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

[Avatre]

I never done this personally, but I always bring a friend or two to run with me; even better if they can start up a voice chat. It really made the experience far more bearable. That being said I already loved the role breaking trinity as a whole, so there's that too.

I did most of my runs through duty finder solo. Ended up doing the last 20-30 with a friend, but still through DF. After finishing mine, they decided to try hosting a speed run PF, and well, those ended up being great(doing 5-6 of them a day for the last couple days). Once you do those runs, you never want to run it through DF again since everyone was using essences and actions to speed it up considerably.

[TabrisOmbrelame]

Was playing with my friend for a duty roulette. Back luck we got Sastacha. She was in Tank, and I was a Melee DPS.

Soon after we enter the dungeon, the two other folks the Healer and the other dps, just run wild in monsters right head, without any gear at all. We finally got through the second boss when they asked for bigger pull. But with undergeared heal, we decided to say no, because it was too risky. The BLM pulled anyway and right after the pack, the Tank was expelled from the group. Never seen such toxicity in a duty dungeons.

Asking for Bigger pull is a thing, but at least, respect the tank's will and ask only if you have stuff. Not doing the tutorial because character was a reroll doesn't exempt them from getting at least a bit of stuff.

Two Lalafell, Two reports.

[Cincierta]

You don't get the people I do then.

I've had healers play redline with me when everything is on cd in a dungeon I'm not familiar with tanking, and telling me to pull more.

I haven't tanked in 5 years and I'm now going back to it. Relearning all this sucks and I'd prefer not being redlined while trying to lol.

Your good healers will play redline with your health, as oftentimes they'll be contributing to dps and using their ogcds to heal you. The times they have to start using gcds to heal you, something may be seriously up, or you're on a mega pull. As a tank you're supposed to be staggering your mitigations, and the dps are supposed to be unloading and rotating their cooldowns. However, if the healer ends up being a cure/physick/benefic1 bot, you'll eventually learn just how annoying that sound is being spammed every second. I can still hear that noise...

As a mass pulling tank, I won't quite notice if my hp is that low until my name goes grey, as I'm quite comfortable now with random healers using their stuff to keep me alive and help kill the packs. This becomes a LOT easier as WAR as you get a very sexy self-bene every 25 seconds.

If you're having to blow through all of your cooldowns on a mass pull and the mobs are still not dead, and the healer's used up ALL of their ogcds, then there is something quite wrong with the party's dps. If all ogcds are used up/haven't come off cooldown yet, the mobs are still alive and munching on your face AND the healer is having to resort to spamming their base heal by being so ungodly low on MP, you're kinda f*cked.

The few times I make exceptions to this is if it's new expansion content and people are brand-spanking new. Like legit 'I just got to this dungeon after playing the game through the start and I have no idea about the pulls of this place' kind of new.

If you're new to the dungeon as a tank, tell them that you're new and are not familiar with the good pull stops in the dungeon. Usually that'll give the healer the heads up. However if they encourage big pulls, do follow their lead and do the big pulls. This is the only way you'll probably end up learning dungeons as a tank.

[Lilyth]

See, that's normally the case, but there are also times where there's unavoidable damage going on, or tank busters, or the type of mechanic that targets a non-tank player, and there's still no healing to be seen.

If I, as the offtank [or worse, main tank] need to constantly throw Clemency because the healer(s) would rather cast their one DPS spell than doing their job, there's a problem. And no, I don't mean the "I'll net you drop to 5% to throw a Bene at you" type of healer, I mean the I will literally let you die ones.

I'm a healer main, I can spot when a healer is doing the mental calculus and weave ogcd to their advantage, and the ones that are stone IV go brrrrr

I play this game since ARR Binding Coil and I've never seen this happen in fluff content. Like, literally.

What I get is tons of heal bots, healers who only spam Cure I, Cure III, Medica II, Aspected Helios, Succor over and over again when the only person taking damage is the tank and then the tank dies because they either run out of MP or just out of flat inneficient healing. Healers with literal zero DPS, forget glare and dots, they won't even bother with Earthly Star or Assize which are both free healing skills! Also don't get me started on how literally impossible it is to use Excogitation on normal pugs since my Co-heal won't ever let the tank drop below 80%, let alone 50%. This goes for Clemency PLD as well, who love to clemency themselves if they get close to 50% HP. For god's sake, let my HoTs/Fairy/Excog/Essential Dignity do their job!!!!

