfway done with a forgemaster run and start insulting people. For whatever reason, people don't like to be called names on the internet, and often we could get them to abandon the run just out of dickishness, even though we were performing our monking jobs well.

The days before heroes were much fun for mischievous monks. Sadly, the only way to grief nowadays is to get a dungeon run, not pay, and then kill the boss by yourself. It's not worth ruining the few groups that are left with some paltry lulz.

When you can do most PvE content H/H (or 2 accounts 1 player 6 heroes), it doesn't really make sense to gamble PUGs that might have griefers or leechers.

In PvP, just /report, and hope you're not banned yourself for too much /reporting...

As far as griefers versus worthless nubs, griefers can literally leave your group stuck in it's tracks (no forward progression), whereas a worthless nub shouldn't have more impact than an empty party slot.

That spirit spammer build posted above did make me laugh, tho - LOL, talk about screwing the party over hardcore! It seems one could also spirit spam with 0 in channeling/communing and do some decent damage (given another party member has a legitimate spirit spam build, overwriting their spirits). SUX that you cannot target and attack friendly spirits...

How hard is it really, to ping your build to the party in town, then immediately load your grief build? There should be a command you can use while in an instance, where you can /view all other 7 party member's builds. Or, can't you just ping them a build from your profile, while having something else entirely different already loaded?!?

PUGs killed themselves from day one.

I did jump up and down on the corpse from time to time, though

In many cases, you can teach a bad player to be better over the internet.

In NO case can you b****slap a douchbag over the internet.

Pings Build: Running Standered HB
Before mission start, adds iron mist and heal area.

It's sabotage, not noobness.

Pretty interesting read. Made me chuckle a bit. But the only real place you could do that sort of thing consistently nowadays is FA. Just plain boredom and spite, nothing new to see here.

Sup buddy! I stopped Pugging back in 2005, when I realized that henchmen were better than the regular pugs.

Though do keep blaming me for everything that has ever annoyed you, I will gladly take any and all credit.

I had a group recently that kept enchanting me knowing full well that there was pretty heavy enchantment removal. Eventually they stopped rezzing me and I left of course. Odd how the other players didn't seem effected.

Conspiracy.