You just can't make this stuff up...

Double the acrobatics, double the fun.

'Tanking from the rear'....always a good time.

Well to be fair, going in buck naked can work in Omni, but I'd hope most know you would need SOME gear.

Stop me if you heard this one before. I am more than comfortable in saying you have. You que into a regular raid run. Someone switches to healer, but only by d-pad command not by armory. So you have an all DPS gear and augs healer. SOMEONE that is a troll (not a troll role just an internet troll, not really that
either but what certain person really identifies as would be censored and result in a temporary ban) inspects said healer, types in "Lol. No." And walks right out of the instance as several are getting their butts handed to them.

He be doing them 4-story jumps.

In a end game reg run? Oh....I've seen it....I've done it....or I vote 'yes' on the kick generally as we wipe a few times...or yeah, leave. Troll is probably the most forgiving of this situation as everything gives POT and you can throw the debuffs whether your gear is wrong or not. CC will be non existent though and I'd guess power will be lacking, but probably acceptable as with Cyborg and a decent SP allocation, many people can manage with a 'meh' troll anyway. Healer or tank though? Nah... that will end in wipes causing THAT person to leave...or the other people.

I had this last night. Went in TSW random (hey...it was like 90 min till reset and I just wanted it done), both the healer and tank (indicated by their 'alt' icon under their name) were not switching. Now I could tank, and would have, but wanted to see what these 2 would do. Tank switched and yeah, was all DPS gear, quizlet, solar and NONE for the 3rd aug....healer also was a mixed bag of....stuff... I told the tank to switch and I'd do it, but 2 DPS left when they likely inspected the healer. We tried the 1st set of adds and it was a wipe fest, but luckilly a new healer queued in (along with a 2nd troll....oh goodie) and we were able to muscle through it. If I did not switch, or that 2nd healer never showed...no chance in heck. I'd have bailed and so would everyone else....or they'd have started kicking.

I think the big problem with the whole situation is that these people don't realize by queuing both roles and not being able to DO the role, they are likely plugging up that spot for a new role to show up from queue. The raid group, as far as the matchmaking is concerned, has a healer or a tank...so it won't get a new one. It doesn't factor in crappy gear or a person that would not or should not switch to the role they were assigned. THIS is one of the things that could be taught in a tutorial. "do not queue up as a role you don't want to/are not equipped to... do, or it is detrimental to the group". It would still happen, but at least people couldn't say they didn't know (assuming a tutorial run is required to queue a role).

Just got ninjaed into Sixth Dimension raid, half the people in there had nothing even remotely leveled. One guy who they kicked for other reasons didn't even have a weapon equipped...

Yeah. And I could imagine the response if he was called on it. "Dur....I use POWERS not Weapons....what do I need a weapon for?....Noob"

You owe me a new laptop as I just did a spittake all over it.

TRWTF is having to google or youtube anything to do with the game in the first place. I might expect that to learn the intricacies of a meta game to mini-max, but no ******* way do I expect the basics of a game to be taught to me by a third party content provider whose content is not in any way regulated or endorsed by the publisher.

It's a "this must be good, yes?" attitude. I had that with the guy that introduced me to the game on PS3.

Gear gives me more stats? Must be good. Do I know what Vit is? No. But more must be good, yes? Moar Vit! Moar Dom! Moar Resto!

Unless you take the time to expand the descriptions in your Stats window (which you have to find in the first place...), you have literally no idea what stats do.

Most beginners don't even know what Might or Prec do - and are a bit peeved when their PFTT loadout doesn't involve shooting arrows... and their Prec play isn't as "Super" as they wanted it to be. And there is literally no reason to learn what Vit, Dom, and Resto do until you run a role that relies heavily on those.

And guess what? You're still not told.

Is there *literally* any point in the game where the game says "Tank gear grants more Health and Dominance than other gear. This is because Tanks need Dominance to maintain aggro cannot affect enemies with more Willpower than the Tank's Dominance, and having more Health is great if you don't want to die very quickly?

No.

Same for all the others.

Don't shoot the messenger. Because that is exactly what that guy is.

So I took a break from the game towards the end of flashpoint and came back at the very end of episode 42.
The first thing I noticed and asked my league about what had happened to average skill/knowledge level in end game content.

I don't know what caused it but it was immediately noticeable. For TSDR I witnessed a large amount of tanks pull the boss then never pull adds intentionally. In a particularly unique run I watched a tank do nothing but ranged handblaster combos on the bosses interspaced with a pull, and nothing else. Not everyone in these runs were bad, but a ton were simply not paying attention or reacting to mechanics and dying because of it. On the plus side I did get to nature tank adds in these runs, which was fun.

My only guess at this point is that newer(?) players are running omnibus content, getting used to mechanics not meaning much, then applying that knowledge to end game content when they get there.

