To my fellow healers old and new

I know this has been said countless times and I pretty much expect this thread to fall into deletion and/or obscurity but it needs to be said.

To the fellow healers old and new: If you healing is not up to par or your still learning the healer job regardless of which one, Please tell the party and especially the tank at the start of a dungeon/raid.

I had to deal with a fresh newbie who didn't say anything till the last area about how I'm squishy since i died despite using all my mitigation and they are still with 10k mp (I was DRK, they was a AST) then 1 of the dps gets on me cause i was asking about how come they ain't healing me when I pull large mobs. They healed just fine on bosses but mobs deleted me.

I'm not sure why Healer roles don't heal anymore. It's beyond me as well. Good luck.

Disclaimer: I do not know what happened in the dungeon so please ignore anything I say that you had done in the dungeon already.

The response you get from people when you say are new is varied. There can be snotty tanks just as bad as that healer when the healer says that are learning and may not be able to heal as good as the oh mighty tank desires. On top of this, there are DPS out there that do not care that you are going slow for learning reasons and will either mock you as a tank or even as a healer. Furthermore, those same DPS will go out of their way to pull more things that the tank opted not to pull. This type of behaviour is not one-sided and any role may be timid to the idea of stating that they are learning in fear of potential negativity from outliers. Of course, there are situations when it is fine and nothing happens, but the point is there is no hail mary solution to the problem.

That said, as a tank, if I don't get steady healing during pulls I will adjust mid dungeon so that it is smoother. I would do this regardless of what was suggested or said in chat to make sure the dungeon gets done.

If any player wants to start to attack or harass any other player in the group then that's on them and any GM that investigates them.

AST's MP pool really isn't a indicator of whenever they healed or not. Right now it's tough to go oom with how overtuned their MP recovery is.

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Originally Posted by RinaShinomiya

AST's MP pool really isn't a indicator of whenever they healed or not. Right now it's tough to go oom with how overtuned their MP recovery is.

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While true, it is extremely irritating to see a tank dead with a healer at full MP. Just shows they weren't using their abilities adequately. If sh!t is really hitting the fan the healer should be healing, period. And if that is happening their CD's are all used up and they've resorted to hard casts which drain mana.

Even if that means Lightspeed spamming Benefic 2. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

I mean, considering you can’t go to any kind of ffxiv media without being constantly reminded of how useless, redundant and boring they are, is it really any wonder healers are just flat out refusing to perform their primary role.

You can never win as a healer so how could they not become disillusioned?

If you cast GCD heal spells you’re a trash Sylphie RP’er with 5 IQ who can barely comprehend how to take a breath.

If you cast GCD damage spell you’re an elitist snob DPS wearing healer clothes who just wants a really fast queue but doesn’t have the big brain for real dps.

If you heal solely through oGCDs you’re a lazy incompetent healer who spams ‘panic heals’ (how do you even panic heal in a game where panic practically doesn’t exist by intentional design lol).

It genuinely makes me sad to see how many healers nowadays will just flat out refuse to heal someone, then if that person dies it’s just ‘it’s your own fault for taking that damage I’m not interrupting my one single dps spell for you’. It’s very common for healers to elect to let a party member die rather than resort to using a single GCD on them (‘my cds were down so it’s your fault you died to that aoe. Ignore my several non-cd heals’). Then again, it’s also common for healers to seek 100% on Medica II for some reason and I’ve yet to understand why lol. Somehow I don’t see it being that good lol.

The biggest culprit for all of this? It’s not the community. It’s the very way healers are designed that’s encouraging them not to heal . And honestly I think it’s becoming more and more of an issue

TL;DR: People are starting to take the ‘healers are unnecessary’ things too literally and it’s causing issues with players who completely misunderstand what it is that’s actually being said; e.g just because ‘healers should try not to use gcds’ doesn’t mean ‘healers must never use a gcd under any circumstances’ lol

I don't think I agree with this entirely. At what point do you stop? Should it become mandatory for tanks to have to declare they are bad, or they are under-geared? Do DPS also have to say they're bad so big pulls will take longer and put more strain on both tanks and healers?

As someone who has been playing for quite some time, it's a lot easier for you to adjust yourself. I've had tanks that as a SCH I don't ever need to heal outside of a few OGCDs, and then you get the ones who drop very quickly and don't bother using their invuln at any point. I can adjust to that, rather than calling out a tank in casual content. It's uncalled for in my opinion. I think DRKs are the biggest offenders for this but it's not at all helpful for me to go around calling them squishies. If I can start healing more and sacrificing my own DPS, you can spend a few extra minutes doing smaller pulls if you see your healer struggling or not playing to your standards.

"Are you okay with big pulls or small pulls?"
Communication goes two ways.

Wall-to-wall pulls are harder to heal than bosses and not all healers are experienced or skilled enough to handle them well. MP is rarely an indicator of performance too, especially if they're a good healer, because that MP is more likely being used for DPS and the resource they're spending on healing is tied to their oGCD's.

Wall-to-wall pulls have a lot more that can go wrong compared to boss fights and it takes fewer mistakes to cause a wipe, and incoming damage is a lot more frequent.

It's why veteran healers like wall-to-wall pulls because it gives them more to do.

But a few of the contributing factors:
- Tank gear can mean they take more overall damage or have a smaller HP pool
- Tank cooldown usage can mitigate how much incoming damage they take or what self-healing they contribute. IMO a tank should know how to use these for big pulls.
- The overall party DPS can affect it, if stuff is slow to drop dead, your healer might start burning through oGCD's, it's oGCD usage that is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, when it falls to GCD spamming, then you're more at risk, sometimes the numbers just don't align.
- Healer experience & skill, reflexes and spatial/situational awareness
- People taking avoidable damage
- General human error, like misjudging how squishy the tank is.
- Job differences. EG: WAR has good self sustainability, DRK does not. SGE has a steeper learning curve etc.
- Incoming damage is faster/more frequent on a big pull, meaning, a person's HP can suddenly drop
- Healers will likely try to fit in DPS, this can create another margin of error. The idea of a big pull is the overall DPS benefit, and healers are generally expected to contribute to overall DPS when they can and a healer trying to get better at this will try to fit in DPS and optimise, however, this can be a squeeze and it's easier to make a mistake. In a wall-to-wall there's less room for mistakes on the healer.


Whilst I don't think it is complicated to do wall-to-wall, it's just that it doesn't take many mistakes for something like a wall-to-wall pull to cause a wipe and for there to be many potential variables for why the healer has had a harder time keeping up. Whereas other roles have more room to make mistakes.

Hence, I don't think it should be an expectation that your healer can handle big pulls, but certainly what they should aspire for. And if you're using Duty Finder, let's face it, you'll get people of all levels of ability.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

While true, it is extremely irritating to see a tank dead with a healer at full MP. Just shows they weren't using their abilities adequately. If sh!t is really hitting the fan the healer should be healing, period. And if that is happening their CD's are all used up and they've resorted to hard casts which drain mana.

Even if that means Lightspeed spamming Benefic 2. If that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

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@Saefinn expressed things very well, however I would just add that in the situation that you 're describing, if an AST is at that point i.e. 'healing, period' and spamming gcd heals , something is seriously wrong with the rest of the group and having the healer being expected to spam Benefic and do no dps isn't going to help. you may well die. fortunately you won't be dying irl.

that's very different from a help throwing out the occasional gcd heal due to a very large pull, or a group that's killing things a bit slowly.