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

[Maeka]

A lot of OTs sadly seem to want to be DPS while riding the tank queue. But if you're a tank in there, and there's a need for a tank, you need to put on your big boy pants and get in the robot, Shinji. Sounds like a bunch of cry-babies.

Personally when I Q as tank for Trials and the like... honestly a lot of time I'd rather MT than OT (provided I'm comfortable with the fight obviously, if I'm not then I am likely Qing for it as healer instead).

1). OT is boring as balls, you just do the highest damage rotation over and over again and... you rarely do anything else for the majority of the Trials other than occasionally pick up an add or two that will die 5 seconds later.
2). It's a lot more running around and grabbing adds/objects/what-not and that's just.... eeew, I'm not a fan of it.
3). I end up not trusting the average other tank in Trials, and I'd rather just do it myself because I know I'd be better at it.
4). Half of the time they don't assert who is MT and who is OT and they will either fight me for aggro, or only half do their job if I let them MT.

#4 is what annoys me the most... I go in and watch to see what stance they throw up. No stance. awesome. Sometimes we wait and wait until I go 'screw it I'll do it myself' or the tank will finally throw tank stance on and go attack the boss.

One of two things happens... the tank will actually MT, or they'll haphazardly dump abilities on it and their threat generation blows and I'll rip it off them while in DPS stance. Then my own tank stance goes up.

Or, in the case that we stand around doing nothing and I decide 'screw it, I'll do it' ... the other tank will throw tank stance and fight me for aggro. Then I gotta go to DPS, and try to find a way to get off #1 threat so we don't end up cleaving the raid or something.

Just.......nngh.

Seriously. Pick one. OT, or MT. Pick one, and assert. I'll adjust. But I hate guessing which the other tank is gonna do, because yanno, 90% of the time, the other tank ain't gonna reply to anything I say in chat. There was a time I used to ask before the pull, but I fell out of the practice because 90% of the time, I never got a reply.

[SenorPatty]

I finally started leveling a DPS class, and was farming Brayflox's Longstop for XP. We had a tank that was new, but that's ok with me we all start somewhere, and i never get mad at anyone for making a mistake because i'm really in no rush when I play this game. On the last boss the tank would not move out of the poison so we end up wiping. The other DPS and healer start talking trash to him, and kicked him before i could say anything. I asked why did you kick him he was new. they said they didn't have time to waste. Why are People are so impatient and mean. I tried to private message the person to tell them to keep there head up but i think he already got offline. I felt so bad even though there is nothing I could of done. I hope he don't give up tanking because other than that fight he did a great job, even though the other DPS was pulling ahead of him.

I don't advocate thrash talk but I will say this: If I tell the tank "move boss out of poison puddle because it heals it" and you stay rooted...I can't help but feel trolled, new player or old. I can totally understand if the tank tried to move and you guys still wiped but as you said, the tank would not move.

[Maeka]

I don't advocate thrash talk but I will say this: If I tell the tank "move boss out of poison puddle because it heals it" and you stay rooted...I can't help but feel trolled, new player or old. I can totally understand if the tank tried to move and you guys still wiped but as you said, the tank would not move.

Some people have tunnel vision and might not be looking at the chat in mid boss fight, though.

At least allow one wipe to see if they read the chat after the wipe.

[Juicinators]

Yeah, but after one wipe. I could see if he kept doing the same exact thing. Being new he probably was not looking at the chat.

[TalithaSolarien]

I finally started leveling a DPS class, and was farming Brayflox's Longstop for XP. We had a tank that was new, but that's ok with me we all start somewhere, and i never get mad at anyone for making a mistake because i'm really in no rush when I play this game. On the last boss the tank would not move out of the poison so we end up wiping. The other DPS and healer start talking trash to him, and kicked him before i could say anything. I asked why did you kick him he was new. they said they didn't have time to waste. Why are People are so impatient and mean. I tried to private message the person to tell them to keep there head up but i think he already got offline. I felt so bad even though there is nothing I could of done. I hope he don't give up tanking because other than that fight he did a great job, even though the other DPS was pulling ahead of him.

