Things that really "Grinds my gear"

[ShorreasAeatose]

Oh, I like this thread so much I'm going to necro it. lol. I'll just leave these here before HW comes out. Some of these examples may become obsolete once HW is out. A story for most of my gripes/complaints.

1: When someone tells you how to play your class, but you're already doing what they're telling you to do. Example: I rolled bard in pharos sirius. The other dps was a summoner, so foe requiem is good, right? I used it in almost every fight as we were moving through the dungeon; if I had the MP for it, it was probably up. As we were killing the two birds on hte stairs just before the second boss, the summoner says "bard, use foe requiem + battle voice in this next boss." ... ummm... right. Are you blind? Have you not noticed that foe has already been up and down 6 or 7 times this run? Do you really think I won't use it against the next boss here if you don't tell me to? If you're going to tell someone else how to play their class, or even just 'give some friendly advice', do yourself a really big favor and pay attention to what the other person already IS doing before you try to tell them what to do. Telling me to do something that anyone who's paying attention can plainly see I am already doing is NOT helpful. At best it is a waste of time, and personally I find it very annoying. Also, double the fail points when they insist that you weren't doing it (even though you were) instead of trusting that you're aware of which freaking buttons you've pressed. Example 2: I rolled paladin in preatorium. This was back when soldiery tomes and SCOB were new and people were just starting the climb from i90 to i110. I was maybe i70-ish and the other tank, also a PLD, was maybe i90-ish. So other guy is MT due to higher gear, that's the way it usually is. So I'm using shield oath during trash to help control any stray monsters and sword during bosses to help with the burn. We reach Nero, other tank steps up and MT's him, I go sword oath and just help burn Nero whole fight. Gaius, same thing, I'm just burning on sword oath whole fight. Just before Ultima weapon, one of the healers says "OT, you should be using sword oath to do more damage, we don't need two tanks." I type back "I was one sword oath the whole fight." (which was totally true, sword all of nero and all of gaius). Healer types "Nah, I saw you on shield, and your agro was really high." ... right, two things, half wit: 1: You could not possibly have seen me on shield at any point during nero or gaius; if you think you did, then you are just flat out mistaken. 2: My agro was high? Oh wow, big surprise, since my only 3 step attack is the rage of halone combo. Savage Blade and Rage of Halone still have enmity bonuses, even on sword oath. PLD's can't help generating agro. Only way around this is to fast blade, riot blade over and over, but that takes your already low tank dps and makes it even lower.

2: When someone tells you how to play your class, but their 'advice' is total fail. You read what they tell you to do and say "ummm, no, if I did that, it would make me a LESS effective <insert class/job name here>." and you have to wonder whether they've ever even played as your class. Double the fail points when they're also not even playing their own class correctly. So I rolled warrior in high level duty roulette, landed Stone Vigil HM with a WHM who basically told me to stop using overpower correctly. Yup, seriously. Here are the details: Our dps were two black mages, and all 4 of us were at or above the item level sync threshhold, so we agreed that we were going to do some big pulls for the sake of flares. I'll cut to the part where he told me to stop using overpower correctly. It was just after the second boss (the turtle dragon). I ran off down the hallway and grabbed the 2 taurus and the aevis, further and grabbed the second aevis, into the next room and grabbed the third aevis and other two taurus and started tanking them. As they bunched up, they formed a circle around me (due to floor space mechanic).

In case anyone doesn't know what I mean when I say "floor space mechanic" here's how it works (plz read because this is helpful knowledge, espcially if you tank.) Target any character in the game, a colored circle will appear on the ground around them. This circle represents that character's floor space. Mechanic: With very few exceptions, two NPC's cannot occupy the same floor space (which effectively means they cannot overlap floor space circles). Player characters are not subject to this rule and freely phase through NPC's and other PC's, but NPC's cannot phase through each other. If two NPC's try to occupy the same floor space, they will push each other out of the way and/or slide around the perimeters of each other's circles. It's not always the big ones that push the little ones, either. Small monsters can push big ones, which can result in some very funny looking middle fight repositioning, such as the FATE "It's not Lupus" in Eastern La Noscea, where the little jelly fish adds can totally push the huge crab around. I can think of only two expections to the general rule that NPC's cannot share floor space. 1: In Steps of Faith, the adds can phase through the boss freely, though the adds still can't phase through each other. 2: In World of Darkness, wolfsbanes can phase through Cerberus.

