Which makes it that much more infuriating when you finally get into a group and the tank/healer is some stuck up prick who seems to want nothing more than to make your life hell.

@Revynn

Playing primarily DPS for the last few months or so, i've never run into any sort of problem with the healer/tank being pricks, except to DPS who were being pricks in the first place.

Oh I ran into a good one just the other day.

In the new twilight dungeons, there are some areas where trash can be skipped if everybody plays it just right. However, I've noticed that tanks are getting lazier and lazier, and just assuming everybody will be absolutely perfect and never pull anything by accident that they didn't want to take the extra 30 seconds to kill.

Other day the druid heals accidentally pulled a group in azure dragonshrine that the tank had skipped. Queue tank going full on nerd rage at the poor healer for being a bad because he hadn't done his job as tank.

Tanks, don't skip trash automatically. If the rest of the group is already threading through black dragons to get to Baine, fine. But don't you run off first and then biatch when somebody pulls and wipes because you weren't there to do your job (tanking the mobs). Always assume somebody is going to screw up and pull something, and be there to handle it.

I agree edymnion! I can't count the number of times I've gotten left behind a pack of mobs that everyone assumes we're skipping because they did some funny wall-jump or ran a weird way. If there's a pack in our way, please just kill it, it's so much simpler.

@Edymnion: Honestly? I think clearing trash should be mandatory. Yeah, I'll get growled and snarled at for suggesting this, but sometimes it would definitely be better if, say, the boss would be invincible or not present until the trash up to it is clear. I know some, typically older-content bosses will cause all the trash to engage you if they get attacked (Selin Fireheart, for example. And I've abused Multishot on Pandamonius to get a screen full of arcing damage numbers on more than one occasion). I know we all want to clear content as quickly as possible, but... Well, skipping trash seems to reek of laziness to me. And typically causes more trouble than it's worth.

Couple of horror stories, both from End Time: I join a LFD group and at least half the existing group is dead in Obsidian Dragonshire. By the time I actually fiddle with the goddamn fiddly time-fiddler gate-fiddly-thing (They're unnecessarily fiddly) the rest of the group is DOA. I wait for everyone to get back in, and watch as they try again to sneak by the trash successfully (Though the healer dies in the magma, unbelievably). I whisper to one of DPSes what exactly happened and it turned out that they had wiped three times on the trash because the tank was adamant about skipping it. It's just that the time I was there they were actually successful. They could have killed all the trash and not had a DPS drop in the time it took them to sneak around.

The second one happened in everyone's favourite: Azure. DPS group leader ordered us to skip the trash, so instead of a five-minute killathon we wound up doing a ten minute hide-and-seek with the occasional killathon when the mage blinked into a pack. The first wipe happened when, while engaging one pack without issue the group leader stepped back and aggroed another pack. I was the first to notice, first to start CCing as much as I could and the damn mage jumped in and started AoEing everything. Second wipe happened while fighting Jaina; see if you can guess how exactly it happened?

Yeah, we all hate trash. Trash only exists to be hated, but the fact that killing trash helps everyone really needs to be hammered into the skulls of some group leaders.

@ Gordal...
I had a similar situation in Azure. The tank tells me to stealth through and collect the stones, while the rest of the group clears the trash. I do my job, and I ask the tank before I do the last one, just to be sure. He says go ahead and grab it. Jaina spawns, another pack shows up, we wipe, and the healer blames me.

Re: the part in the article about different ways a dps can be effective, beyond just the numbers: please do not post recount results after Az in Well of Eternity, and say that my dps sucks. It is basically like a trash pull. And with all the target switching, cc, and interrupting I do, my dps will suffer. Nobody has good dps on that fight.

The other day, our first tank had to bail just before that fight. Our replacement tank posted the recount and then said things like no wonder our first tank dropped, with the terrible dps, but he'd try his best to get us through the last fight. Achievement was out of the question, though.

Funny thing, I already have the Mannorath achievement, with a group doing far less dps, and even throwing tricks on the tank at every cooldown, he couldn't hold aggro, and the mobs came after me.

The point is, no matter what role, don't step in and think you can tell what everyone is capable of until you have a chance to see them in action.

When I tank, I skip trash because most people want to skip whenever possible anyways. But I always look back and watch the group, ready to rescue in case someone messes up. That's about 90% of the trash skips. I usually don't skip trash if it's a risky thread-the-needle environment because with 5 people, someone's probably gonna blow it. But if the 4 people rush past me and go for it, sure.