No GCDs for tank?

Heya, hoping someone out there has some good resources they can share.

I mostly heal as WHM, and I've been told/reading that you generally should not be using GCD heals on a tank, which I usually do, so I guess I'm doing things wrong.

I kind of built the idea of how to play the job based around the job mechanic, but I guess that was a bad idea.

I'm skeptical about not using GCD heals for tank, but i'll try it out and see what happens. It makes me wonder what else I've assumed wrong, so any advice or guides you could supply is appreciated.

Thanks

Unfortunately, the WHM Job Mechanic (Lilies) is very counter intuitive to optimized play for healers - which is usually exhaust your non-GCD options first to minimize healing GCDs and maximize DPS GCDs. This isn't to say you should be ignoring your GCD tools, but you should be using those when you have little options left to keep the party healthy and ready for the next tank / raid buster. Hopefully we see fixes to this come 5.0.

I don't think there are any other assumptions that would be deemed "wrong" with looking at how you play the job, to be honest. So, just keep on trucking along~

I'm not a healing pro at all, but I think it depends on the content. For dungeon, it depends on how well geared the tank is. If the tank is undergeared, I'll have to spam Cure II's to keep them alive. Otherwise, Asylum/Regen/Tetra is usually enough as long as the tank is also using CD's to help mitigate damage.

For trials/raids, most of the healing I do is AOE healing while keeping Regen on the tank and using Tetra if the tank's health goes too low. I'll also toss the tank a Divine Benison for tank busters. Otherwise, I use my GCD's for DPS.

I play SCH when I heal so the mostly I just use OGCDs while my fairy heals the tank. Unless the tank is squishy and doesnt use cooldowns.

When I play on my WHM though I find myself using GCDs on that job.

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Originally Posted by NikolasCalypso

I'm skeptical about not using GCD heals for tank, but i'll try it out and see what happens. It makes me wonder what else I've assumed wrong, so any advice or guides you could supply is appreciated.

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It's not about not using them, but more about priority.

For example, you want to use tetragrammaton, benison, and asylum first.

Tank still needs more healing? Ok, use regen.

Still not enough? Then you can use cure 2.

The idea is that by making cure 2 last in line, you can spent more time DPSing. If you do have to use a GCD heal, Regen is the most efficient. But you want to overall minimizes the GCDs you use for healing. Even in savage fights, there are plenty of time slices where only a tetragrammaton and maybe a regen might be needed. Even if there's something like a tankbuster, after that the boss might go into a long animation or such that gives lots of time for regen to work, or for Tetra to come off CD again.

All that said... you might not be immediately comfortable with minimizing healing on the tank*. And that's OK. A dead tank is worse than spending a few GCDs healing. So take your time - but when you want to optimize, take steps in this direction.


* Also worth mentioning that gear sync can make levelling dungeons harder than endgame dungeons. So you may still need to do healing on the GCD. It's not a cardinal sin to GCD heal, you just want oGCDs to be higher priority.

Just think about healing in terms of resource management of potency, MP, and time.

If you have a lot of time to heal someone, a higher potency but slower HoT like Regen can do. If something needs to be healed right away, use off-GCD heals first like say Benediction or Tetra. If you are out of off-GCD heals, then you are forced to GCD heals. Most healers will use something like Cure II over Cure I since Cure II is more GCD efficient than Cure I. Cure I is more MP efficient but has lower potency.

The goal is to use the most efficient heal for the incoming damage. If something is going to kill the tank or party, of course try to keep their HP topped off. However, if nothing threatening is going to hit, leaving the tank or party below 50 percent HP can be okay.

As people have said, it depends largely on your party and what content you're doing.

