What I've noticed when one of the healers die.

8-man party.

Two healers. I understand that one of them will be doing 80% of the healing while the other is helping with 20% (Tank busters and big AoE damage).

Aka he is saying "I can handle this, you can dps".

BUT. What I don't understand is when that healer (Lets call him main healer since is pretty much doing most of the work) dies. The other healer is very slow to react to that.

Example; when the MT dies the OT almost immediately provokes and takes charge of the situation. We don't see this happening with healers.

Main healer dies? It is 90% chance of wipe because the other healer did not take charge and coverup for him.

I've seen this a lot in 24-man raid. Is it hard to cover up?

I feel like it depends on the group honestly. I've had more runs lately that it's like the OT is taking a nap, main tank dies and no one grabs aggro or even attempts.
Yet like you've said I've watched the same thing happen with healers. I think the problem is people in the off tank or off healer role sometimes check out and don't realize right away that something bad happened? I've also had groups where healers work extremely efficient with each other. I get what you mean tho, and sometimes things can be hard to come back from based on the rest of the group make up too. If main healer dies and the rest of the group is taking insane damage from not dodging or any other possibility that seems to occur it can be hard to bounce back from. It's all just situational.

Majority of the time I am the OH and if I have swiftcast ready (Which unless someone else died prior for whatever reason I always have it) then I immediately go for it. Not like it's that difficult.

I don't think 24-man instances are examples good enough to stereotype healers in general - as I see it a lot of people in 24-mans don't even necessarily go in as their main class, because they're hoping to gear up alts.

I main healer (SCH specifically) but having a set of 260 gear that is upgradable makes Dun Scaith drops redundant, so I've been going as BLM (alt which i frequently play) ever since 3.5 was released. Admittedly, most of the healers I see in that place have no idea what the heck they're doing... they can't even keep their tanks alive, much less react quickly to such changes. Most wipes I've seen in DS so far happen partially because one team's healers die (thus the whole team ends up dying shortly after), and NO ONE pays attention to the allince member list to see if any of the other teams needs any support.

Most healers there either DPS-only, thus dumping the responsability of doing any actual work on the other healer, or stand around uselessly casting regens when no raid wide damage is happening. D:

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Originally Posted by Spiroglyph

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Yeah I underhand. I do Dun Scaith as a healer myself but at least I know what I'm doing :)

This situation happens with Alexander Normal as well, not just 24-man raid but it mostly happens there.
The reason you mentioned might be the case.

the difference is pretty clear

When the offtank is smacking the boss and it turns towards him, something is very obvious and in thier direct view.
When the main healer dies, the offhealer is in dps mode only healing when needed. The more familiar they are with the fight more they focus on dps knowing when those times occur. They simply aren't looking at health bars while trying to dps.

So in the end, the difference is the how obvious it is when it happens.

As for 24 mans, that is where people go to play badly. Haf the time im in there and we wipe, it is because healers in one group go down and the other groups dont even have the alliances on thier ui to res them.

For me, as OT or OH, it depends on the content, and how used to it I am.
If most of my runs, nothing goes wrong, and if the group does great on the 1st couple of bosses, I end up "checking out" assuming the others have it.
If the content is something ive done a few times, but im still semi new to, ill be slow to react, since ill assume it will play out like my other experiences.

but if ive done it for months, and i know people tend to wipe at a certain mechanic in 1 boss fight (example being ozma) ill be ready to take over, even if everything has been smooth up until now.

how often are dps looking at the party stat bars? Even SMN who have to maintain dots, T mean a good co healer will be monitoring it constantly but ya know.... Im much more concerned about what happens when the only healer or both healers die

It depends on the run. If both healers have good awareness of the raid and each other, it's going to continue smoothly. The off healer will send out a raise and keep the heals going until they can get the other healer back on their feet. What I usually do is keep the raised person hard targeted so I can send an essential dignity their way and re-protect.

I've had really good duty finders where the other healer and I found a good balance with each other.

Runs go really well when I'm in with a co-healer from my FC who's in voice chat, because we can communicate and divide things up really well. With DF I wait to see if the other healer is going to raise; with an FC mate I tell them I'm going to do a raise or need them to watch the party or tank while I do a slow raise.

