I just spent the last 2 hours in a party in WoW doing a quest that involved a instance dungeon. It was the one quest that took place in the deadmines in Westfall. In the party we had to warriors, a hunter, a mage, and me as a paladin. Since I was the only one that could heal others, I was the official healer for the group as well as the one that would ressurrect them. At first it seem to be going well. All four of them were holding there own so I didn't have to worry too much about healing them. However, later in the quest after the first boss encounter, it started to get real messy. The warriors started to get pissed off at me and resorted to cussing me out. At first I understood that I was messing up and apoligized but after a while, it was getting on my nerves. I'm not the kind of person who insults people back or talk smack behind them to others but I was really getting tempted to just tongue lash them. The reason it started going bad is because my party members kept running out of my sights and the enemies kept charging at me because my party members either lured them to me on accident or because I didn't notice one of them sneak up on me. Because its quite a journey to run back when you die, it was vital that I was kept alive so I could resurrect. However, no one seem to be too interested in protecting me and I got yelled at even though I was trying my best to keep them alive and keep myself out of harm's way. Anyway, we never did finish the quest because everyone couldn't take it anymore and bailed. Considering that I didn't even have the quest in the first place (I was doing the quest for them with absoluting no gain to me), you'd think they would be a little nicer to me, eh? It was only the warriors that were yelling at me. The mage and the hunter didn't get mad at all which was good.

I hope I didn't bore you with my slight rant about that session tonight. To make something of this thread, post your experiences with parties in MMORPGs, both good and/or bad ones.

I have a friend with whom i frequently mud on the realms of despair. I'm the ickle mage who sits back and hurls spells o' dhoom at things and he's the big paladin that things beat up on generally.

Unfortunately he is also very impulsive and headstrong. For instance the other day we'd been out slaying dwarves in Mithril Hall for a while, then came back and were chilling in the astral plane. I was totally out of mana and buffs and was resting up, when the Messenger of the Gods comes floating down and beings to say something like:

"Hark, have you heard about the troubles on Mount Olympus? Perhaps you would be willing to travel there with me and help us ou-- *GACKT*"
[gackt in this case indicating my friend having leapt up and decided to see how strong he was by stabbing him in the face].

This led to several minutes of us getting the snot absolutely beaten out of us, mostly me being wimpy, mana-less, and half-asleep [and thus very low armor class] at the time. I made up for it by running away and laughing at him from a room away while he struggled pitifully to defeat Hermes or whomever he was. Though somehow he did wind up beating him, and got a pair of winged sandals out of the whole event, which were marginally useless aside from having aff-fly.

Similar other events have happened more than a couple times, to be honest.

Which is why i find this comic to be incredibly hilarious by the way: http://www.vgcats.com/comics/images/040513.jpg

This is why I like FFXI. While that comic is certainly indicitive of early-level parties, those above level 20 will find that the ignorance and stupidity level falls exponentially. This is more or less because the idiots die so much, that they never get enough exp to make it to 20, much less to Quifim for leveling.

In FFXI, you usually only need one WHM healer, otherwise you won't have enough damage output. And everyone I've met makes sure the WHM lives, at all costs. (I've seen characters that only had 50HP left pull a monster off of me, just to give me the time to heal the tank. And keep in mind, this is before I had the raise WHM spell.)

I've only been yelled at in a couple of parties, which I either promptly left, or called for a mutiny and left the guy without a party. The ones that yell are usually the black mages and such that cry and whine that I didn't heal them when the tank is about to die himself, which would result in the entire party dying. Sorry, BLM is not as important as the entire party. Gotta make sacrifices somewhere.

I'm a Black Mage on FFXI and I hate healing when I'm levelling my Red Mage sub. People whine when I fail to heal them enough, despite the fact that Red Mages should never main heal. But otherwise, if the party is knackered and low on HP, and I'm the only one with any real strength, I'll chain nuke it and try to take out the git that took the rest of us out.

Hurrah, I'm off to Crawler's Nest.

Being the healer sucks. Everyone blames you when they die, even though 99% of the time it was their fault for doing something stupid.

That said, a really good healer can turn a bad team into a really good one. Also healers are pretty much always in demand, so it aint hard finding a group.

As for my experience with healers... Well ARRGH. My secondary character in City of Heroes was a Kinetics Defender. The most popular Defenders are Empathy, read: healers. Everybody wants a healer on their team, nobody realises how incredably useful the other Defender classes are. The number of 'can u heal??' tells I got quickly became very annoying. My answer was generally 'no, but I can keep your Stamina bar at 100% while increasing your attack rate by 30% and attack power by up to 300%'. A team invitation would usually follow.

You havent gotten very far, have you?

At level 41, the game changed dramatically, when RDMs get refresh. This makes RDM a main heal class as well as WHM, and the other things RDMs have to offer (Dispel, refresh, every buff known to man) makes them much more attractive to PTs then a WHM who has to /heal after every fight, instead of RDM who just ends every fight with MP.


RNG 54... so close to sidwinder...

Star Wars Galaxies.

We had some precious memories on there, though.

That is what I love about WoW so far. I have never partied to complete a quest, or level up. I know I might have to eventually, but I really like soloing in the game. That is the problem I had with FFXI, it was so party focused, you just could not level up by yourself. And yeah, I had some bad parties in FFXI. Being red mage and the only healer sometimes, well that just sucked.

Yeah, MMORPGs do tend to cause a mix of fun and pure anger. Especially within in tibia, because of the fact that it has free accounts, and is VERY popular with young brazillian kids. So you end up with a multitude of people spamming you with "pls mi hutn herr pls just 2k more xp" Only reason i play that game now is the awesome awesome pvp. Takes actual skill, not just high numbers:p

Healers usually cause moderate groups to become sloppy. They'll usually then go off and try something really stupid which the group can't handle and get all killed.

In non-epic NWN, I would almost always play Clerics(healers). But since HoTU sent the game epic, I now play almost exclusively Fighter/WM/Rogues, or some magical mix of a sneaky fighter.

the great part of lineage2

the women & the killing people that anger you