Where are all the healers?

[Vyriah]

It's seems everyone avoided the topic, so I guess I'll be the idiot n00b healer and say it : this raid tier is just too painfull to heal.

First time I stepped in O2S, people dropped dead from the very first gravitational wave and it gave me cold sweat. I know it's a mix of a lot of thing (it was week 2, everyone was undergeared, no reduction was used, etc) but every single damn boss of this tier is just about this. Mechanics are everyone get rammed by a train, have fun with this please.
O2S and O4S are the main offenders, the way they make thing hard for healers by asking for movement between huge heal burst is lame as that "don't look or you die lol" kind of moment. It brings nothing to the fight outside adding layers and layers of thing to do at the same time until you trip to your death because you're doing too much at the same time. It does kill people, but not any really interesting ways. O3S kinda works because it involve fighting on a gigantic game board wich makes any arbitrary mechanic quite on point even though "every on takes a lot of damage" being the only resolution of most of the queen's waltz is still disapointing. But the rest of tier is just bland. And taxing. And every one runs arround singing how easy it is.

It's not at all, and not in a good way. It's pointless, artificially hard. It's not engaging, it's not interesting, it's not amusing. It's just big healz over big hurtz and get down with it. The only way to have fun with this is to either play DPS or be a masochist. I hope it can only get better since almagest seems to be the event horizon of raid damage (wich means, a raid damage that hit so hard a part of it had to be differed as a DoT for it to be even manageable). But the more I look at the game, the more it seems it lost it first Coil of Bahamut (and general ARR end game content (except King Mog, fuck King Mog)) mastrea for memechanical fights just because it's FF XIV.
Just compare Ex "Bulchitzfaust" Death to T1 as a whole and notice how the second just makes more sense than the first. Omega's gatekeeper isn't even here before the last tier of the raid, it's that level of "we didn't even think about anything we were doing while we were doing it". And most of that bullshit actually rest on the healer shoulders, outside standing at some cardinal position (to obviously take more damage). There's nothing new outside of O3S and it's extremly taxing.

So when people get sick of that they either go for the omnipresent AST and their shiny new skills (and their less regarded DPS) or the more flexibles DPS classes. RDM especially is the way to go, it's easy to pick-up, do solid damage in good condition but doesn't plummet hard with minor missplay and provide good utility with their party buff and instant raise. BRD is also less regarded for their DPS and their supports spells will be welcome with less risks of getting chewed if you miss.
After all, there's always the healers for this.
This is bound to calm down as gear get stronger, new weapons this week will certainly make heal DPS less needed. But right now the game is too toxic for healing. But then, that's what gonna happen when you center your game arround multi-tasking your players until someone do that one mistake that kills everyone.

There, now you can come telling me how bad of a player I am while the best player of the game cleared day 1 while I didn't.

Yea this happens at low lvl but those are training dungeons so we shouldn't expect a healing challenge there.

It's not that obvious.
TSW first normal dungeon involved some gigantic lovecraft-esque monster that hit like a boat, and the fourth had that boss wich was basically a set of three trash mobs. There was no mechanic at all, but those trash were hitting so hard it was impossible to tank them indefinitly. So DPSes had to burn one down the fastest possible before the tank drop.
Wich meant you couldn't get past this (optional) dungeon without a proper build, rotation and gear on everyone in the team. It wasn't to restrictive but still asked you to understand of character building worked before the game start getting more and more difficult.

Dungeon are certainly on of the most flawed part of FF XIV. They're full of thrashmob wich needlessly high HP that hit individually for nothing, bosses included. It noticed after recently trying to let some annoying teamates die that you can actually self-sustain lot of content as DPS. It ends up in painfully long rollercoaster run that get boring really fast and end up being a chore. I never got tired of running Darkness War or Fallen Hell on the other hand, no matter how simple it was mechanically speaking.

[Hysterior]

O2S and O4S are the main offenders

O4S is healing intensive yes. O2S really isn't...