OK, as this relates to tanking and my SV HM run: When you get a bunch melee monsters all attacking one tank, they tend to push each other around as they jocky for positions close enough to the tank so that they can attack. If all enemies have relatively small floor space circles (PC sized) this generally isn't an issue. But when you get monsters that have larger circles, they may push each other around to the tank's flanks and rear as they try to get close enough to attack. This is what happened to me. 4 taurus and 3 aevis - 7 melee enemies with larger size floor spaces. As they bunched up, they pushed themselves into a circle around me. Now if I had been a PLD that run, this wouldn't have been an issue, since flash and circle of scorn are circle aoes centered on the user. But I had rolled WAR. WARs only get 3 flashes and you need a full wrath stack to use steel cyclone. As a warrior, your primary aoe argro grab is overpower, but overpower is a not a circle, it's a frontal cone.

So, in order to hit all 7 monsters with overpower, I have to move out of the center of the circle. So I moved a little to the left, used overpower, they started moving to reform the circle around me again, I moved a little to the right and used overpower, rinse and repeat, tagging all 7 of them with every overpower to make sure I have a good agro hold for these BLMs. And here's this white mage, complaining like an entitled little wuss that the slight back and forth movement is an inconvinience to his holy spam, and ***telling me to stop doing it***. Right, look, I've played WHM, I realize the slight back and forth isn't the best thing for your holy spam, but let me tell you something: If I have to chose between inconviniencing your holies, and letting the BLMs pull half the monsters, I think it's pretty plain which is the lesser of two evils. I'm going to hold that agro, because if I don't, then WTF kind of tank am I? You're basically demanding that I stop using overpower correctly, might as well tell me that unequiping all my armor will make me a better tank.

Oh, and remember how I said "Double the fail points when they're also not even playing their own class correctly"? It might be worth mentioning that the WHM in question was a WTF WHM who couldn't figure out when to turn cleric stance OFF. Here's this guy's approach to WHMing big pulls: Divine seal, Eye for an Eye, Cure II, Regen, Cleric Stance, Presence of Mind, spam Holy until the tank is almost dead, Benediction, continue spamming Holy until all mosnters are dead or the party wipes, which ever comes first. Now, you can get away with this if the burn is high enough, and if you do, great. But I died on that 3 aevis and 4 taurus pull, and he was still spamming holy as my toon fell to the ground. The remaining monsters turn to the BLMs on flare hate. BLMs are fleeing down the hallway spamming scathe on their persuers, what's WHM doing? Raising me? Nope. Making any effort to help the DPS? Nope. He's stading there whining like an entitled little idiot, (with cleric still up). Although we actually didn't wipe, the four taurus and one of the aevis were dead, the 2 remaining aevis had only maybe 3-5% hp and the blms did finish them off. Still, healing me instead of letting me die would've been really nice.

3: Healers who can't figure out when to turn cleric stance off. (see the above). I hate tanking any run with a healer who tries to play like the party is a tank and 3 DPS. It always ends with the tank being (repeatedly) sacrificed in the name of "oh wow look at all the dps we're doing". Nevermind the fact that much (or more) of the time gained by the extra DPS is lost again by wiping, or needing to raise the tank over and over or wait for the tank to catch up to the party again after releasing to the duty entrance. Moreover, anything and everything that goes wrong is always the tank's fault. In my experience at least, these perma-cleric scrubs play blame-it-all-on-the-tank faster than most noobs play blame-it-all-on-the-healer. Is it pitifully obvious that a pull would've gone just fine if the tank had been getting heals so he could stay alive long enough for the real DPS to do their work? Doesn't matter, totally the tank's fault. If you're on cleric for 20+ consecutive seconds and you're still spamming holy while the rest of the party is dieing around you, then you are a failure as a WHM, regardless of you much DPS you're doing. Don't get me wrong, I'm an i126 whm myself and I love Holy, it's a great spell. But there's a time to turn cleric stance off and heal people (after all monsters have aquired 100% stun resistence is usually a good time). I would also like to mention that, while this behavior is stereotypically accosiciated with white mages who think that their worth as a WHM is measured by the number of times they cast Holy, Scholars are NOT immune to it. I've been in a couple runs with SCHs who tried to play like they were a summoner with a healing pet - and no, I'm not talking about low dungeons like tam-tara normal where it is possible for eos to solo heal the whole dungeon; I'm talking about level 50 duties where the tank is getting hit hard enough that the fairy has no hope of keeping up alone.

