The Case for the Spear

[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

[NocturniaUzuki]

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.)

Well, the opportunity cost is a bit more estimated. I'm simply basing my view on two things:

First, a party wipe causes a huge loss of clear speed due to having to restart the entire fight. If I find myself regularly running into situations where using the Spear prevented a wipe, then it follows that I have been regularly saving large sums of time. Comparing that the the ~5-10% clear speed increase of using offensive cards, and it seems clear to me that preventing a wipe is better than just direct clear speed increase.

As for how I know the Spear prevented a wipe, that comes down to memory more often than a video. I think we can agree that we're able know whether we needed to use a skill to prevent a wipe. So when I look back at what happened over the course of the fight, even if it's only using my memory, and I know the following:

• I only use [skill] if I absolutely need to use it.
• I used [skill] while under the effect of the Spear.
• [Skill] came off cooldown just before I needed to use it again.

...then I think it's a reasonable deduction that Spear prevented a wipe.

And those sorts of situations seem to happen a lot to me. However, it's important to remember that I play in an uncommon niche of helping less experienced parties all the time.

Finally, I just like preventing wipes, and from the perspective of "just enjoying the raid" (remember, I am an Immaterial Goal Achiever, so I don't care about whether I do or don't get the rewards quickly). I would happily throw out large sums of DPS opportunity if it let me prevent a wipe.