The Case for the Spear

[HyoMinPark]

@Hyomin Park

I'm interested in why you feel that "there are more useful cards to hold." From my perspective, I've always found the idea of holding Balance a little silly, actually.

Even if the Spear were to be redesigned in the way I wanted it redesigned, my Spread would still be better used holding other cards, which I already pointed out in my post.

I mostly hold Balances because a lot of the groups I join (and my static) want the extra DPS to push phases and maximize group DPS. I hold Boles for tanks or for a phase such as Susano Ex's Sword phase to minimize outgoing damage so that I may contribute to DPS, and not have to heal as frequently. I also hold Ewers for myself if I find myself in a group or piece of content where my MP is being strained. Occasionally, I will hold an Arrow if I cannot draw a Balance, and attempt to Expand the Arrow, or Enhance it if I am with a BLM, since a lot of them seem to ask me directly for Enhanced Arrows nowadays (all those Fire IVs, I suppose).

Again, my Spread is never used on a Spear. Because the card is too situational to use, especially with its current design, and you run into it taking up time in your Spread when you could be holding other cards. To expand on this: Lucid and Celestial both have 120 second cooldowns. Even if you were to draw a Spear and use it on yourself before using those two skills, and 30 seconds later draw another Spear and hold it in your Spread, there will still be an entire minute before you could even use the held Spear on Lucid+CO again. An entire minute where you could be holding a Balance to expand to the group for a DPS check, a Bole to toss on a tank that needs it for an upcoming tankbuster, or a Ewer to toss on yourself, your co-healer, or maybe even a SMN or RDM that were killed and need a little bit of MP to get back on their feet. To be honest, it's an almost selfish thing to do, because, like myself and others have said, you cannot know (especially when paired with randoms) when your party members are going to use their cooldowns, or when they would need or even want a Spear for them. So you would essentially just be holding the card for yourself, rather than using your Spread to try and optimize your team. And, to me, that is selfish.

Yes, I am one of those ASTs that DPS as often as I can. I do not like being forced into the "main healer" role, and I firmly believe that both healers in 8-man settings should contribute equally to healing and DPS, regardless of the job they are playing.


When you join, for example, farm parties in PF, most if not all of them are looking for clean, fast runs so that they can squeeze in as many clears as possible with the time they have to farm. AOE Balance, even if you think it's silly, achieves this goal. Plus, a lot of people care about their own personal DPS numbers, and will never ever say no to a Balance. That's a given, regardless of whatever potency Balance is changed to if SE decides that it needs rebalanced. The majority of the playerbase is the one with this mindset, and that is not something that will be easily changed.

While I always stress for people to learn mechanics and never expect to outright skip them (see: Zurvan Ex Soar), it is always a pleasant surprise when they are skipped. I have to respectfully disagree with your assumption that having one skill off of cooldown 20% faster is enough to prevent a wipe, and that it should take priority off of optimizing your group as a whole as often as you can. Call me DPS-centric if you want, but this is my opinion.

[NocturniaUzuki]

I have to respectfully disagree with your assumption that having one skill off of cooldown 20% faster is enough to prevent a wipe, and that it should take priority off of optimizing your group as a whole as often as you can. Call me DPS-centric if you want, but this is my opinion.

That's fine if that's your opinion. I would like to point out that it's not necessarily just 1 skill though. It's as many skills as you need to cast during the 20 seconds. And if you're holding the Spear, you may run into situations where you will actually have to use virtually every major cooldown as an AST within 20 seconds. Though actually, if your redesigned Spear was implemented, there would be no reason to hold it anymore. Instead, you'd use it immediately if you wanted your cooldowns to be reduced. Personally, I still prefer the old one a bit because if I wanted to reduce the cooldowns of all my skills consistently, I'd have to keep using every single Spear I drew immediately, just to get the same effect as the original Spear. So I'd actually have less cards available to use on DPS.

Also, if you'd like an example of where it is legitimately necessary to use Spear to maintain MP, here's a video of one of my 4-man Royal Menagerie runs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTWoy2MxNDQ&t=3s

It was the first time I did it, and our first attempt as a party, so I was actually playing a little more defensively than I really needed to with this party, and not optimizing as well as I could have been (not that I claim to have perfect optimization even now though). But I've had parties since then that have put me under far more pressure, and in those parties I definitely had to be putting things on reduced cooldown at all times. Also, it's not from my perspective, unfortunately, but you can still sort of see my situation.

[HyoMinPark]

That's fine if that's your opinion. I would like to point out that it's not necessarily just 1 skill though. It's as many skills as you need to cast during the 20 seconds. And if you're holding the Spear, you may run into situations where you will actually have to use virtually every major cooldown as an AST within 20 seconds.

