@Darian
First:
Please take into consideration that many of the points I made refer rather to pick up groups, and not to close knit groups, that have a lot of experience in playing together. Since the advent of the honor system I have been to a lot of pick up groups lately, because many of my guildies went crazy over Honor Points farming and I have found myself accepting more invitations from strangers than usally. (Though I play on a PvP-Server and enjoy riding about the landscape picking up targets und ganking them, I loathe participating for hours in the TM-SS-Perma-Zerg-Situation, running back an forth between TM and SS, suffering from epic lag, and getting single digit contribution points for some zerged random kills).
With pick up groups I mean, that the priest is often the pick up, while the other 4 group members often know each other already and have been just looking for some priest to get things started. This automatically places the priest in an outsider position.
Second:
Many this problems don't become so apperent until you start doing instances from BRD on upward. BRD is the first instance which can not be conviently outleveled, i.e. even a group consisting mostly out of 60s can easily get wiped for doing stupid things.
Third:
Wether you belive me or not, many people don't think highly about priests. I mean what kind of strange persons priest players must be, who play class that requires them to stand in the background to just heal people, instead of tackling mobs and dealing high amounts of 1337 damage. Naturally a person playing such a class must be insceure and overly cautious by nature, shunning risks etc. Certainly there isn't nmuch use to gain out of such persons comments.
If you have never encounterd such people, consider yourself lucky. On my server there not exactly a tiny minority. Going from there, why so few people play priests (mages and warlocks aren't a dime a dozen either), while warriors, shamans, rogues and hunters are legion? I stand by my statement, that there is a certain condescending attitude by the more bully classes for the flimsy cloth wearers, priests especially (mages can do insanely amounts of damage, even when theys die like flies, warlocks can at least summon a sexy succubus, but what is cool about priest?). To sum it up: Cloth wearers are needed, but not overly respected.
On this note: I have never aspired the role of the "leader of the pack" so to speak, and most the priests I know don't want this either. I'm quite content to follow to big badass tauren warriors leading us into battle, but this doesn't mean, I like to be ignored, when I come up with some concern.
e.g. Last time doing BRD, I told our warrior, not to bypass nearby mob camps, because the amount of time saved, does not pay off the risk of these adding up suddenly to another pull, thus causing the group to wipe. I said this three times, three times I was ignored, three times we wiped because of this, then I left the group.
Another example: Telling people to keep out of the toxic clouds the infected zombies ooze in Scholo. There are seemingly always people who won't listen. Isn't the priest there to heal out such things? Of course we are also expected to jump up and heal when people dive into the toxic clouds to loot the zombie bodies, insted of waiting 10 sec. to let the toxic cloud wear of ("Whats your problem? Just heal me then, and everything is fine").
Fourth:
When I say "empirically proven" this is of course an exaggeration. I should have put an ;) smiley behind this sentence. My apologies for not doing so. But the fact remains, that I better not count on the puller obeserving the casters mana pool. I have already surrenderd to it as a fact life and made up a macro "Stop! Mana break" to deal with it ;)
First:
Please take into consideration that many of the points I made refer rather to pick up groups, and not to close knit groups, that have a lot of experience in playing together. Since the advent of the honor system I have been to a lot of pick up groups lately, because many of my guildies went crazy over Honor Points farming and I have found myself accepting more invitations from strangers than usally. (Though I play on a PvP-Server and enjoy riding about the landscape picking up targets und ganking them, I loathe participating for hours in the TM-SS-Perma-Zerg-Situation, running back an forth between TM and SS, suffering from epic lag, and getting single digit contribution points for some zerged random kills).
With pick up groups I mean, that the priest is often the pick up, while the other 4 group members often know each other already and have been just looking for some priest to get things started. This automatically places the priest in an outsider position.
Second:
Many this problems don't become so apperent until you start doing instances from BRD on upward. BRD is the first instance which can not be conviently outleveled, i.e. even a group consisting mostly out of 60s can easily get wiped for doing stupid things.
Third:
Wether you belive me or not, many people don't think highly about priests. I mean what kind of strange persons priest players must be, who play class that requires them to stand in the background to just heal people, instead of tackling mobs and dealing high amounts of 1337 damage. Naturally a person playing such a class must be insceure and overly cautious by nature, shunning risks etc. Certainly there isn't nmuch use to gain out of such persons comments.
If you have never encounterd such people, consider yourself lucky. On my server there not exactly a tiny minority. Going from there, why so few people play priests (mages and warlocks aren't a dime a dozen either), while warriors, shamans, rogues and hunters are legion? I stand by my statement, that there is a certain condescending attitude by the more bully classes for the flimsy cloth wearers, priests especially (mages can do insanely amounts of damage, even when theys die like flies, warlocks can at least summon a sexy succubus, but what is cool about priest?). To sum it up: Cloth wearers are needed, but not overly respected.
On this note: I have never aspired the role of the "leader of the pack" so to speak, and most the priests I know don't want this either. I'm quite content to follow to big badass tauren warriors leading us into battle, but this doesn't mean, I like to be ignored, when I come up with some concern.
e.g. Last time doing BRD, I told our warrior, not to bypass nearby mob camps, because the amount of time saved, does not pay off the risk of these adding up suddenly to another pull, thus causing the group to wipe. I said this three times, three times I was ignored, three times we wiped because of this, then I left the group.
Another example: Telling people to keep out of the toxic clouds the infected zombies ooze in Scholo. There are seemingly always people who won't listen. Isn't the priest there to heal out such things? Of course we are also expected to jump up and heal when people dive into the toxic clouds to loot the zombie bodies, insted of waiting 10 sec. to let the toxic cloud wear of ("Whats your problem? Just heal me then, and everything is fine").
Fourth:
When I say "empirically proven" this is of course an exaggeration. I should have put an ;) smiley behind this sentence. My apologies for not doing so. But the fact remains, that I better not count on the puller obeserving the casters mana pool. I have already surrenderd to it as a fact life and made up a macro "Stop! Mana break" to deal with it ;)