How do you feel?

[Frodo_Lives]

Oh, I was taking a big picture look alright. Actually, in this case, he was in the front of the pack leading the charges. We were running Rainbows and were going to run past the earth ellies and rusties and burn them at the steps/ramp up. All of us were there except for the "melees". I had to run back through the mobs to get to them to keep them alive because one of the earth ellies had all three of them in a corner killing them. They couldn't even hit the dang thing. (Don't ask why they stayed to fight it in the first place. I have no answer for that.) The sorc came running back and killed the ellie for them. None of them even tried to heal themselves through the entire quest and the Pally never used LoH to heal himself when he was about to die. (I actually grouped with a Pally and a Bard today that did the same thing. A Pally and a Bard that don't even heal THEMSELVES?? )

Now that sounds like a really really bad group. I have also run with characters that have the capacity to self heal who don't. They usually receive a lot less healing than they'd like. I just ran with a WF cleric who was a battle cleric and at the start of the quest he asked the sorc if he had any repair spells lol! I mean a battle cleric who doesn't heal is bad enough, but one who doesn't even want to heal himself is almost funny. The real kicker is that even though he was a zerging mess and always way out in front of the party he was outkilled by a same level barbarian who hung back with the rogue and sorc! I can only imagine that he was frustrated as all get out by being outkilled by someone who was two rooms behind at the start of every fight, because the way he was zerging it was specifically to get kills, heck his bio even said that he will get more kills than the other melees. It takes all kinds and there are lots of people who just don't get it. People who think the kill count is the end all and be all rank right up there.

I know that kill count is fairly meaningless. But when THREE melees can not total ten kills and the rogue with all the agro has 85, something is BAD wrong. And no, no one was using intimidate. Honestly, besides sucking up manna, I'm not exactly sure what they were doing. I just figured they were new and didn't really know what they were doing.

In that case it was one very well played rogue and three very poorly played melee. No problem letting people die who can't play at least somewhat intelligently. Not knowing a quest is one thing, being totally ineffective and and imcompetent is another.

Pre GH I rarely use a shield, mostly solo and hardly ever die. You don't have to use a shield to survive if you play smart. And things die MUCH faster with a great axe or dual dwarven axes than with one weapon and a shield. Dead things don't hurt you.

By Barb almost never used a shield and a lot of my melee characters rarely use a shield, but in a hard quest in a group that might not be up to it when the cleric is on wands it might be time to think about reducing damage taken. It's not that you (generic you) are a sponge but rather you might be in a group with a couple of them and at least you can do your part to help the cleric conserve his blue bar.