Tales from Duty Finder: Some make you laugh, some make you cry. Let's vent.

Queue popped early in leveling for Aurum Vale, 4m in progress. Go in as RDM, there's another RDM and a WHM there. I ask what happened, RDM says he doesn't know, the other members left as soon as duty started. So we wait for a tank to come - we get a DRK. First thing I immediately notice - the DRK is dying really fast.

But no, this isn't a story about the DRK. Oh no, that tank was good. It was the Stone-Only WHM. We revive, I ask him to cast protect and to make sure to keep the tank healed. What does the WHM do? Not only does he not cast protect, but when the tank finally goes whatever and starts pulling, the WHM exclusively casts Cure 3. Me, the RDM, and the DRK are all letting the healer know that, hey, Cure 3 burns MP, and its not very useful - cast Cure Is and IIs instead.

We go through this song and dance for about 5 minutes. Get to the first boss - again, we ask for protect, and inform them to cast the right Cures.

WHM doesn't say anything. I ask them to speak if they don't have protect as their cross-role. Nothing. Instead, they run inside and pull the boss. So the three of us just stand outside of the boss room and let the boss go to town on the WHM. As soon as they rez, they sprint from the starting area to reach us - but, nope, I'm not dealing with that, especially in Aurum Vale. Initiated a vote, kick went through immediately. Got a great AST that joined us and the run went smooth as butter. I don't mind helping new players out - but if you ignore the advice that is given or don't at least say anything, I'm going to kick you, depending on the content level. At a lvl 49 dungeon, yeah, you should know about protect and cure Is. I don't feel bad at all.

People seem to get really salty if you ask for the LB to be saved for healers in Mach recently even though nobody wants to do mechanics in there anymore and half of the time you get alliances where someone dumps nox in the middle of the group. Just a polite "please save the LB3 until Diabolos is down to 15%" will get all kinds of attitude. I just wanna avoid wiping and wasting a lot of time on old content people shouldn't be screwing up so excessively to begin with and they gotta get a attitude over it.

I personally enjoy messes it's very satisfying to heal your way back from a near wipe when things do go down the toilet. But there's only so much you get do if both healers get killed by nox and you get smn res'd with aetherflow still on cooldown and do not ask for whom the salt salts it salts for thee.

I've finally experienced the elusive cast-mostly-out-of-range-Medica-only healer. They did cast manage to cast cure twice, but otherwise it was just mostly useless medica casts. Thankfully it was Ifrit story, so we managed to scrape by since his damage output is pretty low, but that poor tank and monk in the party both died the slowest deaths that I've ever witnessed. Thankfully they were just a level 23 Conjurer, so hopefully they're still very much in the learning phase, but man that was hilariously painful to watch. I actually thought we might fail it. Kudos to the monk for getting the LB off right before they died. XD

I... I have no words...

Queued up for Expert as SMN and had an insta-queue, which is surprising, and got Skalla, which is less surprising. Party was DRK, AST, and another SMN, who is also the main character in this story.

At first everything seemed okay; tank was decent, healer not bad. I did notice trash seemed to be dying rather slowly, considering we have two SMNs in the party, but I just assumed it was because the SMN was likely new and getting used to the class, which can be tricky to master for those that aren't used to it. Then we get to the first boss, and killing it seemed to take twice as long as it usually does, even with a clueless DPS - more like the time it'd take if we were a member short. I started watching them after that, and quickly found the problem.

They never used Bio. Mobs weren't Baned. No Deathflare. No Shadowflare. No Bahamut. Not even Ruins. They were casting Miasma III over and over as their "main spell", interspersed with Aetherflow and Energy Drain.

https://media.giphy.com/media/NqhlGDZqCeAsU/giphy.gif

I have no idea how you can even get from 60 - 70 on a rotation that wouldn't even be optimal at level 10, let alone 70, and I'm not sure I want to know.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lunaxia

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I've seen a summoner like that and no matter how much I tried to explain to them why dots and ruins and all that were important, they just kept doing Miasmas and Energy Drain. I understand sometimes so many skills can be daunting, but there's a point where it's just baffling why they wouldn't have learned their job.

I was in a dungeon today and things were dying kind of slow, and I notice the whole time the BRD does absolutely no AOEs...entire time RIP

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ronove

I've seen a summoner like that and no matter how much I tried to explain to them why dots and ruins and all that were important, they just kept doing Miasmas and Energy Drain. I understand sometimes so many skills can be daunting, but there's a point where it's just baffling why they wouldn't have learned their job.

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I'm still mildly floored by the Energy Drain part because of it's cost in regards to your Aetherflow stacks. I'll freely admit I stopped playing Summoner seriously back during the end of 2.55's run cycle, but that sort of play goes beyond lazy and into straight trolling.

I finally encountered one of “those ASTs” in Rabanastre. You know, the ones that sit in Nocturnal Sect with a SCH in the group, and when everyone INCLUDING the SCH ask them to switch to Diurnal because shields do not stack, they refuse to do so.

Actual wording was something like:
SCH: “Please switch to Diurnal. Our shields will overlap.”
Party: “Please switch...When ASTs are paired with SCHs they need to be in Diurnal.”
That AST (verbatim): “That may be how YOUR AST works, but I don’t like Diurnal so I don’t use it.”

Never seen a vote kick pass so fast.
Didn’t help that they were practically useless the entire time... barely healed and didn’t DPS. But had no problems trying to tell party members when to LB.

Was in POTD (Once again) trying to learn the basics of AST, just floor 51, ended up with 3 AST in the party and a BRD, it was interesting to say the least.

I dunno what it is with the healers I've been running into lately when I'm leveling my PLD. I cringe when I see them doing something that I would never do. Had too many healers this weekend that won't put on protect - I had one of those today. Went into Satasha, and this one particular CNJ wouldn't put up a protect, even though I asked them twice. But I'm not going to hold up the run because of a stubborn healer, so I went through the dungeon - it's not a hard dungeon, so whatever, it's gonna make their job harder. We had two sprouts with us, so I didn't want them to give them a bad impression.

After the first few pulls, I noticed the CNJ did little else other than heal me when my HP dipped below 50%. Occasionally they would throw out a Stone, but the vast majority of the time, they just stood there. Given they didn't have the sprout icon, I got petty (I know...I shouldn't do that) and did a massive pull in that area before the Couerl boss. I pulled everything in that room. Thought I was teaching them a lesson. But nope...they managed to keep me alive.

And then went back to occasional stone casts and healing me when I went under 50%. I resigned myself to doing normal pulls and just gave up on hoping for protect. I looked them up afterwards - level 70 Bard, Lvl 67 PLD...so yeah, they definitely knew better.

On the plus side, the Satasha run before that, a sprout asked me something I was never asked before - he wanted the exploration achievement for the dungeon. So I took the party through every single room in the area before the second fight with the Captain. I was surprised that there was that much there in the first place. The other party members didn't seem to mind either. So there was my feel-good moment.