As anyone who's run their share of NMRs knows, there are often people who do The Wrong Things during them. Understandable, as many players are new to Rift, new to MMOs or maybe just haven't picked up various things for whatever reason. I thought I'd start off a general guide with a few tips and incorporate others from the comments if this thread takes off. I'll start off with a few that I consider the most important.
-- Run mobs to the middle of the rift or otherwise group them up. The majority of stages have 3+ mobs; some have only two, some have a single boss, but packs are the norm. The easiest way to kill packs is via AOE (area of effect) damage, and these abilities only work if the mobs are somewhat closely packed, depending on the ability in question (some are larger than others). Don't be that person who picks off one mob from the pack, pulls it out of everyone's AOEs or, even worse, runs it around.
-- Speaking of which, don't run around, save to get out of the enemy's aoe damage (colored circles on the ground, generally, or cones). This probably won't save you and will only annoy other players, especially melee players who have to try and keep up.
-- Stay out of AOEs, especially red ones. Red ones in NMRs will give the mobs a shield, meaning they take longer to kill, sometimes long enough that you fail the stage and the rift closes. This is right up there with not running mobs to the middle for ways to annoy others players and cause failures. Other than red, standing in anything else can get you feared, teleported or deaded.
-- Healing. If there's already one healer in the group/raid, give it a couple of stages to see how they're doing. If there are two healers, you don't need to be a healer yourself. The goal in NMRs is to have the minimum amount of healing to keep people alive, then as much DPS as possible. If you're a Chloro and there's already a Chloro, you don't need to be a Chloro, too. Veils don't stack, Radiant Spores overwrite one another, etc. This goes for solo Harb/Chloro (or Anything/Chloro) builds as well. At the very least, turn off your veil and don't overwrite Radiant Spores.
-- The DPS you do. I won't throw numbers at you, but consider this: If you join a NMR and just kind of use a few abilities and don't try to play well, you could be the one to cause the group to fail. The reason being is that the mobs scale with the number of players in the rift, meaning they get harder to kill (more HP, anyway), meaning everyone there needs to be doing as well as they can, at least if they want to progress to high stages. This really becomes a problem when there are multiple people who are doing very poor DPS for their level and the rift won't progress much past, maybe 30-40, depending. No one can stop you from joining the rift, so it's up to you, but please try to play well. You get more stuff and so does everyone else. Win win.
Ok, so I'll leave it at that. What I'm hoping for is for this to turn into a megathread that we can direct people to who are new to NMRs. Will