As much as people complain about weekly lock on loot..Follow

I don't think the players actually get dumber, but I think more people become interested in doing the content.

Remember, if you possess even average intelligence, then fully half the people you encounter will be stupider than you.

Sure takes me back to those FFXI days...

How can that be though, the game required 70 less intelligence to play...

I've only been doing ST and Extreme Roulettes, but to me it's a combination of people who didn't farm the content before (even if they did it) and not caring because the content is old.

Mostly not caring. Like, oh this is old content, just let these people carry me.

Absolutely disagree. If there was still a lockout, the queues wouldn't be 5 minutes for dps right now, and people like myself would have a hard time catching back up to participate in current content. Right now I've been running ST constantly so that I can reach 110. With the nerfs to hunts, sands and oils are even harder to get (because no one does hunts anymore).

I've gotten 3 oils, 1 tomestone, and 1 sand in about 6 runs. I feel I've been particularly lucky, but RNG is fair in its absolute unfairness.

The vast majority of my trips into ST were fine. I did get that "one group" however that played badly and blamed the healers.

It all started with Scylla, of course. I myself got frozen, which isn't a crisis but the entire 5 DPS members were standing in a puddle while Ancient Flame wasn't being cast, and you guessed it, someone stopped by with an ice sphere and froze them all (a first for me to see a freeze that bad). Which then evaporated the puddle they were in. And then staff AoE plus Ancient Flame nuked them all. And they all complained that it was "someone new" who screwed it all up for them, even though no one told them to all bunch up in a puddle at once like that, and if they weren't new, they should have known better.

So we're down to 2 healers and a tank, who was main tanking Scylla, by the way, so I have to prioritize. I throw out Raises when I can, but I can't Swiftcast them all and it takes a good 8 seconds to cast it which is an eternity in an AoE fest (people are getting hurt while you're casting plus if you have to dodge, you have to start that long cast all over). So, after 8 seconds of ignoring the tank, I'm overdue for a Cure 2 in that direction, and the person I raised gets up and gets blasted by a no-warning Unholy before I can follow up with a cure. So I get a, "What, no follow up cure?" as though this was the first time they ever saw this happen to someone, and there couldn't have been a good reason. With all that raising, I'm running on fumes, but the bard, who has never heard of Mage Ballad, won't cease to complain that we're losing to bad healing without any sense of irony.

But where the group was all bunched up before, now they were spread all over the map. I get that sometimes you have to move away to deliver a sphere, but there's no reason everyone needs to spread out at once. There's nothing more infuriating than when you cast a Medica 2 while you have almost MP left and you realize that the only people who received it was the tank and the other healer because the DPS who were right behind you have all moved away. I have to try hunting down the other 5, one by one, to individually cast cures on them before they die from the next Unholy or whatever AoE they'll fail to dodge, all the while keeping the main tank alive, and all the while the DPS complain that I'm doing a lousy job. It's pretty much futile to save everyone in that situation. Casting takes too long to get to everyone in time, and any instructions you give to improve the situation are seen as lame excuses and ridiculed.

So eventually, the DPS were a lost cause: all dead because they wouldn't stick to the group, and they would be triple weak (or worse) if raised again, and both us healers were out of mana, anyway (first time I needed to grab an MP potion from my inventory since forever). So we focused on the main tank and let the rest of the alliance carry us in shame.

I probably should have quit right after the fight, but I stuck around for more hijinks. We had a black mage with us who had over 5000 hp, so he was well-geared, and should have known better. But on the Glasya robot, he peeled hate off the tank, who was main tanking up to that point, so he probably struggled to get control at first. The robot punched the mage for half his health; I started casting a cure as soon as I saw it, but it was too late. He died a fraction of a second later because he chose to type the words HEAL instead of dodging the easily avoided AoE underneath him. But then he rips into the healers for not saving him, as though he was totally blameless for his actions (Quelling Strikes? Manawall? Maybe not tossing out your hardest nukes in your repertoire before the tank has control?), and as though there was any chance we could have saved him. Even more spectacular was that after he was raised, he started attacking Glasya even though not all the robots were in place. So he nuked his own dumb self to death because Glasya reflects all attacks in those conditions, and he raged at the healers again.

And it was pretty much like that the rest of the way through. Any mistake a DPS made, it was the healer's fault, because it was already established we sucked, and nothing we could say about the mechanics of the game would convince them.

It's only the second time I've ever experienced a party like this, and the first was on the first day of ST.

So this isn't typical, just a rare instance of the worst that DPS has to offer all landing in the same party at once, like some kind of perverse Yahtzee. Most of the time, almost always, it's routine. People stay the near the healers, they don't stand in things they shouldn't (and they stand in things they should), and they don't lose their sh** if someone makes a mistake (especially if it's their own mistake and don't realize it).

Edited, Nov 3rd 2014 5:29pm by Xoie

You would have probably loved Everquest and early WoW then. Was a blast running 50+ man raids in EQ. Downside was the invariable loot headache of having to split one or two pieces of loot per boss kill among that many people.