Quote Originally Posted by Freakiie View Post
While I do have my fair share of experience in MMOs which helps me pick up stuff faster than most people I really don't think it should take people more than a few runs to figure out WP/AK. Those dungeons are so horribly straightforward the only way not to pick up what to do is by paying more attention to your **** than FF. Especially in the DF where you generally aren't speedrunning there's simply a limit to how much damage your tank can receive, unless he makes sure to get hit by every AoE there is, so unless he's severly undergeared there's a massive amount of downtime as a healer.

I'm not expecting a firsttimer to go in there, stancedance around and nuke everything, but even as firsttimer you should realise that if you're standing around scratching your butt because your tank has near full HP that tossing out a few DoTs and perhaps a Stone II might just move things along even that little bit faster. Considering that even as Whm, where mana can be a problem, you already ran multiple instances with Shroud and even improved Shroud by that time you should start realising that, unless you're perma spamming Cure II/Medica (Admittedly some Whms do this *sigh*), mana really shouldn't be the issue it was in the early dungeons anymore.

Basically by the time you hit 50 and start running the dungeons everyone does over and over and you generally want to be done with as soon as possible you should have enough experience as a Healer (assuming it was your first class) that at least healing is already something you do automatic and it doesn't require all your attention just to keep a party alive through something like WP/AK. At that point there are two things you can do. Scratch your butt because there's no healing to be done or start looking for ways to help the party in other ways than healing, which with the tools we got so far leaves you with nothing but DDing. Now you can tell me that you don't like DDing, but last time I checked scratching your butt while staring at a bunch of HP bars that don't move in a dungeon you've already done far too often wasn't all that interesting either.
That's great.

I've encountered healers at 50 who don't know what Esuna does. I've encountered healers at 50 who don't know how to target switch at all (literally, they can only heal one person, and if you ask them to do more than that, they don't know what to do). Healers who think that any little bit of damage calls for Medica. Healers who don't know what their CDs do (despite the fact that the tooltips tell you what they do), who don't understand the purpose of Shroud of Saints, who don't know what stats they should be looking for, much less what each stat does. At 50.

I'll also remind you that if you're using the random Duty Finder to run AK or WP, every single run is going to be different. You'll have your clockwork runs where everyone knows what they're doing. Your runs where no one knows what they're doing. You'll run with the tanks in full Coil gear (assuming they even queue >.>), and then you'll run with the tanks who refuse to wear their AF gear because it's "ugly" and insist on using level 40 armor because it's "prettier." You're going to run into the DPS with broken gear who dies every other second from standing in things (that wouldn't one-shot him if his gear wasn't broken, but...). You'll get the people who know what an interrupt is, and those who do not. Those who can follow marked orders, and those who just DPS whatever the hell they feel like. Those who understand what CC is and how to use it, and those who just stand around with their thumbs up their butts while the tank is getting pounded into dust. The random Duty Finder is just that - random. And I hear enough bitching and moaning from other players every single day to know that it's incredibly hit or miss as to what kind of group you'll get.

And into this incredibly chaotic, confusing environment, you expect someone who has never played a healer before in any game, or for whom this may be their very first MMO, to just "get it" in one or two runs.

Okay. Sure.

And therefore, because you have not encountered any of these difficulties, and because "getting it" was easy for you, it should be easy for everyone.

Seriously, I would rather have a healer not DPS at all if they are unsure. I would rather have them do nothing but heal, if that is what they are comfortable with. Because I can live without the DPS - that's what DPS are there for. But I really, really, really need the healer to be healing when the shit hits the fan.