FFXIV: Tales from the Duty Finder – The July 1st Tank

I’m not sure what it is about roulettes lately, but they’ve been a constant source of blog posts. Since it’s mostly been the three of us running (Zeb, Amoon, myself), we’ve been picking up a random to fill in the blank. That’s usually a tank for Expert roulette.

Tanks seem to come in one of two flavors lately: A bit strange, but gentle with the pulls… or insane and wall-to-wall.

Now, I get that some tanks want to pull big to get the dungeon done more quickly. But last night, the tank chided me for using a limit break on a boss…. instead of the massive trash pull he planned to make later on.

Okay, so first, this Dark Knight tank zones in to Ala Mhigo wearing the Moonfire Faire speedos as a glamour. Ugh. This looks ok on female characters but on males… I’m not a fan. It’s about as impressive as tanks who glamour underwear.

Syn examines him and notes that his gear isn’t all that great. I’m not a healer, so I don’t really know what to look for. I just know that the guy constantly pulled big and that she could hardly do any DPS for fear that he would die if she wasn’t spamming heals.

So, despite crazy big pulls, we’re doing just fine. I know Ala Mhigo pretty well as it’s a common dungeon we roll on Expert. I’d finally upgraded all my gear like a good DPS, so I was feeling out my damage output, and pretty pleased with my AOEs.

Then we get to the second boss, and I limit break as I normally would. The tank pauses, and then:

What?

Did the tank just snark at me for using a limit break on the boss… instead of a trash pull? Who uses a limit break on a trash pull?

Well, apparently, I wasn’t reading his mind… because I discovered exactly which pull he’d expected me to LB down… because suddenly, he exclaims:

And he does this HUGE pull of just about everything from point A to B… three or four big groups. Only problem? He sprinted ahead of us, and the rest of the party got left behind, dodging an AOE… because we had no idea what “going to the gate” actually meant. In all the runs of this dungeon, I’ve never had a tank who did this.

Well, he died pretty quickly, followed by the rest of us.

This earned a “…” from me. Which is me showing disapproval without actually saying everything I really wanted to say to him about this mess. Syn and Amoon tried to explain:

What does the tank do? Proceed to insult the party.

This indicated that he would have to *sigh* pull slower for the noobs who didn’t know how to play with the big-boys… like you had to do back in July when the dungeon was still new. When he was the one who caused the wipe to start with.

At that point, I was really annoyed, and decided that he wasn’t getting a single AOE skill out of me for the rest of the dungeon, since he was in such a rush (we were close to the end anyhow). Syn had better ideas. After we easily cleared the first few individual pulls, this was how the conversation went:

By then, we were on the last boss, and he proclaimed:

Yeah, buddy. If that’s true, try acting your age.

Anyhow, not much else was said after that. Not sure if he got the point that not everyone can read his mind and that we aren’t all there for crazy speed runs. If you’re with your FC where you can communicate tactics like that, that’s fine. But in a roulette with randoms, don’t chide your DPS for doing what’s normally done, and run off without your healer expecting to stay alive. Just don’t.

These people don’t know how silly they come off. Or that they’re going to get blogged about. >:)

After the run talk:

Oh yeah. That’s right. The RPing tank. We’ll have to do that one tomorrow! 🙂

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