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

[Cincierta]

Just got out of duty finder to advance an alt through Sirensong Sea, and my friend volunteered himself to come along as blm.

So the party comp was DRK, RDM, BLM and me on WHM. Everyone gets the notice that there's someone new (both the rdm and my character are new) and warn the group that I am running on a new keyboard, so bear with me. (sidenote I bought a new one since apparently Best Buy's return policies on bundled items make you return the entire bundle are not exactly listed on their website, so fair warning. However the one I bought today works as smooth as butter.)

First trash pack the drk runs forward after I pop Protect on the group and immediately starts spamming Abyssal Drain on everything, and the second I try to cast Holy she immediately hits Blood Price (it's like this throughout the entire dungeon). Now I'm the type of person that usually watches for buffs, and as such I move to cancel because of courtesy. Spoiler alert: they almost never used any of their other melee skills unless it was a boss, and they really liked spamming Unleash and Unmend. Also note they loved to run ahead and mass pull, resulting in them almost dying half the time before I could catch up with them.

The rdm, after the first trash pack, was seemingly allergic to using Scatter and melee combos on groups of mobs, thereby forcing my blm friend to buck up for the damage lost. However on the bosses they would only use their melee combo at the start, and then proceed to just stick with magic the entire boss fight. This made boss and mob fights rather unbearably longer than they should have been.

After the first boss is dead, the drk pops sprint and I had not realized they did until 1/4th of their hp was gone. By the time I get to them I had to pop Benediction on their butt and spam cure/regens, as they somehow forgot to pop their cooldowns and thought I was right behind them. Nope, that would be my blm friend, bro.

We get to the second boss and naturally the rdm jumps into their only melee combo after the drk pulls, and due to their bad positioning both the rdm and drk tank eat a couple vul stacks. After the third Bloodburst, the rdm somehow loses 95% of their hp, and I swear I could hear them clenching their buttcheeks through my headset. We finally down the second boss that took far longer than it should, even with me helping drop dots and dps on top of healing.

Next set of trash after the second boss they naturally mass pull, however they don't bother to let the regen I had on them from the previous fight to finish ticking off, causing me to pull aggro from the tank. She continues to run and has a ton of mobs on her, and once she does actually peel off the mobs that were trying to eat me alive, she goes back into her drain spam. I try to cast Holy but then I immediately see her hit Blood Price yet again, and I finally had enough of that bs. I let Holy finish casting and go back to curing, and I could tell the drk was upset that I wasted her BP. Girl, it's only 40 seconds. You living is far more important than holding a buff that you can live without for now.

After that pack was dead, they then proceed to mass pull again to the Fleshless Captive, and still had the regen ticks on them, thereby I ripped hate from the pack. I almost die (rdm is still doing single-target spells and no Scatter/melee *cries*), and the last pack just takes forever to kill.

Final boss the drk doesn't seem to pay attention to advance/retreat very well, and they always seem to get hit with the bleed dots. The rdm seemed to learn from the first set of eating bleed dots and started to position himself a bit better. The boss finally goes down and the drk hangs for a bit, possibly waiting for a comm before making a dash for the exit. Before the rdm left, I told them that enchanted moulinet was their best friend. He seemed to remain silent at that before leaving.

My brain.

[SoleilAlphi]

I lost count of the number of RDM that don't use Moulinet in dungeons big pulls... it's like they remove it intentionally? Or they have an allergy to it? And when you say it does more damage that big flashy Verflare, they ignore it, and keep on single targeting. I swear, red mages of Eorzea, Moulinet is useful, it's not Tether.

[Nestama]

Doing Expert Roulette as SMN, getting the Burn and everything is going... okay. Reach the final boss and I begin to notice that the WHM is doing a lot of nothing. Other SMN makes a mistake and gets hit with the DoT and are just left to die. Healer didn't throw a Tetra, Cure II, Regen, anything their way to keep them alive. He just let them KO (and didn't Swift Raise, so I had to do that). Heck, even after I raised them, the healer didn't heal them until the very last second (boss was using the unavoidable AoE attack), so they could have KO'd again. Throughout the fight I kept an eye on them and that's when I noticed they were doing a whole lot of nothing. No DPS is expected in Roulette, but no healing? Did they expect the SMN's to use Physick?

Nearing the end of the fight, myself and the healer were pretty low on health because they just were not healing. Boss did the Rime Wreath(?) AoE twice and I was down to around 10-15k by the end. That's roughly 10-20 seconds of them doing literally nothing.

[Driskus]

In a 70 roulette I even had a tank tell me as whm to pop diverision!