In dungeons, with a good party, I will generally just cast Regen on the tank at the end of the pull, then just use Divine Benison on cooldown while spamming Holy non-stop. Since Holy will let you a total of 6s of stun time, that is plenty of healing so long as the mobs die fast and the tank uses cooldowns appropriately. For particularly large pulls, I'll also throw in Asylum. If the tank does start to get low, I will then burn Tetragrammaton or Benediction to get them healthy again. If the mobs still aren't dead by this point, your party has low damage for whatever reason. At this point, I will often have to resort to using Cure II. But if the mobs are nearly dead and the tank won't die before the mobs do, I'll just not bother healing. The out-of-combat heal ticks will get the tank up in time for the next pull.

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Originally Posted by NikolasCalypso

Heya, hoping someone out there has some good resources they can share.

I mostly heal as WHM, and I've been told/reading that you generally should not be using GCD heals on a tank, which I usually do, so I guess I'm doing things wrong.

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Do not ignore, but rather pay attention to this advice. This is a condensed version of how you should be using your GCD heals on a tank. Allow me to elaborate:

In the early levels, you should primarily be using Cure 2 to heal your tank. The obvious reason is because you do not have all the ogcds and regens available to a high level WHM. Your first DPS extender - Regen is not learned until level 35, and your first ogcd heal - Benediction is not learned until level 50. However, here is the underlying reason why you should be using Cure 2 instead of Cure 1 after you learn it (these two abilities honestly need to be consolidated similar to the mastery system for offensive abilities): The reason is because even though Cure 2 is less MP efficient than Cure 1, it is more GCD efficient than Cure 1. The only reason why you currently need to keep Cure 1 on your hot/cross bar is because of leveling roulette. Take a look at this example of GCD usage when the tank drop to <50%

WHM 1 used x2 GCD Cure 1 to get tank back above 50% leaving them at 90% HP remaining
WHM 2 used x1 GCD Stone II, and x1 GCD Cure II to get tank back above 50% leaving them at 78% HP remaining

Do you see where I am getting at here? While WHM 1 gives back more HP, this HP is not needed to keep the tank alive. WHM 2 understands this, and also knows that active regens will continue to restore lost HP without over healing, while WHM 1 now runs the risk of it, resulting in wasted GCDs. You add the abilities that tanks possess such as DRKs TBN, and it becomes a bigger issue for WHM 1.

Optimizing your GCD heals means using them when nothing better is available. In the later levels, after you have exhausted all of your other healing tools should you use GCDs on Cure 2 and Medica. What happens in the early levels, is this comes MUCH sooner.

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I'm skeptical about not using GCD heals for tank, but i'll try it out and see what happens. It makes me wonder what else I've assumed wrong, so any advice or guides you could supply is appreciated.

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As you should be. Question anything and everything you are curious about. You SHOULD be using GCD heals to cure a tank, and I hope I've enlightened you that it is perfectly ok to do so. However, it is also important to know that your GCD heals fall lower on the priority list of available healing to you. Abilities like Benediction and Tetra should not be held onto for emergencies, but rather used to provide instant and free-of-cost healing for the tank when it is needed.

The truly optimal 'heal as little as needed' playstyle requires coordination and trust from your group. This does not really exist in anything outside high-end duties unless you have a static for prog content or something similar. In PUGs though your threshold for healing should be MUCH less restrictive because you honestly have no idea what that player below your threshold will do next. Tanks can't tank dead, and DPS players contribute 0 when on the floor.

Optimal healing is healing as required. Simple as that.

Mathematically, I find that Cure 2 simply isn't efficient. It is a 700 Potency and costs double the MP of Cure 1, when you use Cure 1 though 450 potency and is able to proc Cure 2 as a free heal. I personally say that if you can keep the tank up with Cure 1 then you can hold your Free Cure for more vital circumstances. I find MP to be a concern for WHM if they focus on only Cure 2, Cure 3, and Medica 2. I do find Tetragramation to be more of an emergency oGCD Cure 2 to be used with tank busters and the like. As for Benediction, they are best for the true emergency button when the Tank pops their Hallowed Ground/Holmgang/Living Dead. SCHs should use their oGCDs more since they can use them A LOT more and the CD for them is much less than Tetra and Bene. Just my opinion.

