Healer Aggro

What is the deal with healer aggro ?

I go into a dungeon, The tank pulls, and yes I wait for the tank to establish. No I do not ever run past the tank.
Some if not all the mobs head straight for me.

I know certain spells pull aggro . But this is getting ridiculous.

I AM allowed to heal right ? Without having to spam heal myself because in CM all the adds head for me because I have to heal people who should not be getting aggro .

I can understand some aggro but this is getting out of hand.

Healer Aggro needs to be adjusted.

Sounds like Regen is your problem. If the tank still has Regen on when he/she goes to pull, when it ticks, the mobs run to you. If they're paying attention they can (and maybe should?) click it off first, but mostly they are either not paying attention or just don't know that they can do this.

99% of the time in any dungeon if the adds come straight to me on a few cure I/II, it means the tank didn't get solid hate on them. If DPS are also getting threat, it either means the DPS didn't wait for tank, or again tank didn't establish enough first.

Problem is almost never healer aggro in those cases. This isn't to say healer can't easily get aggro, but that if it is happening right from the start, it is on the tank. Run into this all the time in DF.

And yes as stated above by Calyanare, the other 1% is regen and I just timed it badly. ;)

I cast regen on all party members at all time and focus my cure II or III on tank (after the tank gets firm hold of aggro), whenever adds comes at me i use Shroud of Saints to decrease the aggro, if all that fails, i would run to tank and hope tank would pick the rest of adds off me, and try not to over heal, that generates aggro.

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Originally Posted by baopee

I cast regen on all party members at all time and focus my cure II or III on tank (after the tank gets firm hold of aggro), whenever adds comes at me i use Shroud of Saints to decrease the aggro, if all that fails, i would run to tank and hope tank would pick the rest of adds off me, and try not to over heal, that generates aggro.

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You shouldn't really keep regen on all party members. Overheal generates aggro, but regen overheal does too. Every tick of a Regen on a player adds that heal amount to the threat of all enemies in combat. If you've got 4 regens ticking at once which arent healing anything, your threat will be through the roof.

A tank's enmity combo establishes threat on one target.

A single Cure 1 builds threat on all engaged targets evenly.

At a guess, I'd say you ran into a tank who wasn't using Flash properly to build threat on targets he wasn't actively slapping.

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Originally Posted by baopee

I cast regen on all party members at all time and focus my cure II or III on tank (after the tank gets firm hold of aggro), whenever adds comes at me i use Shroud of Saints to decrease the aggro, if all that fails, i would run to tank and hope tank would pick the rest of adds off me, and try not to over heal, that generates aggro.

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Wow, no, regen is reserved for tank, or a dps you don't expect to take more damage any time soon. and for MP you should be using Cure I which will prevent much overhealing and allow for free Cure II, as for Cure III it's very situational in that its range is so short that it is only MP and Enmity effective on an Overcure proc with a stacked group. Also if one mob is left and around half health don't apply a new regen just to be safe.

I rarely have problem with getting agro, but when I do, it's usually because regen ticked at an awkward time because we are running through mobs fast and tank still has it on from the fight previous. I love shroud of saints though, that usually does the trick during the times I manage to get agro.

It's usually the tank if you know for a fact that it's not you. If you didn't over heal, spam heal, cast regen or buff before pull, stand away etc... it could be because your gear is higher than the tank. I was in SVigil with a seriously low geared tank and he couldn't hold hate... I had to basically be the tank and spam heals so that we could move forward. But I told myself that this is stupid and just left. Because there's no way I could keep it up when the first boss comes around.

Thank You for the responses . I will try clicking off the regen suggestion. But as I am reading all the responses all I see is,

This spell is generating aggro that one is generating aggro . Use this and not that ect.
So yes some of the spells healers are casting creates to much aggro .

Then why did SE give me a spell that creates way to much hate? It seems that it is a lot of guess work at this point.

All I am suggesting is SE take a close look at healer aggro and adjust it accordingly

SE gave you a toolbox. You can't use a hammer for every job in building a house and you can't use Regen every GCD. It's not guess work at all. If you don't want to take the time to understand your tools on your own, there are a lot of guides (starting with the good advice you've already ignored in this thread) to help you out.

As far as I can tell, all of the heal spells generate the same amount of hate per HP point healed.
So: Regen doesn't create any more hate per hitpoint compared to throwing a Cure. It's just that if it's on the tank and he pulls a group of mobs he's usually only hit one of the of them. If the regen tick happens before he's managed to land any damage on the secondary mobs that healing will put you onto the top of the hate table and they come running at the healer.
If you timed a Cure to happen at that precise moment the same thing would happen...except it'd be worse, because Cure would "heal" more HP so you'd end up with more enmity than a regen tick would cause.

