seeing all these total newbie tank is hilarious

[Hierro]

Yes, because you are judging them without any information on their circumstance. That's kind of a jerk move.

there is never a valid excuse for being a jerk.[/b]

Where did I say anything about being a jerk? Was I a jerk to you when you caused that weeping city wipe? No, this is about being perfectly justified for being annoyed, and pointing out someone's faults. It's inexcusable with how many resources there are. If anything, coming in without any effort to learn an instance expecting to be carried is a jerk move.

[Seku]

It's inexcusable with how many resources there are. If anything, coming in without any effort to learn an instance expecting to be carried is a jerk move.

The entire thing their arguing is that you don't know what someone has or hasn't done, which includes looking over resources and trying to learn things before hand. There's a line between watching a video and actual practical experience that no amount of watching a video is going to help a majority of people. There are some that can pick it up fast and perform great right away, but that's not a majority of any large player base.

While I don't like working with new people either, your demand for them to learn things and perform is pretty unreasonable. If everyone could look anything up, read it, and apply it right away we'd have a ton more doctors, engineers, ect. But oh wait...people normally learn (use resources at their disposal) and then take time to actually put it into practice, which takes time.

All my time is spent practicing and improving more and more. How long can I hold FoF on the GCD before the animation clips Goring Blade?.

And there are resources out there, even in this own forum, that goes over this. This also changes as more stats are added into the game over time and values change. If you're still at Sohm Al normal, (Assuming this since you didn't say Hard), you don't even have all of your gear or skills to get current results. --- Even worse is that attack rotations and cool downs changes fight to fight. It's cool if you want to dive deep into old content that is 2 years old or content that is about to be useless in a month and 15 days, but I pray you're not holding everyone to that standard as thats highly unresonable.

Also another important skill of a tank is the ability to gauge the situation their in on the fly due to consistent changes. You don't know who you're getting in your party, nor their skill level. No amount of training on a dummy after you've learned your rotations is going to help you keep hate, because you've got no one to try to keep hate off of.

[Kaeoni]

I don't think there's anything wrong with having an unverifiable standard so long as you aren't imposing it on other people.
If someone were like
"Kaeoni what is it I should do if i want to get into FFXIV"

Id say Pick a class you think looks cool, do all the Novice training, keep up with your class quests and MSQ, read the ability tooltips, and don't be ascurred to ask questions. I'm not saying this is mandatory or anything. But I do believe people should do this.

I don't think anyone who had certain standards said it was ok to be a jerk. But if they did that's not cool, I certainly don't agree with that. I did skip a few pages.

I suppose I'm a bit of an oddball. I do read info on my class. But I don't do videos, I team up with people and figure stuff out with friends since I find playing that way more enjoyable than watching a video and having someone figure it out for me. In turn I'm fine with people doing the same. It's a pre-internet way of thinking I guess? It's more fun and challenging to me.

Recently I did go back and make a new tank, and it only makes you do the first Novice training session. I don't think It's a horrible thing for tanks to take part in, doesn't take long so I do think it should be mandatory for all players with their first class. be it DPS, Heals or Tank. You get nice gear for it too so it's pretty rewarding. It doesn't teach you how to hold threat as a tank, But it gives you a good idea of how big overpower actually is, which I think is great since there's no real indication other than "Cone before you". Wait can you setup multiple training dummies at a house? Never tried it. mmm I guess you could simulate it, but if the player is new how do they even know that's a possibility... I also went through many lower level dungeons, they do a good job of introducing concepts slowly to people. But like Seku said, practical experience is where it's at gotta just go for it and hope people can be a little understanding.

At the end of the day I just want everyone to treat everyone like a human being. Duty Finder is a great tool, but it causes people to nearly treat other humans like tools. You could really play this game start to finish without saying a single word... I find THAT weird...

[SyzzleSpark]

Circumstances matter, and everyone in this thread is dealing in absolutes. Either you're a work-hard-play-hard-high-standard-do-gooder that is a shining beacon for newbs 24/7/365, or you're an absent-minded anchor drowning the party with the party/mechanic awareness of a dead snail in their parents' basement... 24/7/365.

