This. If they refuse to dial it back to reasonable levels, tell the healer to let them die.
Oh and make sure to grab popcorn for the incoming drama, it’s delicious. xD
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This game is easier than balls. I’ve been in some crappy groups and guess what, we always finish the run. It isn’t hard. My suggestion is to relax, give helpful advice when you can, and let people play how they want as much as you can.
When you find people that play like you do, then try to hold on to them, guild with them, friend them. With everyone else, just play the game and learn to laugh when things go wonky. It’s a game.
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You are level 48. You are barely into the territory where you need to mark or even have a tank use a shield. Calm down.
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You likely won’t need to worry about a blacklist as a tank. There’s always another group.
Just be polite, and explain yourself before bailing. ,“I’ve asked you all three times to let me handle the aggro. So now I’m leaving/booting people”
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Don’t worry about the dps let the mobs deal with them.
Then after you know what happens next happens you can say, I need to leave this group because you’re not meeting the dps requirements.
Most of the time when I put up kill orders quietly while preparing for the pull, I find that some DPS simply don’t understand the meanings. They get Skull-X but then get a bit confused at other symbols. I find that taking a second to explain if you notice a problem early helps. Use it as a teaching tool while the healer’s taking a drink break.
If they continue to be a problem, or simply don’t want to communicate, then simply don’t group with them. Explain calmly what the issue is. If they don’t acknowledge it at least, then simply leave and make another group. Chances are another dungeon group will be hunting for a tank, and maybe someone from the old group might still tag along. I can fully understand why you’re worried about that problem character’s guild blacklisting you… But you have to ask yourself this: If that guild recruited that character, then what does that tell you about that guild?
Granted, I’ve not hit max level yet or found a guild yet (waiting to fund my own mount as a rule of pride/stubbornness before I bite the /g bullet), so please take my advice with as many grains of salt as you like. Just there’s a difference between idiot DPS and inexperienced DPS: The latter can learn and adjust if you simply point out the issue calmly.
If the DPS is dying due to pulling before tank gets threat, that’s the DPS’ fault.
It’s up to the DPS to adjust their gameplay to the skills and limitations of the tank, not the other way around.
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Outside of RFC I have not run a dungeon that wasn’t filled with guild members on discord. Stop pugging.
I was sorely tempted to do this with a healer that was chain pulling with Shadow word pain.
Just wanted to hit the x button and watch him handle it.
Worry less about ‘blacklisting’.
Basically I make a mental note of never grouping with said person again. No thanks, you can be someone elses headache.
it’s not that serious; 25s is not a lot. ZF mobs drop like 10s at a time and all of the gray items they drop vendor for at least 50s. You’re probably bringing in like 3g-4g per ZF run from mob gold and vendor grays alone.
usually when people say the problem is that they consistently find other people “not listening” it means they believe themselves to be entitled to be the leader but have never really worked on their leadership skills. Maybe just let other people mark and follow their lead. Maybe just do some runs without trying to manage everything.
TBH I think the leader should be the person that knows the instance the best. Often times in Classic you wind up in a group where someone had just run the instance that day, and everyone else hasn’t run it since Vanilla and doesn’t really remember it. Just have the person that already ran the instance be the leader.
I did a few runs of ZF yesterday. I wasn’t the leader in most of them, but in one, I was the only person that had been in ZF since Vanilla, so I marked all the mobs and directed the group and it was fine. There’s no rule that says the tank is required to be the leader. Sure, the tank is the default leader if the group doesn’t really talk about it, but sometimes the group is better off having someone else lead.
25s per wipe.
Wipe 4 times than that’s 1g, and I’m only level 50.
Once I’m 60 my wipes will cost me a lot more.
How much do your repairs cost?
I played from Vanilla through to Cataclsym and tanked most of it, up until about halfway through Wrath.
I’ve run all these instances multiple times before, I know where to go and what to do. It’s not a matter of “lack of leadership skills” its a matter of people willfully ignoring instructions or just not caring about aggro.
