A recent comment on a recent tanking post got me thinking about how I use the Vote to Kick.
“Anonymous says
The reason: vote kick has a cooldown, and the more times you use it, the longer cooldown becomes. Vote kick must be available to get rid of game-ruining player, not lost on minor inconvenience.”
I think most of the recent votes to kick I have initiated since this cool down change has actually been people who dc, and even then casually suggest ” should we kick the dc” and someone else does it.
I got burned bad back in the early days of tanking in Mara. We had two dps afking at the start of the run. It was like they wandered off and did something else while we killed stuff and they got free xp. The cool down wouldn’t let me kick them both. So I try not to use it. Kicking someone from group for peeing me off isn’t as high on my list of things to do as it used to be, and I guess that’s the point. I don’t think I ever kicked for anything trivial, but it’s forced me to triple think, I want to be able to use it when I NEED to use it, but as another commenter said often its not worth it. How many of us are complaining about the state of attitude in groups now, ‘not worth’ it is rather defeatist, and at least I am feeling a little defeated. It doesn’t matter what the role I’m playing. Often there is always one person who makes it their job to make everyone else s just that little bit harder.
Petty Reasons
On my main in my healing gear I was doing a POS, it was a high hp tank who knew what he was doing, so I started dpsing too, a couple of dots, a mindblast, and some mindsearing in a group. We had a DK dps not doing so well, and I was beating him. Tank linked the damage metres and had a laugh at the healer and the tank out dpsing a dps.
Tank initiates a vote to kick, I say no. It fails. Tank then says ” 100 gold” and the party is like “?”
“100 gold each to carry you” he says to the DK. ” don’t be silly” I say in party chat. It put me in a bad position because I was being an over-confident /bored healer, trying to make things go a little bit faster because I didn’t have to worry about the tank as much.I may not have come to the tanks attention if I had just done my selected job.
I zoned into another instance into what looked like a wipe recovery. People at half health, scattered cross the instance probably running back. One of the Dps was slow running back, not stupid slow and it is frustrating when one person is holding the group up, but we were buffing, and the rest were drinking, and he was at least on his way, but someone initiated a vote to kick.
” Why… ”
“He is too slow”
It failed thankfully.
They highlight why there has to be a cool down so that petty reasons do not succeed. I’ll steal anonymous words again. ” game-ruining player, not lost on minor inconvenience” Game ruining is trying to cause a wipe, refusing to do your job / afking – being grossly offensive – and that’s about it. There are so many minor things which are still going to get the dungeon cleared, just aren’t going to make your game fun. The vote to kick wasn’t aimed at getting rid of people stealing your fun unfortunately.
Let them die
What if there was a “Let them die” vote. I was taught that not taunting off a dps made me a bad tank. So I feel it’s my responsibility even if it’s their fault.
Letting them die needs a collaboration between a tank and healer – healers feel its their job to heal. Tanks react when they lose control of a mob ( usually) and try to grab agro back. There has to be an agreement between tank and healer to let them die.
As a healer I’ve told dps to let the “Tank tank.. ” Linked damage metres to show they took most of the damage that the tank should have. I am not sure how I would react if a Tank asked me to let that person die, and stop healing them. I knew he was being bad, I knew that this would have stressed the tank out, spending more time trying to grab agro back then concentrating on tanking. Given what I know, if I felt the tank had good reason to say that I would support the tank if I felt I would be supported in my decision to refuse to heal, and not only is our tolerance for bad a problem, but also what is missing is the lack of support that the other players give to the people who are trying to change that.
Could I tell a healer to let someone die – maybe. I think if the situation got extreme again, I would.
However imagine the scenario
“Tank: DPs1 stop pulling
DPs1: Your too slow
Tank: Healer just stop healing him
Healer: um.. ok..
DPS2 : Just pull the boss
DPS3: finish the Fracken instance
Lack of Support
Because everyone “Just wants their badges so we can all go home. Healer and Tank refusing to compensate for a person making their lives difficult are not going to get the other dps’s support, and the tank and the healer will be the ones slowing up the instance by causing drama or making a fuss, not the asshat in the first place, and that’s the sad part. I guess when you talk about this different mentality you need to have when being the healer, or the tank – it can also mean you are very much all alone, and the price of your conviction inconveniences the rest, and what would cause the most stress, is not the asshat, but not feeling supported for doing ‘the right thing”.