4: Tanks who don't tank. Ah, the glorious counterpart to healers who don't heal. Just as healers who try to roll like the party is a tank and 3 DPS are terrible to work with, so too are tanks who try to roll like the party is a healer and 3 DPS. Hint, you have the highest armor in the game and learn all those defense boosting cooldowns for a reason. While this behavior is stereotypically associated with Warriors, Paladins are NOT immune to it. I rolled WHM in low level roulette and landed Stone Vigil normal mode with a paladin who would not tank. The guy used fight or flight all the time, but just kept using rage of halone combo on one enemy over and over, no flashes, no shield oath (he didn't even have sword oath up either). When I typed "oath plz" in the party chat, the summoner quickly said "Yes, please turn on shield oath, the healer and I keep getting too much hate." The PLD stops and says "hang on a sec". He stood there for about 30 seconds, and I can only assume he was reading the respective skill descriptions of sword oath and shield oath, because suddenly he had sword oath on and said "oh yeah, more attack power" and ran off and pulled the next mob, still making no effort to actually tank. I think I tanked more monsters than the PLD did that run. The summoner pulled out titan egi.

5: When people insist on reckless approaches to a fight in the name of shaving time off a run, never mind the fact that the risk is horribly disproprtionate to the gain - as in, we'll save five lousy seconds if that plan succeeds, but lose three or four minutes due to wipe if it fails. I rolled BLM in high level roulette, stone vigil HM, first boss - WHM says "I've got adds". Now, I've seen enough wipes due to healers doing this. The adds' attacks interupt the cast of holy, repeatedly, and the healer dies, then we're down our healer while the boss still has 60%+ HP. It's not that the healer CAN'T solo the adds, it can be done, but it's an unnecessary risk. If I stop DPSing the boss for 6 seconds and throw a couple fireballs at the adds, it gaurentees they will go down. I did this. After the boss dies the healer says "ofc someone can't read." Nope, sorry scrub healer, I can read just fine, I'm just not retarded enough to gamble 3 minutes against 5 seconds. I'll take the extra 5 seconds to make sure we win on the first try.

6: "Don't got time for buffs! Leeroy Jenkins!" Pretty similar to #5, people who think waiting 3 seconds for the healer to cast protect on the party at the start of the duty is a waste of those 3 seconds. That +15% armor will save more than 3 seconds over the course of the duty. Not even waiting for protect is probably the biggest offender, but there are others.

7: When you're learning a duty and someone treats you like you have an IQ of 20 because you made one mistake. So I was doing Leviathan Extreme one night, it was down to maybe 24% or somewhere around there, we were doing fairly well, but then a big oops happened. We lost all four dps at once to boat tilt. All four fell off. Of course, then the add with the hysteria causing spells spawns just a few seonds after this. Yeah, wipe. OK, I'll confess I was one of the DPS, and I'm still learning LEX. I've only done the duty maybe 6 or 7 times and only cleared it once. I'm not a master of the fight and, yeah, I oopsed, along with the other three DPS. That sort of thing happens while you're still learning EX primals. But after the wipe, here's one of the tanks: "All the DPS died. Guys, you need to stay alive, no matter the boss's health, you need to survive." ... right... wow... what an epiphany. You must indeed be enlightened to have arrived at such a deep and profound truth, please share more of your boundless wisdom with us. /sarcasm /rant ... but no, seriously, if you're going to tell me things I already know, could you please at least talk about something half ways intelligent, like the timing of a particular mechanic or something? Look, I've been playing online games for over ten years; I'm well aware that there are a lot of stupid/derpy/bad/scrub players out there. They annoy me as much as they annoy the next competent player (heck here I am, complaining about them in this post). But let me tell you something: Of all the bad players I've met in over ten years of gaming, I have never met anyone who was so brain dead that they honestly needed to be told "Um, guys, we don't win if we wipe. Plz live."

