24-person Raids are a big headache

Rant warning. This shit isn’t going to make its way to my tumblr because there is enough negativity on tumblr. This personal blog of mine has less audience and is quite a secluded place, so I will let my steam off in here.

I’m not a big fan of CT, ST and WoD. One of the reasons is that the possibility to run into a jerk (or jerks) intensifies, about roughly 3 times as much as a 8-person dungeon.

We have had to put up, or deal with, people who don’t cooperate. Tanks who do not like to be a team player. Tanks who do not do their job properly and let enemies eat a healer. Tanks who intentionally try to compete enmity and steal the boss from other tank instead of being cooperative. Tanks who kept darting ahead to secure enmity on a boss regardless of other people’s readiness. Tanks who insist on tanking even when they can’t handle the boss and keep dying. People who do not dodge AoE or who do not try to learn the mechanics even in real practice. People who pull bosses early when the alliance isn’t ready. People who pull boss and shut out a few or many members outside of the boss room (the most epic shut-out I’ve witnessed was like 8 people from 3 parties, where we, or course, wiped due to failing a DPS check phase). The list goes on and on.

And with people being overgeared nowadays, the new headache adds to the list: people deliberately ignoring mechanics and just focusing on brute force.

4 out of 5 times, in CT (The Labyrinth of the Ancients), people do not deal with skeleton adds in first boss room anymore. Worse yet, they (on Chaos Data center) prefer to tank the dragon on one edge of the room, as opposed to the center. This had been my woe since forever. I used to sneak into Masamune and they tanked in the center, allowing melee jobs to chase the skeletons and help killing them without having to run through like 10 yalms of deadly water, which could kill my monk in 5 seconds.

Just yesterday, in our CT run, Dew tried to tank it in the center. And it went well until the first wave of skeletons popped. People immediately killed them where they popped, which was center. I screamed into the voice call, and Dew ran the shit away, dragging the dying dragon with her to one edge of the room.  Then, someone killed 2 skeletons too close together, and yes they ran so fast, through deadly water, to the dragon and exploded.

The skeleton exploding fiesta continued in 2nd round of adds. And in 3rd round of adds, all the ahrimans chased me for forever without any sub tank picking them up and I had to use Benediction on myself to survive.

The headache continued in King Behemoth room. At least 2 person out of the whole alliance died to Meteor each round. This, I can forgive, because super fast DPS on Behemoth could mess up the phase and make him pop meteor much faster than people’s expectation.

Meanwhile, in both Behemoth room and last boss room, I saw Dew trying to tank, and the WAR from other party competed with her to get aggro. So I told her to slack off and let him tank.

Then, we continued to ST, where things weren’t as brutal to my mental health. People still died to stuff like Curtain Calls, as usual, but otherwise there’s not much to complain about.

The World of Darkness, however, was when I snapped. My irritation was too much pent up and grew out of control. You see, in Angra room (Eye boss), people stood there and waited. Dew  hesitated for a bit, and after seeing that the other tanks didn’t go in, she went in to tank. However, a WAR competed aggro and took it ( immediately resulting in a beam hitting a healer to death because of bad positioning). I told Dew to let him tank. In the middle of the battle, Dew was bound with level 150 spell or something, and people didn’t leave the circle properly, so she died at the same time with our other healer, and someone else in our party. I Swiftcast raised Dew (should have raised the healer, but at that very moment I failed to notice that our healer was among the casualties). Dew hit the wrong button and went homepoint, and ran back to the door.

Towards the end of the fight, this WAR tank moved to the door and tanked it on the edge of the room, messing up the position of Double Vision (red and white flood on the floor). So it was very hard to run to get to one of the colours, resulting in many people dying to 2 or 3 stacks. This was where I got really mad, but still refrained. I only told Dew that she should tank the next boss because this WAR tank is a pain in the ass.