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I did most of my runs through duty finder solo. Ended up doing the last 20-30 with a friend, but still through DF. After finishing mine, they decided to try hosting a speed run PF, and well, those ended up being great(doing 5-6 of them a day for the last couple days). Once you do those runs, you never want to run it through DF again since everyone was using essences and actions to speed it up considerably.

Interesting. I see that we're in the same DC (and I assume your story of your friend's PF, too), I might just join that PF if I happen to see it

[Allegor]

I play this game since ARR Binding Coil and I've never seen this happen in fluff content. Like, literally.

What I get is tons of heal bots, healers who only spam Cure I, Cure III, Medica II, Aspected Helios, Succor over and over again when the only person taking damage is the tank and then the tank dies because they either run out of MP or just out of flat inneficient healing. Healers with literal zero DPS, forget glare and dots, they won't even bother with Earthly Star or Assize which are both free healing skills! Also don't get me started on how literally impossible it is to use Excogitation on normal pugs since my Co-heal won't ever let the tank drop below 80%, let alone 50%. This goes for Clemency PLD as well, who love to clemency themselves if they get close to 50% HP. For god's sake, let my HoTs/Fairy/Excog/Essential Dignity do their job!!!!

I've seen it happening a lot when I'm not the healer, specially this past week. It is exactly because it's fluff content that people don't care to perform badly, or queue with a boosted job they have clearly no idea how to use.

If I had to guess, people who only recently start healing believe one stereotype or the other - either you have to heal 100% of the time like most other games because god forbid a tank dropping below 90%, ooooor healing in this game is so easy that you can let the tank drop to 5% and heal them with a single button so just focus on DPS - both are lies, or at least exaggerations.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Ever entered a certain duty via roulette that literally make you scream to yourself internally: "This is where I die, for real :^)"?

Because I surely just did: Baelsar Wall via roulette, as a WHM. Paired with PLD, returner SAM and subpar geared MCH (everybody had about 23k HP or more but they were sitting with just 17k HP), no first timer notice. Whatever, it's a capstone dungeon. It shouldn't be that bad, right?

Breaking them down...

• PLD...
  does not properly rotate their defensive cooldowns. Rampart, Sentinel, Shelltron popping up at the times when they aren't really needed (i.e, close to an end of a pull, boss auto attacks) and almost always eats tankbusters raw. This antics caught me off guard as they also got bombed to death by Sensory Jamming, and does not learn how to stop attacking/moving on the 2nd time. Yeah, no. I'm topping you up full from now on, I just need you alive to be party's meat shield.
  
  Oh yeah, they also tried to tag all the Griffin's sword at last boss with Shield Lobs. This is the first time I knew that taking those sword AoE spells damage down debuff. The 2nd time I just rescued them to the middle....only for them to move back into the bad stuffs again
• SAM
  The only AoE they pull off during mob pulls are only Tenka Goken. There are no AoE fillers. They're filling their gauge purely with their single target combos. At least they're pulling their weight in boss encounters.
• MCH
  Ironically the one that performs the best amongst all three. If only they didn't come in with that subpar gear, they could've carried the party's damage real smooth.

"So where did you die, Reiner?"
You can already guess: The Griffin

The party wipes twice because only the MCH tried their best to break off the chain. SAM acts as if there is nothing else to attack but the Griffin, while PLD follows suit, only that they start using their AoE weaponskills at random frequency too. Like why,...?
The chain strangled me to death, twice. MCH spoke up after bothi wipes but that wasn't enough to get those two clowns to listen. Again, down we go. Third time's the charm as people says, I spammed the chat with sound effects to gain their attention. Finally! PLD had a light bulb pops above their head, while SAM... welp... boss dps uptime is everything, eh? Whatever, the chain breaks and we clear the run soonafter.

My comm goes to the MCH.