[Lastelli]

O4S is healing intensive yes. O2S really isn't...

And it was solo healed in the first or second week...this really gives a nice idea of how healing intensive this game is. Honestly, this looks more and more like a thread where bad healers try to justify other bad healers' shortcomings rather than a serious discussion about healers balance. And just to put things into perspective, sch+diurnal ast is the preferred pair for speedrunning. Which means that no high level player gives a damn about the fact that nocturnal aspected benefic and helios provide more powerful shields than a sch's adlo and succor respectively. And that's simply because the rest of sch toolkit (fairy skills included) more than compensate for their inferior shields. Of course this is meant as a reply also to the other "adlo and succor" thread. There is no way a healer cannot heal through any kind of mechanic that involves heavy movement given the high amount of instant heals in their toolkit. If they can't do it either the party is bad and it's taking avoidable damage or the healer is bad and is not using his toolkit correctly.

[Ghishlain]

That's not what I meant, of course there are differences in APM between jobs, and you can't require a BLM to have as many APM as a BRD, that would be absurd. I simply meant that all party members should try to be as active and effective as possible: to do something useful for their group whenever they're able to instead of refraining from doing so. Like back in HW when I once did an expert run where I only healed just to try it, I was only active for 17% of the whole dungeon, while all my other party members were active for at least 70% of it. That's a huge gap that I could have been able to fill if I had chosen to be useful instead of doing /mandervilledance and /idlecam. :P

Then let me pose this in a different way - why does a healer have to have the same active uptime as their DPS and tank counterparts? But it's nature, the healing uptime requirement will continue to shrink as players get geared because there's only a finite amount of healing require versus no upper limit to DPS numbers outside of 2.X EX Primals and their enrage mechanics.

I guess to boil my question down - why does it bug players when a healer does the bare minimal to complete the duty? Yes, it's slower, but it's not wrong either. If it comes to the point where a player will get actively antagonistic with no-DPS healers in DFs, perhaps they should just avoid DFs and run with friends too (likewise for any DPS-healer wanting to avoid comments from the opposing crowd).

And I remember that video, I still wished you just got a random group together and did it at min ilvl =p That would give a better gauge of how S-E designed "uptime" versus being overgeared and well above the ilvl requirements.

There are also tanks and DDs who are afraid of joining DF because they're afraid of the feedback they would get. This is not an issue limited to certain role, but it is an issue. Luckily it's also something we all can affect by using our own behaviour to make the DF a friendly and encouraging place at least when we're running with it.

It's not limited to certain roles, but healers is most certainly the one role where you can be playing at 90th percentile DPS while keeping everyone alive and still be told "Do your job or I'm going to kick you". Just look at the number of healer DPS threads compared to tanks that stay in 100% DPS stance threads and how polarizing the topic is as a whole. That's discouraging in its own right.

I'm a fan of encouraging good player habits but when a random and/or new poster reads "If you don't DPS, you suck" without any context or understanding of how the XIV meta works compared to other MMOs, it can turn someone right off from the role.

[miraidensetsu]

Just to remind you, there are fights in this game where healer DPS is required to clear (right now at least OS3 and OS4) even when all DDs and tanks are performing optimally.

That was designed to be cleared without the healer DPS. And these fights have healing checks.

Also, doing DPS is part of healers' job in this game. They have the abilities, they have plenty of time to use them (on normal runs in every content), so they should use them.

But that don't change the fact that if healer's DPS is absolutely needed, the DPS is failing at THEIR ROLES. The fight, as Yoshi-P stated, was designed to be doable without healer DPS.

If a healer outdps some proper DPS, he must check their rotations ASAP because he is failing HARD.

[Lastelli]

But that don't change the fact that if healer's DPS is absolutely needed, the DPS is failing at THEIR ROLES. The fight, as Yoshi-P stated, was designed to be doable without healer DPS.

