[Opinion] Why I'm disappointed by most changes to healers.

[inhaledcorn]

DPS-centric players feel this is a reasonable expectation. Players that make mistakes are holding the party back and deserve to be kicked. They should get better before they join public parties.
I do not believe this is a reasonable expectation. Players that make mistakes are only human, and everyone has different skill plateaus. Players with a lower skill plateau shouldn't be disallowed from joining parties if it is within the healer's power to manage the extra load.

You are greatly misunderstanding group content. It's more than just a healer taking on the extra load of a bad player. The entire group must take on that load. Every high end content has hard enrage timers that, if they aren't met, will instantly wipe the group. If the entire group can't take on that load, then the run is a failure and ramming your head into a wall multiple times won't change that, thus, a change of party is required. If they can, most players are going to resent that obviously weak link who got carried or, worse yet, can jeopardize future runs. I'm not saying everyone needs to bring top percentile dps numbers, but I am saying there's generally a reasonable expectation that people know how to play their job and handle/learn mechanics so that they're not a hinderance to the run.

You are basically saying, "If you can't carry bad players, you're not a good player," and that's not fair to people who don't want to put in so much work for someone else's sake. Do you know what happens when you tell people that's what you need to do if you don't get properly compensated for that? That breeds resentment and anger in the group. People will probably quit of their own volition because they held a reasonable expectation that people could pull their own weight. You are encouraging "DPS has no culpability" which 100% makes bitter players, if not just healers.

[NocturniaUzuki]

This is principally a response to the original post, not subsequent replies. I hope it does not come across as a personal insult; it really isn't intended as such.

I would encourage OP to consider what compels them to pursue this crusade. Everyone is free to hold their own opinions, however eccentric they may be perceived by others. I do wonder though if there is a path to a better enjoyment of the game by embracing the "dps-centric mindset" (i.e. letting go of their ultra-defensive mindset) to some degree.

We can set our own challenges and attempt feats outside the intended content. None of us, however, can change how the game works at a fundamental level. You need to kill the boss before it kills you. Every ability, whether rotational or situational, is used in service of that goal.

That's an artificial distinction. Every ability has an impact on DPS or healing throughput, including situational abilities. You grip a player to allow them to get an extra cast off for more damage or to save yourself the mp of a raise or burst heal. You use immunities (thinking more of WoW here) to bypass mechanics saving movement (=dps) and healer mana/time.

Minimising movement, saving GCDs, skipping mechanics etc are not valuable in themselves. They're useful outcomes because they increase throughput. A raid boss is nothing more than an optimisation problem: minimise time-to-kill. That's not a question of mindset. That's just what it is. Obviously, randomness and human error mean that no fight can be mapped out perfectly so you are forced into a reactive stance some of the time. But the utility value of every action is nevertheless quantifiable in terms of dps or hps (at least in principle).

There may of course be situations where a situational ability can have a much greater impact than a straightforward %-damage or healing buff. They are however fairly rare in FFXIV and old Spear wasn't in that category. As I said in the other thread, I believe OP significantly overestimates the number of situations where Spear actually made a difference.



As many others have said, this isn't really how encounters work (acknowledging that my experience is WoW-based). You know that certain mechanics will wipe you unless everybody executes them correctly. There is no point in preparing for failure (by holding cooldowns) because that won't save you. You use your cooldowns on the assumption that everybody else manages to stick to the strategy, because if they don't you're toast anyway.

I can agree with a lot of this. Most notably, the question of what compels me to pursue this "crusade" as you call it. And you're right in a way. I know that speaking up isn't going to make a difference in the MMO world where almost everyone disagrees with me. But I still think it's important to say. It's also about self-discovery, in large part. Sometimes I post things that are more about enabling myself to understand my own opinions through writing and discussion (I posted a blog-like thread awhile back that took even more heat than either of my last two). People don't understand or appreciate what I'm doing with my threads, a lot of the time. That's to be expected, because most people would agree that a public forum is not where you work out your own beliefs. Though in the case of The Case for the Spear, the goal was to try to raise awareness about the value of the Spear, because I was frustrated by the general mindset. Honestly, though, over the years I have started to feel more and more out of place in the world of MMOs.