I think its relevant that Dragonseth hasn't done any of the higher-end end-game content, because a lot of us that have expend our high standards and peak performance there, and when we go into roulettes we tend to be more relaxed, or at least I am. It also depends on the job. When I go in on my main I'm a sprinting AoEing DPSing edgelord tank machine blah blah yadda yadda... but if I go in on my alt jobs I just wanna relax and let someone else take the tank reins for a while, and I'm a much less skilled DPS than I am a tank. I still try sure, and I know what everything does, but I'm not going to pretend I know the most up-to-date-optimal rotation or more subtle nuances - I simply don't play on the same optimized level and a more skilled person at that job could easily point out many mistakes if that's how they chose to expend their energy that day... like.. if I go in on SMN and my DoTs fall off for a few seconds during DWT do I really want someone like Dragonseth telling me what's what? Fuck no. That's not called for during a roulette. There's a reason there is casual content and hardcore content; in casual content you can afford to lower your standards. As long as you aren't actively impeding the progress of the run in one way or another it just doesn't matter. I'm not saying efficient runs and speed runs aren't fun or awesome when they happen, (or if you're tanking/healing, when you can MAKE them happen) but what kind of delusions must one be under to just expect that by default upon queueing into a roulette?

But I digress. Circumstances matter. Maybe the tank that Flashed in the middle of nowhere had his wife come in and yell at him about the laundry or to walk the dog or change their kid's diapers and he hit the GCD while looking at/talking to her. Maybe they get a phone call. Maybe they dropped their controller. Maybe they were drunk. Maybe they're goddamn disabled or missing a finger. You don't know. I don't know. I don't care. I care in a raid where its expected that people have set aside time and their attention away from those distractions and that their irl responsibilities are taken care of at least for the duration of the pull. In a dungeon man... I don't care, the stakes just. Aren't. That. High. And these poor fucking pugs don't owe anybody an explanation for every simple, harmless mistake they make. In a savage farm party yeah, I'll demand an explanation if not outright tell them what I saw them do wrong; that's the time to demand your high standards - "why did you die there" "I did the thing with the thing and it made me die to the thing, sorry" "don't be sorry just don't do it again". But in a roulette none of those people owe me anything other than finishing the roulette with out wiping more than once. As a tank main I go in on tank when I want control over all these things. When I go in on DPS I accept that there is a 99% likelihood the tank is going to do dumb things I would not do myself, and ignore it, unless its actually impeding progress - then i'll say something/offer advice (I have a bit more patience than the average gamer) at the point at which I realize a less patient person would probably spout obscenities, "L2P" or whatever and leave the duty, precisely so that this poor bastard doesn't make those party-wiping mistakes when they land in a roulette a jerk. You people need to learn to pick your battles. I also know as a more experienced player that there are plenty of things I can do to apply my knowledge of game mechanics and make a new tank's job easier. I can watch aggro meters and switch targets, stand near the tank in case I pull anything, etc. Or I can just accept that a new tank is probably not going to hold aggro off me and just go balls to the walls, if I take hate I take hate, at least the thing will be dead soon.

Posts like the OP leave out 90% of the details for the sake of making an amusing although only partially (at best) true story. You can have a laugh about it but at the same time it provides nowhere near enough information to properly judge that tank.

And tooltips. Lets stick with the Flash example. It says increases enmity in all nearby enemies. Blind, etc. You can cast it every 2.5 seconds, and it costs a pittance of MP. Everything else is left up to interpretation. Having not gotten any information beyond this, what can a new player assume? Does it increase enmity permanently a la Shield Oath (They haven't gotten ShO at this point so there's no point of comparison)? By how much? More than a Savage Blade? Is it directional? 5y radius? wtf is a y? Being that Flash doesn't do damage, its entirely likely that a newbie tank used it while soloing and saw that it didn't make the thing hitting him die faster and thus never touched it again. Therefore he may not have experimented with the range. It doesn't specify whether it is around you or around the enemy (although other more advanced skills do. Collective Unconscious specifies "around the caster" and Abyssal Drain specifies "target and all enemies near it", just as two examples). Flash's animation also does not have a stark boundary like Unleash does, for instance. If the GLA/PLD is the first job they're leveling they may not have seen any other more specific tooltips in the game (Overpower specifies "in a cone before you"... Dark Passenger specifies "in a line in front of you"... ) There's any number of misinterpretations a new player that doesn't know any better could make. This all boils down to a a simple lack of empathy and inability to put yourself in that scenario prior to knowing everything you know now, and failure to consider circumstances. Also being that enmity values aren't displayed in-game, for a new player who is not privy to the proper resources yet, Flash may appear to be a relatively useless skill compared to their other abilities that actually do/reduce damage. There's also no way of knowing how enmity efficient Flash is relative to Savage Blade or RoH without googling it, and at that point, you can no longer blame the tank for not reading his tooltips, you have to blame him for "not googling it" which is ridiculous in light of the expectation that tooltips ought to preclude you from needing to "google it", at least early in the game, and that every player that knows better never asks "did you google it" they ask "did you read your tooltips". Its entirely conceivable that since most of Flash's effects are unseen, that the tank in the OP assumed that Flash applied some sort of flat buff to his enmity that would be retained when he ran over to the mobs after using it. Seems silly, of course. But totally not worth giving someone a hard time about. Hopefully the OP clarified. When I give advice I try and be specific otherwise I'm nothing more than a glorified tooltip. The only thing that is inexcusable, is if you try and offer help and people throw it back in your face, actively. Then THEY are the jerk, they need to check themselves, otherwise they deserve whatever comes to them.