This is a dull argument as he didn't specify at which ilvl healers dps stops being a necessity. If all your party is at ilvl330+ then sure, healers' dps is not needed to avoid the hard enrages in o3s and o4s. And this is the point. Dps checks have always been much much tigher than healing checks in this game. And this is why healers are expected to dps in relevant content.

[Taika]

Then let me pose this in a different way - why does a healer have to have the same active uptime as their DPS and tank counterparts? But it's nature, the healing uptime requirement will continue to shrink as players get geared because there's only a finite amount of healing require versus no upper limit to DPS numbers outside of 2.X EX Primals and their enrage mechanics.

I think you answer your own question here. Because otherwise, healers will simply be contributing much less than DDs and tanks, and when the group gets more geared / experienced, that gap will only grow wider. What I'm asking is, why should one (or two) party member(s) be allowed to contribute a lot less than the others?

I guess to boil my question down - why does it bug players when a healer does the bare minimal to complete the duty? Yes, it's slower, but it's not wrong either.

Because I believe that in team content everyone should do their best to carry their weight instead of doing the bare minimum and let the others do all the heavy lifting.

I'm a fan of encouraging good player habits but when a random and/or new poster reads "If you don't DPS, you suck" without any context or understanding of how the XIV meta works compared to other MMOs, it can turn someone right off from the role.

I don't know, I think these discussions offer plenty of context and reasons for why healers should be DPSing if you read more of them than selected one-liners.

That was designed to be cleared without the healer DPS. And these fights have healing checks.

Please read Yoshi's quote again. He specifically said that in effort to clear raid fights without healer DPS, you will need to be past certain item level (which is not even available for the players when the fights are added in the game, so it's literally impossible) and, even at that item level, you will need all your DD and tank players to pull at least 85-90% of their maximum possible DPS. These circumstances are simply close to impossible to reach for average groups doing this content, which is why it's very misleading to phrase it as you did.

[Ghishlain]

I think you answer your own question here. Because otherwise, healers will simply be contributing much less than DDs and tanks, and when the group gets more geared / experienced, that gap will only grow wider. What I'm asking is, why should one (or two) party member(s) be allowed to contribute a lot less than the others?

Because I believe that in team content everyone should do their best to carry their weight instead of doing the bare minimum and let the others do all the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, we aren't the gaming police or the developers. Healers having a lower threshold of required activity doesn't mean they're playing badly. It just means their sub optimal as all get out.

As like you, I do believe in doing more in team content but not everyone has to follow the same as we do. It doesn't mean no-DPS healers are wrong either. There is a wide range of what would be deemed as acceptable but if the developers feel "20% uptime from healers" is the acceptable with them, who are we to tell others players they're "terrible" for not adhering to our own personal standards but still adhere to the standards provided by the developers themselves? That's all I'm getting at.

I'm not saying you are disrespectful to the no-DPS healers, but there have been a fair number of negative comments from both sides of the coin to make me scratch my head, throw my arms up, and walk away from the issue and aggravations associated with it, lol.

I'm actually very surprised I'm putting as much time into this discussion as I am right now >>; I'm actually waiting for a random person to tell me "Get out you no-DPS healer" because of the position I'm siding with despite my enjoyment at playing at high levels of optimization.

I don't know, I think these discussions offer plenty of context and reasons for why healers should be DPSing if you read more of them than selected one-liners.

It's a shame that the one-liners are the ones some people put the most effort into and also the easiest to digest too. One-liners are obviously effective because look at the clickbait titles we get. Those are all one liners and they tend to generate the most volume of responses.

I do appreciate the civil discussion we're having since civility seems rare at times but not everyone wants to wade through the walls-of-text we're bringing forward too, which is sadly where the one-liners capitalize on.

[Sebazy]

Hate to disappoint you in advance, but there's really nothing else they CAN do to make SSavage not a joke, aside from emphasizing the piss out of the gear-check side of things.

Do you even raid bro? =(

No seriously, what are you basing your assumptions on?