Your Enjoyment
We had a bad dps in an instance say ” Hurry up – I need to go soon,” I told him to “dps faster”, and also said ” why is it the person doing the least damage is that one that wants to hurry it up” I don’t like being that person – but I tried it on for size, and it didn’t make him perform better – or the run more enjoyable.
I think this is where ” it’s not worth it” can make your experience better, Ignorance is bliss. How bitter those words taste. If only I derived more joy from being snarky at people. Then maybe I would feel better about sounding like the asshole.
But Support the right decisions. Maybe I should have supported the vote to kick the slow dps, but there are so many other factors we would need to ask them – new player? First 80? new Spec? Lag? to at least justify why we thought they were bad. They were just low, and in the scheme of things stuff was dying. It was ok. Don’t support the person who is a little slow running back ( little.. ) Personally I would LOVE to kick the people who want to vendor/repair/get reagents as soon as they zone into the instance. Usually it’s dps who have had how many min’s of waiting time to be be prepared. We get to the first boss. ” Hey I’m back” – you didn’t need me” but again. Is that a kickable reason? In comparison to what other crap people pull.
We need an I like bubbles “Vote to kick” Friday Flow chart.
But for now you get a pic of my cat being grumpy.
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
I’m leveling a Paladin as a healer, only running instances but I do wind up tanking a lot of them because its faster (thank god for dual spec, tanking as holy was possible but annoying.)
Letting stupid people die is one the highlights of healing. I’ve tricked him out, he can keep just about anyone up in appropriate instance.
Had a druid that was tanking. As a moonkin. Could I have done the instance? Yes, but he was also bad a tanking. Let him die, rezzed him, asked him to switch to bear. He pulls again, dies. Druid leaves group and we get a real tank in a few seconds.
tanking as a boomy – uhuh.. thats being silly.
“tanking as a boomy – uhuh.. thats being silly”
I’ve been known to pull threat as a Boomer, and then kite the mobs around using cooldowns and dots. Often ends with chicken gibblets everywhere, but I find it keeps 5-mans interesting.
It’s pretty effective. When we were doing dungeons everyday, girlfriend would often tell me to tank and I would, if we ran into a bad tank. She usually played her Disc Priest with my Moonkin. It is often important to know your limits — for example, the Devilsaur boss in DTK is a no-no, but the other 3 bosses are perfectly fine. Druids often have as much armor as new tanks; they only lack parry/dodge.
In fact, we often pair up our alts/chars so we can take advantage of most any situation — only ICC-5 throws us off.
Also, you’d be surprised how effective a Shadow Priest can tank. I can tank all of Occulus as shadow, albeit I am super well-geared and I am specced for Imp. VE.
Me, as Tank (just enough gear for hc PoS), talked to the healer before the start just to let him know he might have some real work to do. He was actually happy.
Of we go and after the first couple up pulls I ask in party chat if he’s having any problems. He says no, so I reply: “even with dps xxx (a DK death-gripping) pulling from me?” to which he answers: “next time I’ll let him die”.
Support is out there, you just have to be lucky to find it! 😉
I “encouraged” my slightly newbie bf to level a tank to match my stable of healers. It’s easy to initiate a vote to “let them die” when you’re in the same room irl 😉 We don’t do it often.
We kick people that like to facepull lots, and people that clearly aren’t paying attention (breaking cc, afk, not in the instance) and we wait a little before vote kicking dcs. I think someone has a “kick dcs” macro though.
Sometimes I just don’t have time for people to be wasting it for me. If you are terrible, that’s one thing, but I won’t wait for you. Must be tank entitlement, but I do my fair share of dps on my mage so I know the pain of missing a 15 queue. If they can wait 15 min to do the run, are there to start it, then they should be happy to finish it in hopefully the same amount of time. Meh, just kick people.
Lucky for me, I rarely have to worry about issues on my main. I can carry bad tanks in almost every instance (trust me, I’ve healed rogue tanks and moonkin tanks through DTK and HoS) — though Halls of Reflection needs a decent tank gear-wise and decent competence.