Confirmation bias I think. Been in several situations where in 24 man content not a single provke being thrown for a good 2 minutes after mt went down (it was the revived mt that finally did do so). Been in several 8 man contents where mt goes down and ot continues doing the ot mechanics instead of picking the boss up as it proceeds to systematically tank buster the rest of tge party members.
I've seen healer never heal and blame deaths on dps/tanks for taking too much unavoidable damage, and seen heals called out for letting people die when they stood in every possible dodgeable aoe.

To the matter at hand, you may be noticing the healers more then tanks because, when a tank goes down it is usually to a tank buster that is only hitting one person (theoretically) and usually both healers are doing some healing mitigation to deal with it, and the recovery mentality is keep the other tank up to stabalize the fight. (In addition lots of fights have a party killing cleave that immediatly follows the tbs and no one in their right mind is going to complain to an ot about not being able to stop that, reducing the possible instances where a mt death is recoverable to begine with.) When a single healer goes down it is usually to an aoe hit after they get picked for a single target part damaging move which is usually healed through by the mh alone. The heal priority is also different, second healer (now solo healer) stays alive at all costs or everyone is dead in about 30 seconds give or take.

Idk what SE is thinking with these char limits.

Edit:
The Cleric button is bad. Odds are when the healer dies you're finishing your cast, pressing Cleric to turn it off and then STARING at your buffs to make certain it's off (I.e. it accepted your button press and you didn't accidentally click twice). You also need to move into position—BLMs are jerks and like to stand at the furthest edge of the arena, and if there's multiple BLMs they'll likely be at opposite ends just to F@%# with you. So you eyeball it and try to position yourself between BLMs and the tank and then begin casting your AoE heals and what have you.

So that's the standard process which is slightly more annoying than provoke + shield lob/tomahawk/unmend. There are things you can do to help, for example casting instant heals while you move into position on those needing them urgently, or using something like LighttSpeed to heal as you move to position. It's not that hard to pick up after a dead co-healer, however there is a brief panicked moment where you need to do things right or the rest of the fight goes downhill.

You're lucky because the healers I come across are all allergic to cleric stance.

This drives me crazy too, both when I'm healing or on a DPS class. In the latter case, what makes it worse is when half the party is dead and the first DPS they choose to raise with barely enough mana is melee - while the SMNs/ BRDs are left to tank the floor for most of the fight.

I know that when I'm OH and I see the MH drop, I immediately get out of Cleric and assume MH responsibilities until I can get the other healer back on their feet.

I have noticed however, that if I am the main healer and I happen to fail a mechanic and die, it almost always leads to a wipe. The way I see it though is it just makes me better at staying alive.

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Originally Posted by Lunaxia

This drives me crazy too, both when I'm healing or on a DPS class. In the latter case, what makes it worse is when half the party is dead and the first DPS they choose to raise with barely enough mana is melee - while the SMNs/ BRDs are left to tank the floor for most of the fight.

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Got a story to support this. >:3

I got Sephirot in trial roulette (1st run of it actually lol). About half the people get knocked off in the first 10-ish minutes - OT and MH included. I blow my swiftcast to res our remaining DRK (who died when OH didn't react fast enough). Healer goes down literally seconds after, and I'm starring in horror at my swiftcast still sitting at 57 second cooldown. We're all at 10-40% health and DPS are dropping like flies because of the unavoidable damage. So I decide "fuck it. Slow res it is. I'm dead with the next hit anyway." I take an AOE hit to res the healer. And then lay dead on the floor for the remaining 20 minutes of the fight while healer proceeds to res EVERYONE except me (the only SMN, the only one that could potentially help get the party back up). I was officially flabbergasted. O_O;

On the bright side we cleared without a wipe (somehow), but it annoyed me lol. Like dude, I died for you~! D: I can heeeelp.

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Originally Posted by GeekMatt

It's not that hard to pick up after a dead co-healer, however there is a brief panicked moment where you need to do things right or the rest of the fight goes downhill.

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I completely agree. When the main healer dies, there are a lot of things that the off healer has to worry about right away. I have a checklist of examples of things I think about, and I assume other healers go through a similar process:

- Notice the other healer is dead
- Is swiftcast available?
- How is your mp?
- What CD abilities do you have available?
- Is everyone okay without a heal for the next X seconds*?

