do I hafta..

[KisaiTenshi]

@KisaiTenshi

Either you're the most unlucky player around (every single pug group is a horrible mess), or you're just paranoid and just assume every group is terribad (even if they turn out to be awesome).

Honestly this is how most PUG's go, your data center may be different:

A "Perfect" run means nobody has to be resurrected

4-man Low level: So rarely do I get one newbie, it's almost unheard of to get two, but today I got a party with the second-worst combination: New Tank and new DPS. Both DPS Melee Pugilist. (Worst is all 3 being new and DPS all melee.) So this will set my baseline for what I expect from newbies vs non-newbies. This was also Tam Tara Deepcroft.
- Tank stands in every AOE, each AOE hit removes slightly more than half their HP.
- Tank fails to hold emnity (given I probably outgear him by an order of magnitude, I think he was having to use Flash every 3 heals.)
- One Cure recovers half the tank's HP
- Both DPS don't attack the same target
- Both DPS die within 2 seconds of each other due to having enmity.
- I don't have time to switch to CS and heal the tank at the same time, so I alternate between curing the tank and hitting Aero.
So that boss took about twice as long as I expected. The other Bosses nobody dies. However the Tank was still standing in the AOE's.


4-man Low-level other than Satasha, Halitali and Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Those three tend to be the only dungeons that I'm tolerant of newbies making boneheaded mistakes):
- I expect a "perfect" run.
- I expect the DPS to not stand in directional AOE's.
- I expect the Tank to not stand in directional AOE's
- I expect that everyone will at least try to get out of omnidirectional AOE's, but I'm less annoyed by it.
- I expect the DPS to not take any damage from trash if the Tank is doing their job.
- I expect ranged DPS to not take any damage from trash, even during boss rooms unless the boss has a room-wide AOE (eg Cutter's Cry)
- I expect that everyone has appropriate gear. You should not be wearing any gear in any slot that is 5 levels below the dungeon level on the left side. All the dungeons are 3-4 levels apart, so if you ran the dungeon 3 times (usually the minimum needed to level up) you should have had enough opportunity to get dungeon drops. The Right side is a bit harder to get drops for, but it mostly affects things other than defence and hitpoints.

On average, if anyone dies during a 4-man low-level before the first boss room, that's an indication that they don't know the mechanics well enough to avoid taking damage.


4-man "Hard" dungeons, AK and WP:
All of the above except I do not expect a perfect run and:
- I expect that the Tank will try to pull the largest amount they are comfortable with.
- Some tanks may try to pull trash all the way to the first boss room door, which is NOT recommended except with two BLM's who know what they're doing. Nearly every tank that does this fails.
- I expect the DPS to use AOE's.
- I expect BRD's to use songs whenever appropriate, which seems like no BRD likes to.
- I do not expect everyone to have ilevel gear over 90 before "Keeper of the Lake", AK Hard, and WP Hard. Most of the time they do, so I don't check people's gear unless they are taking disproportionate amounts of damage. (eg the Tank losing half it's HP in a single hit.)

8-man Mainstream:
- No DPS should be taking damage from AOE's
- Healers tend to generate too much Emnity, and it's usually the healer that drops a healbomb first. With this in mind, remember how the game mechanics work.
- Main tank should be keeping the bosses busy, Second tank should be rounding up the adds and bringing them to where the DPS can burn them.
- Main healer should be focusing on the Main Tank. Second healer should be focusing on the second tank and the DPS.
(Rarely does this happen.)
- If the party has full HP, and is fighting any boss other than Ultima Weapon, I don't care of the healers DPS. There's more opportunity to DPS during Castrum.

24-man Raids, While I don't expect everyone to always know the mechanics:
- If you step in avoidable AOE's, you're not ready for this.
- If your Alliance is Main Tanking, your Healers should NOT be DPS'ing. They should be healing the Main Tank.
- If your Alliance is not the Main Tank, your alliance should not be fighting the Main Tank for control of the boss.
- For the one-hit-kill mechanics, if multiple party members die, I don't expect a repeat the next time that mechanic comes around.

Unfortunately:
- Routinely there are party members who go to the wrong rally points, even when they're hilighted, so they end up out of range of being healed in the larger boss rooms. In one recent example, the second tank in LotA was -ALWAYS- out of my range that I was wondering if he was even in the room as I wasn't able to click on him for the entire boss room run.

WoD has a lot of unavoidable killshots. Particularly Angra Mainyu. Cereberus also has a few. The rest of the Bosses have generally not resulted in Wipes.
CT only has one mechanic that people routinely get crushed on, and that's the stacking part with the final boss. However as I mentioned before, there was at least one run where the "vote abandon" came up several times.
LotA, I've seen only one wipe before, and that's from someone jumping the gun where the parties split up, resulting in a wipe.

There have been bum runs with all the Raids at least once where I end up in the party with the people who don't know the mechanics, or just plain are awful, and these are predictable by how much healing you have to do to the party members other than the main tank. Yet none of them have required abandoning the Raid. Lemons, Lemonade.

The thing that irks me the most are the people who suck the fun out of the game.
- Demanding that people read a walkthrough/guide or video before even playing some aspect of the game for the first time.
- Demanding that players "maximize" their effectiveness the first time they run something, or anytime they want to farm something.
- People selling "Carries" for content, or "selling" wins on primals.
- The Speedpullers who don't even wait for buffs before they run off.
- The foulmouthed ragequitters after they die once.
- Players spouting "Healers must DPS" or get kicked. I haven't personally seen anyone do this, but clearly it's happening or these threads wouldn't exist.
- People who seem to think that bots are somehow good or sanctioned
- People who want freemium-style featurecreep.

TL;DNR: Please stop sucking the fun out of the game by making demands of (all) players that are clearly unnecessary.

Back to the OP:
You are not required to DPS if you are a healer. There are no game mechanics in the game that require it, but there are game mechanics that you may find boring if you stick entirely to healing, but that's your prerogative.