74: Black Circles are Universally Bad

The above dialog is from a DTK run I had last night.  If you don't remember, the first few pulls in DTK will put big black "void zones" on the ground that deal a decent amount of damage while you're in them, even on normal difficulty.  There was a priest in my group who was standing in one of them spamming heals on himself while also trying to keep me alive.  You'd think the fact that his health was plummeting would have been an indicator to him that something was wrong.  Or the fact that there was a giant black circle under his feet.  But no, he just stood there and died, excusing his performance with a casual "it's been a while since I've been here".

Now, this is one of the more obvious times where a player completely lacks situational awareness and needs to be told that black circles are bad.  Even though for most of us, if you're standing in something that looks bad and you're taking damage, chances are you should move.  But in my adventures through pug world, I've encountered a lot of people who need to be explicitly told to do something that seems painfully obvious to most people.

Silencing casters.
This is painfully obvious in Old Kingdom with the spell flingers who have a ridiculously long cast but deal a lot of damage.  My only interrupt as a bear is on a one minute cool down so I can only interrupt one of these casts ever couple pulls.  In one run, I marked the spell flinger with a skull to make it really apparent that it was a threat and should die first.  I then faerie fire to pull, but can't charge in because I don't want to aggro a second pack.  I could have run way back and LOS'd them but since we had a mage in the group I figured he'd do the intelligent thing and CS it.  Well he didn't.  Instead he stood there blasting away at it while it charged up its spell basically shouting "please interrupt me, I'm slowly but surely casting a spell over here".  Finally I yelled "WTB counterspell".  But by the time the mage realized what I was wanting, I had already decided to screw it, charge in and bash.  It was about that time that I saw the counterspell animation go off on the spell flinger - while the mob sat there still stunned from my bash.

Killing rifts.
The "rift boss" in Nexus... I'm too lazy to look up his actual name.  He occasionally goes immune and summons some rifts.  If you've already discussed that you're going for the heroic achievement then I can understand if you don't want to kill them.  But I can't even count the number of times I've seen somone continue to attack the boss long after he's gone immune and the rest of the party is off killing rifts.  Even if it's your first time ever doing the instance, wouldn't you take a hint when you see "immune, immune, immune" over and over while the rest of the party has moved on to killing something that isn't immune?

Tremor Totem.
In a pug I don't think I've ever seen a shaman use this on his own initiative.  It usually takes several pleas in party chat and some yelling (which reminds me how frequently I get annoyed that I can't do raid warnings in 5 mans anymore) before they take the hint.  And usually by that point the mob(s) that fear(s) are(is) dead.  Specially, see the T-Rex and the last few pulls in DTK.

Buffs, especially those of paladin origin.
When did we start needing to request buffs?  Before 3.3 I remember people buffing as standard procedure in 5 mans.  Sometimes you wouldn't get the Paladin buff you wanted, but you'd at least get something.  I see priests do this sometimes, but mainly it's paladins.  Probably 50% of all the paladins I run into won't buff anyone unless they're ask to, and then they'll just give a 10 minute ghetto buff.  When the shitty buff runs out you'll need to request a refresh which will usually take 2-3 pulls to get, while the paladin presumably rumages through his spell book to find it.  When I'm in a group with a paladin and see a 30 minute kings over my head it feels like a luxury.