The other dps and the healer were idiots, plain and simple. Not giving a new player to learn and react to a new challenge is dumb.
Also wiping on that boss is on the healer, even if the tanks stays in the poison and doesn't move him out of the Regen field. The poison isn't to hard hitting and 2 dps can easily out-dps the Regen on the boss. Just takes a bit longer.

[Starflake]

The other dps and the healer were idiots, plain and simple. Not giving a new player to learn and react to a new challenge is dumb.
Also wiping on that boss is on the healer, even if the tanks stays in the poison and doesn't move him out of the Regen field. The poison isn't to hard hitting and 2 dps can easily out-dps the Regen on the boss. Just takes a bit longer.

While I agree that the tank should have the opportunity to learn, you are not making any sense. When you are at that level and you have to Esuna tanks, DPS and yourself, it drains your mana by quite a bit. If the fight continues to drag on, you'll find yourself unable to cleanse or heal. When I healed it, I had a tank that kept it in poison. And even though I was DPSing as a healer too and we had relatively good DPS, barely were we doing actual damage on the boss with the regen in mind. If it's a wipe, it's the tank's fault for not going the mechanics, nothing else.

[AxHell]

snip

You did nothing wrong. You tried your best to explain them how the fight works despite the pressure of the situation you were in.
You just happened to be with a bad group full of whiny people.

[KaivaC]

It may be related to the parties you're in. In the calculation of enmity for the list you don't really know where everyone is in relation to each other. To put it plainly if your parties mostly suck you'll sweep past them in enmity very quickly by simply performing well.

In the last few days I recall an o7n via normal raid roulette where I used Diversion in my opener (not really an option on RDM) and shot to second as it ended. I popped Lucid as soon as it was feasible and... was still second.

Then a friend mentioned how poor dps was and how the MT WAR was doing the second highest damage. The run ended with more than 2k difference between me and the next dps (the war) and so even though I was sitting at second for the vast majority of the fight (I started popping Diversion on CD for passive threat reduction, it helped) I was perfectly safe because the gap between me and the MT was the same size it just didn't happen to have any other people in it.

Also it isn't odd for a dps or healer to be second in threat. An OT only needs to provoke to jump above someone. Unless there is an OT mechanic like Lakshmi's cone DPS have no reason to keep themselves below the OT.

It seems like the OT was just stupid. If he can't pay attention and do his job (take over tanking when the MT dies) he has no room to talk. I would take that vote kick with pride - who doesn't want a 'different playstyle' from people like that?

Yeah, I'm actually a bit surprised because I average a 336 right now in Ilvl, so I found it weird that I was still getting up to 2 or 3 in the aggro list in level 70 content at this point in time (I assume most of the time right now, most of the players in the trials and raids for lvl 70 are 350-370). Dunno how to deal with aggro when I don't have Shadewalker and throwing up Diversion in anything Ravana and below, other than gimping myself which isn't an option. Just gonna have to chalk it up to maybe a bad group. Funnily enough, I stopped feeling bad after posting the experience.

[Frizze]

Is there a particular reason tanks love prematurely pulling on Labyrinth of the Ancients? It's not infuriating since it hasn't resulted in any wipes yet but seeing '4 on the pad' 'everyone got forced into the A platform because one of the tanks pulled before everyone got here' every time I run LotA on Roulette gets annoying.

Can they not just use the Ready Check?

Early pulls in alliance runs get on my nerves pretty easily. Most of the time it just means the first 5-10 seconds of the fight will be more chaotic, which is just an annoyance and not really a big deal. Sometimes one or more groups had left-over LBs from the previous fight and that guy running in just threw away potentially hundreds of thousands of points of free damage - i get that we dont need it but why just throw it away for nothing? But i have seen a wipe to premature pull in LotA(to the fight it sounds like youre describing). The atomos fight will wipe the raid after a certain amount of time, and ive seen alliance B only end up with 2 or 3 people when the locked-out players get randomly shunted into one path or other.