I would agree that AI bosses are nothing more than patterns and optimization. But how we approach that optimization is a matter of mindset. I don't think it's quite right to say that the game boils down to "kill the boss before it kills you." It's true that there are enrage cutoffs, and those enrage cutoffs set bars for DPS. However, in many situations hitting the enrage is not a major risk. In a minIL situation, it can be a risk though - especially if players are dying a lot. Generally, healer-enabled increase in kill speed beyond the bare minimum necessary to pass the basic DPS check of enrage is in exchange for safety, though.

There may of course be situations where a situational ability can have a much greater impact than a straightforward %-damage or healing buff. They are however fairly rare in FFXIV and old Spear wasn't in that category. As I said in the other thread, I believe OP significantly overestimates the number of situations where Spear actually made a difference.

I think it really all comes down to this. I believe there are plenty of situations where situational abilities make huge differences. This is because I am always playing with self-imposed challenges or trying to carry parties with very low levels of mechanical competence. If you're playing at with more experienced parties, or in content where a single mechanical failure will wipe the party regardless of the healer's best attempts to save the run, then more often than not you'll want to focus more on offense. I've said this many many times through my threads. This might include instances like losing a DPS player in A12S synced pre-Stormblood. In some cases, like the add phase, for example, this would cause a wipe and there was nothing the healer could do about it.

If you haven't already, I strongly recommend trying to put yourself in some of these situations, and refuse to see your party members' failures to avoid AoE as the cause of their deaths, at least for a moment. Put all of the responsibility for their lives on your shoulders. Do this, and try to look at things from the perspective of how you could have done things differently to save your party. What if that cooldown had come up 20 seconds earlier? What if you hadn't re-rolled that Bole for a Balance, and used it on the tank instead? What if you had used that Ewer earlier instead of rerolling it; would you not have run out of mana due to the party suddenly taking a lot more avoidable damage that you had to heal though?

[Taika]

I'm not a healer main anymore (although I do have them all at 70 and play them in extremes etc.), but I absolutely loathe the attitude that DPS (and perhaps tank) players are the ones who get to focus on their own performance and shine while healers should be holding back and babysitting the rest of their team. Sure, I will try to save a DD from a self-caused death, even for a third time (possibly more), and when I'm doing raid progression I will of course save my cooldowns in case my party members will mess something up, but there are limits to what I have to do to carry the weight of others. When people are doing content that everyone's familiar with, I will not do double the work at the cost of my own performance and enjoyment just because a DD or tank (or the other healer) can't be bothered to focus.

And now, as a DPS main, I certainly want my healers to focus on playing their job well and effectively, instead of holding my hand through the fights...

[NocturniaUzuki]

You are greatly misunderstanding group content. It's more than just a healer taking on the extra load of a bad player. The entire group must take on that load. Every high end content has hard enrage timers that, if they aren't met, will instantly wipe the group. If the entire group can't take on that load, then the run is a failure and ramming your head into a wall multiple times won't change that, thus, a change of party is required. If they can, most players are going to resent that obviously weak link who got carried or, worse yet, can jeopardize future runs. I'm not saying everyone needs to bring top percentile dps numbers, but I am saying there's generally a reasonable expectation that people know how to play their job and handle/learn mechanics so that they're not a hinderance to the run.

If a player is dying enough that the party literally can't clear the fight due to hitting the enrage, then sure, kick them. But not having that player dying a lot isn't an excuse for the other players to try less. The DPS should be playing as efficiently as possible regardless of whether one of their brethren is slowing down the DPS. Likewise, the tanks should be playing to their maximum potential. So there's not really an "extra load". Everyone should be performing to the best of their ability at all times.

There's nothing wrong with booting a player if it's genuinely impossible to clear because of them. But booting the player just to speed up runs or to avoid potential wipes caused by healer-preventable circumstances is something that I can't support.

You are basically saying, "If you can't carry bad players, you're not a good player," and that's not fair to people who don't want to put in so much work for someone else's sake. Do you know what happens when you tell people that's what you need to do if you don't get properly compensated for that? That breeds resentment and anger in the group. People will probably quit of their own volition because they held a reasonable expectation that people could pull their own weight. You are encouraging "DPS has no culpability" which 100% makes bitter players, if not just healers.