8: When people refuse to accept responsibility for their mistakes. We've all run into this person at least once, they screw everything up, then deny they are at fault. Possibly the most classic example I have for this one comes from a much older game. Back in its hayday, In played the orignal PlanetSide. For anyone who have never played PSide or its more recent sequel, PlanetSide2, here's the gist of the gameplay: It's an open world, perpetual world tactical warfare game with a first person shooter interface. Hundreds of players wage war across continents in large scale PvP, with the objective of capturing bases, and each base is about the size if whole death match arena in other FPS games. So it's large scale and you have combined arms options (ie, you don't have to be infantry, you can hop in a tank or a plane and use that, too.) So that's setting.

Alright, so one day I was in a Reaver (a VTOL capable arial gunship armed with machine guns and rocket launchers). I was hovering near the aircraft repair and rearm platform at a base controlled by my faction/empire. It's a busy place because it's being used as a staging ground for attacks on the next enemy base over, and there's a constant flow of planes, tanks, infantry, and other stuff coming and going. I see Reaver belonging to another empire/faction come flitting into the airspace over this base - it's alone. I pull around and start shooting. It starts shooting one of the other planes on my side that are hovering there. The guy he's attacking and a third guy start shooting at him. He tries to run away. I and the guy he attacked both chase him. We're both unloading machinegun fire into his rear as we pass over some open fields, then some forest, and finally a beach. The enemy player ejects from his Reaver over the beach and his derlict plane sails off and dunks in the middle of the lake. The player himself lands just off shore, about up to his chest in water, greatly slowing his walking/running speed. There's no cover or concealment for him to use. I swing around, drop altitude, hover for a moment while aiming, and drop a few rockets into the water around him. He dies.
A few seconds later I receive a /tell from the guy I just killed: "Fag" he says. I replied, "It's your own fault." He replies "Not really." I reply, "Dude, you made almost every mistake in the pilot's handbook. Totally your own fault." Only to receive a /return from the system saying 'That player is ignoring you.' LMAO, he put me on his ignore list.

Let's take a moment and visit this guy's laundry list of newbie mistakes.
1: Entering enemy territory alone. It's an entirely PvP game. If you're fighting an enemy, it's a player, there are no AI characters except for a couple types of robotic turrets. Going alone into a place where you can reasonably expect to run into a bunch of enemies at once is asking to die.

2: Flying a reaver at low altitude into the air space over an enemy base, alone. Anti-air weapons are legion in PSide. There will almost always be someone with a guided missile launcher or automatic flak cannon looking to smoke planes that are bold as brass. In this particular case, this guy got lucky and WASN'T greeted by a salvo of flak and missles the moment he arrived - but it's something that happens more often than not.

3: Picking a fight he couldn't win. Not only did come alone into a place heavily populated with opposing players, but instead of getting out of there before it was too late, he tried to make some kills... and promptly found himself in a 3 vs 1. This isn't Dynasty Warriors, you can't walk into an enemy base with 50+ enemies in it and solo them all, you're going to die.

4: Run away fail. OK, fleeing from a fight you know you have no hope of winning, is not, unto itself, a bad idea; it's quite reasonable. But there's one catch: In order for running away to work, you need to actually be capable of escaping. He was in a Reaver, I was in a Reaver. We're flying the same plane. We have the same acceleration and the same top speed. He can't outrun me. The other guy chasing him was in a Mosquito (a VTOL recon plane that's even faster than a reaver), not outrunning him either.

5: Running... the wrong direction. This dude fled west... yeah there was nothing out that way. He should've gone southeast, that's where the nearest base controlled by his faction was, and it was heavily engaged. If he had gone southeast, he would've had decent chances of running into more players from his faction. Running west was suicide.

6: Didn't eject over the ideal eject spot. If you're going to ditch your plane and go infantry in an attempt to save yourself, the best place to do this would be over the forest. He could've decended into the trees and gotten below the canopy, down to the forest floor. The canopy would've provided decent cover and excellent concealment against me and the other guy chasing him. It would've been hard to shoot him through the canopy. As for decending under it while still in a plane... not advisable. Like most games, the terrain colision detection mechanics in PlanetSide treat tree branches as being as immovable and unyeilding as a mountain face. Trying take a plane and hover/decend/nudge your way through a bunch of tree branches is very risky and usually results in death. So in short, he would've been relatively safe below the trees, but he just flew right past them.