A) What is the condition of the tank and the rest of the party?
B) Has the party been pretty good at avoiding things so far?
C) Are there AOE’s coming up?
D) Is a tank buster coming up?
E) Will the newly risen healer need to be topped off quickly?

*When I’m healing, I don’t actually think about it in seconds—I just sort of “feel” it—but for the purpose of explanation, I’d say you need about five seconds buffer time. Swiftcast is about half a second, there’s waiting for your GCD to refresh, then there is the cast time for your actual healing spell. Assuming you don’t have a cooldown ability available.

With experience, most healers are reflexively cognizant of the items on the list during the fight, so they only have to think about one or two things when its crunch time. But how well and quickly a healer responds to all these things depends on the skill, experience, and how focused that healer is. It’s not surprising that a healer may freeze up, or make a poor choice, when the other healer dies since it often happens in a bad situation that is quickly escalating.

It really varies with the group you are apart of at that time.

As a SMN main, I always let the Healers know I'm running Swiftcast/Resurrection to help them out if the random party member dies. This way they can focus primarily on healing the group and the Tanks (plus save some MP).

It's so nice to get a "thanks" from your Healers on that little bit of help. ^_^

The reality of this situation is that there is no main healer and off healer. Just co-healers. This MH OH thing is a meta made up by players that is outdated from back in the day when it was a lot harder for whm to do decent sustained Dps because of mana issues. If you checkout some of bokchoys posts on Reddit you can see some great theories and arguments about why forcing healers into the roles of main and off healer is bad and usually results in a decrease in raid Dps (the only Dps that really matters). The issue is people are too wrapped up in their personal Dps to realize that this concept is wasteful and suboptimal.
If we can work on changing this system so both healers contribute to Dps AND healing more equally, it would subsequently make situations where one healer dies much easier to handle. Right now through, when the "main healer" dies ... all the "off healer" is thinking about is how much the death is going to nerf their Dps.... Even worse, there are so many "off healers" that have no real perception of incoming damage or how to handle because they are usually so focused on Dps that if the "main healer" dies and can't be raised immediately they have no idea how to handle the healing load in the mean time and it ends up being a wipe anyway.... which was definitely 100% the other healers fault for dying and 0% their fault for not knowing how to actually emergency heal on their class.

Edited to add we actually have a tank in my static that is so obsessed overnight being the main tank that he just tries to immedately take the boss back when he is raised even if he's not topped and has no buffs. It's like a reflex in response to dying that he wants to get thing back to 'normal' as fast as possible and I have to regularly remind him to just off tank for a while and it's FINE for the warrior to tank too lol. He was doing it all the time in a12s prog it was driving me nuts. So I guess maybe I'm too harsh on off healers. They are just as much a victim of pidgenholeing as main healers. I mean how many scholars have been told if you are sub 1k then you're bad cuz you're the off healer. Probably a lot.

Look at it this way, what does the OT contribute to tanking? Not much really, maybe a 10% damage debuff if it's a WAR. So when MT dies, OT picks it up, nothing has really changed setupwise.

This is not the case with healers. BOTH healers are healing, even if you focus on dpsing you are still healing, SCH has a fairy, WHM and AST have their regens. so when 1 healer dies you have lost half your group healing. So not only does the 1 remaining healer have to pick up the slack of the healer that died but they have to heal the MT and get the dead healer up AND make sure they survive the raise, that's a lot more work than provoke + skull sunder = MTing achieved.

I see this phenomenon even in Savage mode... that, and 'why the fuck are you hardcasting raise on me while [the boss prepares a tank buster/there's a huge raid-aoe incomming/insert kill mechanic here]???'
It's infuriating...

@Cabalabob
More often than not, this kind of healer doesn't really heal, but only focuses on dps. To the point where they don't even precast shields before big aoe's/busters... so, yeah, in this cases you sadly do have a MH/OH setting with around 90% of the load dumped on the MH. Who is, of course, also blaimed for the eventual wipe.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

Look at it this way, what does the OT contribute to tanking? Not much really, maybe a 10% damage debuff if it's a WAR. So when MT dies, OT picks it up, nothing has really changed setupwise.