Again, though. Situational, and very much so. Thus, why I do not waste my Spread on them. I've never been in a situation where I have to blow all of my cooldowns at once, and typically, I do not find that very effective gameplay. Even if it saves one mistake, what if there just happens to be another one 20 seconds later, and you have nothing? I find that when I'm in groups that mess up so badly I have to use almost everything in my arsenal to try and scrape people off the floor, generally the run is not going to end in a clear anyways, be it from more botched mechanics, or failing to meet the enrage timer because of decreased DPS from Weakness/Brink of Death. It is the same logic I apply to tanking: do not blow all of your cooldowns in one go, because then you are left with nothing.

[NocturniaUzuki]

I agree that blowing all of your cooldowns within 20 seconds leaves you vulnerable - just like tanks. But unlike tanks, healers needing their cooldowns depends on how well the party plays, not on a strictly timed, scripted fight. That's why I use Spear to reduce the cooldowns. True, I'm left vulnerable, but if it was the only way to save the party, then I had to do it. And I'll just have to hope that the reduced cooldown is enough that my party won't mess up badly again within the reduced cooldown time. Having them on reduced cooldown makes it more likely that I will have them off cooldown for the next disaster. As you say, if a group is messing up that badly, it will likely happen again. Where we differ there, though, is that I believe the run can still realistically clear. It's what I like about being the healer: we can push a group through to a clear, even in some of the darkest moments. I don't believe in "just wiping" a run because it is going badly, and because of that philosophy, I've had many miracle comebacks. It feels great when that happens, and I usually have to challenge myself to the extreme to pull it off. Of course, I've had tons of wipes too. Sometimes I can't fix that many mistakes. But when that happens, I don't just sit back and think "Well, there was nothing I could have done, the party just sucked." Instead, I share the blame. I look back at the run and think "Yeah, you know, I actually could have saved the party there if I hadn't used Lightspeed back there," or "If I had used that Bole instead of rerolling it to try to get Balance, the tank would have survived." And, of course, if the party is messing up this badly, I'm already at the point where I'm constantly looking for Spear to hold for my next Lucid Dreaming + Celestial Opposition combo, at the very least. And sometimes if I can wait 10 seconds on Lucid and throw in a couple extra cooldowns to get the reduced cooldown too, I'll do it.

There's a phenomenon I've noticed too, which is quite remarkable:

If you refuse to give and keep trying, you encourage others to do the same.

In a lot of the miracle comeback runs I've had, it hasn't ended up in a clear just because I managed to pull us back from a situation where 6/8 players were dead. It's because in doing that - in refusing to give up and giving those players a second chance - I encouraged them to try harder. When players get back up after dying, they tend to play better, due to reflecting on their mistake. This is especially true if they feel like they just got a second chance they didn't expect. They'll pull out all the stops to not mess up again, because they suddenly believe that they can actually win.

[Fortune_Cookie]

In a lot of the miracle comeback runs I've had, it hasn't ended up in a clear just because I managed to pull us back from a situation where 6/8 players were dead.

At the risk of quoting this unfairly out of context, to my mind the mention of "miracle comeback" hints at the real problem with determining the value of a card like Spear. It's just not possible, in any sensible way, to measure the statistical contribution to successful clears from Spear.

What tends to stick in our minds therefore are stand-out moments, near wipes and last-man-standing kills. We remember them because we're emotionally invested and we tend to attribute the success to our heroic actions simply because that's how humans work. You may readily recall that one time when it was just you and the tank and the boss hit the floor just as your mp ran out. And you attribute that to your judicious use of Spear earlier in the fight. How often does that really happen? Do you go and check the logs to work out whether the Spear really did result in extra casts that were instrumental in getting the kill?

In short, how do you avoid the confirmation & self-serving bias that these situations are naturally rife with? Do you keep track of all the runs when nothing special happens that Spear might help with?

In contrast Balance has a much more quantifiable effect. Because of that I'm not limited to my own biased feeling of what the success of a run was really down to - I can go on fflogs to get an objective sense of what dps buffs do based on tens of thousands of runs.

I can certainly appreciate that unusual situations (soloing etc) might place more emphasis on otherwise overshadowed abilities. But in most standard progression or farm scenarios the certain benefit of a damage buff ought to win. More damage is always good and always happens pretty often...

[NocturniaUzuki]

At the risk of quoting this unfairly out of context, to my mind the mention of "miracle comeback" hints at the real problem with determining the value of a card like Spear. It's just not possible, in any sensible way, to measure the statistical contribution to successful clears from Spear.

What tends to stick in our minds therefore are stand-out moments, near wipes and last-man-standing kills. We remember them because we're emotionally invested and we tend to attribute the success to our heroic actions simply because that's how humans work. You may readily recall that one time when it was just you and the tank and the boss hit the floor just as your mp ran out. And you attribute that to your judicious use of Spear earlier in the fight. How often does that really happen? Do you go and check the logs to work out whether the Spear really did result in extra casts that were instrumental in getting the kill?