It really is more efficient gcd-wise, if you keep your mana up. In most fights, if your group manages to stay out of avoidable dmg, you can't go out of mana. Hit Lucid Dreaming when your bar down to 2/3 of mana.

If you read the post #8, the point in spending more mana is, that you have more gcds to cast dmg-spells. So if you preserve more mana, but need more spells to heal, you do less dmg, like you could've done with less healing time.
Over time you will learn what kind of enemy-abilities do small or big amount of dmg. If the group fails in avoiding dmg you have to heal more, but if everyone does fine, why should you hold back in your own potential dmg-wise?
-> Fights need less time otherwise so more dmg is always nice.

There is no point in reducing your ogcd healing potential.
If you can use tetra and Bene, then use them and convert a few heal gcds into dps-gcds.
If you get into emergency situations then simply heal normal, that has to be good enough.
If not, then you did something wrong in keeping hp-bars up, or too much avoidable dmg came in, or someone has gearing problems...

Preserve Mana with regen abilities and ogcds and do more dmg. But you can be that whitemage, standing in the corner and spamming cure1 all the time, while waiting for dmg to come in thats ok. :)
But it's a no go if you want to be of good use in any raid static, by playing the lazy waiting game, instead of helping with everything in your arsenal.

"Optimal healing is healing as required. Simple as that."
Thats the best advise here and so simple. ^^

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Originally Posted by Songwillow

Mathematically, I find that Cure 2 simply isn't efficient. It is a 700 Potency and costs double the MP of Cure 1, when you use Cure 1 though 450 potency and is able to proc Cure 2 as a free heal. I personally say that if you can keep the tank up with Cure 1 then you can hold your Free Cure for more vital circumstances. I find MP to be a concern for WHM if they focus on only Cure 2, Cure 3, and Medica 2. I do find Tetragramation to be more of an emergency oGCD Cure 2 to be used with tank busters and the like. As for Benediction, they are best for the true emergency button when the Tank pops their Hallowed Ground/Holmgang/Living Dead. SCHs should use their oGCDs more since they can use them A LOT more and the CD for them is much less than Tetra and Bene. Just my opinion.

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So you are basically just spamming cure 1 and doing nothing else? If you keep the tank up with only cure 1 you could also just use hots and hit the fancy dps buttons in the meantime.
Cure 3 has only 1 use anyway and thats when the party is stacked and you have heavy incomming partywide dmg.
Tetra and Benediction shouldn't be used just as the famous "oh shit" buttons, you can use them effectivly in dungeons to keep your dps uptime as high as possible without wasting a GCD for healing.

oGCDs are free resources. They cost neither uptime nor mana. As a rule of thumb, if you're delaying their use unnecessarily, you're wasting uptime and mana.

It depends on the situation. Trash pulls in dungeons usually require more GCD healing (especially large trash pulls) and in a PUG or DF group it’s best to be more careful, as you often don’t have time to perfectly plan things out with PUG cohealers and tanks.

That said, in savage and ultimate, you want to minimize GCD healing as much as possible. Most healers at this level will map out the fights and figure out where to use cooldowns. My static’s healers have it down to a science - they use a spreadsheet with the fight timings mapped out and coordinate with our tanks. It’s very much like “OK, at 1:07 the tank is using holmgang on that buster, I’ll use benediction there,” and “main tank will only have rampart at 8:50, good place to put an excog on them”. Much like a DPS, our healers try to repeat the same “rotation” of skills each time we do a fight, optimizing when possible.

Of course things change here and there based on party skill and mechanic RNG. Then there’s the possibility of someone making a mistake and taking unnessary damage, critical hits, etc. The best thing to do is familiarize yourself with your whole kit and use your oGCDs more frequently to allow yourself more DPS. Get comfortable with fight timings, know when you can just apply some regens and let them do their job.

The point isn't to strictly neglect GCD healing, but instead to only use it when you have no options.