7: Ejected over the worst spot. He really couldn't have picked a worse place to eject from his plane. He was a single, dismounted infantryman alone on an otherwise abandoned stretch of beach, with no cover or concealment anywhere. He was up to his chest in water, which meant he could barely even walk, and he had a VTOL capable arial gunship shooting at him... chances of survival pretty much zero.

I tell you what, if I had made that same laundry list of rookie mistakes in a 40 second window just like this guy did, I would've been cussing myself out up and down and wanting to crawl into a corner somewhere for putting in such a piss poor performance. But this guy refuses to admit he did anything wrong and adds me to his ignore list for killing his rookie arse.

9: When people play the "race card". And no I'm not talking about Highlanders punting Lalas. In MMORPG terms, it would be more acurate to say the "Roll card." Example: Tank goes and grabs a group of monsters. He's doing everything a tank sould be doing, he's holding agro like a champ, he's using his cooldwons well, he's kiting marked aoes, etc. The DPS are both hitting hard and wrecking stuff... then the healer has a serious derp and lets the tank die. The monsters then devoure the DPS and finally the healer. When called out on his screw up, the healer's reply is "Yeah, sure, blame the healer." Congrats, you have just done the MMORPG equivilent of playing the race card. It's also possible to this more than once in a single denial of resonsibility. Example, there is a stereotype that warriors are much more likely to play blame the healer than paladins are. Say the above situation has a WAR tank, after the wipe it is the WAR who calls the healer out on his big derp moment. The healer replies "Sure, typical warrior, blame it all on the healer." Congrats again, not only have you failed to accept responsibility for something that really was totally your fault, but you also played the race card twice in one sentence! Congratulations on your triple fail.

10: When someone tells another person to stop doing their job correctly because they can't do their own correctly and don't want to learn how. This usually, but not always, comes in the form a mediocre tank who understands that tanks are supposed to hold agro, but doesn't really know how to do it, and gets angry with DPS who are good at dpsing because they keep pulling everything. I rolled bard in SV normal and had a warrior who couldn't keep agro off me or the BLM. We were both using aoes, I had requiem up, and this tank wasn't using flash or overpower anywhere near as many times as he should've been with two aoe speciallized dps in the party. He got angry and told us to stop it and just attack whichever enemy he was using his 1 2 3 combos on... right, nevermind that we can deal more than twice as much DPS with foe up and the blm using fire II and me using quick nock and applying wind bite and venomous bite to more than one enemy at a time. We're going half our dps just because you're too lazy to figure out how to tank correctly. I had another run like this when I rolled black mage in pharos sirius one day. Had a PLD who would not flash anywhere near enough times to keep hate off me. I couldn't even cast flare because the second hit (sometimes even the first hit) of fire II would pull half the monsters. I kept trying to build into flare combo through out the dungeon, hoping this PLD would get his act together. Never casted flare once the whole dungeon. At one point a little over half way through, the PLD apparently decided I was the one who was wrong and told me to stop pulling everything... right. I might as well unequip my soul crystal. If I can't cast flare I might as well be playing thaumaturge.

11: When someone who is woefully undergeared tries to do something you should not do unless you're as overgeared as you can be. I rolled WHM in low level roulette and landed Haukke Manor normal with a horribly weak marauder for a tank. He was character level 28 (minimum for dungeon) and his gear was just pitiful. Normal quality whites, all. Level 25 axe, level 23 tank gloves, and level 20 tank boots, only two pieces of tank armor. Head, chest, belt, and pants were all pugilist/rogue/archer armor of level 20 or lower, and his accessories were so bad they made his armor look good. Now, being this underpowered, you'd think he'd pull lightly. Nope, "I want to try some big pulls" he says, and runs off down the hallway without waiting for a reply. He grabs the first 7 or monsters and starts "tanking". Does not activate foresight or bloodbath. He did activate berserk. But then here's what really got me, he also activated blood for blood. When I saw the b4b icon appear on his buffs list, I didn't even know what to say, I had forgotten marauders could equip it. I had Eye for an Eye on him, presence of mind was up, and I was spamming Cure II as fast as I could, and really that's all a WHM can do at level 31. He totally would've died if the arcanist hadn't been spamming physic on him as well. And the worst part is, the fact that actually survived seemed to validate this behavior to him, and the whole dungeon became repeat perfomances of this. I consider it a minor miracle he only died three times over the course of the duty. Oh, and one other thing: you mass pull for efficency when you have aoe DPS. If your DPS don't have a lot of aoe power, then mass pulling isn't gaining you anything (except extra stress on the healer for no good reason). We had a level 29 arcanist (only level 29, doesn't know bane yet), and a level 30 DRG, which also doesn't have any aoe attacks at that level.

