Newbies in the Lowbie Dungeons

9 July, 2013

MMORPG

RIFT

I spent most of the holiday weekend queuing for lowbie dungeons with my new collection of lowbie Defiants.

I’ve realized that I don’t like tanking with a warrior … dealing with the builder/finisher mechanic interferes with focusing on the tanking. Maybe I just need to forget about finishers. Anyway I generally prefer the cleric tank, where you don’t have to really do anything but spam the AoE attack. (I say that knowing full well that you almost never see cleric tanks in raids or expert dungeons. I wouldn’t ever want to be a raid tank anyway.)

Having done RotF and IT now with four different characters in many different roles, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern with the people you see in these first dungeons: A lot of them don’t know what they’re doing. :) This is contrary to what I would have expected, which is that everyone knows these dungeons by heart and speed runs through them.

I assume this is because the game just went f2p and a lot of new people are seeing these places for the first time. These are the DPS mages rolling with their rock pet, the tank warriors rolling with two-handed swords and cat, the DPS warriors rolling with sword and board, and the DPS rogues stealthing around and sapping trash mobs. Worth a chuckle, but harmless. Mostly they just haven’t learned you can setup multiple roles.

But there is another class of people who are just dicking around without the slightest interest in learning to play. Usually it’s a group of them that queued together. They spend most of the dungeon quipping back and forth in all caps and trying to be funny (I guess?) instead of paying any attention to what’s going on. The rest of the party has to carry them through so that their mistakes don’t waste everyone’s time too much. But occasionally their antics ends up wiping the party even in someplace as easy as Realm of the Fae, and then they get all bent out of shape and someone ends up leaving or getting kicked, and I have to put a bunch of names on my ignore list.

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