[Mesarthim]

Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to a wall when I ask people not to kill bubbles in a bismark trial on lightning weather. At least no one died. 4 just got close to be. If they stacked any closer we would've had a half party wipe just as the cannons became available.

That would've just been sad seeing as it was going flawlessly otherwise, even with new people.

[Fland]

Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to a wall when I ask people not to kill bubbles in a bismark trial on lightning weather. At least no one died. 4 just got close to be. If they stacked any closer we would've had a half party wipe just as the cannons became available.

That would've just been sad seeing as it was going flawlessly otherwise, even with new people.

TBF if people spread out with full hp and shield then it's fine to kill the bubbles.
Most of the time what kills people is the overlapping splash damage.

[Miracle_Diva]

Let's level bard - thought I as Leveling roulette popped, got Halatali.
Sprout tank, that was probably an alt or they did big research on how to properly do their job, sprout BLM who did pretty well and him, the one with almost all jobs lvl 80, WHM who didn't bother to do anything. He stood there, targeting our tank and doing literally nothing until tank's hp would drop below 50%, only then he would spam Cure to top up the tank and then go back to afk. Kinda think it was a bot at this point.
--
Okay, going next, Normal Raids queue popped.
What do we have here?
The Eyes of the Creator.
Okay, no biggie, let's do this. Adds die fast, everything is going great until we get to the boss room. 1 minute passed, none of the tanks pulling. I set countdown, 3. 2. 1. 0 - we finally start attacking the boss. 10 seconds into the fight boss starts spinning like crazy. MT is trying to run away from the boss for some reason. Well, whatever. No one is doing mechanics.
We wipe.
Happens, let's try again. While some people are still coming back, boss is already pulled by another tank. This time people start pulling adds away from burning platforms, both tanks die but get fast recovery from healers that struggle to heal the group, because you can't go far on Cure I and Medica I alone.
We wipe.
Second try we manage to get to Faust and kill him in the right spot, but boss is buffed again, this time MT dies because he ate all possible dots, agrro falls on me, I take 2 autoattacks and follow MT to sniff metallic floor. Freed from DPS burden I now notice that WAR OT is just autoattacking the boss with tank stance on and not even trying to take aggro that fell on our healers now. I ask him to finally start tanking, meanwhile witnessing the final smack on WHM as he joins the rest of the group to chill on the floor and now WAR finally got the aggro, but refusing to use any CDs dies too.
We wipe. I see unknown to me language and my name in one sentence. I drop the text into Google translate. French words turn into English and now I finally see that I got told by our Warrior to better watch myself instead of telling someone what to do.
I open party menu.

Like, guys, I have no problems with French players. But we didn't manage. Anything. Healing, tanking, damage, anything. Someone left and I followed, got into A10 instead that went pretty much without problems if not to count people constantly stepping on traps.
Okay, time to do Alliance raids Roulette.
Queue insta pops, but since I have fill option set, I get thrown into Orbonne. Last boss.
I see a lot of complains in chat as I load in. That's gonna be fun right? Fight starts with our tank as MT dying because he didn't get healed.
I get the aggro.
Sigh.
Oh, tank from another alliance saves me from my misery. Let's go bois, we get to live and see another wipe see another victory. First AOEs come, 7 people dead. Okay... Boss starts spawning mechanics from previous raids, people start dropping like flies. Our healers focus on rezzing members of different alliances instead of healing our party. Hashmal comes and cuts half of the rest poor souls who were too slow to pieces.
Somehow our healers survived and we slowly recover to the Shield fase. It goes pretty smooth, even tho our healers struggled. We get back to fighting Ultima. Our tank attempts to MT again, dies. Same reason, no one is healing him. People start dying to raid AOEs, healers don't heal and focus on rezzing anyone in their vision. We end up using healer LB3, but the timing is bad and a lot of people get caught in ground AOEs and others not moving with their markers. We manage to clear by throwing corpses at the boss and I'm finally done with leveling as I had enough of suffering fun leveling my bard for today.
The amount of healers not using anything but their basic heals lately is over the top. 0/10 would not go alone into Roulettes again.