12: RMT. Ah, here's something almost everyone can agree on. All those annoying /tells from rmt advertisement bots. Nothing beats having your chat box flooded with rmt spam. And the best part? If you blacklist them, you just receive the exact same advertisement from a different character name 2 minutes later. And then there are the ones that send you friend requests... ew.

13: Lag. The bane of everything online gaming related, glorious lag. In particular, lag + any attack or mechanic that results in instant death, such as Titan's landslides.

14: Endgame raiding/content elitism lockout. This happens in every MMORPG. The more challenging end game content gets a group of players early on, and once those groups are established and the content has been out for a while, it's tremendouly difficult for someone who picked up the game more recently to get a group. It doesn't matter whether or not you're good at the game, no one will let you in their group because you don't have prior experience, but it's almost impossible to get experience BECAUSE no one will give you a chance to even try. This creates a self perpetuating lockout that is very difficult to work around. I have not-so-fond memories of the Hero's Ascent elitism lockout in the original Guild Wars. As people left the game the Hero's Ascent comunity began to dwindle but still refused to accept new blood. They eventually strangled themselves and Hero's Ascent died. FF14 isn't as bad as some other games I've played, but it definitely does exist here *cough* Coil *cough*. I've almost given up on ever clearing T5. I've gotten so sick of being eaten by snakes while most of the other party members face down in purple flames. A divebomb is really nothing more or less than a landslide that doesn't have its hit box marked on the ground before going off. If you can survive Titan HM, you should be able to survive divebombs. But to this day I have yet to have a chance to experience twisters phase... so sad. Join a static? It's been forever seen I've seen any static advertise that they're willing to pick up anyone competent and help them play catch up if they need it, all statics want you to already have T11+ experience. Buy a carry? NEVER. I don't believe in paying someone else to play the game for me and then walk around *pretending* that I won. I am well geared, I know how to play my classes, and I am more than patient enough and competent enough to learn how to do mechanics correctly. The only thing I lack is 7 other players who meet that description as well, are on the same server that I am, and need a T5 learning party. Unfortunately, finding that party is vastly more difficult than the duty itself.

15: Healers who forget they have esuna/leeches. Roll melee DPS in WoD. Fighting Cerberus. I move in behind a wolfsbane and start wrecking its arse. Another wolfsbane on the opposite side of the tank does its poison cone aoe and I catch the egde of it, losing a bunch of HP and getting poisoned. Anyone who's actually taken a moment to check the dps on this dot knows it's no freakin joke. Wolfsbane poison deals maybe 1200~ish damage per tick to healers and DPS. Can I get an esuna, plz? Lose 1.2k hp, pop second wind, can I get a leeches plz? Lose another 1.2k hp, um, help? plz? An esuna now will save you a raise later. HP continues to drop... dead. But how fast does the raise come? Why, my corpse has a raise on it only 2 lousy seconds after death. Can get an almost instant raise, but an esuna is asking too much. *sigh*

16: Overworld trash mobs that are totally not even worth 1 lousy second of your time inflicting heavy on you as zip past them on your mount. I'm an i130 warrior with zeta, you're a level 41 kobold trash mob with only one or two attacks. You have absolutely no hope of beating me. Leave me the F alone.

17: RNG... whether you trying to get zodiak drops, craft something, whatever... so much spitefullness by the rng. I've lost count of the number of time I've had Rapid Synthesis and/or hasty touch fail 9 times out of 10 attempts (yes, with steady hand II active). Then there was the time I was trying to attach materia to clothing with a 19% success chance. 36 consecutive failures later I gave up in frustration, 36 copies of craftman's competence III lost.