[frefaln]

Nice post OP, and as someone who tanked for years on Live I'm always encouraged to see people understanding/sharing the basic mechanics of an EQ group. And you are spot on.

I joined P99 a few weeks ago and was about 18 levels into a paladin, and I was quickly reminded of why I got burnt out on tanking on Live back in the day. Simply put, there is an engregious amount of ignorance, impatience, and immaturity out there. If you want to be a truly successful tank on P99 you're going to have to 1) simply accept the chaos that goes on around you, or 2) be an outspoken instruction-giver and risk getting a rep for being "bossy". Either way, you not only have to deal with your weighted workload but you often have to work against your own group members. You're screwed two different ways.

Since I don't have the energy for 50+ levels of that nonsense, I scrapped the pally and rolled a rogue. As luck would have it, my tanking experience has already made me a much better rogue than I would've been — because I know exactly what the tank's going through. For instance, when a paladin's tanking I actually wait to see that Flash of Light has landed before I go ape-shit with backstab. In other words, I actually pay attention to messages and group mechanics. Novel idea, eh?

The OP mentioned a tank pulling "occasionally", but I was always expected to pull since joining P99. And that's fine, I kinda like it. But I'll say this, I cannot believe how many people on P99 simply cannot sit still for one moment. If there aren't sparkles and battle spam they start going emo/schizophrenic. It's not just impatience but also ignorance, for it never seems to dawn on people that chaotic chain-pulling is not a guarantee that XP rate will increase. In fact, unless the group is just the right mixture and they're working together beautifully, it'll often have the opposite result. Think about it... if you're pulling DPS off the mob to chain-pull, the current mob dies later, the tank takes more damage, the healer's mana drains faster, and the tank will need to work harder to engulf aggro. And for what? A .04% increase in XP rate, if that? And all that's negated when the healer finally screams for a med break. Oh, the irony of impatience resulting in slower XP.

As much as I bashed SoE in the past, the original devs knew what they were doing. The dynamics of a group are very well designed and implemented, it's up to the players to not be impatient jackasses and actually let the well-oiled machine function as intended. If DPS classes would learn that pulling aggro isn't an accomplishment on their part (it's not hard) and would actually let the tank be the healer's sole target, they'd see that everything, including XP rate, goes so much more smoothly.