Pugged players and personality conflicts

I have about as much affection for priest healing as I do for hunter DPS. My hunter was my first character, and she holds a higher percentage of time as my main character, but I have mained my priest in a raid healing capacity, and it was a lot of fun for me. It's actually a little unfortunate, because there's no way for me to heal without feeling twinges of "I wish I were on my hunter," and I can't play my hunter without getting similar twinges of "I wish I were on my priest."

Since I do main my hunter, this means I keep my eye out for opportunities to take my priest through current content. Somewhere in, I think, September I saw someone posting ads in trade looking to recruit a healer for their Firelands progression raiding. I sent her a tell saying that, while I couldn't be a permanent person that could make all their raid times, I could help out with their Friday raidtimes until such time as they found someone that could better fill in and was she interested in a discipline priest?

Her response was "no," which was fine, but then she gave me the reason for that no and said that it was because they already had a holy paladin.

I could go in-depth as to why this was an incorrect opinion to hold at the time, but I think it's enough for my purposes here to simply state its incorrectness. Having a holy paladin is just absolutely not a good reason to turn down a discipline priest with the current game balance, and it was an even worse reason before 4.3 was released. But this person Knew What She Knew and nothing was going to change her mind, certainly nothing so petty as the game's actual mechanics.

And you know what? That's fine. I shrugged and wished her luck and went on my way.

Earlier tonight, I posted a recruitment notice in trade and actually got a response from it, which was certainly a first. I'm not sure if this particular person is going to work out, but it'll be nice if he does, and since he didn't server transfer to play with us I won't feel any pressure to try force it to work if he's not a good fit with the guild.

Shortly after I'd invited him to the guild, he mentioned that he was pugging Firelands with the guild that I mentioned above. My sleep schedule is totally weird right now (totally weird) and, although I'm completely burned out on sick of Firelands, I could still use the trinkets from Domo and Rag. More importantly, it would be a good opportunity to hang out with the new recruit and see how he did, so I said sure, I'd come.

The raid essentially had one person in it who hadn't cleared the instance on normal before, and yet they felt the need to do full-length boss explanations on vent. Once more, that's fine. It's ok. Not everyone has my particular bias against pre-pull boss explanations going longer than a minute (maybe two minutes), and I get that.

What I don't get, and where I think I again have to say that I think they were just incorrect, was insisting that their raid leader be the only person to discuss encounter mechanics ever, in any capacity. Even on an AFK break, when said raid leader wasn't present, and someone not in their guild had asked a question.

I understand that it can be rough to bring in players from other guilds. Everyone does everything a little bit differently, and a lot of people have this notion that any difference from their method is wrong, rather than merely different. They feel like they're clearly better, and they have this weird misplaced arrogance happening, and they want to change the way you're comfortable doing things.

This guild leader pretty much instantly jumped to feeling like I was doing this, because the first time I mentioned anything her response was "we've been here countless times before." I could see the gear they were wearing. I could see the rote facility with which they went through the encounters. It was already obvious to me that they'd cleared all these places before and were just here to farm stuff for their mage's staff.

There was eventually some bad feeling about this, which is really unfortunate, and to be honest I think she's looking at things with the wrong attitude.

I've learned a lot by pugging myself into other guild groups, and I've learned a lot from people we've pugged in. We improved the way we did Valiona and Theralion, we improved the way we did Ragnaros, we got little tips for weird trash packs, etc. It is not necessarily disrespectful if someone mentions the way they're used to doing something. It is not necessarily confusing to have someone bring up an idea, especially if it's someone that's not doing things like talking over the raid leader. I think you run a very real risk of missing out if you declare that there shall be No Discussion of the Encounters.

So, I did get lucky. Domo dropped his trinket and I won the roll on it. Awesome. I don't think I'll be pugging with that particular guild any more, but I do wish them luck. I just think that things could be a little easier and more fun for them.