I did three ZF runs total.
One with my guild, one with pugs(we wiped on the first boss so I left), and one yesterday where we wiped just after we killed Gaz.
I typically only do instances 1-3 times. Once for the quests, and another 1-2 times for the gear unless I really like the instances. SFK and SM for examples of instances that I like, I ran those a lot. The thing is, you can mark mobs all day but if the DPS is ignoring the marks you can’t make them follow them.
I’m just getting tired of people not caring about anything other than leet deeps and rushing through the instances as fast as possible.
Maybe my stance would be different if I hadn’t quit playing due to how boring the game became with Cataclysm. I feel like this “GOGOGO SPEEDRUN” mentality is something that’s been ingrained into the playerbase with the recent expansions.
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yeah, they’re exhausting. But you know what they’re like, you know what to expect. You can’t really change what the playerbase is like. The playerbase is just different now than it was in the past. You can only change how you deal with them.
If you approach it like you’re the “rightful” leader and people must “obey” you, it’s not gonna work. It’s a game. You can’t “make them listen”; you don’t have authority over anyone. But you can convince people of things. Approach it like you’re trying to convince people that the strategy you’re describing is the best strategy, not that you’re the authority and they have to listen to you.
No, its not ‘solely’ the tank’s fault when that stuff happens.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading the post originally and answering. So if I pull it back to the top, that is why, I’m ready to try to put into words what my thoughts are now. I’m going to share three things that have made a big impact over me in my time with WoW. Two in vanilla, one the other night in classic.
- When I first started in vanilla, I was brand new to any kind of gaming, and definitely new to MMO’s. I read a LOT, tried to find answers to all the millions of questions I had, and when I just couldn’t find the answer, sometimes due to just not knowing the right question to look for, I would ask in chat.
I don’t remember the question now, but I asked one night in chat, something I had spent a lot of time trying to find an answer for, and one response in chat was “If you don’t know the answer to that, you are too stupid to play and need to quit now”.
Not an answer, but one I found just as enlightening as if he had answered the original question. How? It told me not everyone had all the answers. I’ve come to the conclusion over time, that when someone answers with a idiot answer, it’s because they too, don’t know.
- My first dungeon was about a week or so into the game, I was in Westfall, and a group was looking for a dps for deadmines. I had a ton of quests there, and told them I’d go but that I didn’t know what my role was supposed to do as I was new and never did a dungeon before, so if they could deal with that, send an invite.
Boy did I ever make their day. That run was horrid. I can’t count how many wipes, it was bad, I did not leave until my gear was completely red. I mean every. single. piece. They kept telling me I was the one messing up, but come on back and we will keep trying to help you learn.
Later that night, I was bummed, not at all happy with myself, thinking that it was really all on me, and was in Ironforge doing some stuff on professions. I was only semi watching chat, when something caught my eye.
I started reading all about this 'new hunter that we trolled the hell out of today in DM’s". That group I had been in? A group of bored 60’s on alts out to troll new players. Well, they got me. But by the time I got done with them in trade chat, I had gotten apologies whispered to me, and again repeated in trade, since I said it means nothing if its not public. I tore them up, I was about as mad as I ever get over that, and they knew it. As did anyone reading chat. You don’t mess with Mom and get away with it, and yeah, I was at that time, 45, and a mother. Over time, one of them and I did become friends, and he in turn ended up helping more than anyone else in the game did, as far as showing me the ins and outs of playing the game.
I never did do many dungeons, was not the type to want to be the cause of a wipe, and since it was well know that hunters were huntards and always to blame, it just wasn’t something I wanted to get into. I did a few over time, some were ok, some not good, some went really well, but more of the not so good or ok’s than the really wells, and I eventually just settled into my solo play style I still have today. Think of how different things may have been had I not fallen into a troll group for my first dungeon as a new player to MMO’s.
