
Originally Posted by
Lewtskie
Back around early-mid ARR I had joined the game, after a time between 1.xx and then, and I picked up MRD/WAR. My experiences with MMOs were slim-to-none, the concept of tank honestly was new-ish to me. I knew of the idea of tanks playing other games that weren't MMOs, but they can cast a different light. My time leveling MRD though was well enough, I was enjoying the idea of the tank; this was of course leveling to 50, so function was limited to just being tanky. Come to reaching 50 my world is opened to end game and all its quirks, among them being the mass pulls. Up until that point I was never pressed to mass pull or pull more than a camp at a time, it was never asked and I never considered it. And obviously would have been near impossible with what gear is available. So my FC mates at the time are explaining to me that this has become an almost necessary thing, because at the time the tomes farms were all about spamming the dungeons then, like Brayflox(Hard) and running them as fast as possible.
The idea of this was unsettling at first; I quite liked the careful and controlled style I was used to, so now this concept was like going from 0-60. Now being a fresh 50, gear wasn't just pouring from everywhere at that time and it was a little bit of work if you didn't really know what you were doing. But I gathered up what I could through MB and elsewhere and worked up the courage to press on into the big scary world of the Hard dungeons and whatnot. First run I did was with FC mates, and when I ran with them they were VERY pushy about me pulling large packs, not necessarily in a mean way, but more I got two experienced people telling to just do it, that they had it handled, and I honestly had no idea what was going on. Hindsight would tell me not to give into the peer-pressure, but I did.
The end result was obvious; my gear was nowhere near enough, I couldn't handle the damage and ended up in the dirt. What really nailed it in was the one on healer claimed she thought my gear was good enough. Being where she was, she should have easily been able to see I wasn't geared for heavy pulls, but she didn't look, she just assumed. The price of that was what confidence I had was near shattered and I was even more nervous than ever. I learned nothing from that other than my FC mates were butts. At some point after that I got desperate for better gear and decided to just throw myself into dungeon runs again, and it was fine until I came across one of those worst-case-scenario types of the most toxic and spiteful players, who was a BLM and tore me apart. I would get nervous pulling more than one camp, I would pull two, but it wasn't enough for them, they wanted more, so they would pull the camps themselves, and their gear was far superior, it was making the run an absolute nightmare for me. After that I just kinda gave up on WAR for the rest of ARR and all of HW while the tanking style of WAR was so aggressive. I considered the other tanks, but honestly those past experiences just kept me from working up any of that courage for the longest time.
tl;dr - Fresh 50 WAR, shit gear, pressured by FC mates of the time to mass pull. Got wiped, didn't learn a thing other than tanking was scary, later got shit on by BLM potato and got tanking PTSD. Still kinda working through it, tbh.