I see a lot of posts full of dissatisfaction with PvE gameplay, expressing boredom with normal difficulty and frustration with high end content, so I wanted to share what keeps me playing PvE: dealing with situations where things go wrong, and coming away with “war stories” of great successes or failures in normal difficulty content. Often have I played Blue Healer as a tank when the actual healer has died in a dungeon (thank goodness we now have Phoenix Downs!), or been Scythe Tank on Reaper when the actual tanks are dead or have their stance down in alliance raids. But there are a couple of particular stories that stick in my mind about helping struggling players through content…
Back when I was leveling Ninja a couple years ago, I queued for a high level dungeon roulette and got Aetherochemical Research Facility with a healer on their first time through. It went fine up until the second phase of the final boss, where our healer died to Dualstar, then we DPS died to unavoidable partywide damage, then the tank (of course) couldn’t pass the DPS check alone. So we wipe and come back and the same thing happens again. The next time I take a few minutes to explain the mechanic and how to know where to go, but the healer dies and we wipe a third time. This continues for a while, and I have little ability to do anything about it because I don’t really have party support as Ninja, until finally I take a few moments to make callout macros telling the healer where to go on each instance of Dualstar. With that help, we finally clear.
Another example happened last night: I was healing a struggling party with several first-timers in M12 Normal. There were a LOT of deaths on the first pull, and both of us healers were struggling to keep the party alive. Finally it was down to me, one tank, and one DPS, with my Swiftcast on cooldown, and I got killed by a stack marker so we wiped. Second pull, we did a bit better but DPS was still very low and I eventually flubbed a mechanic I don’t normally have to deal with; I died, and the party dwindled to just one tank, the other healer, and one DPS. We had LB3 and we exhorted the healer to use it, but they didn’t and we wiped at 2% health on the first phase.
The other healer departed without a word immediately after that, and before I could suggest we wait for a new healer, one of the tanks pulled again. I thought to myself, “welp, guess I’m solo healing this,” and gave it my best shot … and succeeded. People were starting to learn the fight and there were fewer deaths, but it was a real challenge. Party DPS was still low and the fight must have dragged out for 15 minutes or more, but I managed to solo heal the whole thing; I got a lot of praise in chat, and a heap of commendations.
So, those are the kinds of things that keep PvE fun and interesting for me: improvising in difficult and unexpected situations, pulling victory out of disaster, and helping struggling players. Anyone else have similar war stories?
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Back when I was leveling Ninja a couple years ago, I queued for a high level dungeon roulette and got Aetherochemical Research Facility with a healer on their first time through. It went fine up until the second phase of the final boss, where our healer died to Dualstar, then we DPS died to unavoidable partywide damage, then the tank (of course) couldn’t pass the DPS check alone. So we wipe and come back and the same thing happens again. The next time I take a few minutes to explain the mechanic and how to know where to go, but the healer dies and we wipe a third time. This continues for a while, and I have little ability to do anything about it because I don’t really have party support as Ninja, until finally I take a few moments to make callout macros telling the healer where to go on each instance of Dualstar. With that help, we finally clear.
Another example happened last night: I was healing a struggling party with several first-timers in M12 Normal. There were a LOT of deaths on the first pull, and both of us healers were struggling to keep the party alive. Finally it was down to me, one tank, and one DPS, with my Swiftcast on cooldown, and I got killed by a stack marker so we wiped. Second pull, we did a bit better but DPS was still very low and I eventually flubbed a mechanic I don’t normally have to deal with; I died, and the party dwindled to just one tank, the other healer, and one DPS. We had LB3 and we exhorted the healer to use it, but they didn’t and we wiped at 2% health on the first phase.
The other healer departed without a word immediately after that, and before I could suggest we wait for a new healer, one of the tanks pulled again. I thought to myself, “welp, guess I’m solo healing this,” and gave it my best shot … and succeeded. People were starting to learn the fight and there were fewer deaths, but it was a real challenge. Party DPS was still low and the fight must have dragged out for 15 minutes or more, but I managed to solo heal the whole thing; I got a lot of praise in chat, and a heap of commendations.
So, those are the kinds of things that keep PvE fun and interesting for me: improvising in difficult and unexpected situations, pulling victory out of disaster, and helping struggling players. Anyone else have similar war stories?
Continue reading...