WHM has a lot of oGCD tools to heal with, and a good Regen. It's more than enough to deal with almost anything the game throws at you. The game is designed in such a way that big damage almost never comes out more than once every 30s or so, if even that, so relying on regens and waiting for a Tetragrammaton is the way to go.

Looking at the most recent example, Seiryu ex, you can get away with not a single Cure I/II cast. There's simply never any damage that can't be healed with a ogcd coming out.

It all takes some practice, but the main takeaway is to only heal when you NEED to.

Most dungeons I run I usually pop medica II on the pty then regen the tank, most the time I dnot need to heal after that, refresh as needed otherwise stones and aeros for days, I like tho throw both aeros on the mobs for added effect.

Regarding the Cure I vs Cure II discussion:

I use Cure II if I need to, and also Cure I if it's most efficient. For example, if you just need to get the tank up above a certain threshold to hold them until a lull where regens will do all the work, Cure I is better. It costs much less MP, and in the long run, the extra HP from Cure II will be restored later via regens after the immediate threat.

In terms of large scale heals without oGCD options available, Cure is almost always better. Only exceptions being if you need to save the oGCD you have remaining for something that would cause more efficiency loss (i.e. save Benediction to heal off Walking Dead instead or 3x Cure II), or you need a Lily to make your rotation work properly (almost never an issue, but there are a few cases where you might want to ditch a GCD to help line up a cooldown later to save yourself a GCD or two).

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Originally Posted by NocturniaUzuki

Regarding the Cure I vs Cure II discussion:

I use Cure II if I need to, and also Cure I if it's most efficient. For example, if you just need to get the tank up above a certain threshold to hold them until a lull where regens will do all the work, Cure I is better. It costs much less MP, and in the long run, the extra HP from Cure II will be restored later via regens after the immediate threat.

In terms of large scale heals without oGCD options available, Cure is almost always better. Only exceptions being if you need to save the oGCD you have remaining for something that would cause more efficiency loss (i.e. save Benediction to heal off Walking Dead instead or 3x Cure II), or you need a Lily to make your rotation work properly (almost never an issue, but there are a few cases where you might want to ditch a GCD to help line up a cooldown later to save yourself a GCD or two).

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Edit: Cure I is only better if you only need one cast to meet the threshold. Otherwise obviously cast Cure II.

Its a Brave new world, in where a "healer" isn't just a healer. We have DPS tools that we should utilize.
That's where this comes from. Time spent using GCD heals is time you could be damaging the monsters and needing less healing overall.

Lets assume a monster does 200 damage a second. If you stick to cure 1 every 2 seconds and do nothing else, you'll break even, but do no damage. Where if you use Regen and Tetra when tank starts to get low, you can be casting Stone 2 (whatever tier you have) causing damage that whole time and causing the monster to die faster.

Don't think the damage from Healer spells doesn't add up. True, we aren't a hardcore DPS, but e still do substantial damage.

I learned a lot by reading this thread. Thanks to everyone who pitched in.

I hope they change this moving forward by weakening oGCDs and increase auto attack damage of bosses, forcing main tanks to tank stance and forcing Healers to.. well.. heal. Rather than Healers being DPS with healing cool downs.

While i understand the want for more Healing focused healers, this isn't a game where that's all a healer does.
That's also part of the "reward" for getting higher Item levels. It makes your job easier.

I know as a main healer, i don't want to "force" a lot of the game's population to Need to play on a 90% efficiency level for healing. Ive had plenty of groups as a Red mage where i've basically Main healed, cause the healers had no clue what they were doing.

Id rather not make dungeons where its that healing intense where a normal player can't progress.

A bit of a challenge is good. But make it too hard, and it just gets out of hand.
Plus, healers Already get blamed most of the time when a party falls, usually when its someone else's negligence, i don't want things to be so difficult that its actually the healers fault because they lagged for 2 seconds, or were off a second with a cure, or they tried to sneak in some DPS (which is basically mandated now a days)