Need more level headed tanks! A plea from a healerFollow

The cleric's job is to sit at the back of the group meditating and keeping everyone alive, and keep quiet.

This is all he/she should be concentrating on.

The pace of the pull is determined by the MA and the Puller. And based on how quickly they are able to despatch each mob and how well CC is working.

The cleric has no business interfering in this as he/she has no idea of the mob placement and density and shouldn't even be worrying about CC unless things get desperate.

The cleric has more than enough to worry about in keeping everyone alive, conserving mana and not taking aggro.

If it is a bad group and the cleric is constantly going LoM healing everyone, he/she has to use his/her skills to prioritise his/her targets and the type of heal to use to try to be as efficient as possible. It is possible for a good cleric to carry a bad group in this way.

If it is a good group and the cleric is only having to cast an occasional HoT to top up the MA and is sitting around constantly FM, then he/she should stun or nuke according to which ever provides the most benefit.

If you're fighting undead, obviously nuking undead can shorten the battle considerably. Somtimes casting stuns judiciously can ensure that you almost never need to heal at all.

Personally I think the cleric has more than enough to do without wanting to "direct the traffic" as well.

Rarely nowadays do the healers run out of mana (KEI, FT items and tanks who just don't require as much healing with LDON mobs hitting like they do)

Typically in LDON I get chanters running out of mana (with all the adds etc... especially when a tank is pulling).

As a tank who sometimes pulls in LDON, it's usually pull until someone starts screaming LOM or OOM (someone important, I don't give a #@$@#$ if the wizard runs OOM). I for one would not want to hear your healing mana update on everypull. It would get annoying.

http://www.magelo.com/eq_view_profile.html?num=726981

Yes. I'm digging up a day old thread. Sue me! :)

I think that a combination of many of the ideas on this thread are what's needed. Obviously, if you have an idiot puller/tank who doesn't listen or pay attention, you're going to have problems. Nothing you can do will fix the other guy's problems. If he doesn't filter combat spam, and doesn't pay attention to his group chat, then no amount of you playing tricks with different channels will help.

It's each groupmember's job to make sure that they have their interface set up to be useful to the group. There's no one "right" way. While some general suggestions are good (direct combat spam out of your gsay box at a minimum), there's a ton of variation that will work differently with different playstyles and classes.


Additionally, it doesn't really matter who's asking whom for information. Communication in general is the key. The puller should be aware not just of the healers mana state, but the *rate* of gain/loss of mana. The idea of the puller asking for mana levels after each fight is a bit tedious. However, the "pull until OOM" approach isn't that bright either. What you need is something in between. All casters in a group should adjust their casting rate to the pull rate. If that means that their mana level is dropping over time, they should let the puller know. A simple: "Hey. We're losing mana here, slow up a tad" to the puller works wonders. Your pull rate is going to be the same whether all your casters are sitting at 4m or 1m. You may as well be at 4m so you've got some leeway if/when something goes wrong.


The puller needs to be aware of everyone's mana rate. Not the exact amounts, but whether he's pulling too fast or too slow. That's all he needs to know. If the mana expenditure of all casters is equal to the mana regen rate (they're mana level is relatively constant over time), then the puller is pulling at exactly the correct rate. What most people miss about group mana management, is that the key factor isn't so much worring about the low end of the mana, but the high end. If casters are ever sitting at FM, you have wasted ticks of med time, and therefore wasted mana, and therefore lost kills you could have gotten. The trick is to maintain mana levels as high as possible without ever letting anyone top out. Running your casters out of mana isn't a sign of a good puller.

The casters need to adjust their casting to what the other casters are doing. If the nuker is 0M, but the healer is 4m, then the nuker is casting too much. If he casts a bit less, the mobs will take a bit longer to kill, and the cleric will use a bit more mana per kill. This will even out the mana rate for those two characters and result in a better sustained pull rate. There's nothing more annoying then killing really fast right up until the wizard runs out of mana, then either sitting on your butt (with some folks wasting at FM) or thinking that's the pull rate for the group, over pulling and running the group into the dirt (and getting people killed). When you play a caster, always always always look to get that sustained rate going. Once you've achieved some sort of mana parity with the rest of the casters, then the puller will naturally know exactly how fast he can pull. Lots of mistakes and deaths can be avoided that way.


Again. If you've got a total idiot pulling, you're dead no matter what you do. Just put that person on the "do not group with ever" list and move on.