A few things I'd like to cover:
1. You probably were sorted into the instance with a pre-arranged party of three. That or you were dealt malcontents.
2. If your tank is having issues staying alive for whatever reason (be it poor play or poor gear), you should not be DPSing as a healer, especially not to the point where you are running out of mana. An exception is made if your damage dealers are the ones playing poorly by not killing things fast enough to alleviate pressure on you and the tank.
3. Tanks do have weird itemization at times before they hit level 50. This is particularly noticeable when wearing lower level gear will give you more defensive stats overall (I mean PhysDef and MagicDef, not Parry) than wearing a higher piece of gear that takes multiple slots (any variant on Heavy Iron, for example). The people you ran with were correct, to an extent, in saying that a MRD/WAR's weapon damage is most important since it is the key factor in whether they can hold aggro provided they know how to play their class.
4. MRD defensive cooldowns are sparse pre-WAR, and the ones they get suck (see: Foresight). This is even worse if they haven't cross-classed for skills like Awareness or Second Wind or Featherfoot (all of which are "meh" when cross-classed anyway). WAR only starts getting good defensive CDs once they hit 35, which is when they receive Inner Beast.
5. It sounds like the MRD in question hadn't leveled GLA for cross-classing Flash, which isn't necessary but does help alleviate TP concerns.
1. You probably were sorted into the instance with a pre-arranged party of three. That or you were dealt malcontents.
2. If your tank is having issues staying alive for whatever reason (be it poor play or poor gear), you should not be DPSing as a healer, especially not to the point where you are running out of mana. An exception is made if your damage dealers are the ones playing poorly by not killing things fast enough to alleviate pressure on you and the tank.
3. Tanks do have weird itemization at times before they hit level 50. This is particularly noticeable when wearing lower level gear will give you more defensive stats overall (I mean PhysDef and MagicDef, not Parry) than wearing a higher piece of gear that takes multiple slots (any variant on Heavy Iron, for example). The people you ran with were correct, to an extent, in saying that a MRD/WAR's weapon damage is most important since it is the key factor in whether they can hold aggro provided they know how to play their class.
4. MRD defensive cooldowns are sparse pre-WAR, and the ones they get suck (see: Foresight). This is even worse if they haven't cross-classed for skills like Awareness or Second Wind or Featherfoot (all of which are "meh" when cross-classed anyway). WAR only starts getting good defensive CDs once they hit 35, which is when they receive Inner Beast.
5. It sounds like the MRD in question hadn't leveled GLA for cross-classing Flash, which isn't necessary but does help alleviate TP concerns.