Thread of HauteurFollow

My static might actually have enough time to get through all the content before 4.0 hits!

I know this was posted like 6 months ago, but since I just returned to the game, I feel it is highly relevant to what I feel.

This here says it all.

I also refuse to tank new content (in a Duty Finder PUG) that I am not experienced in, for a couple of reasons:

1). Random groups oftentimes demand the tank know where to go, and they want to do just that: GO. God Forbid a tank pause between pulls to figure out where to go next, and if a tank should pull extra mobs that are unnecessary, people get upset rather quickly if it is done too many times (even if it's a <50 leveling dungeon with no 50s or 60s in there! Somehow "Go in to get XP" != "Kill Mobs"). Obviously if I've never been there, I am NOT going to know which groups must be killed and which can be skipped, and many dungeons have optional side-passages and rooms. Some dungeons are rather bad about this (I remember Qarn being quite mazy).

2). Everybody expects you to know the boss fights, and I've seen people groaning around when a tank asks for instructions before pulling a boss, or you just get silence. I also see tanks not even bothering to ask (they obviously didn't know the fight, judging by their lack of awareness of mechanics), then we have a wipe, and people start telling the tank what he/she should be doing in a not-so-polite manner (why didn't you say that crap EARLIER!?).

Now, maybe if the PUG scene was a little more kind to newbie tanks, then you wouldn't have tanks refusing to MT dungeons, or at least newbie tanks not wanting to MT.

A newbie healer or DPS on the other hand, has a lot less burden placed upon them -- everybody just follows the MT unless told to do otherwise. Tank pulls, DPS attack his mobs until they die. Healer keeps everybody alive. The only time this is different is during boss fights, and in very few other situations. All of the burdens of knowing the dungeon (sans boss mechanics) is placed upon the MT.

Edited, Dec 21st 2016 8:39am by Lyrailis

I highly doubt there's a pull-by-pull guide of entire instances, and even if there were, I doubt I'd be able to remember the whole thing, and I doubt they want me alt-tabbing after each pull to look up a walkthrough for (insert dungeon here).

Tanks already have enough stuff to keep track of, trying to learn dungeon layouts with other people being impatient is an unnecessary extra burden. Maybe if people wouldn't be so impatient and rude, more people would be willing to tank unfamiliar content. Or at least, that's the way it seems from my eyes anyways.

But until then, they can enjoy their longer wait times because fewer people want to deal with the issues with being a tank.

I like tanking, I like the gameplay... I don't like the pressure from the people. I don't like being expected to know the layouts of dungeons before I even step in them, and I don't like being expected to pull up to THEIR pacing.

I'm the tank. I pull to MY pacing. I pull what I think I can handle.

But, people don't care, so I don't tank as often as I'd like to. I don't have the mood for it a lot of times. I'd rather Q up as WHM instead. Then I don't have to worry about a thing. If we get a bad tank, then I get player commendations for keeping everybody alive despite that fact, lol.

EDIT: I also am probably weird, but I believe a tank and a healer should watch each other for the first few pulls and get an idea of each other's skill and strength level. It's what I do -- when I'm a healer, I take mental note of how fast the tank takes damage, and based off of that, I formulate my strategy of how often I heal, and what heals I throw and how long I wait before starting to heal. If I'm a tank, if I see a healer casting Stone, Ruin, etc, then maybe its time to pull a few extra mobs.

But the first couple pulls are always cautious until I get a feel for how this is gonna go.

Edited, Dec 21st 2016 6:01pm by Lyrailis

I actually usually START with a mass pull, because the vast majority of DF parties can handle it just fine. In the rare instances that DPS is slow, then I just burn all my cooldowns and get through it... doesn't really matter because we'll be pulling slow afterward and I don't need cooldowns ready if that's the case.

If the healer sucks, burning all my cooldowns usually gets us through the first pull too. If we die, we die, but that's super rare.

As someone who's mained both MNK and NIN, this makes me want to commit felonies. Like... it's tricky enough for me to dance around the aoe cones and come out in the right positions every gcd without the tank spinning things in circles unnecessarily.

As to your other thing, yeah I feel the same way. I'll go into new content as either a dps or a healer. I simply won't tank something I've never seen before.

Man, I remember when people thought dancing around mobs in XI made them miss more. That said, I suspect the strafe thing is a PvP mindset, either brought on by other MMOs where it's more of a thing, or gamers perhaps coming from FPS backgrounds. It's silly to see when no mechanics are at play, and it's even worse in games where jump canceling kills animations (and possibly rooting), too. Makes me wish continuous movement after a point in-combat would incur some sort of damage/accuracy penalty, or keeping stationary buffing the two. Of course, the "GOTTA MOVE FAST!!!" crowd would hate the **** out of it.

As I said in my FC the other night, I'm going with my initial guess about circle-strafing: I bet players who do this are former WoW players.

WoW is ridiculously picky about Line of Sight in its PvP and people are always circle-strafing each other to hopefully break Line of Sight on just enough attacks to get them the edge.

Any PvP battle between two melees in WoW looks like ret*rded children on pogosticks trying to hit each other because they are both circle-strafing each other and constantly jumping. I hear that XIV isn't so picky about LoS, which leads me to believe the behavior comes from WoW rather than XIV's PvP (that and I've never heard of XIV's PvP being popular, most people I've heard talk like it is this side thing that hardly anybody does, kinda like how XI's was).