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

[GeekMatt]

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.

[DestroyerOfLargePlanets]

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

[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.

[Gemina]

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.

[SeriousxSarcasm]

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.

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.

[Warr_of_Lint]

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.

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.

[Blonde_Huntress]

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. ^_^

[Tiva]

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.

[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.

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.

[Yuyuka3]

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.