Now Horde too will be able to walk into their main cities and see the Trade and General chats spammed with “Striping 4 g @ AH door!!”
The best way for a healer class to get control of a group is to tell whoever is tanking that their hp bar will be kept at the same level as the healer’s mana bar. That usually slows down an overzealous puller. I also tell others that if they steal aggro, they’ll get a heal or rezz, whichever is necessary, between pulls.
I play a bit of Battlefield: 1942 on-line (yeah, I know, it’s old), and I have to say, when you get a good team working, it’s an amazing, unparalleled gaming experience.
Of course, if you don’t, it’s a n00bfest of the highest order, and incredibly frustrating.
Most of the problems surround the planes and vehicles in the game- especially the planes. Because many of the planes are 2-seaters (pilot/rear gunner), it’s generally considered not only useful but polite to wait for a few seconds before taking off, so that another player can get in the rear gunner’s seat if they want (even if it’s purely for transport, so they can bail out later).
Of course, a lot of people (n00bs!) simply take the plane and fly off without waiting to see if anyone wants a lift (even when people are telling them to wait so they can get aboard), which brings me in a roundabout way to my second point: Aircraft Etiquette.
If you are actually flying (ie the pilot in) an aircraft (in either BF1942 or BF Vietnam), it is considered extremely bad form to bail out without warning your passengers, unless the plane has been severely damaged. By the time the passenger(s) realise you’ve jumped, the plane has usually lost so much momentum or altitude that it’s impossible to bring it back under control, with the result that it crashes, killing everyone on board as they can’t bail out at low altitude.
Secondly, learn to fly the planes in single-player mode first. The respawn times on the planes can be a minute or more, and its incredibly frustrating to watch your air force get wiped out by 14 year olds who can’t type properly or act like mature people, when they take the planes, get airborne, then crash into a tree or a hill or something a few hundred yards away.
One of my most memorable BF1942 experiences took place on the Coral Sea map, which is just a big ocean map with lots of islands and two aircraft carriers (with planes) facing off over it. First team to sink the other carrier wins.
I hitched a lift in a 2-seat SBD Dauntless Dive-Bomber as the rear gunner, and the pilot made several passes over the Japanese carrier, bombing it several times whilst I shot up the planes and people on the deck.
The Japanese carrier was getting bombed by other planes from our team, and someone got on the AA guns and eventually shot our plane up so badly we had to ditch (we were too low to bail out). We came down behind the carrier, jumping out at the last second, and swam towards it while the rest of our team bombed the carrier. We climbed on board, and started planting explosives, detonating them everywhere and reloading from an ammo crate, until the carrier started sinking- at which point we climbed on to the flight deck just as a Japanese “Val” bomber spawned. We both jumped in and took off down the flight deck as the carrier sank, with the water washing over the deck just as we took off, preventing anyone else from taking off or returning fire.
It was more exciting in the game, of course, but it remains to me the perfect example of how teamwork can really improve games, instead of just having a massive free-for-all.
And I wouldn’t touch WoW with someone else’s 60ft pole, based on some of the stories I’ve heard. 
By level 59, you should pretty much know your role. It would be when they want you to something different that they should tell you about it.
Pallys don’t tank. Repeating, pallys don’t tank. They can soak up damage like a tank, but they really can’t hold aggro like a tank. Unfortunately, that means that pallys are healbots with cleanse… and the guy that the 'locks soulstone.
It really doesn’t matter what is in each group in a raid. Every healer should have everyone’s health monitored in the raid, and can heal them whichever group they’re in. When we do Garr, we have 4 warlocks and a pally in one group to banish the adds and with the pally healing.
pfffft good one, good one!
The other day someone insisted in explaining to my gnomage that she shouldn’t carry such a “low level weapon”. That water breathe staff from Gnomeregan, you know? In pristine condition, I’ve never hit anything with it! Kind of makes me feel like the Worst Proportioned Icy Majorette Ever, that thing…
The guy finally decided I must actually know what I was doing once we got to the Monastery and they found out a barely-high-enough mage can sheep just fine. BAAAAAH!
Yep, fire blaster, and that certainly sounds like him.
