The other day Tamarind made a post about how, simply put, he ran heroic Utgarde Keep with a bunch of raiders who considered themself so "uber leet" that they were beyond things like caring about their healer or how much mana he has, and how this made the whole thing a very miserable experience. As someone who mostly plays healers herself, I commiserated.
Today I actually had a similar experience... except that I was the tank and the dickhead was the healer. Huh. I have to admit that threw even me a little.
Nexus was the heroic daily and upon checking the LFG channel I noticed that there were plenty of people of all persuasions looking for a group for it, they were all just too lazy to actually build the group. Me being on my paladin at the time, I decided to bite the bullet and put a party together myself - not that it was difficult or anything, considering the sheer amount of people. I just invited a nice mix of different classes and we were off.
Everybody was a good little pugger and made their way to the instance, except for the resto druid, who was busy capturing the flag in Warsong Gulch. As we all stood around the summoning stone I pointed out politely that we were only waiting for him... he did leave us hanging a little longer but eventually deigned us worthy of summoning him.
As he appeared next to the summoning stone I noticed that he wore the guild tag of one of the top raiding guilds on my server. I was momentarily torn between whether to consider that a good thing or not: The other day I had pugged with three people from the top raiding guild on the server and they had been perfectly nice, even (mostly) watching their aggro against my little undergeared druid tank. On the other hand Tamarind's post was still freshly on my mind, and this was a different guild.
Unfortunately it turned out that the wary part of me was right. We had barely entered the instance and buffed up when the druid instructed me to "pull lots" to make it a fast run. Sorry, but for someone who just made the whole group wait to finish his WSG match that's a pretty daft first thing to say. Not to mention that I don't appreciate backseat drivers, especially not when I'm already doing them a favour by putting the group together and providing my tanking services (which are pretty hard to find on my server at the moment).
Still, in my eternal desire to please everyone I tried to go along with his wishes as we made our way to Ormorok the Tree-Shaper, especially as the high density of mobs in there and the aura of regeneration made it easy to pull two packs at once without getting anyone into serious trouble. For a while we were okay, though I noticed that our healer had an alarming tendency to run ahead and moonfire mobs to then "bring" them to me. I really wanted to say "You want to tank then? Fine!" and let him die, but the problem is that while you can do this with annoying dpsers no problem, letting your healer die is kind of like shooting yourself in the foot, even if you are well-geared.
When we got to the section of the instance that contains Grand Magus Telestra our tree started to get more impatient again. "Pull more!" he urged constantly. I said no, since these trash mobs silence a lot, which is really annoying for a paladin tank and makes it hard to keep aggro properly. He was convinced that I should just be able to hit consecrate once and be done. Just before the boss he got so impatient that he pulled an extra pack despite of my warnings. I tried to taunt them off him, but since the paladin "mass" taunt only hits up to three targets that wasn't all of them. Add to that me getting silenced again right after and you won't be surprised to hear that both our tree and the warlock died. The remaining two dps and I managed to finish off the rest of the mobs just fine with me popping a few survival cooldowns. I resisted the urge to say something smug as I resurrected the druid, but quietly hoped that he had learned his lesson.
This was of course not so. He immediately reprimanded our warlock for sitting down to drink after having just been resed. "Just life tap, it's faster." God help us if a warlock doesn't want to drain himself to one hit point to fill up a completely empty mana bar! Then, as soon as we had killed the Magus, he started to emote /sleep on every other trash pack to express his boredom, only interrupting to press his "pull more" macro occasionally. Just to make things clear, I'm not one of those tanks who does a ready check for every trash pull and then waits ten seconds afterwards. I tend to pull quite speedily, but I don't like rushing for the sake of rushing.
Unlike our druid, who started moonfiring things again. I was so fed up with him by that time, all I really wanted to do was say "Look, there is no shortage of healers at the moment, if you insist on being an idiot you can find yourself another group" and kick him. But we were so close to finishing and finding another healer would have taken some time at least that I decided to keep my mouth shut for a few more minutes and get on with it. But I definitely won't group with this guy again.
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This is the Final Finding Jaina Day
3 hours ago
Bugger. I just wrote a long commiseratory post and Wordpress ate it. It seems that Dickhead Syndrdome is an infectious disease. I was the unwitting carrier, and spreading it from my blog, to your, and then it manifested in your game during your Nexus run.
ReplyDeleteObviously been a healer m'self, I rarely see other healers behaving like tossers so I'm genuinely bewildered. I mean, being a healer enforces you to recognise your vulnerability and your dependence on others early on - of course, all classes are dependent on each other but I suspect many DPS classes secretly think they're independent operators. Tego (tank ego) is pretty common, I've found, since tanks are the heavily-armoured person at the front, setting the pace, and being the most visible presence.
But, God, that guy was just a moron, regardless of role. My delicate nerves don't require a ready check before every pull but I'd much prefer an over-cautious tank to a reckless tank. Regardless, sounds like you were my ideal tank - considerate, knowledgeable, skilled, polite and setting a sensible pace.
I have a pally tank and I know exactly what you are talking about, people who haven't played tankadins and don't appreciate that we only have one AOE agro generator and two ranged pulling spells one of which has a cast time and the other with a cool down timer.
ReplyDeleteWe have only two ways of getting the agro back if and when we lose it and one of those has very low success rate (with me anyway)
The cool down on my SOR spell is what controls my time between pulls, if I manage to throw that first then the pull will normally be good and the agro more or less concentrated on me.
I hate healers that insist on throwing a heal spell just as you are running in to drop consecration at the feet of a large group and I also hate (other than hunters with misdirect who I love) ranged DPS who insist on shooting at mobs that are running towards you but haven't yet hit the circle of consecration.
I consider myself a very experienced tank and like to think that pallys have a lot of tools in their box to play with, almost too much to remember every one in the heat of the moment which brings me to the last thing I hate, DPS that have read up on one or two things about paladins and think that they can run him better than you can, they criticise your choice of seals and auras then moan when they expected you to do something to save their skins after they have done something silly and pulled agro off you onto the main group.
I like to run PUG groups and have spent a lot of time and gold making sure I am crit proof and can generate as much agro as possible on a pull, there are a lot of elitist players out there who all have T9/T10 gear and can generate amasing amounts of DPS, some can remember the time when they couldn't and have the patience required to run with the pugs, others are just frankly rude and need to go run their raids with their other elitist friends and leave us poor unraidworthy guys alone.
Sorry that turned into a rant there lol.
Anyway, I have had more good experiences than bad which is why I still play the game, but the gap between new level 80s and long experienced ones is growing and with it will come the gap in gear, this is where it will lead us.