I've had that happen quite a few times already, not just in 70 dungeons either. I always let them know healers don't get diversion, and then they're always like "well use lucid dreaming," not realizing that i did already and that its still on cd. Ended up getting one-shotted by a buster from the Yol in bardam's once. I had already used lucid after pulling the boss once, and still ended up pulling it even after completely stopping DPSing and not putting med II up for the aoes. Just using cure and medica only still pulled it on the next attempt.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

After that pack was dead, they then proceed to mass pull again to the Fleshless Captive, and still had the regen ticks on them, thereby I ripped hate from the pack. I almost die (rdm is still doing single-target spells and no Scatter/melee *cries*), and the last pack just takes forever to kill.

Final boss the drk doesn't seem to pay attention to advance/retreat very well, and they always seem to get hit with the bleed dots. The rdm seemed to learn from the first set of eating bleed dots and started to position himself a bit better. The boss finally goes down and the drk hangs for a bit, possibly waiting for a comm before making a dash for the exit. Before the rdm left, I told them that enchanted moulinet was their best friend. He seemed to remain silent at that before leaving.

My brain.

Nowadays I don't bother with casting regens during trash mobs cuz 90% of tanks I've met rarely pulls aggro away from me when the regen is still ticking.

So I basically decided that on trash mobs in dungeons I'll just go with Nocturnal Sect and shield them + Eye for an Eye and only turn Diurnal sect on bosses(I dunno the equivalent of noct sect for WHM so I can't elaborate much on that sorry) since shield ticks dont generate aggro like regen ticks do

Maybe im doing it wrong and maybe regen is considered better in mass pulls not sure but at least in dungeons this worked for me much better than casting regen cuz I just cannot trust the common tank anymore to use cooldowns,stay out of aoes or get aggro back especially undergeared ones cuz otherwise it would devolve either into a battle of aggro or me kicking the bucket(like the sastasha case I mentioned 2 days ago)

[Iscah]

(I dunno the equivalent of noct sect for WHM so I can't elaborate much on that sorry)

WHM doesn't have an equivalent to sects. WHM does regen; SCH does shields, and it's only AST that can switch between the two.

[MetalSnakeXI1]

WHM doesn't have an equivalent to sects. WHM does regen; SCH does shields, and it's only AST that can switch between the two.

Oh.....then I'm glad I pick AST as my main healer then xD

Don't get me wrong I'm sure good WHM can circumvent the regen aggro problem somehow(well beside using Lucid Dreaming I mean) but for me Noct Sect is a godsend in dungeons(especially with tanks that actually know what a cooldown is) as the benefits from coupling that with eye for an eye on mass pulls outweighs any benefit the miniscule regen would have on the tank during such cases

[Mesarthim]

Raid roulette dumped me into a lousy Alpha 4.0. I was on DRK and the problem in this run was the other DRK. He was in 360 gear or so on average (almost entirely) so he was near minimum. I started off the run as the MT and everything proceeds fine until the split (aside from people killing each other with aoe markers). He died a combined 3 times because he wasn't using cooldowns. No living dead, not sure if he was even using blackest night. Eventually we wiped. He still had problems in the second run because he died 2 times there too.

One healer chimed in saying "yall tanks are squishy." Now I don't have that lingo in my arena but I hope "yall" wasn't including me. I never died (except the time I let myself get blown off right before the passage of arms split due to distractions). I used cooldowns (all of them), he did not. The tankbusters lately actually hit for a decent bit without them and you shouldn't be ignoring cooldowns, especially in minimum gear.

Edit: I might have learned why I was potentially included. Since the OT kept dying over and over the other one was close enough to resonate. This apparently caused the next auto attack to punch me for 55k, killing me. This doesn't happen on runs where people use the skills they have and stop dying.

[Pepsi_Plunge]

WHM doesn't have an equivalent to sects. WHM does regen; SCH does shields, and it's only AST that can switch between the two.

WHM has a shield, Divine Benison. It helps a lot in big pulls too.

[Kallistra]

Speaking of Benison. I was doing Expert on...Monday, I believe? With a healer in my FC. I decided to be lazy and went SAM so the poor guy had a pug tank, but we got the Ghimlyt Dark which was nice. WHM friend of mine kept putting Benison on the tank before he pulled trash and the tank kept clicking it off. He's a pretty passive guy so he didn't say anything. After the second boss I was pretty annoyed by this and asked the tank why he was removing Benison.

"This healer is level 70 and should honestly know by now not to Regen the tank before pulls."

I was pretty torn between laughing and dying inside. We explained to the guy that Regen is green and Benison, which is a shield, is blue. Took a couple pulls of him having to "test to make sure we weren't BSing" (by just pulling with his ranged skill and watching them not fly at the healer), for it to click for him. He apologized at least and my healer friend walked away with both commendations.