It may be related to the parties you're in. In the calculation of enmity for the list you don't really know where everyone is in relation to each other. To put it plainly if your parties mostly suck you'll sweep past them in enmity very quickly by simply performing well.

Yeah, ive seen this happen more times then i can count. Pop diversion, do opener. Im 7th or 8th in enmity when the buff drops. A few cycles through my rotation later ive climbed up to 2nd(sometimes first if its alliance and another group has the MT). Pop lucid for the instant drop and fall all the way to 3rd(for a few spells anyway).

Also it isn't odd for a dps or healer to be second in threat. An OT only needs to provoke to jump above someone.

Which is precisely what i was thinking when i said that when that OT could have gotten back to 2nd in a keystroke or two - provoke to get to the top and then maybe shirk the MT to fall a little behind while keeping his lead safe.

We had a tank that was new, but that's ok with me we all start somewhere, and i never get mad at anyone for making a mistake because i'm really in no rush when I play this game. On the last boss the tank would not move out of the poison so we end up wiping. The other DPS and healer start talking trash to him, and kicked him before i could say anything.

One thing you dont actually make clear in the story - did anyone actually tell him he should move the dragon? As others pointed out, reading chat in the heat of battle isnt a skill everyone has mastered. But if no one even bothered to TELL him what he was doing wrong then they were even dumber for kicking him before giving him a chance to see the text and know what to do next time. And new tank guy if youre reading this(i realize you almost certainly arent), when people treat you like this file an in-game report on them. Not for kicking you(which was mean but within their right), but for trash talking. The GMs do take abusive behavior seriously, and we really dont need those types of people playing our game. And dont let that one experience put you off tanking. If you were enjoying it before, keep at it. Everyone makes mistakes.

Dunno how to deal with aggro when I don't have Shadewalker and throwing up Diversion in anything Ravana and below, other than gimping myself which isn't an option. Just gonna have to chalk it up to maybe a bad group. Funnily enough, I stopped feeling bad after posting the experience.

So shadewalker and diversion do close to the same thing. Shadewalker reduces your incoming hate by giving 80% of it to the tank for 15 seconds. Diversion reduces your incoming hate by i-dont-know% by just not having you generate that extra hate for 30 seconds(similar to smoke screen in that way). So for sync'd fights where Shade isnt an option id just substitute diversion in the same spot in your rotation. For fights where you can do both, you could start with shade to give the tank the extra hate, then use diversion after it wears off to make sure you dont climb as fast. But yeah, that sure sounds like a bad group problem. And whether you made a mistake or not, youre trying to learn from it and get better so you have every right to not feel bad. Someone who wants to learn and get better eventually will. Someone who wants to blame others for their own mistakes will always be an idiot.

[AxHell]

So today I had an exhausting Susano normal as WAR (first time tanking it). My co-tank is a PAL and put on Sword Oath so naturally I went Defiance in order to MT. And good lord was he annoying.

So during the first phase, when my HP got around 60-50% he provoked (in Sword Oath) the boss without any good reason except for : "You were around half-life so we must swap." Hmmm no ? May I also add he used every CD he had when he had full aggro ?

Then at the sword phase with the QTE, I click on the marker. My gear was better than him and with Defiance I had way more HP hence why I went to do the QTE.
He just stayed there, not catching any balls or attacking the sword, leaving the DPS to do all the job.
I called him on that but he didn't answer.

Second phase I die to the tank buster because I used my CD a bit too late and...he doesn't provoke the boss. He tries to aggro the boss in Sword Oath while it went to kill the rest of the party. Then when he was the only one left he provoked.

Second try went way better but sometimes he tried to provoke the boss STILL IN SWORD OATH and it almost would have worked if I didn't stay in Defiance. And then he would just stay put and eat all the AOEs (which he did in the first try mind you).

I admit I really wanted to shirk him during the second phase just out of pettiness but decided not to because some players were new and I wanted to clear the boss for them.

I love this boss fight but good lord he made it really stressful for me.