I don't really have a strong stance on omnibus content myself, I don't really run it.
Personally I actually wish there was a setting where you could choose the difficulty on older content similar to FFXIV.
I'd implement it with 3 settings, No Scaling | Current Omnibus Scaling | As difficult as when it was current.
It would take more work on the devs part but would largely solve the vast majority of issues people have with omnibus content.
Loot would need to be worked out but I would just have no scaling be for feats and the gear they used to drop.
This would enable people to be able to more easily earn the difficult feats as the content became older, which could help to alleviate the SP gap/monumental task that newer players have. I say this despite having the vast majority of feats from older content. I know some people are in the camp of "you have to earn them the hard way" but at some point we've got to implement something as years worth of content becomes excessively difficult for new players to grind through.
The as difficult as when it was current setting could give a bit more source marks or something.
Personally I would just want this level as I would really enjoy being able to experience older raids as they were.
This would definitely take some dev work though since all the new systems have been introduced that affect balance.

RE: Player knowledge/experience I'm not really sure what could be done as a solution here. There seems to be a perpetual war on the forums between those who think elite shouldn't exist/give rewards and those who think content needs to be harder.

This would never happen, but I'm starting to think there needs to be more mechanics in regular raids. I'm not however arguing for mechanics that if failed, wipe the group. I would implement mechanics that would somehow convey to the player in a bold fashion that they have screwed up. This could be bringing them down low enough for the near death screen effect to kick in, making them lose control, ANYTHING, to get them to understand that something really bad happened because of their actions. We can't expect players to learn mechanics if when they run content the mechanics have no effect on them. The jump between normal and elite content is astronomical, and as such there isn't a great place for people to learn without joining an elite run only to get kicked for not knowing mechanics.

The skill/knowledge gap comes from the same place it always has come from in the last few years. Everybody thinks a youtube video makes you OP. Regardless of whether you understand/are capable of carrying out the rotation demonstrated.

Because asking people ingame is hard - from the point of view of ego and also because DCUO chat does not lend itself to long discussions.

Edit: There is a reason why most Leagues use off-site persistent chat.

I'm not the kind of player to have total knowledge of just how everything works to a t in this or other games (though I do try to at least know enough to be reasonably competent and functional at least lmao, and I do welcome polite advice or recommendations), so I don't totally understand the full context of this thread, but this specific remark amused me and just suddenly brought back memories of a nickname I gave a particular version of one of my characters. She's always had a color scheme with black as the main color and neon yellow and neon green highlights and she still is that way, but at one point she had the Gotham Knight chest and leg styles, so I nicknamed that version of her "Skittlewing" for how colorful she is lmao.

Anyway, to make my post here worthwhile and not a waste of everyone here's time, I'll share some of my own misery:

Once I was doing the final boss fight in the Teen Titans alert and we wiped a few times or so and some people left. Of course I reopened matchmaking and I think a Leaguemate at the time hopped in to help as well. There was this one player who's gear was all super damaged and their CR had suffered for it (seriously, they'd gone from the episode's required 230 or whatever it is to like... 40 or something like that). We noticed that and let them know about it and offered to give them some cash if they needed it to repair their gear. For some reason they were super resistant to this and started throwing a hissy fit about CR not mattering anyway or something even as we politely tried to explain that it really does. Eventually we and the other random player from matchmaking got tired of them and just tried to do the fight with the three of us as this PITA just stood around outside it. We wiped and they went off trying to use that as some kind of proof CR is worthless. I forget if we kicked them or they just left or what happened in the end. I just..... why?!

Another time I did a raid with a mixture of then-Leaguemates and randoms and right at the final boss, after a couple or so wipes, someone started barking out weird and very very wrong commands. They had no idea what they were talking about but were so confident they were right. Everyone was just annoyed. I don't remember all their BS, but I do remember them scolding the tank and saying for the tank to stay away from the boss. One of my then-Leaguemates started calling them out on the bad commands, especially that tank one to which she pointed out that the tank is literally the one person that should get somewhat close to the boss because it's part of their job/role. They started a vote to kick her.... which backfired hard and ended with them getting unanimously kicked instead lmao.

Maybe the developers can create an in-game Title called "10 Minute Kick"? If you get kicked from anything in 10 minutes or less you get the Title. The Title is not feat-related, so some will ignore it, but completionists would be ok with it.

Maybe they can create content so people know WTF they are doing other than pew pew pew when they hit EEG?

Players aren't stupid, generally. Ignorant, yes. One you can fix. By teaching.

I have seen way more players with the rainbow augs than i should. Sometimes i will try and help them out and tell them its a bad build and they are making the game harder on themselves. I have had 1 guy say he was just doing it to see who would notice.

Only Inspectors notice.

The thing is that if all your Augs are low level, there's very little difference. You could stick a potato in that slot and not have much of a meaningful effect on your stats.

What is lacking is any kind of in-game explanation as to whether a potato is better than an Aug in that slot. And why. Otherwise I might go full carrot loadout on my augs. Because **** potatoes.

Clue: He doesn't know they are terrible choices. Kicking does not teach him those are terrible choices. Did he die, when you did? Or did his HLS, pew-pew-pew strategy keep him alive when you died? If so, why do you think he might be doing it? It sounds like a guy who's been used to running solo, has no idea about team play, and probably isn't yet capable of threat assessment.

Which is largely what the game funnels you into.