Its not just tooltips; There are things that are on SE as well. For example, you can level DRK/AST/MCH without having so much as unlocked another job from their respective roles. So they basically made 3 of the least beginner-friendly jobs in the game accessible to people completely new to their roles.

The newer generation of gamers is also more accustomed to paying attention to text-based verbal in-game tutorials where the game actually spells out for you like you're an idiot what to do, a la class/job quests. Older generations see this as annoying, and are more accustomed to paying attention to the action rather than the text scroll in the chat log, in which they may not even be in the correct tab to see what the NPC's are saying. These older gamers are more likely to be waiting for a situation in game wherein using a skill in the correct way is literally the only way to progress, where you learn by DOING. Its entirely possible to just DPS and roflstomp your way through these verbal tutorials and because the game didn't give you a hard mechanical roadblock to surmount with proper skill usage, the flaws in playstyle go unnoticed. Point being, different players are on the lookout for information from different sources. Some expect user-manuals read-aloud to them by NPCs. Others expect the actual gameplay to show you how to play by forcing you into a trial and error scenario, which is actually proper game design. You learn this way in raids after all.

Most people also forget their early days in an mmo where things are all new and distracting. Even with single-player games it isn't the same. You may know what everything does but you haven't learned to actively apply it. Maybe you're not used to the controls yet, maybe you're still evolving your hotbar setup. Maybe their HUD is still set to the (horrendous) default, and they haven't learned how to properly manipulate it to where the things they need to see and don't need to see are in their rightful places. We take HUD awareness for granted in endgame but a lot of new players just aren't used to putting their eyes where they belong and haven't optimized their HUD so that all the important information they need is close to their character model. Also the muscle memory we develop while leveling and learning our jobs takes time to develop and isn't just there day 1 no matter how perfectly you understand the tooltips. There's any number of things that could explain the behaviors described in the OP but its just more amusing for people in these threads to kick back and assume that it is some drooling sniveling filthy pug on the other end of the interwebs with one thumb in their mouth and the other up their ass, playing the game with their feet.

TL;DR, pick your battles, and give people that are not being directly offensive or hindering to progress the benefit of the doubt. There are just too many variables and unless you are stopping to consider each and every one of them you have no right to enforce or impose your expectations on them (edit: in the DUTY FINDER).

[Lyth]

It's true that we often don't have the chance to learn the life stories of the people we play with. But most people who you're pugging with really aren't interested what your performance is like on the other six days of the week. They're interested in what your performance is like right now. That also means that if you do get feedback, it's not about you as a person, but rather about your performance at the present moment.

It doesn't really matter if this isn't your "main". Your fellow pugs in DF/PF don't really care about what you've achieved on other jobs, or how many "years of experience" you have playing mmos. It doesn't even matter if you're just "playing casually" or "are distracted". Nobody is entitled to special treatment. If you mess up in the now, you still messed up. Own it.

One of the strongest motivations to improve in a game like this is the fear of not letting your teammates down. If your ego manages to survive the initial shock of being rebuked or kicked, you read up and practice. Over time, you're able to judge for yourself what the expectations are, without outside feedback. Growth is not painless.

There is a certain tact involved in giving criticism, of course. But you see more people choosing to err on the side of silently disbanding in PF, rather than risking wasting energy on a confrontation with someone who is potentially hostile even to constructive feedback. So value feedback when you get it. To be honest, you don't need to have set foot in any of the "higher-end game content" to give feedback in Sastasha. Nor should you ever impose such a restriction on others, because you'll generally always find someone out there who's cleared content at a higher level than you have.

