skipping areas should be a group decision

[Niwashi]

A couple days ago, I was running Tam-Tara with a DF group. I was an arcanist in the low-30's levels (not that anyone else knew that last detail, as the party list just showed us all at the level-sync of 19) and was doing it as part of the Duty Roulette. Another player was brand new, running the dungeon for the first time.

As we reached the first optional room, the tank just ran right past it into the next section and engaged the next group of mobs. As we finished them off, I pointed out that we'd missed an area, thinking the tank just didn't know the map very well and didn't realize we'd made a wrong turn. His response was something along the lines of "Oh, I just decided to skip that stuff."

I think some tanks really need to learn that just because their role means they're supposed to be the first to engage each group of mobs does not mean they get to make such decisions on their own without consulting the group. If the tank had even been considering skipping part of the dungeon, he should have said so at the beginning so we could discuss it and decide if that's what we wanted to do. As it turns out, nobody else in the group (other than the tank) wanted to skip any of the content, and after I brought it up we backtracked to get the room he'd run past earlier, but it still floors me that the tank hadn't considered checking with any of us to begin with.

It's possible you may occasionally get a group who all want to skip the optional rooms of a dungeon and just get to the boss, and if that happens, then fine, but it's certainly not to be expected as the norm. Most players are in a dungeon because they want something out of it, whether that's loot or XP or (for newcomers) a chance to see the content, and all of those rewards are diminished by not completing the whole thing. At the very least, ask the rest of your team if they're willing to forego part of their rewards in exchange for a slightly quicker completion time.

Maybe it has to do with the way tanks can get nearly instant queue times, but please keep in mind that the rest of us can't. DPS classes who have a half-hour or more wait to even get into a dungeon will likely only get one or two runs in in an evening. I was running it for XP, and even on a Duty Roulette run, about 80% or so of the XP comes from killing all the minor mobs along the path to the boss. If we don't kill the mobs in those optional rooms, then I lose out on a major portion of the XP from the only dungeon run I may get that day. Similarly, someone running it for loot isn't going to want to miss any of the treasure chests (and while XP was my primary goal, I wanted loot as well).