Truuuuue, but I find it works a bit better to have everyone focused mainly on healing their own group–it spreads out the heals a little better, instead of the MT getting blasted with heals while the rogues are dying. It helps stem overhealing and mana waste. I used to go through my mana pool on my druid fairly fast. Then it occurred to me, “Stop healing everyone in the raid. Especially the MT. Every other healer in the raid is watching him, he’ll be fine.” Granted, I spend half my time in MC spitting out starfires anyways, we’ve got it down quite well by now.
But, "when you get a good team working, it’s an amazing, unparalleled gaming experience.
Of course, if you don’t, it’s a n00bfest of the highest order, and incredibly frustrating." 
Good Lord, who_me, who do you play with? I want in!
I agree with everything you’re saying. But in my experience, most 60s don’t know how to play their class. Pallies holding aggro? Whadaya mean, “hold aggro”? We all just wade in and kill things, right? Same with “watch health bar”. If I get a priest who manages to watch the health bars in their own group, I’m a happy girl. Watch health bars in another group? HAHAHahahhahaAHAHHAHAHAhahhahaha!
I never thought I’d look back at EQ as a good thing, but really… that game forced some basics when grouping. It sucked to wipe. Even a bad wipe in WoW is a 5 or 10 minute recover, and a lot of times it’s only a minute or two.
Sometimes I wonder why I play at all.
I love my guild. We’re not one of the biggest guilds, or one of the furthest along in the endgame, but we work together… mostly. Our Pallys are the best, one of them used to be consistantly the top raid healer… until he gave his account to his cousin. I’m not going to say that all are people are the best… we have one Priest who (according to the new raid statkeeper addon I have) did about 4% of the healing in the raid, while doing 60% of the overhealing. I’m still trying to figure out whether he actually healed anyone that wasn’t at full health.
Our healing strat is that a priest and a druid are usually assigned to the main tank and to the offtank(s) if we need them. Those guys will heal no one other than the tank they are assigned to. The other priests and druids heal the rest of the raid, while still keeping an eye on the tank(s). Rogues generally don’t get heals, nor will DPS warriors… unless a healer has nothing better to do. These guys are expected to have 300 in First Aid and bandages. If no one is actively dying, then pretty much every one gets heals.
We shocked several newer guild members when they found out that we used to play the “Peanut Butter Jelly” song after downing a boss.
We’ve grown since then, now we only sometimes play the “50 DKP MINUS!!” guy when we do Onyxia.
If you want to be healed, stay where the healer can reach you. This means that if you have the Flight power pool, and the Defender you are teamed up with doesn’t, don’t be suprised if you don’t get healed after deciding to fly up and attack the villains on that high rooftop. Your attacks have much longer range than my heals.
If the entire team is getting wiped, it is not my job to stay around and get killed. If I wanted a character who could fight the villains himself, I wouldn’t have built a healer. If the rest of the team is wiped out, my job is to run away and find a safe location where I can teleport and rez the fallen team members.
Yes, as a 59 I SHOULD know my role, and mostly I do. However, once in awhile you group with someone you don’t know and they work their groups/roles slightly differently.
I did not say as a pally I was a MT, only that sometimes I’m required to fill a sort of tank role.
Finally, I disagree with you on the raid group set-up. It is impossible to for one person to monitor the health of 40 people. That’s just stupid. I’ve mostly played in groups where each healer is sort of assigned to a MT for each group/maybe two groups and the people in those groups. Again, LESS chance of dying; less mana being used.
I’ve played a cleric on Everquest for a few years and many levels. I’ve only ever had difficulties similar to yours on one occasion. One night, we were killing as a 6-member group. No one had died after greater than two hours of almost uninterrupted combat. Many times throughout the night I would run out of mana and clearly state so to my group so that they would not pick a fight while the cleric was down. Toward the end we lost our warrior (the main combatant) and replaced him. This was just after a particularly difficult brawl which left me out of mana and unable to heal. I made the new warrior aware of this. He starts fighting anyway. It did not go well and he starts yelling for heals. I didn’t know what to say. I settled for: “Dude, I told you I was out of mana.” He then runs for the ‘zone’ and inexplicably says that he is not grouping with a cleric who cannot play the character. ??? Of course, the rest of the group, nearly simultaneously, asked varying degrees of WTF!? Then he drops from the group and likely put us all on ignore as he never responded to any personal messages.
Was he merely stirring shit, or is he actually as big an idiot as he appeared?
