Playing as healer, from Australia, Garuda is near impossible

[Nosiahk]

Mechanically, its easy. The difference between "you" and other "players" is that you got into a shitty party which made it "seems so hard." A party is not made of "you." It is made of by 7 other individuals. If those 7 doesn't have a single idea what to do, then it'll be hard. So to be correct and "realistic" here, the fight is "easy," but you got into a shitty party. That should be your argument.

[Sirtimid]

No problem on Garuda here, also from Australia. If 'lag' is making Garuda hard, than you better either have 800k for Titan or stick to Ifrit =/ Blunt but realistic.

Just for the record I beat Titan HM a few hours ago, and can say that he's def. doable from Australia. Turning off HUD in graphics helped immensely in my case.

[DanteMog]

I'm also from Aus, also a whm or was, i gave up, made a alt, this game is terrible trying to heal with delays and our ping time, i've since switched to DPS, yes my queues are a little longer but its a lot less stressful and my pings don't ruin so many dungeons, when i can switch to jp servers i'll try healing again...

[Aethaeryn]

I don't know what to do differently. Tanks have 3500hp or so. Within 10 secs, they're down to 1000hp, and that's starting with Stoneskin on them. Have to lob off 2 x Cure II's, and then a regen to try to conserve mana, and then the aggro is on me.

My groups are always pugs. I ask in my guild, and no one wants to go. They all say "it's easy", but not one of them actually balls up to come to help, leading me to think that it's all bluster.

I'm gonna guess 3500 was just a number you threw out there, but if a tank in my party had only 3500 hp, I'd leave immediately. Unfortunately, using Duty Finder means you're going to end up with players that haven't even bothered finishing their job quests yet because they're too lazy. Not to mention the number of people who FATE to 50 and don't learn how to play.

Difficulty amps up with primals over all of the story content. That being said, of course Garuda is difficult for a group of players with no experience with the fight. My big issue with using DF for any primal battles is that new people don't even take the time to watch videos and/or read guides about the fight beforehand, and it drives me insane. Once you get the mechanics of the fight, it really is "so easy." I don't think people are saying that to offend you or anything. Difficult fights in games usually stay difficult regardless of whether or not the group learns the mechanics. If you can win the fight 9 times out of 10 after learning the mechanics, the fight is easy.

As for you pulling agro on tanks right away... Be careful with overhealing. You still generate the same threat with overhealing, and it's poor for MP efficiency too. This isn't like other games where you just stand there and spam cure and jump up to a stronger cure if cure spam isn't keeping the tank capped off. You'll be in a world of trouble when you get to Titan if you're still playing this way.

[Anubis_Nephthys]

I thought it was standard practice for Aussies to play on JP servers?

[Castillan]

I thought it was standard practice for Aussies to play on JP servers?

When I signed up and was looking for a server to play on, all the NA/EU servers had connections listed as "Excellent", and all the Jap servers had their connections listed as "Poor".

That may have been a transient issue specific to whatever was going on at the time in Japan, but when you're faced with that choice in the moment, I naturally went with the server with the better connection.

Since then though, I've often checked the server status, and NA/EU is generally listed as Excellent, while Jap servers are generally listed as Good, or occasionally worse. I'm with Telstra, so go figure...

[Castillan]

As for you pulling agro on tanks right away... Be careful with overhealing. You still generate the same threat with overhealing, and it's poor for MP efficiency too. This isn't like other games where you just stand there and spam cure and jump up to a stronger cure if cure spam isn't keeping the tank capped off. You'll be in a world of trouble when you get to Titan if you're still playing this way.

Yeah, I wouldn't say I overheal. I'll generally heal a tank to 90% or so, and won't heal them again unless they drop below 70%.

Have to remember though, with lag, I do need to err slightly on the side of over-healing, because by the time my client registers that the tank is hurt, and by the time the server acknowledges that my spell has fired and the tank is healed, there can be a good 5 to 6 seconds that have passed between the tank being hurt, and my acknowledgement of his post-healing health status.

The number of times that I've healed in an "anticipation" fashion, by generally timing my heals with boss attacks, and looking like I'm healing a tank at full health, only to see his health drop to half, and then my heal which I fired 3 secs ago lands, and I see their health shoot up again 0.5s later, is near countless.

Playing with that sort of lag is always a fine balance between "over-healing" and "anticipation healing". Short of letting the tank die (which would be disasterous), don't mind me if I err slightly on the side of occasional over-healing when trying to anticipate heal. That the game punishes healers for trying to work around inherent lag mechanics is an issue that should probably be balanced/addressed by the developers.

As a healer, and given the lag I experience, I can only work with what I've got.

[Zezeba]

Just a few points as a player from Australia who's done the encounter umpteen times.

I use WTFast to tunnel at the moment, however I only really got that when I was trying to seriously do Titan. Probably shaved 50-100ms off my latency. Right now pinging from work, I'm getting 313ms to Montreal Data Centre, and that's me going from PERTH via SYDNEY data centre out of the country. Your latency should not be so poor that you're getting more than 650 total response time from the server (due to updates and worst case scenario). and even that is fine for an encounter like Garuda. If you are truly not registering your heals for a long period of time, then you probably should look at fixing your network first and foremost.

The encounter is easy. It's trivial. If you and the group are sufficiently geared and sufficiently skilled. I think you need to learn to manage your resources better (you should almost never be ripping aggro unless people are mechanically failing the fight or you are monstrously overhealing).

[nails]

I've defeated Garuda with lag, knowing the fight is the only key you can stay a step ahead of big AOEs. Titan on the other hand, I can't see anyone getting out of the plumes if you have more than 100ms ping.

[Castillan]

I use WTFast to tunnel at the moment, however I only really got that when I was trying to seriously do Titan. Probably shaved 50-100ms off my latency. Right now pinging from work, I'm getting 313ms to Montreal Data Centre, and that's me going from PERTH via SYDNEY data centre out of the country. Your latency should not be so poor that you're getting more than 650 total response time from the server (due to updates and worst case scenario). and even that is fine for an encounter like Garuda. If you are truly not registering your heals for a long period of time, then you probably should look at fixing your network first and foremost.

Problem doesn't appear to be with my local net. Just ran some tests. Ping to my ADSL router is 1ms on average. Ping to the Telstra border router in the USA is 181ms on average. Ping to Zalera, by FF14 world server, is 304ms on average.

Seems odd to me that there's about 120ms latency added between LA and Montreal, when Australia to LA is just 181ms.

In game though, I can see server response times vary from anything between 500-1500 normally (500ms is standing still, facing a wall, in a low populated region), 1000-1500 is usually when in-battle. If you think about it, at 1500ms response times, that's a good 3 secs that elapses between the server applying some effect to someone, and then going all the way to my acknowledgement of some power I've cast actually applying, and that's excluding my personal reaction time, and spell cast time.

The issue to me doesn't appear to be terribly network related (well, 300ms RTT aside), the issue appears to be the 700-1200ms tacked on top by the server responding to game-client network packets when in battle.