Don't try to change the expectations. Change yourself.

[SyzzleSpark]

Don't try to change the expectations. Change yourself.

I think you may be misunderstanding me here.

Quote from earlier in the thread that is relevant here:

Ultimately you have to be self-motivated to get good at the game, and most truly self-motivated players will figure things out regardless of whether you offer them tips or not.

I'm not trying to change the expectations for myself, I'm fine with them just the way they are: constantly changing. My post wasn't about me. But I do adjust my expectations based on the piece of content I'm in, and I think that any reasonable person would. My expectation of people in A12s is not the same as my expectation of people in AK normal is not the same as my expectation of people in Void Ark. How this amounts to me or anyone else being entitled to special treatment, I'm clearly not understanding. I just know I don't have the energy to go into every single piece of content with the mentality of "these people are ACCOUNTABLE to ME and MY expectation". In fact "change yourself" is the exact point of my post considering that your changing expectations and adjustments you make based on the performance of the people in your group is tantamount to being a good team player, and this includes accommodating the shortcomings of a nugget tank. You can control yourself far more than you can control others and that includes YOUR expectations. If this thread proves anything its that there is no "the expectations". You say no one deserves special treatment, but its this mentality and lack of willingness to give a situation special treatment that is pretty definitively a lack of willingness to change yourself, as you say. After all "my way or the high way" isn't really a flexible mentality or one that fosters personal growth/improvement. I in fact support someone like Dragonseth's mentality up to the point where he defines a situation like that described in the OP as being a display of disrespect. Come now. Even his expectations of himself, like when he described the situation where he lost aggro on WAR as "unacceptable" - how do we know it was his fault? Did he lose it to a BLM that didn't Quell? was there a NIN that just figured Shadewalker was there to make their hotbar look pretty? How are these failures any greater or lesser? I stand by my closing statement that there are too many variables that too-often go unconsidered.

I'm trying to play devil's advocate on behalf of a new tank in duty roulette content in a thread in which the general sentiment has been "lol@this new tank struggling to learn gameplay mechanics" and "this tank in DF that is making mistakes is being disrespectful of his team mates by not having immediate, 100% understanding of the ambiguous information spoon-fed to him in text form by myself and NPCs regardless of how much time he has had to apply said information and form good gameplay habits". Someone earlier in the thread made a work-hard-play-hard reference, I'd add "explain-hard" to that motto, since the less specific you are with new players, the more mistakes are made, and tooltips are a prime example of this.

I'm not too sure where you got the implication that I was making excuses for my own poor play in PF content, in which there are explicit, pre-defined, player-defined parameters people are expected to perform around and I would be the first to acknowledge my own mistakes if they were impacting anyone other than myself.

[Venjenz]

The only situation where you would need to spam overpower to keep aggro is if you are undergeared.

No dps will be able to rip aggro if you play war right with buffs and are around the same gear level. Simple. If you are needing to OP spam to hold aggro id reccommend checking your rotation and seeing where you can improve.

Flash is 99% useless and the 1% time it isnt is for emergency situations that were caused by the tanks own blunder (getting pacified shortly before a horde of enemies spawn).

Other than that, i guess you could just use it for extra "why not" padding during pacification, but its generally useless. Ive had flash on my war up to lvl 45 before i realized i never use it, and i dont miss it.

i understand you dont have war at 60 yet, and perhaps you didnt have a longtime lvl 50 war during ARR, so the learning process is still in effect for you, but once you get more accustomed to war, you will find yourself as well, almost never or if ever, using flash.

Couple points:

1) I am still leveling and gearing up, so sometimes I am very far behind the DPS in the gear power curve. I did the Vault for the first time yesterday, and I was the only one who didn't get sync'd down. I didn't spam it, but I added a Flash to every initial Overpower on trash packs. Nobody seemed to mind, or if they did, they didn't mind enough to say anything. Maybe they weren't expecting me to do much besides hold AE aggro.

2) I do understand my rotations, but not every DPS understands which order to take mobs down, even with marks. Sometimes, in that 4-6 mob pull, DPS fixates on mob 5 while you are working rotations and moving down the line. When a mob turns to run off and I don't want to interrupt a rotation, Flash works just fine. It's on my bar for a reason, same as Provoke, which might get used once every 3-4 DF runs.