At the Hydra boss, of course Dew went in. And while she was waiting for it to finish a cone AoE (before moving it into a proper tanking position) I saw with my own eyes that the WAR tank ran around the back of the boss and then darted ahead, doing something that pulled aggro, making me and many other people get hit by the boss’ swipe or breath attack (or whatever it was, which didn’t have AoE indicator). Dew took back the aggro, and the WAR did that shit again, and yes I got hit by something, due to the bad positioning of the WAR while trying to compete enmity.

I started typing “Don’t point the boss to other people, <t>” but then I saw that Dew completely gave up and stood on the side of the boss, so I deleted it. The fight went on and we won without much trouble.

Then, in Cerberus room, we stood there idly for so damn long. Dew didn’t want to tank because she knew that the WAR would steal hate again, instead of engaging right on to declare that they wanted to main tank. While Dew was asking me on voice chat whether we should go into the belly (we were team B), out BLM stepped ahead and started casting spell, and canceled it. The BLM repeated this many times. And I said to Dew, just go in quickly and secure hate. She did, and of course the WAR from team A competed and stole Cerberus.

I’ve lost it right there and typed in the alliance, “If you want to tank, just engage and tank instead of letting our PLD go in first and then compete to pull hate like a jerk.” To which no one said anything, except Corn in FC chat. He wanted no drama and told me to calm the hell down.

After we won, someone said something like “kek BLM pulled first. No tears.” and the WAR said “BLM pulled first.” All the time in my head I screamed “EXCUSES” because I didn’t see that the BLM spell went off.

In Atomos rooms where we had to split into 3 groups, our party only had 4 people in our little room. Before I could start typing to ask where the other 4 went, some asshole pulled. Again I was like “No….my party!” (had to cut my typing short because I had to start fighting and healing people). Again Corn was like, “chill, dude” and fought like it’s nothing, while in my head I kept having this echo of “OH SHIT WE WILL WIPE” all the time. The fight was quite tough because we didn’t have enough killpower to keep the giant off me or remove it fast enough. I ended up dying before the 3 of them killed off the last Atomos that popped.

Then, in last boss room, I got so pissed and told Dew to just /sit and don’t go in, no matter what happens. I /sit with her ans just stared at the damn BLM, from team B (our own party =_=) did that casting/canceling over and over again. Then, the spell went off, either accidentally or deliberately, and I saw with my own eyes that the BLM did pull first, at least in last boss room. He or she took 2 hits and died, and immediately homepoint so I wasted my Swiftcast for nothing.

Now the same person said “kek B BLM pulled first.” to which I replied “Yes gonna report him later.” and the BLM said “sorry misclicked ^^” (referring to Hompointing, I guess).

Corn got upset (or just annoyed) and said in FC chat “Can we just tank and heal and DPS and get it done and leave?” So I swallowed all my anger and just did my job, saving GM call on the BLM for after exiting.

Dew and I later discussed about the WAR tank using our BLM as an excuse to compete enmity. It’s just irrational and pointless to keep competing hate when the one who had hate was a PLD. Even if BLM pulling was truly why WAR decided to step in to grab aggro, there was no reason, at all, to keep competing when it is obvious that Dew, a PLD, had secured aggro. So we call it bullshit that the WAR and other person blamed it entirely on the disruptive BLM for enmity competition.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been through such a painful turbulence of epic failure of teamwork in 24-person raids. It’s making me hate CT, ST and WoD very much. People just won’t play nice and that drives a troublesome content even more insane and painful. Really, these raids are the main reason why I would hate FFXIV players and avoid interactions. It ruins the fun and makes the game stressful as opposed to enjoyable. I know it’s MMO, and freaks like that who like to bully or ruin the day of other people are in every corner of a data center. It can’t be helped. But I can’t stop wishing for a smooth run and friendlier environment. It is unfair that people who want to enjoy their game peacefully can’t do that because dozens of douchebags are out there ambushing everyone in every opportunity they see. /sigh  /double sigh