One reason there is a tank shortage in group finder

People can be very abusive of tanks. Having played healers, tanks and DPS in my long years as an MMO player, I found that I was a great DPSer, a fantastic healer, but my true calling was tanking. So, I ended up taking a bit of a break from the game. I came back, started working on my tank's gear while leveling alts and such, so I'm well on my way to being in full black hole gear. Long story short, I'm wearing better than Tionese gear on my assassin tank, about half Columi and half Black Hole, and I know my s***.

I queued up last night looking for my quick 5 comms. Group pops for Kaon, everything starts out okay. About the second champion robot pull, I notice my health dropping and staying low. I make it through just fine but didn't get a single heal. Well that's a little strange. We get to the turret event and wipe. Okay, not a big deal, s*** happens. Except, the healer starts whining about how tough it is on hard mode. A DPS instantly jumps in with "it's really not that hard if you know what to do". It really ISN'T that hard, but whatever, let's try it again.

Wipe number two, and I'm thinking about baiing when I see the problem. Instead of dropping Revivification, our sorc healer is just spamming on Force Storm to DPS mobs down while nobody gets healed. Same DPS chips in with "Just drop AOE healing on the turret and keep us up. *Sigh*, alright. One more try. We make it through.

The second warning sign came on the Rakghoul Behemoth boss. It started out fine, removed the first barrel and started kiting down the long stretch to the next barrel. Then something happened I couldn't believe. I was about halfway downt he run when the healer used Extricate on me to pull me back to the start of the turn, where the group was behind the boss. I got knocked down, so between that and the threat drop I lost control of the boss, and was now totally out of position, and the boss had re-shielded. I managed to taunt it back on my way sprinting through and got it back on track. I got virtually no heals during the fight, even with the little damage I was taking while kiting. Still, while I was nearly dead, we still got the boss down. Okay. One more to go and it's an easy one, no problem.

The last straw came when we wiped repeatedly on trash mobs going through the second set of dark rooms. And why? Once again, the healer started spamming Force Storms again instead of healing, dead-centered on ones I had just mind-trapped. I pop cooldowns, aoe taunt, self-heal, medpack and minimize the incoming damage but it's not enough. We still wiped. This happened for a second time before I finally put my hands up and said "I'm sorry but this really shouldn't be this hard." We're getting stuck on this, blah blah blah and gracefully bowed out. I could have initiated a vote to kick, but instead I decided to gracefully remove myself from the situation and find another group. The DPS was little better, and slow anyway.

But it didn't end there. The healer decided to come at me in whispers with something like "**** you, you suck, squishy tank" or some such and ignored me right after that. I had already re-queued and it popped right when that happen. I apologized to the new group, and took the 15 minute debuff just to log over an alt and tell this person off.

I have never been removed from a group or chastised for my tanking ability. And in comes this healer, with a classy guild name all in lower case, spending all of their time DPSing instead of healing, then couldn't let it drop and had to come at me in tells. One time experiencing that is enough for many people to say "f*** the group finder" and go guild-only.

Words of advice to all non-tank puggers. We are the person you wait for the longest in your queue. We don't expect special praise or to exert some special form of 'authority' over the group. We are there to do a singular job: keep you from harm and help the group complete its objective. But I will say this again. It takes us seconds to get a group, and takes you considerably longer. We are thick-skinned, but it doesn't take a lot to make a tank give up on RGF and go guild-only. We don't need you to kiss our feet or stroke our egos. But if you want your queues to be shorter, be nicer to your tanks. A well-played, natural-born tank is a rare and precious resource. Every time you behave in such a manner, your odds of losing one of those resources gives up. That goes for healers as well, I have seen a lot of them get p***ed on lately as well and it needs to stop. But in particular, at least watching the forums and chat on my server lately, there is a rash of tanks reporting getting s*** on by groups/individuals and I just don't get it.