@ WHM who stoneskin whole party

[Jyoeru]

>.<

"Sirens's Non-esuna-able Healing debuffs?)"

WAT?

I agree that Pre-buffing Stoneskin is not needed for certain content.

That's all any of us are really saying.

I just like having it there in case brown stuff hits the air circulator

Interesting way to use a cliche! 1 point.

because the cost of putting it up is very very small

It's annoying to do over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and you get the idea. Especially if it really makes no difference to anything as to whether or not it's up. It "wastes" time, and contributes to early-onset carpal tunnel.

[Maelwys]

WAT?

A FC member swore blind that they couldn't use "leeches" to get them off last week.
This may have been a Derp.

Twintania's Non-esuna-able healing debuffs then. You get the idea though... there are times that your normal "comfortable" level of healing output can start to struggle to keep the party topped up for whatever reason; and your MP starts to suffer as a result. Obviously with better gear and better skilled players these situations become less frequent outside of certain particular fights

It's annoying to do over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and you get the idea. Especially if it really makes no difference to anything as to whether or not it's up. It "wastes" time

Agreed.

There are certainly times that a Stoneskin ends up not being used. It's not being able to predict when those times are, in advance, that is the problem for me.

I guess it just comes down to how confident you are that that the team you're with will clear the content you're running without getting into difficulties.
I'm a bit OCD, and the warning bells go off in my head if I could do something to help prevent a Derp moment, even if that Derp moment never actually ends up happening.

and contributes to early-onset carpal tunnel.

As an aside, about a decade ago I used to get quite severe wrist pains and "tight" finger tendons, and had to take some steps to mitigate my Mouse usage - to the point of training myself to use my left hand for the mouse in work during the day and my right hand at home later for gaming, and using a joypad instead of the mouse and keyboard presses instead of clicking whenever possible.

These days I only get a slight twinge in my right wrist after prolonged typing sessions, never after gaming.
In FFXIV I find it it's a heck of a lot easier on my wrists to use the numpad for teammate targetting and keypresses or joypad buttons for ability casting instead of the mouse.

I'd probably draw the line at using automated macros for casting multiple Stoneskins though, because it'd take some control away from me whenever we have more than one person casting it

[Squa]

hey guys, I guess I change my opinion from reading all the replies here. What I meant to say was that on many fights (like some ex-primals), the stoneskin will be dissolved in the first few seconds from everyone, and mana/hate is not an issue. 1 medica/cure iii, sucor will solve that. So prebuffing 7x3 21 seconds before each pull takes a bit and is not worth it.

I do recognize that in other fights it may be very useful to do so, and especially if you can make a macro to SK everyone with 1 button, I guess it is easy to do and possibly worth it pre-fight even if in some cases it most likely wont help or change the outcome.

[Bigpurpleharness]

just stop it, most of the time its just wasted anyways.

Eh... I give this attempt a 4/10. It's rather poorly constructed, and too easily disproven to warrant higher, but this is the lodestone, so you'll get a few bites.

[Deamon]

I like that whm use stoneskin before fights. when I am playing as whm, I usually stoneskin everyone. Even during certain fights I am glad to see mine gets refreshed. The sandworm in cutter's hits you with a sand cyclone that has a large dot that needs to be dispelled. If you have stoneskin on, the dot doesn't get applied.

Waste of time...I think not.

[DoctorSecksy]

I use SS prefight on everyone. Now, I may not be the BEST WHM to ever grace the game, but I have managed to get my relic, so I guess my opinion is just as good as everyone elses.

While people are casting their buffs, it's better than standing around doing nothing proactive. It takes less time to cast SS on the full party than it does for everyone to coordinate the plan. I manage SS and protect in the time it takes to first pull (if I skip the cutscenes, that is). Where can you go wrong if A: it doesn't take up time and B: doesn't hurt. So what if in certain fights it doesn't do a whole lot of good? What does it hurt? If anything, it gives some buffer for that first hit.

I can see where it may eat time if the party wipes and time is limited. Hopefully you don't wipe. If you do, it's time to change strategies anyways.

I haven't done coils yet and if I find when I get to it that my SS is useless, I am willing to stand corrected. So far, though, SS hasn't let me down.