3) I screw up plenty, but not everything is based on my screw up. If I mark 1-2-3, and DPS starts with 3, that's not on me, but rather than adhere to some hard and fast rotation rule for the sake of forum purity, I may hit Flash. Once again, I use it infrequently enough that I almost always have full MP when I do use it, and it doesn't interrupt any of my TP combos. It can be and is very handy that way.

4) Sometimes, the DPS is such that it's all big pulls and sick AE. My job at that point changes from proper enmity rotations to flinging Tomahawks, running between packs with Flash (since it is PBAE, insta-cast and doesn't require a target to work properly), and then simply holding AE enmity while my DPS does their AE "nuke the world" thing. And even then, I can't spam Flash because 4-5 casts puts a WAR OOMP. I just mix it in to make my DF life easier sometimes.

Bottom line, there are times where Flash is the perfect tool for the job. It is not keybound to any of my G13 keys and I have to actually click it, so it is a background tool, but a tool that has uses nonetheless.

[Hierro]

Couple points:

2) I do understand my rotations, but not every DPS understands which order to take mobs down, even with marks. Sometimes, in that 4-6 mob pull, DPS fixates on mob 5 while you are working rotations and moving down the line.

4) Sometimes, the DPS is such that it's all big pulls and sick AE. My job at that point changes from proper enmity rotations to flinging Tomahawks, running between packs with Flash [...] then, I can't spam Flash because 4-5 casts puts a WAR OOMP.

Why are you numbering enemies in a large mob? Forget kill order, it's all AoE at that point. Put up maim, use bloodbath, use berserk, and spam overpower. Even if your offensive cooldowns are down, you want to spam overpower instead of flash.

[SyzzleSpark]

snip

You have to put yourself in your DPS' shoes.

Many DPS jobs are forced to play inefficiently if focusing one mob down at a time. Most Melee jobs don't get meaningful AoE until post-lvl30, but BRD, BLM, and SMN all want to AoE pretty much any time you're tanking 3-4+ mobs. You can't hope for them to do an ST rotation, numbers or not. On that note, all non PLD tanks have meaningful AoE and shouldn't really be focusing one mob down either in a pull of significant size. Even once your AoE is over, rotate targets, multi-dot, whatever.

[Venjenz]

Why are you numbering enemies in a large mob? Forget kill order, it's all AoE at that point. Put up maim, use bloodbath, use berserk, and spam overpower. Even if your offensive cooldowns are down, you want to spam overpower instead of flash.

I'm not, and that was part of my point. In large AE pulls, I don't mark and I don't rotate through mobs doing HS->SS->BB blah blah...I do Overpower and Flash. Flash does not get used until I see how the AE beatdown is going, and if it looks like I will be there a while, I use Flash maybe every third/fourth Overpower just to make sure I don't run out of TP. On some fights, that can happen, so I just buffer it a bit, knowing yes that I am suffering a minor loss of DPS. It's an insurance tool at that point.

You have to put yourself in your DPS' shoes.

Many DPS jobs are forced to play inefficiently if focusing one mob down at a time. Most Melee jobs don't get meaningful AoE until post-lvl30, but BRD, BLM, and SMN all want to AoE pretty much any time you're tanking 3-4+ mobs. You can't hope for them to do an ST rotation, numbers or not. On that note, all non PLD tanks have meaningful AoE and shouldn't really be focusing one mob down either in a pull of significant size. Even once your AoE is over, rotate targets, multi-dot, whatever.

And once again, I am not focusing targets on large pulls. The 3-4 target, rotate combos, mark order pull is for standard DF pugs where the DPS isn't fast, it isn't AE, people aren't geared or are new to the instance, etc. I know the freaking difference between tanking styles and when to use either. I was merely pointing out that there are situations where Flash is a useful tool for Warrior tanking, because some have made it sound as if a WAR even having that button on their toolbar makes them n00b clowns who should be vote kicked for ever touching it.

I primarily use Overpower, of course. But things don't always go according to plan, and sometimes a DPS or healer runs the wrong way and grabs more friends near the end of an AE cycle and my TP may be low but I still need that AE enmity. What should I do at that point if not Flash? I realize on forums every WAR but me tanks perfectly using perfect rotations that are Elitist Jerk approved and they have never missed a button press and back in their day they had to tank naked and only had a wooden spoon for a weapon, and they were grateful. But for the mortal WAR tanks of the actual game, sometimes they use Flash in combo with Overpower becase unlike forum perfection, sometimes things don't go o plan and you have to still get the job done, even if sloppy and imperfect.