To simplify, most fights can be broken down to: precast Stoneskin to buy the tank time to build aggro before you need to heal, use Regen only when it will be gone by the end of the fight and when most of it will not be overhealing, use Cure 1 for most of the fight (but don't just spam it, you have to react to the party's damage), use Cure 2 when a lot of damage needs healed quickly (with preference given when Freecure procs), use Cure 3 very sparingly (if at all). Divine Seal, Presence of Mind and Shroud of Saints are situational abilities that can be used to keep yourself alive, heal through high damage portions of the fight with higher mana longevity and get more heals out in less time.

Healer aggro is fine. No, you can't just spam heal mindlessly and have the mobs ignore you but that's intentional (for the same reason Stone 1 has a movement speed debuff on it but Stone 2 does not; you need to know your job to be good).

Hey - I am conj and am nervous of going any further than lord of the inferno (don't even want to start that!) - I seem to be having a lag and I got loads of abuse on my last dun. I actually changed world and started again as some woman from a fc was rude and horrid - I play on a PS3. I moved from Shiva to Odin. I need to join a FC that actually does things - the last one I was in did nothing. So now I am a nervous reluctant scared healer who just harvests all of the time. Any suggestions pls?!

Just dive in and learn. Even the complete idiot who is raging occasionally has a good point on what you are doing wrong. Key is learn what is valuable from their bs and try to implement it and ignore the rest.

I would like to see the ability for WHM's to cancel the Regen spell to avoid aggro from fresh pulls.

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Originally Posted by Kerwin

I would like to see the ability for WHM's to cancel the Regen spell to avoid aggro from fresh pulls.

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That.

Also, make it apply to Scholar's fairies.

As a Tank, I can click off Regen (providing that I'm playing on PC not PS3) but I can't do a damn thing about the stupid fairies pulling hate occasionally at the start of the pull... >.<

*FLASH, FLASH, FLASH*
"Dammit Eos, come back here with that Tonberry!" :mad: :p

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Originally Posted by Sapphidia

You shouldn't really keep regen on all party members. Overheal generates aggro, but regen overheal does too. Every tick of a Regen on a player adds that heal amount to the threat of all enemies in combat. If you've got 4 regens ticking at once which arent healing anything, your threat will be through the roof.

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yes, you are right, it could create a lot of hate on me, but i do pay awful lot of attention on aggro/ enmity gauge when i play as a healer. ( i have pld as my main job)

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Originally Posted by Nailkita

Wow, no, regen is reserved for tank, or a dps you don't expect to take more damage any time soon. and for MP you should be using Cure I which will prevent much overhealing and allow for free Cure II, as for Cure III it's very situational in that its range is so short that it is only MP and Enmity effective on an Overcure proc with a stacked group. Also if one mob is left and around half health don't apply a new regen just to be safe.

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you will be surprised what DF has paired up with me,-tank does not know how to tank, tank wanna be dps, dps wont get out of aoe area.

tldr

Either the tank uses the wrong skills or the healer does.

Spamming aoe and upping hots on targets at full health will draw aggro quickly. Some tanks can hold even that. Don´t expect it.
Ofc there may be DD´s not avoiding voidzones forcing you to heal. Not quite true. I can be more benifitial for the group to let them at 30%. They will play more careful and you can still soloheal them up as the rest of the group is stable. If they die it can be even better for the group (very rare though)

That´s the reason many ppl heal with mouseover while keeping the enemies in their target. It´s easier to recognize if it is save to heal stupidity. But you´ll get a feeling for that anyway and with some equip you won´t care about nonboss aggro anymore.

Healer aggro is just fine. It makes the tank and the healer have to actually play the game. You can't mindlessly spam heals and get there and the tank cant do two rotations and go make a sandwich.

Healer aggro is a one for one basis. You heal for 1k then you generate 1k of threat. Tanks build aggro the same but based on dmg x the threat modifiers on their attacks. This creates a situation where when you heal you want to make sure they are missing at least that much health because otherwise all your getting from your overheal is aggro you don't need. Keeping a tank topped off in dungeons (Coil is different and as such requires slightly different approach to healing) is a bad idea and you should be learning how much dmg they are taking from fight to fight so you can heal them as efficiently as possible. If the tank doesn't handle aoe pulls well then you are going to be dealing with mobs regardless of efficient you are.

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Originally Posted by Pharazon

Healer aggro is a one for one basis. You heal for 1k then you generate 1k of threat.

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Actually it's 1 enmity per point of Damage and 0.5 enmity per point of Healing.
Meaning you can heal twice as much as someone else damages the mob for the same amount of "hate".

But the rest of your post still stands. (Overhealing is baaaaad!!) :)

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Originally Posted by Maelwys

Actually it's 1 enmity per point of Damage and 0.5 enmity per point of Healing.
Meaning you can heal twice as much as someone else damages the mob for the same amount of "hate".