In short, how do you avoid the confirmation & self-serving bias that these situations are naturally rife with? Do you keep track of all the runs when nothing special happens that Spear might help with?

In contrast Balance has a much more quantifiable effect. Because of that I'm not limited to my own biased feeling of what the success of a run was really down to - I can go on fflogs to get an objective sense of what dps buffs do based on tens of thousands of runs.

I can certainly appreciate that unusual situations (soloing etc) might place more emphasis on otherwise overshadowed abilities. But in most standard progression or farm scenarios the certain benefit of a damage buff ought to win. More damage is always good and always happens pretty often...

I can understand where that train of thought is coming from. It certainly is true that we often remember things better than they actually were. I've gone back and looked at videos of some of those "miracle comebacks" and they don't seem as amazing when I'm watching them and seeing all my mistakes. However, one thing I can tell you is that, in many of these situations, the Spear did make all the difference. Sometimes I do overuse it - especially when I'm rusty. For instance I just did a few runs of Royal Menagerie again after 4 days of not playing. I held Spears quite often but, especially with the discussions in this thread weighing on my mind, didn't feel it was all that effective. That being said, the parties were quite good and I only encountered one disaster, which I pulled through quickly enough that the Spear was helpful, but not necessary.

It hasn't been "that one time" where I had a miracle comeback and attributed it to the Spear though. Nor has it only been in that moment that I felt the Spear made the difference. I've gone back, looked at videos, and seen that if I had not been using the Spear, I would not have had a skill like Lightspeed up when I needed it, or that my MP would have been drained into oblivion if I had not reduced the cooldown of Lucid Dreaming. I will admit though that I don't do the sort of math that people have done for DPS. But then, the DPS math is based on a context of perfection, so it has its own bias there.

Balance also has bias in how people view it though. It may be a more quantifiable effect, but people tend to believe it has a greater effect than it really does. In reality, by my math at least, it should work out to an under 10% clear speed increase. If you're doing hundreds of runs, it starts to make a significant difference. But just 10-20 runs? It might save 10-20 minutes. Now, at the level of farm parties, I doubt there would be enough situations in which the Spear actually prevented a wipe to make the claim that Spear actually increases overall clear speed over time more than Balance, via allowing for clear consistency. However, as soon as you start looking at rough runs, those situations become more common. Eventually you get down to the point where the Spear regularly makes a difference. If you watched that video I posted awhile ago of the 4-man Royal Menagerie, you will have noticed that it is most definitely NOT a run done by an elite group of players. Just off the top of my head, I think the DRG dies twice, the RDM once, and the tank even dies once. When you're looking at runs where not only is the healer naturally strained in general by solo healing, but the members of the party are dying and getting hit by avoidable mechanics, you have to pop cooldowns very often. Sometimes Lightspeed will have to be used in place of Swiftcast to double-cast a heal just to keep the tank alive during Akh Morn (because in order to save a DPS who ate the Earth Breath DoT you had to divert focus from the tank, causing the tank's HP to be too low to survive Akh Morn without a double-cast Benefic II). At that point, Lightspeed is on cooldown, but the chance of Shinryu casting Aerial Blast (which often necessitates the use of Lightspeed to keep the tank/party alive through it due to the constant cast interruptions) before the cooldown is off is quite high. Reducing the cooldown doesn't guarantee that it will be off cooldown by the time Aerial Blast is next used, but it does increase the chances. Now consider that during the fight, the healer is forced to use cooldowns to prevent wipes like that more than once, and the chance of the Spear having saved the party from a wipe continues to go up. If it even saves a run once every 10 runs, and the cost of a wipe is 10 minutes, then suddenly it's on par with Balance. And eventually, if the healer's allies have little enough mechanical competence, it can reach a point at which so many cooldowns are necessary that Spear regularly prevents a wipe.

Anyways, I need to stop there since it's getting way too late. Hopefully that makes some sense, despite being written past my bedtime!

[Fortune_Cookie]

in many of these situations, the Spear did make all the difference.

Out of interest, how do you determine that? How do even begin to work out the opportunity cost of holding the Spear? It may be that without a particular example in mind I'm overestimating the difficulty, but it really seems quite hard to me to be sure that one Spear made all the difference. (In particular, I think, because cooldowns in ffxiv are relatively weak compared to wow to begin with. An extra tranq can be massive; the value of an extra lightspeed just seems much more situational.)

If you watched that video I posted awhile ago of the 4-man Royal Menagerie [...]

Honestly, references to specific videos or scenarios always scream confirmation bias to me. However, to be fair, I don't have any objective data on the impact of Spear either. It's simply my opinion (no doubt based in large parts on bias and prejudice) that defensive healer mindsets are very often just down to confirmation bias (i.e. unwarranted, subjective emphasis on those occasions when holding a cooldown seemed to pay off).

On a separate note, can I say what a pleasant discussion this thread has been (in contrast to so many others). It just goes to show how hard it is (even in good faith) to accept that other people think differently