[HWF-7force]

As a SCH, I get not using it.
Pop a Succor, Adlo the Tank(s) and pull.

But don't be hatin' on a WHM shielding people!!!

[Firefly]

I will wait for that shit, yo!

[Viviza]

Pre-casting stoneskin is, in my opinion, a measure of insurance when starting a fight.

If things go wrong on the pull, that's several thousand less damage I have to heal. If someone pulls threat and gets punched by the boss, they're less likely to die before the tank recovers and heals come in. If I don't have to medica the first blast/tumults/whatever, that's more healing I can do later on without pulling hate. Etc, etc.

In practice the amount of damage it prevents is small, and when things go well, the effort is basically pointless. You could argue the same for virus, eye for an eye, and several other spells. ("certainly the boss hitting 10% less a few times won't make or break the fight if the tank is being healed properly...") but I don't live in a world where everything always goes right. As healer it's my job to stack the odds in our favor with as many tools as I can.

[Slark]

Some encounters warrant SS before the pull, some don't. With that being said, I always SS everyone at the start of any raid/dungeon, and then prepull on any boss. I also stoneskin tanks before every pull. Doing this takes literally zero time with the help of pre-casting at the end of pulls, and doesn't slow anything down at all, even more so if you have swiftcast.

The only time where SS actually takes raid members time is when the raid is actually ready to pull and you are still buffing people. However, if any of you have actually done high level progression in a raid setting, you would know that almost after every wipe, people talk about what went wrong and what can be done to correct it which takes time, and also that people understand that you should be going in with your absolute best, which means repaired gear, HQ food eaten, Protect/SS/Succor before pulling, etc. Any advantage to help you win, or at least push you into a new phase in which you can learn is time well spent.

I'm going to go ahead and say most people in this thread have not downed T5, or even experienced it for that matter. Well, it is a perfect example of where precasting SS is a valuable asset. I am the spot healer/OT healer for phase one. Since lb3 is incredibly hard to build for my group, we put our OT at 1HP and heal him, effectively shooting our LB through the roof. Doing this however, means I have to be very attentive on his HP, and it detracts from spot healing, during which, DPS can die from liquid hells. Even if we didnt do this strategy, which we didn't adopt until recently, we have had a single DPS eat three liquid hells in a row resulting in barely living due to SS. For those that don't know, SS on a 4.3kish HP target nullifies approximately one liquid hell's initial damage. This means that I get to conserve probably a thousand mana or so in phase 1 due to pre-fight SS, as well as assist MT healing because I have less to do, as well as adopt our current strategy for building LB.

pre-fight SS does not hurt anyone. Hell, most people are more than glad to take an extra 5-10 seconds for SS cast because they want to take a drink and relax for a second. The only people I have met that have zero patience for the extra 10 seconds SS takes are snotty douches blessed with the maturity of a 12 year old, who mostly suck at gaming to begin with.

pre-fight SS isn't just for mana efficiency, its also for time efficiency and insurance. Instead of healing for that first phase of garuda EX or MoogleKing, you can be pulling 170-200 DPS in cleric stance, healing MT on twin, ensuring DPS won't get oneshotted by a soldier/knight/dreadnaught that wasnt picked up correctly, reducing any chance that you will pull snap aggro, and it also allows you to put your attention on any number of things instead on healing.

The only arguments against pre-fight SS are out of laziness/impatience, both of which are immature qualities and would get you kicked from any respectable high end progression group.
Sometimes I get sick of casting 8 stoneskins and a protect after every wipe, especially if wipes are on initial phases of a fight. But then I remember, it's my job and responsibility to my partners to play my job to the highest caliber possible. That means casting SS before a fight unless asked to do otherwise.

Average health for DPS in my raid: 4,550+ = ~800 shield
Iirc, our warrior tank has 8.8k HP without any CDs = ~1,600 shield
Our paladin tank has around 6,800 HP without CDs = ~1200 shield
Our healers each have roughly 4300-4400 HP = ~800 shield

800 x 6 + 1600 + 1200 = 7,600 HP absorbed before the encounter has even started, not even taking into account Succor. That, my friends, is alot of mitigation, which you should be taking advantage of.