This probably deserves to be in it's own thread but whatever:

The current savage tiers are a compromise of many factors, you are absolutely correct in that those compromises limit the number of options on the table for SE as well. No argument there.

However, Savage needs to accommodate for both a wide variety of skill and gear levels. We will likely never see another Gordias primarily because Yoshida will have a very hard time explaining why he decided to commit very significant resources and time on content that an absolutely minute portion of the player base will bother with. For all it's faults, Creator was a massive success in getting a healthy portion of the 'masses' into proper non trivial raiding, thus why it quickly became clear that Omega was going to be more of the same.

BUT

Let's not forget SCOB Savage now huh? That was pretty much the wild dreams of Yoshida's raid team before the playtesters came along to dial it down from 11.

That content was incredibly challenging yet for the much part, it didn't really revolve around DPS checks. Fun fact of the day for you, most of the turns actually required the group to slow or even stop dpsing at times to ensure phases were pushed at the correct time. For the most part, this was achieved through mechanics that demanded pin point precision rather than brute force, but the healer checks were also pretty eye opening especially given the comparatively limited toolkits we had back then.

So back to your confident proclamation that SE can't do anything to make Savage not a joke? The only joke here is a certain individual preaching about raid balancing and content design despite having little to no experience or first hand knowledge of any of it beyond what he might have stumbled onto in a Mr Happy guide.

Remember that Super Savage doesn't need to cater to any lowest common denominator, be it gear, awareness or mechanical skill. Go try SCOB Turn 7 Savage and tell me that you need gear checks to make content difficult. Whilst they are likely limiting themselves somewhat by basing it on an existing Savage encounter (Assuming they don't pull another NeoExdeath surprise ofc), they still have plenty of options and experience in making some very challenging raid content.

some players are just out right discouraged about playing a healer when they don't know if they're going to run into an elitest ass who takes insult to how they play healer because "you don't pay my sub".

I'm not sure an MMO is the best place for such a delicate little flower to try and thrive in. (Not aiming this at you btw! You make some good points <3)

Being able to process, understand and handle both positive and negative criticism is a very important skill in life. One that's more often than not lacking in today's coddled society.

But that don't change the fact that if healer's DPS is absolutely needed, the DPS is failing at THEIR ROLES. The fight, as Yoshi-P stated, was designed to be doable without healer DPS.

Some math for you:

O4S needs about 24000 DPS combined to beat enrage.

In fairly typical high end progression raider gear at the moment (iLvl 320-330) 2750 is a good figure to aim for per tank, 4000 is a nice average for a solid progression DPS player.

So uh, 4000+4000+4000+4000+2750+2750 and another 700's worth of Limit breaks=22200 combined DPS. That's a shortfall of 2800 DPS. You can quote Yoshida all day long for all it matters, it doesn't change the cold hard math in front of us. If you think you're going to be able to squeeze that much out of your 4 DPSers, then I'd like to talk to them about some Amazon vouchers

I'm actually waiting for a random person to tell me "Get out you no-DPS healer" because of the position I'm siding with despite my enjoyment at playing at high levels of optimization.

Not likely, you make decent points and unlike some, you've got the experience and knowledge to back it up. I've got no qualms with what you're saying.

At the end of the day, 'healers don't really need to dps, but it's nice when they do' and 'healers should be contributing as much as they can, when the situation allows it' are pretty much different ends of the same answer.

It's only really the 'Healers shouldn't ever need to DPS' or 'Full healer DPS or kick' for Titan story mode that I take offence to, both of those extremes are as blind and incorrect as each other.

[miraidensetsu]

There are two fixes to this misconception: either SE has to increase outgoing damage to the raid, making healers spend less time throwing out DPS, or they need to tune encounters around a minimum amount of healer DPS. Personally, I prefer the former over the latter.

Or they add buffs to them that increase the overall DPS beyond any contribution given by DPS skills that requires some sort of micromanagement. If those actions have some connection with the lilies and/or faerie gauges, better.