DPS

Nobody cares if the rest of the party doesn’t meet your standards. “Healers adjust” is a meme; their GCD may be worth less damage than yours, but if your healer is new or struggling, one extra weaponskill is not worth the wipe.¹ Likewise, if you run ahead of the tank to pull an extra pack, get ready to take responsibility for the wipe and walk of shame that follows. This is FFXIV; everyone is a DPS, even the tanks and healers. You aren’t special, and sometimes you’ll have to make compromises, which is hopefully territory you briefly touched on in fucking kindergarten.

That covers one half of you. For the other half, I’ll keep it short; learn your goddamn job. Instanced content is not just an attendance check; if you’re using single-target rotations on packs,² running around for 15 seconds between spells, or roleplaying an ice mage, you’re wasting your group’s time because you don’t understand common courtesy. Read your tooltips—like, really, really read them.³ Practice on Striking Dummies. Install ACT and check your numbers. Mostly, just don’t play team-based games if you haven’t grasped the concept of other people existing in the world. Pull your weight and stop being a gigantic bitch.

Healers

Nobody cares if a DPS is standing in damage. One extra Glare is not worth being down a player—yes, even if they’re Brinked, even if they don’t know their rotation, even if their name is N’aruto Tia and they macro their mudras into party chat. You’re not “teaching them a lesson”; they’re tabbed out reading Reddit while they’re dead, learning absolutely nothing, and the rest of your group is pulling extra weight to make up for your tantrum. Heal them if they’re hurt and raise them if they die.⁴

Oh, and because some of you apparently have a degenerative brain condition that causes you to forget about your DPS spells during instanced content; holy fuck, please hit your DPS filler during downtime. If other players stop an instance to politely ask you to deal damage, what they really mean is “your constant overhealing and refusal to contribute is so wasteful and inefficient that it’s physically uncomfortable, and I’m seriously considering selling my computer and joining the Amish so that I never have to watch someone fuck up at video games this badly ever again.” There is nowhere near enough outgoing damage in any fight in the game to jusitify doing nothing but healing. Pure healing is not a “playstyle”; it’s a refusal to play. Put up your DoT⁵ and stop being a gigantic bitch.

Tanks

Nobody cares if someone facepulled early. No matter how irrationally angry you are about the lowly sap daring to disrespect the natural order, letting someone die does nothing but slow the group down; nobody is going to have a life-changing revelation about their conduct and etiquette because an Internet random killed them in a video game. This goes triple in 24-man raids; if another tank is screwing up, and you respond by trainwrecking the aggro table and spinning Famfrit in circles, you are failing to communicate on a level only Square Enix Support can match. Everyone playing now hates every tank in the instance, and possibly every tank who has ever played the role.

You are not important. You are not the group leader. Your role is not a sacred task from Hydaelyn. Nobody cares if you think big pulls are stressful; upgrade your gear, learn to use your mitigation correctly, and wall-to-wall that shit unless your healer absolutely can’t keep up. If anyone’s ever told you “Tanks dictate the pace of the dungeon”, they were wrong and from Reddit;⁶ parking your ass in the Mediocrity Zone makes you no better than the DNC who never assigns a partner, or the AST who heals Doma Castle with only Benefic I. Save that shit for the Trust system. Pick up the monsters, face them away from the party, and stop being a gigantic bitch.