I’m not picking on you or anything, but I disagree. The reason for a tank grabbing aggro is for the mob to be hitting him… and basically only him. The rest of the raid group will be taking little damage other than AOE damage. Yes, this can kill them, but all they have to do is get out of the AOE and bandage themselves. For the relatively minor damage they take, a free or group healer can scan the health bars on their screen and if they so desire… keep the emergency monitor up that will show you the people with low health.
At 59, you may or may not have done any of the Molten Core or Onyxia. MC is (for those of you not in WoW) the first of the big 40 character end game instances. If you have the mobs hitting on someone other than one of the tanks, that character is going down unless they have low life and die before killing him… except a Pally maybe with their plate armor and self healing and his ability to shield himself.
In order not to have non-tanks taking major damage, they need to ensure that they never pull aggro off of the tanks. That’s why most of the healing is busy keeping an eye on the tank. You miss healing him/her for 15 or 20 seconds and the mob will be in the caster camp killing healers, because the tank will be dead. Until someone with some survivability can pull the aggro from the casters, your raid will be in serious danger of a wipe. We can survive the assorted people dying, but unless we have a second tank with the ability to pull quick aggro… we can’t survive a tank dying.
Generally, unless we have several things go wrong… we can kill the first 8 Bosses in MC without losing a lot of people and many times lose no one during the various boss fights. Domo, the 9th boss kills 1/2 the raid and if something goes wrong… the whole raid… we’re still working on getting the strat correct for him. The final boss Rag has wiped us every time…so far.
Ack! That’s so badly worded…
If you have the mobs hitting on someone other than one of the tanks, that character is going down unless they ( **The Mob not the player) have low life and die before killing the player…
I give up…
If you have the mobs hitting on someone other than one of the tanks, that character is going down unless they ( The Mob not the player) have low life and die before killing the player…
Idiot and more than likely a child.
This is how my guild has it set up. Ideally each group has a main healer and a backup. Main healer keeps his eye on MA/SA and their group with the backup. SA engages a couple seconds after MA so hopefully if he goes down SA will be next on hate. At the present time though we are borrowing players from other guilds so the teamwork isn’t always there.
(hijack)
Anyone WoWers playing on Darkiron? I’m ‘aankh’ there too - she’s a young alt (21 Priest). So far I’ve had good experiences with PUGs. Pst me or drop me a mail in-game if you play on this server.
I’m not taking it as picking on me. We just have different points of view. It’s all good.
Look, I try to keep an eye on everyone, but really it’s easier to know that I’m responsible for certain players. I try to monitor everyone, because let’s face it, sometimes the other healers die, or they’re busy. It’s all about teamwork.
Which brings me to why I haven’t played for months on end. The teamwork aspect just seemed to disappear. When we first started playing, we had a great guild, worked well together (most of us were older), and there wasn’t any squabbling about loot. We layed out the rules before going in and things worked well. Eventually, the guild just fell apart and my husband and I started playing in PUGs or with remnants of our guild. It just wasn’t the same. To be sure, there were a few good groups, but most seemed to have been taken over by idiots.
The game just stopped being fun. My husband and I were playing to have FUN, it wasn’t a job. Some people just took the game too seriously and we decided we’d had enough. My kids still play and have quite a few 60 characters.
I’m not sure I’ll play again.
I mostly solo because, except for Two Dollar Horde (made up of Dopers, former Dopers and their friends) most of my party experiences have been. . . not satisfactory. Since I’m a soloist with alt-itis, I’ve yet to have to party as my highest ranking character is a level 42 human warrior.
If I pary, I try to be good and stick with them until everyone had what they need. Only once have I ever hearthed out of a party. I was a level 15 Druid and hanging out in front of Gromen. . . Gorgmen. . . that Gnomish dungeon near Ironforge when a level 20 druid and warrior asked me to join. They both ran ahead and yelled, “HEAL ME!!!” every 10 seconds. The warrior I could see, but that 20 druid really pissed me off. So I hearthed home.
But I have to tell you, the people who really piss me off are those guys who know everything and scream and yell at everybody in their party as if they were drill sargeants.
Here’s an extreme example of what I mean:
http://ragnarosisserious.ytmnsfw.com/
According to my son, he’s a regular guy who just lost it. I laughed when I heard it but if I was anybody in his qroup, I’d have made a character on the opposing side, leveled it up real good and then camped his ass for a month-- that’s how pissed I’d be at him.