Me, Pamama, and I

Teamwork: when people work collaboratively towards a common goal as distinct from other ways that individuals can work within a group.

How is this so hard? When it comes to FFXI, oddly enough, it is the people who solo (BST, PUP, etc.) who make the best teammates. Maybe it's the inherent notion that as pet jobs, we must rely on someone else, so we must pay attention. Assault this week took me to the Mamool Ja Training Grounds, just doing a series of Preemptive Strike missions for points farming. This is a pretty straight forward mission, just run around and kill mamools. In this case, only the RDM and myself have done the mission before, which is no big deal considering we've got a SAM and MNK to tear through mamools. Crossing one of the bridges, we take agg from a puk below, just as I happened to have pulled a mamool. No big deal. SAM and I come over and start attacking and:

RDM starts casting Sleep II on the Puk Executioner.

Now this is usually enough to get people to disengage if they're already attacking, or to even think twice about engaging. Not this MNK. He was content just pounding away at this puk. Everyone else be damned he was gonna do it. So after 3 different messages, he finally turns to the mamool as it was dying. RDM sleeps the puk. This was not that difficult of a situation. Common sense demands that you kill the more dangerous thing first. Why do I rant about such a simple situation? Because little things like this are proof of larger things. This very same MNK is also a RNG who happens to be responsible for wiping my dyna shell on multiple occasions. Pick your allies wisely!

Another thing, for those of you who consider yourselves the DD type. Most of you know that it is common sense to not WS right after the tank fire off Provoke. Doing so requires that the PLD has to burn Cover, Sentinel, etc. unnecessarily. If your working with a NIN tank, well, nice working with you. Hate management separates good players from bad ones. I recall a certain haku run that CircusFreaks did for a BLM and a RNG. BSTx4, PUPx1 plus the aforementioned BLM and RNG. Obviously these two had no idea had to do their jobs without a PLD or WHM around to save their sorry asses. The only mage we had was Pamama, who was there mostly to help the BST's when they needed multiple attempts to Charm. I don't remember exactly how many, but that BLM and RNG died multiple times in the two fights we did. Completely oblivious, and inevitably useless since they spent more time on the ground wasting our MP than they did actually helping.

I blame burn parties. Anytime something like /NIN or /SAM becomes uber powerful in an exp party, all sense among parties goes to Hell. DD's stop paying attention to the rest of the party, and fire WS's off whenever they can, regardless of whether or not the mage or tank can save them. Then when the exp starts to suffer because the mage has to rest, they blame everything under the sun except for their own stupidity. SE: bring back the days of balanced exp parties with a strategy. Make the SAM work with the BLM.