No flame throwers here.
I agree, in any game, no matter the combat system, you have to decide which player...not just character is more helpful to the group. In my EQ days, I have seen players allowed to die due to STUPIDITY (you don't wonder out of your room in a dungeon DUH!, you stick together and you don't just randomly pull when you aren't the main tank.)
If it hurts people's feelings to be "secondary tank" they can, level up melee enough, and get good enough armor that THEY can be main tank.
And since everyone can be a mage, most groups I have been in realized that I didn't mind the healer role, so the other mages learned to toss me a sap heal and live with ONE nuke, maybe two (that land and damage) per pull.
But in a game with NO sap regen skill other than sitting or heals, you have to conserve your sap.
tetra wrote:*dons asbestos suit*
Keep track of which groupmembers are most important. Whenever things get bad, or even strained, you will need to make decisions about who lives who dies and who has no sap/stam.
- The guy tanking the mobs is probably a pretty important person to keep alive.
- When you are in a group with multiple potential tanks, and you know that if the current tank drops that another one will take over, it might not be a bad idea to possibly let them drop for a second so you can cast sap/stamina on other group members because none of the other mages bothered to cast it at all ever when it would be an amazingly simple task for them to do and all stay at 100%.
- Prioritize the importance of a group member's contribution. After mobs and heals were "tweaked" early on, we were left with a game where in any decent high level group you will essentially cast various flavors of CH a good chunk of the time. Since you are often going to be chaincasting heals that keep a player from dropping in 2-4 hits, you may need to decide if giving a caster sap is important enough to risk the tank munching on the dirt for a bit. Even if caster A does more damage than caster B, it is very likely that caster B will be more important on your who to hp/sap list if they are tossing you hp/sap heals from time to time and caster A is not.
- Someone pulls six yettin/varnix/cuttler/etc to your group, the tanks are going down like dominos, and to top if all off you know that there is no chance for the group to survive through the pull... it's probably best for you to sneak off out of aggro range and wait for the mobs to wander away from the speedbump of corpses that slowed the mobs long enough for you to get away. It's much easier and faster to rez a few folks than it is for everyone to wander back from the tp/spawn.
- Sometimes you need to let an occasional warm body take a brief dirt nap when you are constantly begging for sap and trying to convince the 150-200+ group that someone playing with level 60some afflictions or any level of ranged fight, should really be playing with healing instead
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