Well, it's not a very tactful way of putting it, but I am actually saying that, more or less. That's not to say healers must always carry bad players. If you want to kick the bad players, then that's your deal, even if I disagree with it. But a healer that only knows how to play in a party that makes very few mistakes is a bad healer, in my opinion. Not because they are mechanically bad, but because their experience is isolated. If these sorts of healers are faced with sudden, high-pressure disaster situations, they crumble under the pressure; they don't know how to handle it. I've seen it happen many times. That healer may be the best in the world at maximizing DPS potential while dealing with the minimum raid damage. But as soon as crap hits the fan, they fall apart because they consciously avoid playing in parties where crap hits the fan.

It's a two-way street though. A healer who does nothing but practice dealing with disaster scenarios while never bothering to learn how to maximize DPS and efficiently handle minimum raid damage also has isolated experience.

I don't claim to be a flawless healer. Personally, I have more experience dealing with disaster scenarios. I don't completely isolate myself, though. I actively try to maximize my DPS potential and play in farm parties occasionally. But I doubt I'm as good at efficiency as the healers who focus on that sort of thing all the time.

[RichardButte]

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to get into everything I disagree with. I'm tired and I have to be up early.

But if a DPS took damage they could avoid it is 100% their fault if they die. No one else's. It doesn't matter that the healer is there to keep everyone else alive, it is everyone's job to keep THEMSELVES alive as much as possible.

Responsibility on your own life is not healer > yourself. It's yourself > healer. That's like saying a doctor is responsibly if you die because you didn't move out of the way of ticking bomb.

You are literally perpetuating the "healers adjust" meme.

This.

The game is specifically designed so that, at best, DPS getting hit by avoidable damage will drain healers of their mana and wipe the group.

Once again, OP, they mathed out old Spear ages ago and it was bad. Not just bad for hardcore raiders, but bad for everyone because any other card you drew would've been more useful.

An AST who plays 2 hours a week and an AST who plays in a world-first raiding guild got the exact same value out of Spear, and that was less value than they'd have gotten with any other card except possibly Spire (when they didn't need to RR it).

[Seraphyna]

avoid potential wipes caused by healer-preventable circumstances.

A healer cannot force DPS to do mechanics.
A healer cannot force DPS to move out of AOE's on the ground.
A healer cannot force DPS to move out of avoidable hits.

These are ALL on the DPS. If a DPS dies to these, that's ALL ON THEM.

If a DPS isn't even trying to keep themselves alive, why should I?

That's part of the base of running anything in this game: Do damage + Do Mechanics = Staying Alive.

It is not my responsibility to "hand hold" players that don't want to do their job. And it IS their job to avoid mechanics that deal damage, as it is mine and it is the tanks. I didn't sign up to be a babysitter (and frankly, I'm not being paid). All your opinion is perpetuating is continuing bad players to be bad players and healers bearing the load. No thanks.

[konage]

Op is a troll

[BloodRubyXII]

I predominantly play healer because I cba with DPS queues, but I just find healing so boring and bland right now because of the way damage in this game works. You heal a spike then do nothing but dps (which in ast case, is spamming m3 over and over). I'd like our dps to become more interesting (don't need bigger numbers, just more fun) or a much more proactive support toolkit (I only play ast because cards take away some of the dull)

[Tillen]

LOL OP you must be real fun. Did you even mention SCH/WHM once? Or are you basing your entire healing on AST?

[Sebazy]

A healer cannot force DPS to do mechanics.
A healer cannot force DPS to move out of AOE's on the ground.
A healer cannot force DPS to move out of avoidable hits.

These are ALL on the DPS. If a DPS dies to these, that's ALL ON THEM.

If a DPS isn't even trying to keep themselves alive, why should I?

Like many things in life, compromise is king really, Savage (and coil before it) is full of examples where it was always to the groups advantage if there was a way for DPS to flat out ignore mechanics where possible. A11S was a good recent example of this where stacked barriers and a cooldown allowed BLMs to outright ignore major movement mechanics during their opener at the start of the encounter. Stuff like this was a big part of SE's growing disdain for stoneskin and it's eventual removal IMHO.