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My point was that even with tanks it should not be the case that the OT doesn't contribute to tanking. If you look at the way the dynamic is shifting in many groups... they are breaking out of the whole "warrior is the off tank" dynamic where you pld/drk tanks everything until it's absolutely necessary for the warrior to tank. This, again, is an outdated meta. You gain a lot more by having BOTH tanks contribute to tanking and you get better damage mitigation by utilizing both tanks cooldowns. And less damage on the tanks often means more dps for them and also the healers. So now we see a lot more "main tanks" in dps stance/out of tank stance in the case of drk. And a lot more cases where the warrior contributes to tanking the boss even if its just for a short time to take the tank buster. To be clear, I'm talking about savage level play where you can coordinate with your group. But these meta's and definitions of class roles all trickle down from that anyway for the most part. If we start to see more open mindedness about previously defined job roles in raiding, it will trickle down and affect the more casual part of the community. I'm hoping in stormblood some job changes will help speed this up.

The roles of "main tank" and "off tank" haven't really suited this game anyway tbh. They really apply to games with larger scale raiding where adds have much greater significance. There are many fights in other games where you have adds almost the entire fight or there are two bosses in the fight or something. Then main and off tank have real significance, because the MT is the one tanking the boss... But in FFXIV we haven't had as many real add fights. Maybe it's an add phase but not the whole fight where adds play a big role.. but usually in those the boss actually goes away in this game... so then both tanks are tanking the adds. So again there's not really an off tank. A9S is kind of closest to what I mean. But overall the term co-tanks applies better in 8 man raiding.

I have to agree with Tiva that the issue is the MH/OH mentality. If you're both expected to keep up on heals and dps, then you're much more aware of what is going on in the fight and better prepared to take over with one role or the other.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

I have to agree with Tiva that the issue is the MH/OH mentality. If you're both expected to keep up on heals and dps, then you're much more aware of what is going on in the fight and better prepared to take over with one role or the other.

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It really isn't a OH/MH mentality though. The astonishing factor here is how the "off healer" all of a sudden forgets what they've been doing in four-man content since day one. It is a big reason why I shake a finger at DPS focused healers. Like I stated in a earlier post, when I group up as WHM, I am always expected to main heal, and I am perfectly fine with that, but in the case that I fail a mechanic and fall, I am just taken-back that it almost always leads to a wipe, especially with a SCH as the other healer. The times I have seen them continue to DPS while waiting for a rezz it more often than I care to remember.

The mentality is the OH doesn't have an OH mentality at all. They are all DPS and expect the MH to stay alive and keep everyone on their feet. If there is a wipe, it is on the MH for failing mechanics. :/

DPS players in Healer's clothing.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

I have to agree with Tiva that the issue is the MH/OH mentality. If you're both expected to keep up on heals and dps, then you're much more aware of what is going on in the fight and better prepared to take over with one role or the other.

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This is specially toxic when the so-called "OH" never uses their tools to make it easier for the other healer to get into CS and weave in some DPS themselves. A Scholar not properly using their fairy, or a NoctAST not making good use of their instants, Disable and Collective is shameful. It's lazy mentality developed from misunderstanding the metagame.

Me: So called "Off-Healer" as SCH.
You: Mixing up things.

You keep talking about "Off-Healers" that don't want to/ can't handle when the "Main-Heal" dies. But this is not a "OH" problem, nor is it a SCH problem. It's a problem bad healers have. That's where you should make the difference. ^^
I had so many AST/WHM/SCH dying in Dun Scaith where I had to stop renewing my DoTs/dpsing and just went out of cleric to pick them up and heal the group until the "MH" has regained at least half of his/her MP.
This is what good Co-Healers do. :D (End yes, I even go "OH" as WHM when I see the other healer is not using cleric, even if it's a SCH ;) )

So it doesn't matter if someone is "MH" or "OH" (which shouldn't even exist anyways, it's 1.000.000% more efficient having both healers throwing DPS and heals!), what really matters is their skill!
They have none? > One dead healer leads to a wipe.
They have skill? > You barely notice if one healer died. (Except for a loss of DPS)
(Not referring to Savage content here!)