But the rest of your post still stands. (Overhealing is baaaaad!!) :)

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Oops! I had an older set of theorycrafting bookmarked when I did my post. Thanks for pointing that out since now I have my bookmark updated. lol

You need to stop thinking of Regen as a healing spell, and start thinking of it as a "buffer" for the tank's health.

Sure, you can use it on other members of your party/raid, but in general, it's meant to be sitting on the tank, making his/her health spike less.

Personally, when I'm healing as a White Mage, I only use Regen on packs of at least 2 mobs, and I stop putting it out once the second-to-last mob is nearly dead. That way, it won't be of use to the tank during the highest point of damage (when there's multiple mobs on him) and won't be on the tank when the last mob dies (thus enabling us to move to the next pack of mobs more quickly).

Yeah, pretty sure it's only a WHM thing. I think it's because too many WHM get Regen/Medica II happy.

Actually had a WHM casting Medica II before/during Heart phase on Titan, and couldn't figure out why he was pulling so much threat. It was pretty much every geocrusher/tumult he was casting Medica II, like even when it was only 1-3 stomps and we were already shielded with Succor and Sacred Soil.

I've also seen a lot of WHM spamming Cure II and III while also doing Medica and Medica II during CM runs.

On side note, since this is about aggro. I've never seen any class run around more when they get hate than WHMs. Last fight in CM (when she summons the adds to one targeted person), almost every WHM I've seen seems to not understand that they can simply run to the boss and spam heals on themselves. I think we need to get the knowledge out that it's much easier to run to the tank than to run around like an idiot.

I've been seeing a lot of this lately. If I get a good tank, I can heal like mad and never steal agro. Today, I've been getting nothing but bad tanks. They either don't flash or only flash once. In short time, the adds are attacking me. The DPS try to help get them off (probably a bad idea), end up getting attacked, I'm healing them now, generating more threat.

If I have a tank that flashes a couple times at the beginning and actually keeps an eye on agro, there's no problem with threat from my heals.

Everything about WHM is situational. There are no rules that apply every single time. By virtue of the job, you have to use your skills and instincts to decide quickly what the best decision is for your party based on, again the situation. I would love to have macros but personally find them kind of useless as I am always finding new and better ways to optimize my healing while keeping the party alive. My best advise to any WHM is to practice, see what works and what doesn't. Then use it what you learned to be better.

I wrote for you a poem.

Stoneskin.

A few seconds after pull, stoneskin.
A few more, stoneskin + regen.
Stoneskin in the morning.
Stoneskin in the night.
Except for most bosses
Stoneskin saves a life.
Stoneskin don't do that
Aggro you dislike
(It can, but not really)
So stoneskin all the time.
Stoneskin
I love you
I really do
I do, I do.
I love you,
Stoneskin.
More than
Cheetos
Because
Cheetos
Give me
Adipose
Aggro.
Stoneskin:
<3

Really simple! Keep stoneskin on all members of the party as best you can, only use Regen on the tank during boss fights(not trash pulls.... it's just dumb to cast a 21 second HoT that generates a ton of threat and risk it ticking during an initial pull)(except for the demon wall in AK.... regen and medica 2 means you can just jump around the whole fight and cast holy if you are good enough), and only use regen on the party if you know there is about to be a big group attack to help with spike dmg.... I rarely pull aggro during runs unless it is a terribad tank... and even then, I just heal tank if the real tank blows donkey dongs...

The problem is, in a DF one single cure can pull threat if the tank just tunnels on one target, and this happens alot when I'm bored and do it through DF.

It is not difficult to hold the threat if you know what you are doing, but tank needs to be alot more active than a healer, I play both so I know.

Now, the design is really awesome cause tanks need to learn to efficiently hold threat but is extremely noob unfriendly and punishes the healer and sometimes it is impossible to do with some tanks when you constantly having 2 mobs wacking on ya.

can't say how many times that has happened to me

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Originally Posted by szarina

This spell is generating aggro that one is generating aggro . Use this and not that ect.
So yes some of the spells healers are casting creates to much aggro .
Then why did SE give me a spell that creates way to much hate? It seems that it is a lot of guess work at this point.
All I am suggesting is SE take a close look at healer aggro and adjust it accordingly

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Or, now here's a wild and crazy thought, you might learn to play the class correctly, get a proper rotation down. As stated by several people above, the issue in order of most likely to least likely is: Tank is crap and can't hold agro>Tank wasn't fast enough in getting hate>Tank is undergearerd/you are overgeared>you jumped the gun.

Try finding a WHM you trust in your FC or LS that can give you advice. I: am not saying i am a great epic healer, but i get better with every run. DF is your best friend when you are practicing too, then you dont have to care who you piss off;)