Fast forward thru the years and the way the game has changed from needing people to play a role, and to have everyone working together, to the gogogogogo mentality of BFA’s age. Now take those people and throw them back into vanilla, with garbage gear since we aren’t having epics rained down upon us from every direction, and years of not following that original ‘everyone has a role’ game play, and you wonder why people are ‘bad’?
- Last story happened a few nights ago, I was in hillsbrad, and someone asked for help on the elite ogre’s there. Since I needed something with them as well, I said I’d help. The two of us were doing ok, then we tossed a mage into the group, and that is when it got weird. The mage was off on his own questing it appeared, while I stayed with the pally for the most part, helping out when the mage was dying on his mob, and hoping I would not draw aggro when my cat went from one to the other mob. I started to really see where skills had a place, what I could get away with vs what was not working as intended.
I ended up later in STV and grouped with someone else for the troll tablet quest. This guy was a saint lol needless to say. All my bfa playing was coming out and we were getting trashed. He didn’t yell, just kept reminding me what to do, and I finally was able to get it together and put that bfa style behind me, and the last parts of the quest went pretty well.
SO what is the TL:DR part of this?
Not all of us are die hards, some of us learned the right ways in vanilla, but over time and in the playstyle that became known as ‘retail’ and ‘gogogo’, we developed many bad bad habits. The worst thing we learned over time, is that our ‘hero’ was unstoppable. In retail.
That ‘hero’ in classic, sucks. It takes time and patience to unlearn bad habits. Toss in that mix, the many players in classic now, who never played vanilla, and have no clue what it was like (classic is not the same by far, while being close in many ways).
I’m not talking about die hard players who can adapt easily to anything, I’m talking about those of us who never played any other game but wow, or few, and don’t live breathe and eat the game all day and night. We don’t min/max, have no clue on how some things in the game work, whatever.
Don’t expect them to jump into a dungeon and behave the way they should, they never learned it, or are so far past what they learned, they have to relearn it anyway.
So instead of calling dps ‘idiots’, and leaving groups, find players who are willing to relearn or learn, the way it takes to make a run go smoothly. Put yourself back in time to 2004-2006, when the game was new and classes and skills, mattered.
Have patience, not attitude. None of us have all the answers.
Sorry for the long post, I tend to write as I talk, but its generally a quick read.
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Many whelps!!! Left side!!!
Sorry I had to ROFL 
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Have you tried making friends with competent players? It’s worked out for me so far.
Wall of text crits you for 957382984728 damage. You die. Your equipped items suffer a 10% durability loss.
Holy crap that was a massive post. 
I just might age a year or two after I get finished reading it
did you miss that part? Unless you talk real slow, you should read it quite fast. Or is it read slow talk fast?
Either way I talk at a normal rate of speed, so unless you read way slower than you can talk, it won’t take long.
Edited to add: Ok, this came off as rather snarky to me when reading it again, it is NOT meant to be…I was smiling as I typed it, thinking as I often do, of people reading my posts with my southern drawl. I know I write long, but I try to at least make it mean something when I do 
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I’m also tanking for pugs all the time and while occasionally there’s a terrible DPS that does all those things you describe, in my experience it’s not that common. Not saying pug DPSers are great or anything, but they usually somewhat focus skull first and understand the concept of LOS pulling (as long as you let them now in you are about to LOS pull, don’t just assume they are gonna guess it).
About the AOE part, yeah I guess they tend to go pretty nuts on AOE and won’t give you much time to build threat, this would cause a lot of issues for an inexperienced tank that doesn’t manage his Rage properly but it’s usually fine otherwise (at least as Druid I’m not really having issues with AOE threat and I’m not even specced into the extra threat talent atm).
Does this mean that you are having issues with 2 out of every 3 DPS players? if that’s the case then I think the issue might be You. My experience from tanking a lot of PUGs is that yes sometimes there’s a terrible DPS that doesn’t listen or doesn’t want to follow my lead, but that’s like maybe 10% of my runs (at most) the vast majority of groups are at least competent enough for a smooth run.
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