As far as DPS-meters go, I usually don’t care what others are doing. The worst case situation is they’re all pulling 1k, I spec shadow and me and the tank are each doing 5k. These heroics were for the most part made for players who probably were doing 1k dps to begin with. Having two people pulling over 4k dps means we already overgear it.
Point of reflection, at the tip end of Sunwell, an impressive Warglaive (legendary) dps did 2.7k – 3k dps. Average people and newbie level 80s did not do 3k dps. Heck, they most likely did not do 2k dps either. Heroics were _made_ for people doing less than 2k dps. A single dpser pulling 6k+ is practically doing more than 3x what was intended for most of these heroics. (ICC-5, ToC-5 aside, of course).
That said, some of my guildies are elitist assholes. They’ve been known to kick people simply because they feared someone would roll on their gear/trinket. So the cooldown is definitely a good thing in my eyes.
By the way, how is your warrior going? Any better?
My Warrior should not have tried stance dancing for the first time on the Brewfest boss. May have a another go, but with practise on a dummy 1st. Even I has a holy priest healer can get 900-1k dps without using Mindsear in a run.
my only criteria for an auto-kick are the players who try the “on-follow-for-a-sec” garbage. I’ve seen dps go for a quick break for entire sections of instances.
Either they get kicked, or they get dead; nothing else is acceptable.
I got one follow to go over a cliff. But the healer rezed him when he came back 😦
Having seen it from every perspective (tank, heals, and multiple different dps toons) I don’t have patience for asshats in groups. When the Rogue in my H-AN afked at the front door came back in time to roll Need on the first boss drop (when he was wearing an iLevel 277 piece in that slot) then drop down and triple pull at the crusher area in an attempt to wipe the group, I pointed it out and instantly voted to kick only to find that my vote failed. I don’t know if it was a guild or server group because after my vote failed, I didn’t feel the need to hang around anymore and left the group.
That’s the real takeaway from this: If you’re in the position of Tank or Healer and don’t want to put up with awful and/or obnoxious players but don’t want to hurt your ability to vote to kick when it’s called for, just tell people why you’re leaving and do it. Your queue times give you that ability.
I was in PoS the other day on my tree and died on the first trash pull when the tank failed to pick up the extra pat. The rest of the group managed to kill them and the retadin rezzed me. Not a great start, but not a big deal. So we’re all sitting around eating and drinking except for a warrior who’s just standing around with 1/3 health. I asked him why he wasn’t eating and he said “Are you kidding me?” With that attitude, I was happy to let him bump along at less than full health and if he died… well, meh. It wasn’t exactly a decision to let him die, but my commitment to ensuring that he lived was weak.
We get to Garfrost and he’s noticed his lack of health. He asks if I’m going to heal him so naturally I say, “Are you kidding me?” After we get Garfrost down, he explains that he couldn’t DPS because I wasn’t healing him. The group kicked him and the tank dropped at once. The paladin says good riddance to both of them, invites her husband to the group and we finish PoS without any more problems.
I’m usually not that aggressive with people but ffs put some effort into not pissing off your healer. Amber at I Love Bubbles said it best: my mana bar is not your buffet table!
I have only once let someone die intentionally (against belief it was a Mage). There was no verbal queue from the tank, but he seemed to good to let mobs loose (and proved that for the rest of the instance).
I just sensed that there was a lesson being taught, one that required my participation to be effective and let the Mage die.
I immediately rezzed him.
He immediately apologized.
All was right in the world.
On Gnomer I am often pushing the threat to the limit (I judge the tank, but sometimes living bombs explode at awkward moments). When I die, I immediately apologies to both tank and heals (before the Rez). It is usually my carelessness, my fault and the need to know I accept my position lying face down in the dirt.
As for vote kicks. A tank the other night begged to be vote kicked cause he got called away by RL, didn’t want to hold us up, yet didn’t want the deserters debuff.
Took a bit for the rest of the party to realize what he was asking for, meanwhile I am typing “Let’s give him what he wants”. Problem was, we couldn’t kick him yet… bloody timer!