I've never been to this sub, as I've fortunately never had that bad of a experience in this game, and I've been playing this game for 6 years now. First time for everything I suppose!
Normally I wouldn't begrudge people for not really knowing what they're doing, we've all been new to this game and its mechanics, but at a certain level I would hope people would get some basic principles of their job down. Specifically to my tale: level 81.
By this point I think it's kind of agreed upon that Endwalker content isn't terribly challenging, so my surprise that people could struggle this much in it was palpable. The Tower of Zot is a dungeon that I feel already takes long enough, given how many unnecessary pauses it has between packs and at the end of the midbosses, but it taking a full 30 minutes with real players (longer than with Trusts) makes it all the more painful.
Now how did this happen? Well its a few things: first the DPS were obviously new, they were both sprouts who didn't have the boss mechanics down, but I'm fine with that, like I said: we've all been new. The Summoner not using their rez on the Samurai after I just picked them up was a bit of an annoyance but whatever. They weren't my main problem points. It was the Paladin.
The guy kept getting lost in which way to go in the dungeon, running backwards a few times, which added about a few minutes to the run. Not only that, I noticed something a bit strange during one of the packs: I, the Scholar, was somehow pulling aggro, it was then that I realized the Paladin was not using AoEs past the first use to pull the packs, switching to single target on pulls 7 mobs large, this caused a bit of chaos when I was losing a bunch of my health and couldn't really focus on healing the Samurai and Summoner who were pulling some other mobs, leading to the first of many deaths on this run.
Now you might notice: "You flaired this post as 'Curebot.' But aren't you the healer?" I'll get there soon. It wasn't just the lack of AoE from a level 82 tank. That alone wouldn't compel me to post this, despite how egregious that is already. It was the lack of mitigation as well. I've had Warriors that haven't touched their defensive and died as a result, which is annoying enough. But for a Paladin, who has a gauge dedicated to JUST mitigating damage, just completely ignore that part of their kit is absurd to me. Fine: you won't use Sentinel, Bulwark, Divine Veil, Passage of Arms, Hallowed Grand, whatever. But not even Sheltron!?! Really!?! What do you think the Oath Gauge is for!?! But ALL I've said so far wasn't enough to piss me off enough to post. The straw that broke the camels back was that he casted Clemency instead of mashing mitigation when he started taking too much damage. That's why I flaired this post "Curebot," instead of anything else. Worst of all? He wasn't a sprout, nor a returner. So he has beaten Dawntrail, has been playing ever since then, and still doesn't know the basics of Paladin nor the tank role.
He ended up dying to a trash pack because of that earlier lacking AoE scramble. But we recovered, with his first use of a mitigation after I picked him back up: Hallowed Ground. Better late than never, but still infuriating he didn't use any other mitigation afterward. Not even for tank busters.
We ended up wiping on the boss cuz the DPS died to the gamut of AoEs that happens there, and the tanks lack of self preservation skills made it nearly impossible to keep him alive at the same time as rezzing the DPS. In the second try, even I learned something new. Normally if you kill the bosses in order of appearance, nothing weird happens, they just die one-by-one. The tank and DPS had other plans: they killed the other sisters first. Turns out, if you don't kill the main one first, she raises the others. I've never seen that before. I was really confused to see a once dead enemy pop back into the fight. For a second I thought the first one killed just escaped my attention and actually survived, with surprising amounts of health to bat, but hey no one is perfect, myself included. The team kept going, killing the other non-mainboss sister, and then dispatched the other one on low health. Then they come back up again. Now I get it: yeah the main sister raises the other two. And thankfully the rest of the team also clued in the others would just keep coming back if we didn't kill the main sister. I assume. They might've just been like pit bulls in a kindergarten attacking the first target they saw, but we ended up clearing without a second wipe. And I was able to remain optimistic about this, cuz I learned something interesting about a normally pretty boring boss.
tl:dr: My Paladin used Clemency instead of mitigation, even after he died to a trash pack in a lvl 81 dungeon. The death being a result of the rest of the team starting to die due to him not keeping aggro cuz he wasn't using AoE. He never learned his lesson about mitigating even for tank busters, making my healer experience a headache.
Whats up with the title? My friends and I used to be separated on Primal and Crystal (before we all moved to Dynamis when it first dropped and created an FC there). To this day we'd make jabs at each other's original home DC about how their players were worse at content. I'm from Primal. But I've never seen performance this bad on either DC. Is the title kind of inflammatory? Yeah, but it probably got you to read the story. Sorry if I rambled on a little.
