People in Your Ops Pug

I've written about stereotypes I've observed in game before. Today, let me give you a guide to the stereotypical people in your operations pug, as I've encountered them during my own pugging adventures as of late:

The Cat Herder

The cat herder knows the operation and all the boss mechanics inside out and wants to use this knowledge to help lead the group to success. Unfortunately, asking people whether they know the tactics will almost always result in silence, so it's usually better to insist on explaining things anyway. If there is a particularly important or difficult role to perform during an encounter, the cat herder will volunteer, much to everyone else's relief. The cat herder isn't necessarily identical to the one who put the ops group together though, and if their instructions clash with what the actual ops leader tells everyone to do, there might be some issues.

The Hardmode Raider

The hardmode raider hasn't actually done an operation on story mode in several months and you're not sure what compelled them to join a pug run for one now - they're covered in full best in slot gear as it is! Despite, or rather because of all their experience, they'll keep getting confused about what to do on certain fights, ask for someone to kill the tentacle on Bestia and generally keep trying to react to mechanics that don't actually exist on story mode. All the while, they'll still outperform everyone else in the group by a mile.

The Perpetual Pugger

The perpetual pugger has a decent set of gear in terms of item level, but it's all vendor-bought so the stat distribution is super awkward, leaving them with more health than one of your tanks. If you were to ask them, they'd tell you that they already know all the fights as they've done this operation about a dozen times. They're not lying either, it's just that every single one of those runs was in a pug, so their idea of knowing the tactics is "hit the thing that everyone else is hitting" and "heal people that have taken damage". If they suddenly get targeted by a random mechanic that requires them to do more than dps or heal, such as Doom on the Dread Guards or Kephess the Undying's blast attack, they'll stand there like a deer in the headlights and just take damage or die, while learning exactly nothing from the experience.

The Complainer

If your pug is failing, the complainer will be the first one to pipe up with a comment about how much everybody else sucks, but even if you're progressing through the operation with zero wipes, they'll find something to moan about anyway. That one person died to an avoidable mechanic! That one time, the tank was slow to taunt! The dps in this group is much lower than they're used to! Oh, the humanity.

The Ninja

The ninja will roll need on pretty much everything that isn't a pair of bracers or a belt (because you can get decent pieces for those slots from the commendation vendors anyway), even though what they are wearing is already much better. If called out on it, they'll mostly stay silent, or else claim that they "need" it for their alt or companion. The ops leader can't be bothered to remove them because you're already approaching the last boss and nobody wants to go through the hassle of finding a replacement at that point, but there may be some unsubtle conversation in ops chat about how "certain people" are selfish jerks and the only way to win any loot in an operation is to follow their example and need on everything.

The Barbie

There are a lot of different outfits in game by now, but a staple that you'll find in pretty much every operations pug is the skimpily dressed lady, frequently also sporting the so-called "Barbie" haircut. Usually played by a guy who takes great pride in how supposedly sexy his character looks, seemingly oblivious or just indifferent about the fact that he looks exactly like twenty other people on each instance of the fleet at any given point in time. Just like his character, the player behind it will vanish in the crowd and perform no outstanding feats either way.

The Mysteriously Silent

These will make up the majority of your operations pug: people who'll follow the crowd but seem to want to avoid talking at all costs, to the point where you're not sure how they ever managed to overcome the hurdle of having to whisper the ops leader to ask for an invite. Even if you address them directly by name when asking a question such as "Are you okay with pressing the button during the yellow phase?" you'll get nothing but silence in reply. Hard to tell whether they are socially anxious newbies or just lazily ignoring all chat while they try to cruise through the content on autopilot.